POSSE COMITATUS IGNORED

Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, arrived in his new office only steps away from the Oval Office of President Bush, the man who created his job. Ridge's new job was chief of the Department of Homeland Security. Here was the man who was to coordinate 46 different federal government agencies in an effort to protect the American people from terrorists, a position designed from its inception to become a permanent government department.

It was announced that Ridge would work in conjunction with Bush's deputy national security advisor, Army General Wayne Downing, indicating that the military would play a prominent role in counterterrorism activities. Few thought to ask if this was a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA), the law prohibiting the US military from conducting law enforcement duties against the American public.

The PCA has never really been challenged in this nation's history because it addresses a concern dating back to one of the grievances that caused the American Revolution. The act embodies the traditional principle of separation of military and civilian authority, one of the fundamental precepts of our form of government and a cornerstone of American liberty.

The early colonists were distressed at being placed at the mercy of King George's troops plus being forced to feed and quarter them. But Posse Comitatus, Latin for a support group of citizens for law enforcement, i.e. a posse, was passed in 1878 as a direct result of the outrage over Reconstruction in the South following the War Between the States. Following that war, the Southern states were at the mercy of military authorities, many of whom proved inept or corrupt.

Yet, in recent years this act has been slowly shredded, beginning at least in 1981 when Congress allowed an exception to be made for the War on Drugs. The military was allowed to be used for drug interdiction along the nation's borders. This small and what appeared to be sensible action at the time soon grew out of proportion. Congress, still unable to come to grips with the true social causes of drug abuse, in 1989 designated the Department of Defense as the lead agency in drug interdiction.

In the tragedy at Waco on April 19, 1993, military snipers were on hand and tanks were used to bulldoze the burning Branch Davidian church. The use of the Fort Hood tanks under the command of General Wesley Clark was authorized because federal officials used the pretext that the Davidians were involved with drugs. But no evidence of drugs was ever found.

On April 19, 1995, when the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, President Clinton proposed yet another exception to the PCA, this time to allow the military to aid civilian investigators looking into weapons of mass destruction. About this same time Congress considered but did not pass legislation to allow troops to enforce customs and immigration laws at the borders.

During the 1996 presidential campaign, Bob Dole promised to heighten the military's role in the War on Drugs while another primary contender, Lamar Alexander, suggested that a new branch of the military be formed and substituted for the INS and Border Patrol.

In 2005, President Bush announced that he would use military troops in the event of a national pandemic.

“The need for reaffirmation of the PCA’s principle is increasing,” wrote legal scholar Matthew Hammond in the Washington University Law Quarterly, “because in recent years, Congress and the public have seen the military as a panacea for domestic problems.”

He added, “Major and minor exceptions to the PCA, which allow the use of the military in law enforcement roles, blur the line between military and civilian roles, undermine civilian control of the military, damage military readiness, and inefficiently solve the problems they supposedly address. Additionally, increasing the role of the military would strengthen the federal law enforcement apparatus that is currently under close scrutiny for overreaching its authority.”

Yet in the wake of 9/11 and prior to the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), military troops were seen patrolling airports and the streets of Washington and New York with no outcry from a citizenry apparently appreciative of perceived new security. Such scenes were a brief glimpse of life under martial law.

Even after the creation of the TSA, problems persisted.

Eighty-year-old Fred Hubbell, a retired engineer from Texas visiting in Connecticut, was arrested and handcuffed at Bradley International Airport in August 2002, for mentioning one word. Cranky after enduring repeated searches at the airport, the World War II veteran observed a security guard poking through his wallet, “What do you expect to find in there, a rifle?” Hubbell asked sarcastically. “Do you think that was an appropriate remark?” responded the guard. “I do,” replied Hubbell, who was promptly arrested.

Judy Powell, a 55-year-old tourist from Britain, bought a GI Joe toy soldier in Las Vegas and packed it in her bag for her return flight home. But she was refused boarding privileges when an airport security officer spotted GI Joe's tiny plastic rifle. “I was simply stunned when I realized they were serious,” said Mrs. Powell. “I was really angry to start with because of the absurdity of the situation. But then I saw the funny side of it and thought this was simple lunacy.” A spokesman for Los Angeles International Airport defended the action, saying, “We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica. If GI Joe was carrying a replica then it had to be taken from him.”

This excuse, of course, carried echoes of Sgt. Schultz from TV’s Hogan's Heroes explaining, “I vas chust following orders.” It is such unthinking responses to orders based on hastily passed laws that so trouble civil libertarians.

If there was any doubt that planning for martial law did not start with the terrorist attacks on 9/11, just ask the residents of Kingsville, TX.

Beginning on the night of February 8, 1999, a series of mock battles using live ammunition erupted around the 25,000 inhabitants of the town, located near Corpus Christi. In a military operation named “Operation Last Dance,” eight black helicopters roared over the town. One nearly crashed when it hit the top of a telephone pole and started a fire near a home. Soldiers of the elite 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the “Night Stalkers,” ferried by the choppers, staged an attack on two empty buildings using real explosives and live ammunition. During the action, an abandoned police station was accidentally set on fire and a gas station was badly damaged when one or more helicopters landed on its roof.

