In the name of anti-terrorism, Americans’ rights are being challenged.

Dangerous times make for dangerous decisions, and President Obama and Congress are in the midst of a colossal historic blunder by grossly expanding the president’s power to arbitrarily throw U.S. citizens into military prisons on terrorism charges without meaningful oversight by courts or anybody else.

Passed 93-7 by the Senate Dec. 1 and approved by the House 245-169 Dec. 14, the National Defense Authorization Bill obviously managed bipartisan support on a scale unheard of in these politically fractured times. But like the stupid rush to send Japanese-Americans to concentration camps in 1942, a provision buried in this legislation betrays basic principles upon which our nation was founded.

Contained in the bill, which mostly pertains to perpetuating our enormous military overspending, the arrest provisions (“subtitle D”) were somewhat blurred in the wake of citizen outrage earlier this month. But the essential concept survives that America itself is part of a worldwide battlefield from which prisoners – including our own citizens – may be swept up and locked away. Obama last week rescinded a threat to veto the bill.

Bill sponsors, including Sen. John McCain, forcefully reject criticism of it. They see it as clearly aimed at the nation’s enemies and claim to perceive no danger of detention provisions being extended to dissenters or others who don’t represent an actual physical danger to national security.

But in a clear and even-handed analysis (see .com/chemyw6), legal expert Joanne Mariner comes to a less reassuring conclusion. As passed, provisions in the law “represent clear congressional approval of what, up to now, has been solely the executive branch’s decision to hold people in indefinite detention without charge.”

Innocent people mostly assume our government’s intentions are benign. That is a dangerous assumption. Maybe this president won’t choose to define critics or protestors as providing “substantive support” for foreign enemies under the law and have the military capture them from their bedrooms in the middle of the night. But this law makes it more likely that some future president could.

In a somewhat overexcited commentary in the National Catholic Register (see http://), writer Mark Shea explores the possible outcome of U.S. leaders smudging our cherished constitutional constraints on government power. “I think the issue facing our country is not primarily left vs. right or GOP vs. Dem. It is, rather, an elite on both sides of the aisle that is increasingly stronger and more tyrannical vs. a populace that is increasingly weaker and more vulnerable to the depredations of the strong.”

He concludes, “We will have only ourselves to blame if we trade our freedom, bought with the blood of generations, for a false sense of security and a very real set of chains.”

Our institutionalized permanent “War on Terror” really doesn’t even provide a false sense of security, but merely an excuse to continue spending more money on our military than the next 20 highest-spending countries’ total combined defense budgets. We currently have U.S. military personnel in around 150 countries – far more than ancient Roman emperors contemplated in their most grandiose dreams. If we stay on this course, we will all too soon meet with Rome’s fate.