[NYTr] As US Defeat Looms, Threat of Martial Law is Real

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Info Clearing House - Jul 27, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18080.htm

The Threat Of Martial Law Is Real

By Dave Lindorff

The looming collapse of the US military in Iraq, of which a number of
generals and former generals, including former Chief of Staff Colin
Powell, have warned, is happening none too soon, as it my be the best
hope for preventing military rule here at home.

>From the looks of things, the Bush/Cheney regime has been working
assiduously to pave the way for a declaration of military rule, such
that at this point it really lacks only the pretext to trigger a
suspension of Constitutional government. They have done this with the
active support of Democrats in Congress, though most of the heavy
lifting was done by the last, Republican-led Congress.

The first step, or course, was the first Authorization for Use of
Military Force, passed in September 2001, which the president has
subsequently used to claim-improperly, but so what? -that the whole
world, including the US, is a battlefield in a so-called "War" on
Terror, and that he has extra-Constitutional unitary executive powers
to ignore laws passed by Congress. As constitutional scholar and former
Reagan-era associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein observes, that
one claim, that the US is itself a battlefield, is enough to allow this
or some future president to declare martial law, "since you can always
declare martial law on a battlefield. All he'd need would be a pretext,
like another terrorist attack inside the U.S."

The 2001 AUMF was followed by the PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001,
which undermined much of the Bill of Rights. Around the same time, the
president began a campaign of massive spying on Americans by the
National Security Agency, conducted without any warrants or other
judicial review. It was and remains a program that is clearly aimed at
American dissidents and at the administration's political opponents,
since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would never have
raised no objections to spying on potential terrorists. (And it, and
other government spying programs, have resulted in the government's
having a list now of some 325,000 "suspected terrorists"!)

The other thing we saw early on was the establishment of an underground
government-within-a-government, though the activation, following 9-11,
of the so-called "Continuity of Government" protocol, which saw heads
of federal agencies moved secretly to an underground bunker where,
working under the direction of Vice President Dick Cheney, the
"government" functioned out of sight of Congress and the public for
critical months.

It was also during the first year following 9-11 that the Bush/Cheney
regime began its programs of arrest and detention without charge-mostly
of resident aliens, but also of American citizens-and of kidnapping and
torture in a chain of gulag prisons overseas and at the Navy base at
Guantanamo Bay.

The following year, Attorney General John Ashcroft began his program to
develop a mass network of tens of millions of citizen spies-Operation
TIPS. That program, which had considerable support from key Democrats
(notably Sen. Joe Lieberman), was curtailed by Congress when key
conservatives got wind of the scale of the thing, but the concept
survives without a name, and is reportedly being expanded today.

Meanwhile, last October Bush and Cheney, with the help of a compliant
Congress, put in place some key elements needed for a military putsch.
There was the overturning of the venerable Posse Comitatus Act of 1878,
which barred the use of active duty military inside the United States
for police-type functions, and the revision of the Insurrection Act, so
as to empower the president to take control of National Guard units in
the 50 states even over the objections of the governors of those states.

Put this together with the wholly secret construction now under
way--courtesy of a $385-million grant by the US Army Corps of Engineers
to Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc--of detention camps reportedly
capable of confining as many as 400,000 people, and a recent report
that the Pentagon has a document, dated June 1, 2007, classified Top
Secret, which declares there to be a developing "insurgency" within the
U.S, and which lays out a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign
against legal dissent, and you have all the ingredients for a military
takeover of the United States.

As we go about our daily lives--our shopping, our escapist movie
watching, and even our protesting and political organizing-we need to
be aware that there is a real risk that it could all blow up, and that
we could find ourselves facing armed, uniformed troops at our doors.

Bruce Fein isn't an alarmist. He says he doesn't see martial law coming
tomorrow. But he is also realistic. "Really, by declaring the US to be
a battlefield, Bush already made it possible for himself to declare
martial law, because you can always declare martial law on a
battlefield," he says. "All he would need would be a pretext, like
another terrorist attack on the U.S."

Indeed, the revised Insurrection Act (10. USC 331-335) approved by
Congress and signed into law by Bush last October, specifically says
that the president can federalize the National Guard to "suppress
public disorder" in the event of "national disorder, epidemic, other
serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident." That
determination, the act states, is solely the president's to make.
Congress is not involved.

Fein says, "This is all sitting around like a loaded gun waiting to go
off. I think the risk of martial law is trivial right now, but the
minute there is a terrorist attack, then it is real. And it stays with
us after Bush and Cheney are gone, because terrorism stays with us
forever." (It may be significant that Hillary Clinton, the leading
Democratic candidate for president, has called for the revocation of
the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq, but not
of the earlier 2001 AUMF which Bush claims makes him commander in chief
of a borderless, endless war on terror.)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has
added an amendment to the upcoming Defense bill, restoring the
Insurrection Act to its former version-a move that has the endorsement
of all 50 governors--but Fein argues that would not solve the problem,
since Bush still claims that the U.S. is a battlefield. Besides, a
Leahy aide concedes that Bush could sign the next Defense
Appropriations bill and then use a signing statement to invalidate the
Insurrection Act rider.

Fein argues that the only real defense against the looming disaster of
a martial law declaration would be for Congress to vote for a
resolution determining that there is no "War" on terror. "But they are
such cowards they will never do that," he says.

That leaves us with the military.

If ordered to turn their guns and bayonets on their fellow Americans,
would our "heroes" in uniform follow their consciences, and their oaths
to "uphold and defend" the Constitution of the United States? Or would
they follow the orders of their Commander in Chief?

It has to be a plus that National Guard and Reserve units are on their
third and sometimes fourth deployments to Iraq, and are fuming at the
abuse. It has to be a plus that active duty troops are refusing to
re-enlist in droves-especially mid-level officers.

If we are headed for martial law, better that it be with a broken
military. Maybe if it's broken badly enough, the administration will be
afraid to test the idea.

[Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by
Barbara Olshansky.]