Martial Law: It's not just for breakfast anymore
A new law was passed Oct. 17 to make Marial Law easier to impose
Many of us have different political takes, but all of us should know the serious events which happened on October 17, 2006: 1) encouraging a president of the United States to declare federal martial law; 2) ending of Iraq official oversight as we know it.
I
Any President of the United States can now declare a “public emergency” and station troops anywhere in America to “suppress public disorder.” Although it could not be done easily, certain interpretation of new law would allow this. The Department of Defense (DOD) bill, public Law 109-364, called the “John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007” (H.R.5122) was passed into law on October 17th, 2006, signed by President Bush in a unannounced, private Oval Office ceremony. The bill allows martial law.
Placing an area under military law is “martial law.” This is not to be taken lightly. The voting public needs to know now while we are casting our votes.
I’m not saying that any public official would necessarily use this law to harm the American people, but we do know that this administration has already interpreted laws to allow questionable wiretaps of the American people, to peer into bank accounts and to surreptitiously rend citizens into foreign lands where they can be more easily detained without the right to know why (part of habeas corpus) and tortured. We know the CIA has infiltrated peaceful gatherings as it did in the days of McCarthy, and later, Nixon and Reagan.
The DOD bill, Section 1076, is entitled, “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.” Under that is Section 333, which uses the words, “in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The law facilitates militarized police round-ups and detention of protesters, so called “illegal aliens,” “potential terrorists” and other “undesirables.” [i] [underlining and italics mine] We must question exactly who of us constitute these so-called “undesirables”?
Why would G. W. Bush not use the language in this bill to interpret “undesirables” to mean those who gather in dissent? We know that early in the Bush presidency, operatives raided a meeting of “Middle-America” Christian ministers, who were meeting to discuss peaceful alternatives to war. They were fingerprinted and the meeting disrupted.
Detention facilities in the United States have already been constructed. The Halliburton subsidiary, KBR (Kellog, Brown & Root) announced in January 2006 that it was awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to build U.S. facilities in the event of an emergency, as reported in the Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International.[ii] Who are these detention camps for? Could I be labeled a “potential terrorist” for writing this? Is someone who effectively resists the foreign and domestic agenda of the Bush administration unpatriotic?…and therefore would that person be an “undesirable”? Unfortunately, this reminds me of how the United States illegally detained Japanese/American citizens not too many years ago, and Native Americans before that. Who will be next, I worry and wonder? Right now there are more people in our prisons than the world ever saw before.[iii]
Again, I’m not saying that any public official would necessarily use this law harmfully against the American people. Yet this administration’s interpretation of laws state that the Geneva Convention preventing torture does not hold for certain individuals; that some prisoners may not demand to go before a court and state his or her case (petition the court for a writ of habeas corpus). Please understand the term habeas corpus: this country was founded on the principle that any individual has the right to a fair hearing in court...without it, you can be arrested, thrown in jail and never have the right to demand a hearing by the court. You can disappear from view.
Frightening.
An example of this is another practice called “Extraordinary Rendition.” This is a home-grown American term. In order to imprison and interrogate untried criminal suspects, we ship them to countries outside the United States for “torture by proxy.”[iv] It could be you, an untried criminal suspect, that is, not some criminal, but an undesirable, sent off with no recourse to a court of law. There are those who have managed to return from “Extraordinary Rendition,” tortured and scarred, who have been found innocent of any wrong doing. Do you want to take this chance? Habeas corpus has been celebrated as the most effective safeguard of liberty since 1305. These new interpretations of law, which nullify our constitutional rights must be fought by us undesirables as though we were American Revolutionaries, undesirables fighting the Revolutionary War all over again.
