The Last Roundup

By Christopher Ketcham
Illustration by Brett Ryder
April 29, 2008
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20080430182318128
Wednesday, April 30 2008

For decades the federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention under martial law?

In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president’s henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft’s second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush’s first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration’s various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn’t allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush’s men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program’s authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey’s words, “to take advantage of a very sick man,” sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft’s sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and “literally ran” up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. “I’m not the attorney general,” Ashcroft told Bush’s men. “There–he pointed weakly to Comey–is the attorney general.” Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey’s presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House “without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality,” he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can’t help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey’s testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him “to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases.” The larger mystery remained intact, however. “It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate,” the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed “every 45 days” as part of planning to assess threats to “the continuity of our government.”

Few Americans–professional journalists included–know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it’s no surprise that the president’s passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces–and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it’s a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government�s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, �There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived �enemies of the state� almost instantaneously.� He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a �national emergency.� Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a �natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,� while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like �riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.� According to one news report, even �national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad� could be a trigger.

Let�s imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast�say, a suitcase nuke�in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and have been aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a �parallel government� that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency�s incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem farfetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese-Americans�everyone from infants to the elderly�be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of �militants� and �American negroes� who were to be held at �assembly centers or relocation camps.� In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root�then a subsidiary of Halliburton�was handed a $385 million contract to establish �temporary detention and processing capabilities� for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for �an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs.� Just what those �new programs� might be is not specified.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who�for a tremendously broad set of reasons�have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state�as seems to be the case with Main Core�even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Another well-informed source�a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community�says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets� behavior and tracks their circle of associations with �social network analysis� and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

�The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,� he says. �Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.� An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that �it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time.�

A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as �warrantless wiretapping.� In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor �huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records.� Authorities employ �sophisticated software programs� to sift through the data, searching for �suspicious patterns.� In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it�s notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. �The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed,� the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. �Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.�

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local �intelligence� reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; �commercial databases�; and unidentified �private sector entities.� Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI�s Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department�s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor anti-war protestors and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used �to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time.� Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, �What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be.� A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: �Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that �Main Core� database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project.�

If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. �If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues��the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws��so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints.� Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. �It�s clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear.� Giraldi continues, �I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasons�quite likely, including the two of us.�

Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: �In the event of a national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers��the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example�� if Congress doesn�t explicitly prohibit it. It�s really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so.� Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court �when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on the president�s �enemies list.� That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it is�even in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor.�

The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey�s suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: �Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway.�

But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. �The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable,� the senior government official says.

In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won�t prevent terrorist conspiracies. �Because there is so little historical terrorist event data,� Jonas tells Radar, �there is not enough volume to create precise predictions.�

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in post-war American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to �accumulate the names, identities, and activities� of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding �security index,� according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by �the National Military Establishment.� By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included “professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid” to unnamed “subversive elements.” This same FBI “security index” was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).

FEMA, however–then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency–already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford’s character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans, which contained information gleaned from wideranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency’s secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator’s findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers “can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers”–a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather’s databases were run “without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate.”

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a “secret contingency plan,” code named REX 84, which called “for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run
state and local governments.” The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North’s program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas Congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. “I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution,” Brooks said. “I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked.” Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, “That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir.” Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals–prisoners, for example–by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, “Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy’s blacklist looks downright crude.” Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, “The gloves seemed to come off.” What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, “How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?” Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

In July 2007 and again last August, Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the “classified annexes” of the Bush administration’s Continuity of Government program. DeFazio’s interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.

But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are “extra-constitutional or unconstitutional.” Around the same time, he told the Oregonian, “Maybe the people who think there�s a conspiracy out there are right.”

Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an “enemy combatant” forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies,” which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections�as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807–but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident.”

More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence
expert William Arkin, “allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.”

“We are at the edge of a cliff and we�re about to fall off,” says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There’s no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this–for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, “We have to be cautious.” The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, “You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.’ “

As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey’s testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an “endemic surveillance society,” alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)

These days, it’s rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. “The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny,” Church pointed out in 1975. “And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.”

