New Effort To Curtail Posse Comitatus After Colorado Massacre
New Effort To Curtail Posse Comitatus After Colorado Massacre
‘Batman’ shooting cited as reason to increase military role in domestic law enforcement
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Friday, August 3, 2012
Citing an alleged increase in the use of improvised explosive devices on U.S. soil, including last month’s Colorado massacre, the federal government and members of Congress are pushing for Posse Comitatus to be curtailed and for the U.S. military to work closer with law enforcement in fighting “homegrown terrorists”.
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Warning about the “growing threat” of IEDs across the United States, the Pentagon is pushing for Congress to relax Posse Comitatus, which substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement unless under precise and extreme circumstances.
Section 1385 of the Posse Comitatus Act states, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
Citing the need for the military to aid police in dealing with IEDs, the Pentagon is ‘complaining’ about “legal restrictions on the activities of U.S. armed forces” within the United States, labeling Posse Comitatus an ‘impediment’ that “some members of Congress are pressing to change,” reports the Houston Chronicle.
House Committee on Homeland Security leaders Reps. Peter King, R-N.Y., Daniel Lungren, R-Calif., and Michael McCaul, R-Austin are leading an effort to amend Posse Comitatus in order to allow Pentagon specialists to coordinate with local law enforcement bodies.
While police being trained by military experts on how to deal with IEDs is unlikely to cause much uproar, the effort to amend Posse Comitatus, widely recognized as a barrier to the imposition of martial law, is guaranteed to stoke controversy, especially given the fact that the federal government now identifies American citizens who uphold constitutional rights as domestic extremists.
“The domestic IED threat from both homegrown terrorists and global threat networks is real and presents a significant security challenge for the United States and our international partners,” Army Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero told Congress in classified testimony.
“Among the recent examples of IED use cited by authorities is that of the Colorado theater shooter, who allegedly rigged his apartment with the device,” reports UPI.
As we saw in a recent study funded by the Department of Homeland Security, these “homegrown terrorists” the military is being brought in to counter are primarily American citizens, not Islamic extremists. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” are to be characterized as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.Fears that martial law may be imposed to deal with widespread civil unrest in the United States have never been stronger.
As Infowars recently reported, a newly leaked US Army Military Police training manual for “Civil Disturbance Operations” outlines how military assets are to be used domestically to quell riots, confiscate firearms and even kill Americans on U.S. soil during mass civil unrest.
Back in 2008, U.S. troops returning from Iraq were earmarked for “homeland patrols” with one of their roles including helping with “civil unrest and crowd control”.
In December 2008, the Washington Post reported on plans to station 20,000 more U.S. troops inside America for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011 onwards, an expansion of Northcom’s militarization of the country in preparation for potential civil unrest following a total economic collapse or a mass terror attack.
A report produced that same year by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Institute warned that the United States may experience massive civil unrest in the wake of a series of crises which it termed “strategic shock.”
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” stated the report, authored by [Ret.] Lt. Col. Nathan Freir, adding that the military may be needed to quell “purposeful domestic resistance”.
In a recent Council on Foreign relations piece, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Raymond T. Odierno advocated for the U.S. Army to be “transitioned” into a more “flexible force” by deploying in situations normally reserved for domestic law enforcement officials.
Both the U.S. Army and the Department of Homeland Security recently purchased hundreds of items of riot gear in anticipation of disorder at the upcoming RNC, DNC and presidential inauguration.
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