Another dangerous precedent has been set. The Army Times reported from Oct.1 and for one year the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry division will be assigned to U.S. Army NorthCom, which. was founded in 2002 to coordinate defense support of civil authorities. This means they could help with civil unrest and crowd control.
After the unlawful raids into private homes of potential demonstrators at gun point and arrests without habeas corpus in St. Paul by the police before the Republican convention, this new development is troubling at best.
Use of the U.S. Military inside the US was outlawed in the 1880s by the Posse Comitatus Act. However, The Defense Authorization Act of 2006 expanded the power of George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist incident which could include U.S. citizens protesting against any government action. This is a further extension of National Directive 51 which stated the president had the right to do the same and appeared on the White House website in May 2005.
With the crackdown of protests around the country, arrests of people wearing an anti-government T-shirts, police stopping cars with anti-bush or anti-war bumper stickers, the suspension of habeas corpus, the building of 100,000+ more jail cells (the U.S. spends more on prisons now than education) it is a worrying trend especially since terrorist is defined by the authorities.
I have been called paranoid and alarmist. But putting it all together the trend is worrying especially when we have witnessed the demonsratable lies by the administration over the last few weeks of the “economy is strong” and a couple of weeks later unless we bail out the economy “the economy is in trouble.”
After the unlawful raids into private homes of potential demonstrators at gun point and arrests without habeas corpus in St. Paul by the police before the Republican convention, this new development is troubling at best.
Use of the U.S. Military inside the US was outlawed in the 1880s by the Posse Comitatus Act. However, The Defense Authorization Act of 2006 expanded the power of George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist incident which could include U.S. citizens protesting against any government action. This is a further extension of National Directive 51 which stated the president had the right to do the same and appeared on the White House website in May 2005.
With the crackdown of protests around the country, arrests of people wearing an anti-government T-shirts, police stopping cars with anti-bush or anti-war bumper stickers, the suspension of habeas corpus, the building of 100,000+ more jail cells (the U.S. spends more on prisons now than education) it is a worrying trend especially since terrorist is defined by the authorities.
I have been called paranoid and alarmist. But putting it all together the trend is worrying especially when we have witnessed the demonsratable lies by the administration over the last few weeks of the “economy is strong” and a couple of weeks later unless we bail out the economy “the economy is in trouble.”
From multiple sources including Article by Glenn Greenwald, Salon magazine, Army Times and the White House website.)
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