Despite current efforts to paint Bernie Sanders as a dangerous socialist who would send improperly indoctrinated Americans to gulags, the irony is that Sanders is one of the few US senators who strongly opposed the current law to allow the military to detain US citizens indefinitely, without charge or trial, if the executive branch ever claims they are "associated" with terrorism.

In the 2018 iteration of the NDAA bill, which again renewed the provisions, both senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar voted "yea," to pass the bill and all of its sections, including the indefinite military detention of US citizens. As vice president, Joe Biden was part of the administration that pushed for the provisions, which Obama signed into legislation.

Sanders has long taken a stand against the Constitution-shredding measure, the culmination of early Bush administration claims that the government could capture and hold US citizens as "enemy combatants" even when captured on American soil.

To be sure, when analyzed by his positions, which he has put forth consistently over 40 years, Sanders' mild form of socialism makes him more in line with FDR and the New Deal than Karl Marx.

Sanders advocates for capitalism with a strong social safety net and extensive social benefits, like subsidized college education, and a halt to tax breaks and write-offs which benefit primarily the wealthy. In Houston this month Sanders said, we can give "trillion dollar bail-outs to banks...that's socialism too, why can't we forgive all student debt?"

Sanders explicitly rejects the nationalization of private property, saying at Georgetown University in 2015:

"So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this: I don't believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal."



But interestingly, Sanders veers to the libertarian right and votes with the likes of Rand Paul on Constitutional issues. In 2012, voting against a president of his own party along with Paul and a few other senators, Sanders was one of the few who opposed the most blatant assault on the Constitution in its history, in the climate of fear which has reigned since 9/11.

Passed to utter silence in the major media, the NDAA Indefinite Military Detention of American Citizens, for the first time in American history, permanently stripped American citizens of their right to a jury trial if the government deemed they were "associated" with terrorist activity.

NDAA stands for the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill which mostly deals with the authorization of funds for the Pentagon and national security agencies.

In 2012 Sanders joined Paul, a stout critic of the law, and 28 other senators in voting for the Feinstein Amendment, which would have exempted US citizens from the fascistic measures written into the NDAA which were sought by the Obama administration.

The new provisions allowed the Executive Branch to unilaterally imprison American citizens without charge or trial, indefinitely, for the duration of "hostilities" in the War on Terror. All based on nothing more than the claims of the Executive Branch that one has been "associated" with terrorism.

It may come as a surprise to Americans who have been paying more attention to MMA's Conor McGregor and Beyonce that NDAA Indefinite Military Detention of US Citizens is now law.