New Republic: THE END OF POSSE COMITATUS?

[Coastie for Truth]

Over a decade ago, an Air Force lieutenant colonel mused about a military coup in the United States. In a widely praised 1992 essay in the Army War College journal Parameters, the officer, Charles J. Dunlap Jr., argued, in the form of a letter written far into the future, that elected officials would gradually and deliberately cede authority to the military for an increasing number of previously civilian functions. Eventually the generals, encouraged by public disgust with squabbling politicians, accepted the myth of their own infallibility and took the reins of state directly. Dunlap's deliberately hysterical essay was brought up repeatedly in the defense debates of the 1990s: Conservatives used it to criticize the Clinton administration's inattention to civil-military relations and its proclivity for using the military for nation-building in the Balkans; liberals responded that their opponents were failing to adjust to post-cold war military missions. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that one of the sparks for Dunlap's warning was the Sturm und Drang over an insufficient civilian response to Hurricane Andrew....

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush has taken a position that looks like Dunlap on fast forward. In a speech delivered from Jackson Square in New Orleans last month, Bush called for a vastly expanded military role in disaster relief, including "reconsideration" of a century-old law banning the active-duty military from law-enforcement duties. That law, the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) of 1878, is widely considered to be a cornerstone in the development of U.S. liberty. Enacted after Reconstruction, when much of the South was under military occupation (and federal troops monitored political rallies and stood guard at polling places), it sought to prevent any subsequent use of the military to perform traditional police duties.

There's no evidence that the PCA had anything to do with the administration's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. But Bush has cynically seized on the law to reverse the political damage wrought by his administration's incompetence. Civil libertarians are rightly concerned that eliminating the PCA would lead to abuses as the active-duty military begins supplementing civilian police--the slippery slope Dunlap warned about in 1992, when his protagonist wrote, "Faced with intractable national problems on one hand, and an energetic and capable military on the other, it can be all too seductive to start viewing the military as a cost-effective solution." And it's not just civil libertarians who are concerned. When I asked Bush's senior Pentagon official for homeland defense, Assistant Secretary Paul McHale, whether the PCA is a relic of an outmoded era, he immediately responded "absolutely not." And, last week, Admiral Timothy Keating, who heads U.S. Northern Command (northcom), told The New York Times that "I'm not at all convinced that we need to go back and revise Posse Comitatus."

----edited---

The real obstacle to more effective disaster relief isn't the PCA; it's the composition of the military itself. Three years after its establishment, northcom--the regional military command responsible for the continental United States--still doesn't have much in the way of designated military assets, such as aircraft or ships, that can facilitate rapid deployment of troops or civilian aid workers in the event of a catastrophic disaster. (To his credit, Keating is working on a plan to create a rapid-response active-duty force to assist Guardsmen in a domestic crisis.) That's part of the reason why, after Hurricane Katrina, it took nearly a week--an eternity for evacuees in the Superdome and elsewhere, where people suffered needlessly--to deploy enough troops to New Orleans. (emphasis added)

----edited----

---This is a long article, well worth a serious read in light of Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and "Brownie" ---

An interesting point, made by Dunlap, now an Air Force General, is

"Northcom envisages hundreds, not thousands, of specially trained and equipped active-duty forces able to deploy within 18 hours of a domestic emergency to augment Guard forces under state command. That would represent neither a demolition of war-fighting prowess nor the death of federalism. Most importantly, it might save lives when the next catastrophe hits.

"Faster deployment of the logistical, communications, engineering, and rescue capabilities of the Armed Forces would be a perfectly appropriate mission, ... That's the kind of thing where you're not going to get into conflicts with civil liberties."

Think about it.

Since Katrina there have been numerous threads dissing the Red Cross. The other two NGO "heavy hitters" - the Salvation Army and the Southern Baptist Brotherhood are "faith based organizations" (and Evangelical at that), and it will take the National Guard (the proper repository of this function) a generation to recover from its destruction at the hands of the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Rumsfield cabal.

