Headzup: The "Quaint" Posse Comitatus Act

If you have never checked out Headzup, you really should; they are hilarious. In this video President Bush is asked about the deployment of 20,000 troops on U.S. soil in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Read more about this story below.



LibertyAir Blog

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 terroristattack 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.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Political scientist Dr. Steven Taylor writes about his concern on this subject:

There are two key problems here. The first is that the function of the military isn’t domestic security and second, the military is already rather busy at the moment (and for the foreseeable future).

First, the military isn’t designed or trained for domestic responses. Training for a nuclear attack or an invasion is one thing, assigning an active-duty combat brigade to a specifically domestic task is yet another.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Cato Institute are troubled by what they consider an expansion of executive authority.

Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security.

“There’s a notion that whenever there’s an important problem, that the thing to do is to call in the boys in green,” Healy said, “and that’s at odds with our long-standing tradition of being wary of the use of standing armies to keep the peace.”

Why Won't Bush Release Wording on Pact?

If news reports are to be believed, the Bush administration has adopted a much looser interpretation than the Iraqi government of several key provisions of the pending U.S.-Iraq security agreement.

The administration has intentionally withheld the official English translation of the agreement from both Congress and the public in an effort to suppress a public dispute with the Iraqis until after the Iraqi parliament votes. The White House National Security Council said it had purposedly held up the translation's release until the Iraqi parliament votes. My question is why?

What is the Bush administration hiding? Why should we not know what Bush is signing us up for? What if the Iraqi's are agreeing to something that Barack Obama and the majority of Americans will not agree too?

U.S. officials have told McClatchy Newspapers that the Bush administration was eager to complete the deal before it leaves office in January and acquiesced to many Iraqi demands.
McClatchy's Baghdad bureau last week produced an unofficial English translation of the agreement based on the Arabic text. McClatchy on Tuesday also obtained an official English version.

According to McClatchy Newspapers, that upon studying the agreement, and speaking to the Iraqi government, it becomes pretty clear that the Bush administration has very different interpretations of some very key provisions than Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's and his government has. In fact Iraqi lawmakers might actually balk at approving the pact or delay a vote if they were to understand the Bush administration's interpretations. The Iraqi's definitely would post-pone the vote while seeking clarification from the U.S. government.

Among the areas of dispute are:

• Iraqi legal jurisdiction over U.S. troops or military contractors who kill Iraqis on operations. The agreement calls for Iraq to prosecute U.S. troops according to court procedures that have yet to be worked out. Those negotiations, administration officials have argued, could take three years, by which time the U.S. will have withdrawn from Iraq under the terms of the agreement. In the interim, U.S. troops will remain under the jurisdiction of America's Uniform Code of Military Justice.
• A provision that bars the U.S. from launching military operations into neighboring countries from Iraqi territory. Administration officials argue they could circumvent that in some cases, such as pursuing groups that launch strikes on U.S. targets from Syria or Iran, by citing another provision that allows each party to retain the right of self-defense. One official expressed concern that "if Iran gets wind that we think there's a loophole there," Tehran might renew its opposition to the agreement.
• A provision that appears to require the U.S. to notify Iraqi officials in advance of any planned military operations and to seek Iraqi approval for them, which some U.S. military officials find especially troubling, although Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, Army Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Army Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, all have endorsed it.

The administration has sought to assuage such concerns by arguing that the pact doesn't require the U.S. to give the Iraqis detailed information, however Iraqi's seem to be of the opinion they do. The administration has claimed that it interprets the agreement to mean that U.S. commanders would merely need to inform their Iraqi counterparts that they plan to launch counterterrorism operations somewhere in an Iraqi city or province sometime during the month of January. There is no way that this is the interpetation that the Iraqis have. So all this will mean is there are about to be major problems with the Iraqi government, and the Bush administration is kicking the can down the lane for Obama.

That said, it is important that some deal is put in place. The current United Nations mandate governing the U.S. troop presence in Iraq expires on December 31st, and there needs to be something in place to govern how we end this useless war and occupation.