Source: Radar Magazine (http://radarmagazine.com/from-the-magazine/2008/04/mayjune_2008_table_of_contents.php). Please purchase a copy of the May/June 2008 issue immediately, or subscribe.

 

Changes in law regarding States of Emergency

 

In case of an emergency in the United States, Congress has long had the power to declare an emergency and set in motion all the U.S. provisions that deal with emergencies.  There are the Patriot Act and the War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933 and more.  Presidents over the years have assumed more and more power by issuing a multitude of Executive Orders, many of them secret.  There is nothing in the constitution to authorize these, but they are “the law” none-the-less.  There is also a National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html) and a Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html) which assigns all power to the executive branch in case of a catastrophic emergency.  

The outlook for our democracy in case of emergency has always been bleak.  Our democracy is in danger with all the above lurking.  Once an emergency is declared, we will live in a dictatorship.

The situation today is MUCH WORSE than even the above would indicate.  Prepare to UPDATE THE HORROR!

Congress has given Bush himself blanket authority to declare an emergency.  Today the president can himself declare an emergency any time he wants to for ANY reason at all.  We will live in the military dictatorship that follows.  Congress can do nothing about it — ever.  There will be no Congress.

There is no Act with a name for U.S. to look up.  Bush got his new power in a way more devious than that.

A few paragraphs giving such authorization were slipped into the massive defense bill, the 591-page Defense Appropriations Act of 2006:

On September 30, 2006, the Congress modified the Insurrection Act as part of the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill. Section 1076 of the new law changes Sec. 333 of the “Insurrection Act,” and widens the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States to enforce the laws. Under this act, the President may also deploy troops as a police force during a natural disaster, epidemic, serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or other condition, when the President determines that the authorities of the state are incapable of maintaining public order. The bill also modified Sec. 334 of the Insurrection Act, giving the President authority to order the dispersal of either insurgents or “those obstructing the enforcement of the laws.” The new law changed the name of the chapter from “Insurrection” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order.” (Wiki)

The 2007 Defense Authorization Bill, with over $500 billion allocated to the military, and which also contained the changes to the Insurrection Act of 1807, was passed by a bipartisan majority of both houses of Congress: 398-23 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. (Wiki)  They amended U.S. martial law statutes.  Maybe most in Congress have no idea what they did.  There was no public debate or media attention.  They were rushed through the Republican-controlled Congress before the 2006 elections and enacted into law.

Those paragraphs almost destroyed two acts which were obscure bulwarks of our liberty.  One is the Posse Comitatus Act.  The entire text of the Posse Comitatus Act is as follows:

18 U.S.C. § 1385 – Use of Army and Air Force as posse comitatus

“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”.  (Wiki)

The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807:

The laws are chiefly contained in 10 U.S.C. § 331 – 10 U.S.C. § 335. The general aim is to limit Presidential power as much as possible, relying on state and local governments for initial response in the event of insurrection. Coupled with the Posse Comitatus Act, Presidential powers for law enforcement are limited and delayed.

Throughout U.S. history the latter had limited the president’s domestic use of the U.S. military against the American people in case of lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion.  In order for military forces to be used under the provisions of the revised Insurrection Act, the following conditions must be met:

(1)   The President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to–

(A)   restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that–

(i)                 domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order; and

(ii)              such violence results in a condition described in paragraph (2); or

(B)   suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrection, violation, combination, or conspiracy results in a condition described in paragraph (2).

(2)   A condition described in this paragraph is a condition that–

(A)   so hinders the execution of the laws of a State or possession, as applicable, and of the United States within that State or possession, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State or possession are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or

(B)   opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.  (Wiki)

Accordingly, actions taken under the Insurrection Act have always been exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act.^[1][2] (Wiki)

Now after 2006 the president can use the military as a domestic police force.  That is the first critical point. 

The second is he can do it by declaring an “emergency” in response to a natural disaster, disease outbreak, terrorist attack, and “any other condition.”  A blank check!!  For any reason!  Under the newly amended statute, Bush does not even have to notify Congress of his intent to use military force against the American people.  He just has to notify Congress after he has done so. 