Citizens of Kingsville were terrified during the drill as only the Police Chief Felipe Garza and Mayor Phil Esquivel were notified of the attack in advance. Both men refused to give any details of the operation, insisting they had been sworn to secrecy by the military. Only Arthur Rogers, the assistant police chief, would admit to what happened. “The United States Army Special Operations Command was conducting a training exercise in our area,” he said but refused to provide any details.

Local emergency management coordinator for FEMA, Tomas Sanchez, was not happy with the frightening attack and the lack of information and warning. Sanchez, a decorated Vietnam veteran with 30 years service in Naval Intelligence, was asked what the attack was all about. He replied that based on his background and knowledge, the attack was an operational exercise based on a scenario where “Martial law has been declared through the Presidential Powers and War Powers Act, and some citizens have refused to give up their weapons. They have taken over two of the buildings in Kingsville. The police cannot handle it. So you call these guys in. They show up and they zap everybody, take all the weapons and let the local PD clean it up.”

One resident told a reporter, “This is total BS. If we don't stop it now it's going to get worse.”

Asked for comment, then Texas Governor George W. Bush said he was not his job to get involved in the concerns over the Night Stalkers using live ammunition in a civilian area of his state.

Sanchez and other military experts told World Net Daily that the night attack indicated the use of Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 25, a Top Secret document that apparently authorizes military participation in domestic police situations. Some speculated that PDD 25 may have surreptitiously superceded the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.

The events in Kingsville may date as far back as 1971 when plans were drawn up to merge the military with police and the National Guard. (State Guards were gradually eliminated during the past two decades.) In that year, Senator Sam Ervin's Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights discovered that military intelligence has established an intricate surveillance system to spy on hundreds of thousands of American citizens, mostly anti-war protesters. This plan was code named “Garden Plot.” Britt Snider, who worked for the subcommittee, said the plans seemed too vague to get excited about. “We could never find any kind of unifying purpose behind it all,” he told a reporter. “It looked like an aimless kind of thing.”

Four years later Garden Plot began to come into sharper focus. “[C]ode named Cable Splicer [and] covering California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona, under the command of the Sixth Army, [it] is a plan that outlines extraordinary military procedures to stamp out unrest in this country,” reported Ron Ridenhour and Arthur Lubow in New Times magazine. “Developed in a series of California meetings from 1968 to 1972, Cable Splicer is a war plan that was adapted for domestic use procedures used by the US Army in Vietnam. Although many facts still remain behind Pentagon smoke screens, Cable Splicer [documents] reveal the shape of the monster that the Ervin committee was tracking down.”

During the time of Cable Splicer, several full-scale war games were conducted with local officials and police working side by side with military officers in civilian clothing. Many policemen were taught military urban pacification techniques. They returned to their departments and helped create the early SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams.

Rep. Clair Burgener of California, a staunch Reagan Republican who had attended the Cable Splicer II kickoff conference, was flabbergasted when shown Cable Splicer documents. “I’ve read Seven Days in May and all those scary books…and they're scary! ...This is what I call subversive.”

Subcommittee Chief Counsel Doug Lee read through the documents and blurted, “Unbelievable. These guys are crazy! We're the enemy! This is civil war they're talking about here. Half the country has been designated as the enemy.” Snider agreed, stating, “If there ever was a model for a takeover, this is it.”

The War on Terrorism has provided the pretext for the activation of plans such as Cable Splicer, a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. In June 2002, despite promises by the Bush Administration that it would not initiate any new intelligence reforms until after the joint congressional committees had completed their inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon quietly requested permission to create a powerful new position—Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. This request for yet another layer of authority was inserted into a Senate defense bill slated for Congressional approval.

Stephen A. Cambone was confirmed by the US Senate as the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence on March 7, 2003, and sworn in four days later.

“The Pentagon's gambit has been such a brilliant stealth attack that many members of Congress aren't even aware it is happening, let alone what it means,” noted reporter Linda Robinson. “No hearings have been held, and Pentagon officials portray it as merely an internal managerial matter with few broader implications. But intelligence officials and experts say that could not be further from the truth. The new under secretary position is a bureaucratic coup that accomplishes many Pentagon goals in one fell swoop.”

Insiders thought this slippery move served to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act and deliver even more power into the hands of top Bush Administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Initially, the new under secretary for intelligence was to have been Richard Haver. Haver had been Rumsfeld's special assistant for intelligence and was Cheney's very first assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the elder Bush's administration. The new job eventually went to Cambone, himself a neo-con who had served under Rumsfeld and one of the participants in the 2000 PNAC report which foresaw the need for a catastrophic attack to gain support for an increased US military presence in the Middle East.

Fears of secretive, overreaching agencies with military connections that might violate the Posse Comitatus Act appeared to find substantiation in January, 2005, when news outlets reported that, since 2002, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had operated an intelligence-gathering and support unit called the Strategic Support Branch (SSB) with authority to operate clandestinely anywhere in the world where it is ordered to go in support of antiterrorism and counterterrorism missions. The SSB previously had been operating under an undisclosed name.

The defense official confirmed that the SSB reports to Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the DIA, but that policies are set by Undersecretary of Defense Cambone, one of Rumsfeld's most senior aides.