Is this the dreaded 'civilian national security force'?

Way back in July 2008, when Barack Obama was just a candidate for the presidency, he gave a speech in which he called for the creation of a "civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the U.S. military.

No one in the media reported it.

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The line was chopped from transcriptions of the speech handed out to the media and public.

The Obama campaign stonewalled WND's efforts to question what he meant.

Finally, I broke the story in this column.

I begged my colleagues in the press to question Obama and the campaign about what he meant. None of them did.

Over the years, WND and I have followed up that initial report dozens of times.

You can read those WND news reports and my previous columns on the subject here.

We learned quite a bit about Obama's plans to militarize American domestic life. In fact, I was able to predict accurately, months in advance of his election, that Obama would select Robert Gates from the Bush administration to be his defense secretary after learning this crazy plan was actually Gates' idea!

Some have wondered whatever became of this wacky and wholly unconstitutional idea.

I think I figured it out.

In fact, I think Obama may have pushed his "civilian national security force" through the Congress and signed it into law.

What am I talking about?

I'm talking about the defense reauthorization bill that sailed through both houses of Congress and was signed into law recently. I called it, "The day habeas corpus died."

I mean, who needs a "civilian national security force" if Obama can simply rewrite the rules of engagement for the U.S. military and employ those forces to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or trial?

Obviously Obama has broken the bank at the U.S. Treasury several times over and run up the deficit to $15 trillion. He's not going to find the money necessary to build a new domestic military force, so he did the next best thing – with bipartisan help from Congress.

The "civilian national security force" is now in place. The U.S. military has been authorized by Congress and Obama to arrest and detain indefinitely without charge or trial any U.S. citizen on suspicion of being a terrorist. The only one who can override the order is Obama himself.

This is not a comforting thought, especially knowing how Obama views his political adversaries. He probably thinks people like me represent more of a threat to national security than did Osama bin Laden.

It's no longer a question of whether political dissidents are going to hear that dreaded knock on the door in America. It's only a question of who is going to have their door knocked down by U.S. military forces and be dragged kicking and screaming to Guantanamo Bay without even the right to talk to an attorney.

And yet, just as the media compliantly declined to pursue an explanation of Obama's call for the creation of a "civilian national security force," they also refuse to ask questions about this fundamental break from the Constitution's protection of individual rights to a fair and speedy trial.

If you think I'm taking this too far, try to remember back to 2008 when Obama himself was promising to close Guantanamo Bay because it was illegal and unconstitutional as a place to hold foreign enemy combatants without due process. Now it's wide open for business even for U.S. citizens.

It turns out the nightmare specter of the "civilian national security force" was worse than I imagined. It turns out to be a national security force not of civilians, but rather for civilians.