And, make no mistake - even if you don't "believe in" Global Warming or the "fifty year hurricane cycle" or sunspots -- we are enter a period of a lot more killer hurricanes, and we are over due for the "Big One" earthquake in the west, and tornadoes come every summer, and blizzards come every winter, and floods come every spring.

So, what do we do when the band width of our local emergency responders is exceeded (well beyond "mutual assistance")?

The faith community has an agenda -- and the neocon community has an agenda.

And, I have an agenda too - I live between the San Andreas and Hayward-Calaveras Faults.

[mzmolly]

1. Recommended.

Yikes.

[wtmusic]

2. It wouldn't need a natural catastrophe

but a mass demonstration which included "terrorist elements" which got "out of control" and "threatened surrounding communities".

See you in Gitmo.

[Coastie for Truth]

4. I am very familiar with that.

I worked with the father of one of the kids murdered at Kent State by Del Orso and Canterbury and Rhodes, and a cousin of mine was another one of the murder victims.

[jwirr]

3. The "dissing" of the Red Cross is not a new event.

The elderly in our area can tell you stories about how they had to pay for services while the RC tells people in their literature that these things are done free. These stories come from personal experience from the WWII era and beyond. I took many of these stories down in oral interviews for the historical society.

Saying that I too am worried about the direction of bushies military takeover. He wants too many them to do too many things that are not military in nature.

[Coastie for Truth]

5. California's Incident Command System

Saying that I too am worried about the direction of bushies military takeover. He wants too many them to do too many things that are not military in nature.

After years of earthquakes and "urban" forest fires - we have developed a system called the "Incident Command System" , originally developed by for large fires and earthquakes - totally scalable and extensible and seems to work for everything from missing kids to earthquakes.

The trick is -getting macho military people from believing that "If the Army is here, the senior soldier has to be in charge" to accepting the ICS. Even post-9/11, NYC, the NYPD wants to be in charge, not FDNY.

[Nothing Without Hope]

9. The leadership of the American Red Cross is thoroughly corrupt and

a bunch of GOP hacks that do NOT get the money to the people who need it and take enormous salaries for themselves. The ARC in its current state is not to be relied on as the major organized caregiver after a natural disaster. They were abysmal after Katrina.

Read about it in this dKos diary, which starts from an LA Times exposé. (I cross-posted at DU, but the discussion at dKos was better that time for some reason.)

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/25/95628/8554
diary title: LAT exposé: "The Red Cross money pit" - The TRUTH at last!!!

[mopinko]

6. this is why the guard was sent to iraq, imho

i keep asking myself why the have grandmas and grandpas over there fighting, when we have an army that we have invested trillions of dollars in. although everything these jokers do looks like stupid ineptitude, i think they have an agenda that they are following. and i think this is part of it. eisenhower warned us.

[jwirr]

10. Another dumb question: What is the missile medal and

what does it represent?

[mopinko]

11. it's one for us old fogeys.

don't feel bad, i have yet to sell one.
it refers to dwight eisenhower's speech- a chance for peace-
here is the famous exerpt-

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

full text here

[EVDebs]

7. 7 Days In May happened a long time ago

Operation Cable Splicer etc. The whole Ollie North/FEMA 'suspend the constitution' deal. The media is just now finding out about this ?

[Nothing Without Hope]

8. Extremely important - please also read this earlier thread, which has

parts of the story and shows how the neocons have been preparing and laying the legal and organizational groundwork for a martial law power-grab FOR YEARS. Read the ENTIRE thread - there are must-read articles on the FEMA executive orders, the Posse Comitatus Act, NorthCom, and more in the replies. At the end of the replies are discussions of how this new flu threat is being used as more ammunition to terrify people into allowing military martial law to "protect" them, as if it would.

