Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges   (journalist)
Born	1956-09-18 St. Johnsbury, Vermont, USA
A fearless speaker of truth to power, Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for almost 20 years, when he quit and began a blistering series of books which challenge different aspects of corporate capitalism. In 2012 he filed suit unsuccessfully contending that the NDAA's provision for indefinite detention without trial was unconstitutional.

NDAA Lawsuit

Hedges v. Obama is a lawsuit filed January 13, 2012 against the Obama Administration and Members of the U.S. Congress by a group including Christopher Hedges. They challenged the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 which permits the U.S. government to indefinitely detain people who are part of or "substantially support" Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States. On 28th April, 2014, the US Supreme Court let an earlier appeals court verdict stand, implying that there was nothing unconstitutional in indefinite detention without trial.

 

Legal Case

Name	Plaintiff(s)	Defendant(s)	Start	End	Description
Hedges v. Obama	Daniel Ellsberg Chris Hedges Noam Chomsky Jenifer Bolen Kai Wargalla Birgitta Jónsdóttir Alexa O'Brien	Barack Obama Leon Panetta John McCain John Boehner Harry Reid Eric Cantor Nancy Pelosi US Department of Defense Mitch McConnell United States of America	13 January 2012	28 April 2014	The plaintiffs challenged the 2012 NDAA contending that indefinite detention on "suspicion of providing substantial support" to groups such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban was so vague as to allow unconstitutional, indefinite detention of civilians based on vague allegations. The Court of Appeals struck down an initial agreement, and the US Supreme Court concurred, arguing that the plaintiffs could not prove they would be affected by the law, so had no standing to contest it.

 

A Document by Chris Hedges

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)
Document:The tears of Gaza must be our tears	speech	5 August 2010	Gaza

 

Quotes by Chris Hedges

Page	Quote	Date	Source
"Post-truth"	“Reality is under assault. Verbal confusion reigns. Truth and illusion have merged. Mental chaos makes it hard to fathom what is happening. We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors. Exposed lies are answered with other lies. The rational is countered with the irrational. Cognitive dissonance prevails. We endure a disquieting shame and even guilt. Tens of millions of Americans, especially women, undocumented workers, Muslims and African-Americans, suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator. All this is by design. Demagogues always infect the governed with their own psychosis.”	30 January 2017
9-11/Official narrative	“It turns out, 45 years later, that those who truly hate us for our freedoms are not the array of dehumanised enemies cooked up by the war machine — the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, even the Taliban, Al-Qaeda or ISIS. They are the financiers, bankers, politicians, public intellectuals and pundits, lawyers, journalists and business people, cultivated in the elite universities and business schools who sold us the Utopian dream of neoliberalism. We are entering the twilight phase of capitalism. Capitalists unable to generate profits by expanding markets have, as Karl Marx predicted, begun to cannibalise the state like ravenous parasites.”	2017	Unwelcome Guests
Ancient Rome/Deep state	“Commodus, like a number of other late Roman emperors and like Donald Trump was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity. He commissioned innumerable statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show. He fought, victoriously, as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts. Power for Commodus, as it is for Trump, was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism, hedonism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices to the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steve Mnuchin. He orchestrated a vast kleptocracy.”	2017	Unwelcome Guests
New York Times	“The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more important than ever,” reads a television ad for The New York Times. What the paper fails to add is that the hardest place to find the truth about the forces affecting the life of the average American and the truth about empire is in the Times itself. News organizations, from the [NYT] to the tawdry forms of entertainment masquerading as news on television, have rendered most people and their concerns invisible.”
Donald Trump	“Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. He is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality, a sputtering, narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac.”	June 2017	YouTube

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