Tue, 2008-10-07 18:07 — lambert
[UPDATE See Swift Loris's comments here]
Listen:
Now, that's news, I would say.
So, who did the threatening? And did Obama know about it, when he was working the phones for the Bush + Reid + Pelosi + Obama + Paulson bailout?
NOTE Via the utterly essential Avedon, who has a nice little martial law roundup today.
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Did someone say "Martial law"? Dem Now had program on the
US Army plans for US soliders on US streets.
Rep. Sherman, of course, needs to avoid flying in small planes.
That's quite a transcript....
Thanks.
Totally creepy the way that "homeland" has been normalized. Why, I remember when that was a new word!
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"Homeland"--I remember when it made me think of Germany and
WWII. Or at least the home country of immigrants.
No more. Ve haff our own homeland now
Bernhard at MoonofAL posted on our possible use of US military
on domestic soil. There is a new version of the US Army's Field Manual on "Stability Operations" which says nation building and taking over "fragile states" is the way of the future.
WaPo had a paragraph which caught b's ever watchful eye:
There's more of note in b's post--just a click away! As always, interesting comments.
It's brief--and perhaps more important than we would wish....
Is something happening here? What it is ain't exactly clear, but
I've had trouble all day logging in and just now when I posted this comment, IE warned me that I couldn't do that at Corrente Wire. And when I did log on, it took so long to register that I ended up logged on three times. A self threeway. Fun, but, not necessary.
Whassup?? Is it me or is it...NSA surveillance? Programming changes at the site?
Well, IE said IE couldn't post to this site. URL listed. Operation aborted.
Then I get web page expired, but find the comment posted. Weird.
Clear your cache and cookies
and restart your browser.
No programming changes, and I doubt it's the NSA. They're probably occupied reading your mail.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
i wouldn't be surprised at all--
nor if the elections were "postponed".
How else will BushCo keeps its dirty laundry hidden? Unless BO
has already negotatiated with Cheney to assure him he'll make no waves nor brook no investigations?
Gee, am I feeling pessimistic. And skeptical. Verging on cynical.
Rep. Sherman needs to name names
otherwise it is he who is spreading panic and turmoil. Without the ability to verify what he claims, there is no ablilty to assess the truthfulness. "I heard somebody heard" is bullshit no matter what is the subject or who is the speaker.
With regards to the Brigade tasked to support disaster management on US soil, this is nothing new. The precedent for this is over 200 years old, from Washington's use of federalized troops to supress the Whiskey Rebellion. In the past the National Guard has been used rouinely for such tasks, both under state and Federal control, and the Army was used for security and evacuation after Katrina to everyone's great relief. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles Air Assault Division into Little Rock to enforce Brown and suppress rioting, and there was no complaint from Progressives about that.
The brigade down in Georgia is an 8,000 strong integrated service unit designed and trained to secure, hold and build, a task force perfectly suitable for another disaster like Katrina but hardly enough to exercise any real control against citizen resistance. We have 150,000 troops in Iraq, a country with a smaller population than California, and they are kicking our asses. What are 8,000 troops going to do against 300 Million?
Some perspective: There are far more than 8,000 troops and armed law enforcement focused just on US marijuana production and 2008 will once again break all records for both domestic production volume and quality. If the equivalent of a full brigade can't seize the upper hand against a plant, I just can't get too worked up about them being a threat to me.
Sarah Palin, now, there's a scary monster.
Sherman was complaining
about other members who were trying to spread panic and turmoil. If you listen to the Alex Jones interview, Jones is attempting to sensationalize the comments Sherman made on the floor, and Sherman finds this amusing and keeps knocking off Jones's tinfoil hat.
It sounded to me as though Sherman didn't want to embarrass the members who were talking about blood in the streets and lions eating children in L.A. parks--that's why he didn't want to mention names, not because there was some big secret threat from the administration that he'd get killed if he revealed.
The idea that BushCo would threaten the House with imposing martial law on the nation if the bill weren't passed is just nuts, frankly. It makes zero sense (yes, yes, I know, Bush Is Dumb And Treacherous, but he's not actively psychotic, at least not yet).
My take, based on what Sherman said to Jones and on the House floor, is that some irresponsible members were running around muttering that the economic collapse if the bill weren't passed would be so catastrophic that the country would fall into anarchy and martial law would have to be imposed--but clearly that would just have been fevered speculation about the worst that might happen (and even if it did, it wouldn't occur for some time yet).
