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Bush Paves the Way for Martial Law
Jun 2, 2007 - Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the
rule of a single leader, a dictator, willing to use those dreaded
'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing,
to employ."
Michael Ledeen,
White House advisor and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute,
Machiavelli on Modern Leadership:
Why Machiavelli?s Iron Rules Are As Timely and
Important Today As Five Centuries Ago
?Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with
a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties,
the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military
form of government.?
NewsMax,
November 21, 2003
In October 2006, Bush signed into law the John Warner National
Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Quietly slipped
into the law at the last minute, at the request of the Bush administration,
were sections changing important legal principles, dating back
200 years, which limit the U.S. government?s ability to use the
military to intervene in domestic affairs. These changes would
allow Bush, whenever he thinks it necessary, to institute martial
law?under which the military takes direct control over civilian
administration.
Sec. 1042 of the Act, "Use of the Armed Forces in Major
Public Emergencies," effectively overturns what is known
as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act is a law, passed
in 1878, that prohibits the use of the regular military within
the U.S. borders. The original passage of the Posse Comitatus
Act was a very reactionary move that sealed the betrayal of Black
people after the Civil War and brought the period of Reconstruction
to an end. It decreed that federal troops could no longer be
used inside the former Confederate states to enforce the new
legal rights of Black people. Black people were turned over to
the armed police and Klansmen serving the southern plantation
owners, and the long period of Jim Crow began.
During the 20th century, posse comitatus objectively started
to play a new role within the bourgeois democratic framework:
as a legal barrier to the direct influence of the powerful military
establishment and the armed forces over domestic U.S. society.
It served to some degree as an obstacle against military coups
and presidents seizing military control over the country. (However,
National Guard troops have been legally available to the ruling
class for use inside the U.S., and there have been other loopholes
to the prohibition of the use of armed forces domestically, as
in the mobilization of Marine troops during the 1992 L.A. Rebellion.)
So the changes to posse comitatus signed into law by Bush are
extremely significant and ominous. Bush has modified the main
exemptions to posse comitatus that up to now have been primarily
defined by the Insurrection Act of 1807. Previously the president
could call out the army in the United States only in cases of
insurrection or conditions where ?rebellion against the authority
of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws
of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary
course of judicial proceedings.? Under the new law the president
can use the military in response to a natural disaster, a disease
outbreak, a terrorist attack or ?other condition in which the
President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the
extent that state officials cannot maintain public order.?
The new law requires the President to notify Congress "as
soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days
thereafter during the duration of the exercise of the authority."
However Bush, as he has often done during his presidency, modified
this requirement in his signing statement, which declared, "The
executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent
with the President's constitutional authority to withhold information
the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national
security, the deliberative processes of the Executive."
In other words, Bush claims that he does not even need to inform
Congress that martial law has been declared!
Changing Role of Military Within the U.S.
This major change in the criteria under which martial law can
be declared is a continuation of a process, begun after 9/11,
to dismantle legal barriers to unrestrained executive, presidential
powers.
In 2002, the government created the new Northern Command. This
is the first time since the Civil War that the U.S. military
has been given an operational command inside the continental
United States.
In 2005, the Washington Post reported that Northcom had developed
battle plans for martial law in the U.S. One secret document,
CONPLAN 2005, envisions 15 different scenarios where these plans
could go into effect.
The U.S. has also used natural disasters like Katrina to push
for an increased role for the military. According to the Washington
Post, Bush advisor Karl Rove told the governor of Louisiana that
she should explore legal options to impose martial law ?or as
close as we can get.?
Spying by the military against U.S. persons, also supposedly
prohibited, has greatly expanded in recent years. Counterintelligence
Field Activity (CIFA) was created in 2002 supposedly to evaluate
threats against Department of Defense installations. However,
a secret 400-page document obtained by MSNBC revealed that CIFA
had spied on more than 1500 ?suspicious incidents? during a ten-month
period, including a meeting of Quakers to plan a protest of military
recruiting at local high schools and an anti-war protest in Los
Angeles.
James Risen has exposed in the New York Times and in his book
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration
that the National Security Agency, which is under the Department
of Defense, has been used in a massive campaign of illegal spying
of U.S. citizens, including tapping phone calls and monitoring
bank and financial records and the internet. (See Revolution
#35, "Spies, Lies, Thugs and Torture.")
In 2006, the Military Commissions Act was passed which, in addition
to legalizing torture, allows the president and military courts
to declare anyone an enemy combatant without basic civil rights
like habeas corpus.
Plans for massive detention centers are already being prepared.
Pacific News Service reported that in early 2006, Kellogg Brown
and Root (KBR) received a $385 million contract from the Department
of Homeland Security to build detention and processing facilities
to be used ?in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants
into the U.S. or to support the rapid development of new programs.?
Would They Really Go That Far?
The Bush Regime's preparations for martial law are part of an
extreme agenda. This is a regime that is setting out to create
a world empire that is unchallenged and unchallengeable and has
embarked on an endless war to bring this about. Along with this,
they aim to restructure social relations in the U.S., doing away
with many of the social and economic institutions that have characterized
U.S. society since World War 2. Because of this extreme agenda,
the Bush regime takes very seriously the possibility of jolts
and ruptures and resistance and are preparing very extreme measures
to deal with this.
On February 27, 1933, a fire broke out in the Reichstag (government)
building in Germany. The next day Hitler and his Minister of
the Interior Hermann Göring drafted the Reichstag Fire Decree,
which suspended civil liberties and gave the central government
total power. The decree was signed into law within days. After
that point, opposition to Hitler became MUCH more difficult.
In the U.S. today, extreme measures much like the Reichstag Fire
Decree are already being put into place?making it even more urgent
that a determined struggle be waged to drive out the Bush regime
and reverse this dangerous trajectory.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20070321&articleId=5150
http://www.rwor.org/a/083/martial-en.html |