Again, I urge you to read the ENTIRE THREAD, including the replies:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4790112
thread title: Missing A KEY POINT in *'s speech: POWER GRAB FOR POTUS AND MILITARY

Re the threat of avian flu: the LA Times article cited near the end of the reply thread makes it clear that increased DOMESTIC VACCINE PRODUCTION and a distribution network is absolutely vital, but Bush isn't talking about that. He wants to be dictator and he sees the hurricanes and now the flu threat as his "enabling events."

Anybody STILL calling this tinfoilhattery? The route to this point and into martial law, a military dictatorship, is plain as day. Read the thread and see.

Oh, and by the way - the first head of NorthCom, one mission of which is to administer martial law if it is declared, was none other than General Eberhard, who was the head of NORAD on 9/11. You'll recall that it was never explained - the excuses kept shifting and never made sense - why ALL fighter/interceptors were called off on that day so that the hijacked planes could finish their long flights into the most heavily protected airspace on the planet. You'd think that Eberhard would have been courtmartialed for such a lapse, but now, the grateful Bush Administration PROMOTED him to be head of their huge military power structure. Shows you what we're dealing with, I think. They have been purging military brass who uphold the Constitution - like General Byrnes - and replacing them with Bush loyalists.

Why does everyone assume that the US military brass will automatically uphold the Constitution instead of following Bush's orders? According to the infamous Yoo memo of 2001, Bush has sole power to direct the military or declare war. Blatantly unconstitutional, of course, but it will serve as an excuse for traitors.

Read the entire thread. It's all there.

[Coastie for Truth]

12. My purpose in posting the New Republic article

was to start a discussion going on--

IN A POST KATRINA (NEO-CON ADMINISTRATION) WORLD - HOW DO WE A HANDLE A MASS DISASTER THAT IS WELL BEYOND THE CAPABILITIES OF OUR LOCAL PROFESSIONAL FIRST RESPONDERS

1. The "militia" - Which I am using in the pre-National Rifle Association, pre-Revolutionary sense of the word --- local volunteers who put themselves in harms way for the good of their community (in the Lockian "Social Contract" sense of "community).

That is at least the National Guard -- under the Governor's Command, the "Fire Militia" (the archaic term for the volunteer fire service and by extension the volunteer ambulance service), and the "Civil Posse"/"Voluntary Emergency Service Workers" - who are not the criminal posse - but a legal construct to give Worker's Comp to volunteers who are inured while doing "disaster" and "hunting for missing kids" type work.

I am also including the FEMA trained, locally run - ask your local Fire Department, since in most communities CERT falls to the local FD for training.

2. The National Guard - This is the Guard's historic role -- but I think Bush and the Neocons have destroyed the National Guard by elective wars of choice -- and it will take a generation to rehabilitate the National Guard.

3. Sectarian "Faith Based" Emergency Responders - The Salvation Army and the Southern Baptists Brotherhood are truly outstanding - (at least not yet) they don't hand you a Bible with the hot meal, cot, and blanket.

4. Red Cross - which has been beaten to death on DU.

5. Local Government Resources - That's really the alternative. But - in a major disaster your Fire and Police and Medics may well be pulled away on "Mutual Assistance."

6. Neighbor Helping Neighbor - Like Habitat for Humanity, and your local churches, temples, mosques, local Salvation Army, local Red Cross volunteers, etc. Viable - depending on scale and organization (see the Incident Command System links in the OP). But, as my Grand mother used to say "From Your Lips to God's Ears."

We really need to ask - what is the Mass Disaster Plan - without DOD and the Neo-Cons -- for your region.

What is your (extended) family's Mass Disaster Plan --- and I mean without guns to shoot your neighbors and/or marauders.

We really need to think about this--

-whether you "believe in" "Global Warming" or the "50 year +/- oceanic current cycle" or "Sun Spots and Solar storms" -- with more and more people living on Coast and flood plains -- we are going to see severe storms.

-tornadoes are not going to go away.

-blizzards are not going to go away.

-earthquakes are not going to go away.

You have to plan for your family - and (as a good Progressive, who buys into John Locke's "Social Contract") your community.