Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.
The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now just broke a story that is a piece of a larger puzzle: and that puzzle is the spying on dissidents right here in the United States.
This time it was done by someone working for the U.S. military, which may be illegal.
This new report today from The New York Times'
Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston reveals an entirely unsurprising
though still important event: in 2002, Dick Cheney and David
Addington urged that U.S.
WASHINGTON — Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated
testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of
Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.
Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney,
argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic
soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the
Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.
The U.S. military
expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by
2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear
terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon
officials.
The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's
role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop
commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts,
defense analysts said.