That got all mixed up, BTW, with a real threat from Pelosi to invoke a House provision also known as "martial law," in which members are not given the mandated 24 hours to study a bill before having to debate and vote on it, and can't leave the building until they do. The threat was never carried out, but the phrase "martial law" was misunderstood by some blogs to refer to a threat by the administration to impose martial law on the country if the House didn't pass the bill, an entirely different and vastly more dire (and in this case remotely unlikely) circumstance.
There's a YouTube audio of Rep. Michael Burgess on Alex Jones explaining House "martial law" and how it was threatened but not invoked:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bH1mO8qhCs
Thanks a million, Swift Loris
Great comment, great information. I'm de-front-paging this and adding a link to your comment at the top.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
It's a data point...
Read the Army Times article; read the Democracy Now transcript. If you are inclined to trust military spokespeople, then the brigade may seem like business as usual; I'm not, so it doesn't.
I don't think that past precedents count for much; the more important perspective, I think, is the unprecedented expansion of executive power we've seen under Bush, and the office of the Presidency doesn't tend to surrender power, once gained. So the invocation of the Whiskey Rebellion and Little Rock doesn't impress me very much.
All that said, names would be nice. Highlighting this YouTube might help shake them loose.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
I have read them and more
including everything I could find on the Brigade itself. "Go read"? C'mon, eh; this is me. My conclusion the last time this came up was so what big deal, but I didn't press the matter because I forget why; juice just wasn't worth the squeeze.
Do you remember the horror expressed when all law and order broke down in New Orleans and nobody was taking control of anything? Once the Army rolled in things took a sharp turn to the better and everyone, including here at Corrente, asked why didn't that happen sooner?
This brigade is tasked to provide that capability in a formal way. It is a capability we always had until the Reagan cuts to the military, and this does nothing more than return things to where they were before. YOMV, of course, just expressing my POV.
Got a link on the Reagan cuts?
Before we move along, move along, there's no story to see here?
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Not saying move along; eternal vigilance and all that
and of course right to ask WTF
with any and every change in governance, real or suspected.
Sometimes, perhaps, I write too forcefully. I'll try to moderate that.
Towards the end of the Cold War Dick Armey and Ronald Reagan began a program to close military bases and re-align duties. With the fall of the Soviet Union those cuts were deepened, at least in terms of a percentage of GDP. Maybe the right term is restricted rather than cut.
The programs were instituted under Reagan, the initial sorting out by commission happened under PoppyBush, and the actual reductions and closings began in earnest under Clinton and entirely outside of his control.
As to specific unit tasks, IIRC and this was a long time ago that I worried about it, the 101st Airborne Division and the 1st Infantry Division had domestic peacekeeping responsibility back in the day. I have no specific references to offer for the re-tasking of those responsibilities; when bases were closed and troops realigned the mission statements all changed and changed again. At some point I recall having a discussion during which someone said that the responsibility had been shifted entirely to the National Guard; maybe true, maybe not, but during Katrina the Louisiana National Guard were overwhelmed and regular military were drawn from the Army's 1st Cavalry Division and 4th Infantry Division.
I mentioned Katrina as a contemporary use of Federal troops for domestic order; the citation of the Whiskey Rebellion was indeed to establish precedent because I'm big on that, helps me with perspective on change. Over the years the National Guard has been deployed both by states and the federal government and there is to my mind no difference; it is armed troops under government control either which way.
An interesting backstory here is that after Katrina, BushCo started pushing for using Blackwater to handle this task as well as border security instead of Customs and Border Patrol. An enormous amount of pushback, aided by the various debacles by Blackwater in Iraq, scuttled that effort - so far. Instead, this one brigade got handed the task to carry while they are rotated back to the US from overseas posting. As they gear up in another year to redeploy overseas, another brigade or maybe more than one coming home will be added to the mission. Net net, I think that's a better course than private contractors for a necessary task.
&
the Civilian National Security Force
&
redeployment of Blackwater Security, et al.
Back to the spin and forcefulness of pushing for passage of the
Paulson Fix Is In--Atrios has a good comment:
It would not surprise me that BushCo might tell Congress Critters that there would be riots in the streets, bank runs, mass protests--and that martial law could possibly be imposed. In fact, I would be surprised if it had not brought up as just part of the downside of no passage.
No threat intended, of course. Just part of the "nice economy you have here; be a pity if anything happened to it."
"Nice society you have here...." "Nice democracy you have here...."