If what I read is true, then we are no longer protected against powerful administrations using the military to enforce their will. We have lost the U.S. criminal statute of 1878 that outlawed military operations directed against the American people under the cover of law enforcement. This would mean that United States citizens are no longer protected from the sort of oppression that exists elsewhere in the world for so many. We have seen what that looked like in 1989 at Tiananmen Square, and see it now in Darfur. We have seen examples of this illegal behavior throughout the history of the United States: at the violent overthrow of government in Wilmington, NC in 1898, crippling the Black segment of Wilmington, which hasn’t recovered in 107 years (the incident is the only known violent overthrow of a government in U.S. history); at the May 4, 1970 Kent State Massacre; at the 1968 Chicago beatings during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; and in fictionalized labor busting in John Steinbeck’s famous 1940 novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Will there be more of it now sanctioned by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez style interpretation of law?
“President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law.”[v] It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limited the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States. “The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.[vi]
If this is true and if you think we do not have reason to take the bold step, to speak out, to dissent from faked electronic voting results, and to sing our partisan songs aloud and proud, think again:
As I read it, the new law bridges the historic divide between the police and the military, which could be a sign of a growing police state. When we allow too much power to accumulate at the top, we all become “the usual suspects,” the “undesirables.”
Please let me know this is not happening.
“We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law.”
—Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), objecting to the law in its
proposed form on September 29, 2006[vii]
II
“Midnight Rider Terminates Iraq Reconstruction Watchdog.” Clearly the headline says it all. It’s by Daniel Schulman in Mother Jones. “Secreted into a military authorization bill…is a provision that will closely office investigating the potential fraud and abuse of reconstruction funds. Even Congressional Republicans are confused by this act of chicanery.”[viii]
Susan Collins (R-ME), of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she does not know how this provision made its way into “what I thought was the final version of the conference report [the last step before the vote]….The provision was not in at that time.” It turns out the provision was inserted into the bill by staff working for Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who has declared that he plans to run for president in 2008. He is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.[ix]
Agencies controlled by the Bush administration do not police themselves well. The Pentagon’s acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, admitted that he had no agents deployed in Iraq two years into the war, but only when Representative Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) forced the issue. Unearthing that the military did not properly account for hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces, which are now thought to be in use against American soldiers only came to light trough the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. This office also found the overcharges and the disasterously shoddy construction by Halliburton.
Frightening. They are desperate to cover their tracks—illegal and immoral that they are. What “Family Values”?
With great respect, Paul Aaron
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[i] The Library of Congress, Thomas, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109QLmkOH:e939907:, October 31, 2006
[ii] Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International, "Recent Contract Awards", Summer 2006, Vol.12, No.2, pg.8; See also, Peter Dale Scott, "Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps," New American Media, January 31, 2006.
[iii] See also my song, available at www.myspace.com/paulaaronandgladdogrunning or www.paulaaron.com.
[iv] Christopher H. Pyle: Torture by proxy – HowIimmigration Threw A Traveler To The Wolves. San Francisco Chronicle, January 4, 2004
[v] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109QLmkOH:e939907:, October 31, 2006
[vi] http://www.uruknet.info?p=27769, October 31, 2006
[vii] http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200609/092906b.html, October 31, 2006
[viii] Schulman, Daniel Must Reads, The Best of MotherJones’ MoJo Blog, Vol. 4, Issue 44, November 3, 2006
[ix] Glanz, James, New York Times, Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office, November 3, 2006.
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Dr. Paul Aaron's publications include: "White Flower" and "Our Blessed Love Enduring." "Catastrophizing" was performed by the Deep Dish Theater Company at the Cornucopia House Cancer Support Center in 2003.
In 1971, Dr. Aaron began teaching Yoga and meditation. In 1972 he became the owner of Manna Fest Station, a natural foods macrobiotic restaurant. The Journals of Manna Fest Station are in his plans to publish next year. Organic gardening is still the way of his family’s kitchen table and he continues teaching in the fields of Nutrition and Meditation.
Graduating cum laude from Logan College of Chiropractic in 1983, Aaron practiced Chiropractic and Acupuncture until the point that Democracy and writing demanded all his attention.