Bush would take over by declaring a state of emergency, starting all the administrative procedures already in statutes and in the often secret Executive Orders and Directives.  It will be a military dictatorship.  Google “martial law.”  The Constitution will be suspended overtly or in effect.  The Bill of Rights will be null and void.  Congress and Federal courts will have no power.  There will be no rules, no protections, AND NO ELECTIONS. 

In countless practices for responding to such an “emergency,” practices by Cheney as well as others in government, there was never any plan for reconstituting Congress.  An “emergency” will end even the appearance of the United States as a democracy. 

I greatly fear that those planning to demonstrate at the Conventions in August could precipitate a state of “emergency.”  Or a terrorist attack somewhere in the US could precipitate same.  Bush could declare an emergency for that or any other reason.  There is some speculation that he might find an excuse to do so – to cancel the November 4 election if Obama looks like the winner. 

Hold your breath until January 20^th.

State of Emergency and the acts that define them.

The subject came up about the Patriot Act provisions, so I scanned the Patriot Act again and War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933. Since the War and Emergency Powers Act, every president has usurped lawmaking powers. Their ‘laws’ are called Executive Orders (EOs). These EOs, not our Constitution, are what is governing America today. The War and Emergency Powers Act enables … the president to declare a national emergency, and thereby become a dictator.” (Wiki)http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.htmlLink

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=State_of_national_emergency

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Security_and_Homeland_Security_Presidential_Directive

Once a state of emergency is declared by Congress, the Constitution is effectively thrown out the window. The bad part is, we have state of emergency declarations that are still in effect from 1971. The state of emergency of 1933 was not ended by Congress until ~1952. As long as there is a state of emergency in effect, no matter how old, the president can effectively bypass Congress whenever he wants.   At the point the Congress issues a state of emergency, we effectively live in a dictatorship.

 Lovely thought, no?

Trashing the Constitution: We now live in a dictatorship. Don’t believe me? Read on!

The subject came up about FISA, the Patriot Act, et al., provisions, so I scanned the Patriot Act again and War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933.

“Since the War and Emergency Powers Act, every president has usurped lawmaking powers. Their ‘laws’ are called Executive Orders (EOs). These EOs, not our Constitution, are what is governing America today.  The War and Emergency Powers Act enables … the president to declare a national emergency, and thereby become a dictator.” (Wiki)

http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.htmlLink

http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind ex.php?title=State_of_national _emergency
Link

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20)” also known as the “National Continuity Policy” was signed May 9, 2007, by President George W. Bush. This assigns all power to the executive branch in the case of a catastrophic emergency.

Once a state of emergency is declared by Congress, the Constitution is effectively thrown out the window. The bad part is, we have state of emergency declarations that are still in effect from 1971. The state of emergency of 1933 was not ended by Congress until ~1952. As long as there is a state of emergency in effect, no matter how old, the president can effectively bypass Congress whenever he wants.   At the point the Congress issues a state of emergency, we effectively live in a dictatorship.

The best part is that, once the president had asserted this power, the Congress and the Judiciary are defunct and can no longer impeach him or declare the acts upon which his dictatorial power based unconstitutional.  This is an issue that we must address now in Congress.  Along with presidential signing statements and executive privilege, we have given GWB all the tools he needs to seize control of our government.

Then there’s Blackwater, a mercenary army that has thousands of troops serving in Iraq at twice the pay of our military and with legal immunity to commit murder and mayhem, accountable to no one.  This firm has now purchased FIGHTER JETS.  Why would a security firm need FIGHTER JETS?  Begs the question, does it not?

So, in short, Congress must move to rescind these acts and end the states of emergency that are currently in effect.  At this point, if the Congress tries to impach Bush or Cheney, all Bush has to do is declare that he is asserting his executive power under the state of emergency, and Congress, for all practical purposes, no longer exists.  Please DO NOT TAKE MY WORD FOR THIS.  Read it for yourself at the links provided above!

Lovely thought, no?

Desensitized Americans and the new threahhold of tolerance re: corruption in government.

I was a young adult when the Nixon administration committed all its crimes, including the cover up, and was finally sent packing. Over time, I have seen our country’s threshhold of tolerance pushed further and further away and our citizens become more desensitized to the corruption.

