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The US Military Coup
(David Isenberg, Asia Times, December 5, 2003)
In 1992, a then little-known deputy staff judge advocate lieutenant-colonel by the name of Charles J Dunlap Jr published an article titled "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012" in the US Army War College's military journal Parameters. In a plot that was a cross between Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and the movie The Siege, he depicted an America in which a military coup had taken place in the year 2012, and General Thomas E T Brutus, commander-in-chief of the Unified Armed Forces of the United States, occupies the White House as permanent military plenipotentiary. A senior retired officer of the military is one of those arrested, having been convicted by court-martial for opposing the coup. Prior to his execution, he discusses the origins of the coup, arguing that it was the outgrowth of trends visible as far back as 1992. These trends were the massive diversion of military forces to civilian use, the monolithic unification of the armed forces, and the insularity of the military community. . . . a report in the November 23 Los Angeles Times by respected military affairs analyst William Arkin provides the latest evidence that the supposedly inviolate wall keeping the military out of traditional civilian activities is eroding, due the diversion of the military to civilian missions. . . . That wall is embodied in the US by the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, enacted to preclude federal troops from doing the bidding of local politicians in the occupied South following the Civil War. It prohibits the military from conducting domestic law enforcement operations. Congress wanted to make it crystal clear, as Richard Nixon might have said, that there is a great difference in a democracy between protecting our nation from foreign attack and policing our neighborhoods. But the law also allows Congress and the president to make exceptions, and over the years they have done so. . . . They did so notably in the 1980s in the Ronald Reagan era when the US military was dragged kicking and screaming into counter-drug operations. Ironically, then defense secretary Caspar Weinberger wrote in 1985, "Reliance on military forces to accomplish civilian tasks is detrimental to both military readiness and the democratic process." . . . On May 20, 1997, a Marine anti-drug squad stalked, shot and allowed to bleed to death Ezequiel Hernandez, an 18-year-old high school sophomore, while he was herding goats near his home in Redford Texas, near the Rio Grande River, the site of heavy military drug interdiction activity. Hernandez's death was the first fatal shooting of a US civilian since the military began anti-drug missions in the 1980s and is the first American killed by soldiers on US soil since the 1970 National Guard killings of four students at Kent State during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. . . . In the future, the National Guard will be the lead organization that coordinates military and civilian responses to terrorist threats and attacks against some critical infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants, McHale said. . . . He also said the Pentagon reviewed the Posse Comitatus Act and determined that it would not be a violation to deploy the National Guard to protect critical infrastructure in some circumstances. He said he expects more presidential directives in the future to expand the military's homeland defense role. . . . But the same basic concerns about military involvement still remain relevant. From a civil liberties viewpoint, while members of the armed forces take an oath to uphold and defend the constitution, they are not trained, like the police, to uphold Americans' rights to privacy and due process. Civil libertarians' fears about due process have been heightened since September 11 by the indefinite detention of citizens and immigrants, and by proposals to try them before secret military tribunals.

posted by Lorenzo 11:25 AM