Is Martial Law Around the Corner?

[kpete]

Condensing power into a single branch is precisely what concerns me about Bush's new National Security Presidential directive http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2063.shtml.

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The Northern Command, Northcom, created by Bush, already has plans to militarize the United States in the event of an attack.

"The new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks," Bradley Graham wrote in The Washington Post on August 8, 2005.

Then there is the revision to the Posse Comitatus Act, which Bush whisked through last October.

In an editorial on February 19 of this year, aptly entitled "Making Martial Law Easier," The New York Times wrote: "Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the President may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack, or to any 'other condition.' Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new Presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate."

Interestingly, some in the Bush Justice Department didn't believe this Congressional change was even necessary. On October 23, 2001, then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty, then-special counsel in the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a memo to Alberto Gonzales, then-White House Counsel, and William Haynes II, then-general counsel for the Pentagon: "We recently opined that the Posse Comitatus Act, 18 USCs.1385 (1994), which generally prohibits the use of Armed Forces for law enforcement purposes absent constitutional or statutory authority to do so, does not forbid the use of military force for the military purpose of preventing and deterring terrorism within the United States."

Now Congress has given Bush and the Pentagon this power anyway.

more at:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/23485