First, it was Nixon, then Reagan and the Iran-Contra (arms for hostages and the illegal war in Central America ran out of VP GHWB’s office), the the S&L debacle, then the HUD scandal, then GHWB first Gulf War, the GWB used the U.S. Supreme Court to steal a presidential election with little protest or violence, then the Iraq war and all the corruption that has gone on in this administration (which I won’t bother to detail, because most of you here already know about that).

With each succeeding administration, the bar was pushed a little further down the road of corruption. If GWB had tried to pull any of the stunts he pulled in the last eight years during the early 1970s (Watergate time period), there would have been blood in the streets. Impeachment would have been a sure thing, and he, Cheney, Rummy, Armitage, Libby, Gonzales, Rice, Wolfowitz, et al., would be in jail.

We have become desensitized to corruption in government. We have come to accept the power for power’s sake of illegal executive privilege and how it is used to put the president and his administration above the law. We have become numb to the use of signing statements that blatantly and boldly assert that the president does not consider himself subject to laws he himself signs.

What is it going to take before we have finally had enough? Niemöller’s poem about the Nazis says it all, doesn’t it?   When we start holding some people accountable for breaking the law and others not accountable, where do we draw the line? Who is in the privileged class?  The Constitution of the United States explicitly prohibits any class structure. There is no nobility or ruling class or privileged class in the eyes of the law.

The use of executive privilege by the Nixon administration to exempt his administration from being held accountable for their criminal activity has been pushed to new extremes by GWB.  Now, his administration simply ignores Congressional subpoenae — they don’t even bother to show up and say they are claiming executive privilege.  They simply ignore Congress as if it doesn’t exist.  Because, in their eyes, it might as well not exist.

The use of signing statements by GWB — over 750 times in less than 7 years — has overtly stated that Bush did not intend to obey or be held accountable for the law he just signed.

This is a dangerous precedent to set. It will only be pushed farter and farther. The next corrupt administration will aver that, since we have terrorism or some new national security crisis, they have a right to completely throw the Bill of Rights out for the sake of national security, which Continuity of Government essentially does, thanks to the War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933, the Patriot Act and other provisions that have made it possible for the President to assume complete dictatorial control in the even of a national emergency, which he himself can declare. Then they will enlist private companies toward this end who will expect to be exempt from prosecution– criminal or civil, , as Blackwater in Iraq  or just like the telecoms did in the instance of illegal warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

The new FISA Amendment of 2008 granting retroactive telecom companies OR ANYONE ELSE from any criminal or civil punishment for disobeying the Fourth Amendment must be removed from FISA.  If they get away with it this time, next time will be even worse. 

 We cannot let this stand.

Continuity of Government (COG)

The laws are already in place for the president to declare a national state of emergency, after which the Congress and the Judiciary would be disbanded and a group of administrators would take over the government.

If you read my blog on the state of emergency and the various acts that created this, you will see that the original act required Congress to declare an emergency, but it also required Congress to officially declare the emergency over. The original act was in, I believe, 1939, and that state of emergency was not officially called off by Congress until 1952. Under that act, there are several states of emergency still in effect, including one from 1971, that have never been declared over. Because of that, the president could effectively and legally establish a dictatorship now under COG.

A later amendment expanded national emergencies to include insurrection, natural disasters, etc., not just acts of war on the homeland. Katrina could have set the COG in motion should the president have decided to do so.

This blog is right. We are in much greater jeopardy of losing our republic than anyone imagines. The FISA law was just another nail in the coffin of democracy. There are several blogs I have written that apply to this (one is not an original article, but another’s work — credited properly):

http://www.democrats.org/page/community/post/lauraschneider/CNWl

http://www.democrats.org/page/community/post/lauraschneider/CRGP

The subject came up about the Patriot Act provisions, so I scanned the Patriot Act again and War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933. Since the War and Emergency Powers Act, every president has usurped lawmaking powers. Their ‘laws’ are called Executive Orders (EOs). These EOs, not our Constitution, are what is governing America today. The War and Emergency Powers Act enables … the president to declare a national emergency, and thereby become a dictator.” (Wiki)

http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.htmlLink

http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind ex.php?title=State_of_national _emergency
Link