the next military dictatorship

It's hard to know now where to look to find a democracy, or what it looks like. So Obama has decided not to veto a bill that's gone through the Senate and is now to be addressed by the House (basically a Republican body). This new law ignores the U S Constitutional Bill of Rights, giving the military powers to arrest suspected American terrorists (very loosely defined) on the streets, on home soil, and hold them indefinitely without trial, at for instance Guantanamo (what happened to that election pledge of his to close down the camp at Guantanamo Bay?).

Isn't this one of the criteria by which we recognise military dictatorships in the more brutal regimes?

'"It's something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent."' (The Guardian)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/15/americans-face-guantanamo-detention-obama

Plus ca change...