Kentucky News Network

The Marines are landing in our backyard.

2,300 Marines are converging on this region for two weeks of intensive training in preparation for an upcoming deployment.

Part of the training involves exercises in small cities in Kentucky and southern Indiana. Simulated missions will take place in Frankfort late next week.

Beginning today, you may see Marine aircraft in the skies. They include the Cobra and Chinook helicopters and Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

The Marines, from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, will base their training at Camp Atterbury in southern Indiana.

Clarksville Online

The Soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, along with the 5th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, both of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), will perform a scenario-based air assault for training purposes, in the Troy, Tenn., Sept. 29-30 from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m.

Once the areas are prepared for training, Soldiers will be flown to Troy via helicopters from Fort Campbell and dropped onto multiple locations within the city, such as they would in a real-world, combat scenario. Once the helicopters land, Soldiers from 2-327 will exit the aircraft and conduct the training exercise to clear each pre-determined building based on the scenario. There will be four different objective areas.

This will be the first time the Soldiers from the 101st have conducted this type of training exercise in this area. The local community leaders have been in contact with key leaders from the Fort Campbell and information has already been distributed throughout the local communities.

The Soldiers are conducting the training in order to provide them with pertinent realistic training in unfamiliar terrain to prepare them for possible contingency operations around the world.

by Matthew Rothschild [seriously?!]

The Pentagon has approached Congress to grant the Secretary of Defense the authority to post almost 400,000 military personnel throughout the United States in times of emergency or a major disaster.

This request has already occasioned a dispute with the nation’s governors. And it raises the prospect of U.S. military personnel patrolling the streets of the United States, in conflict with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

In June, the U.S. Northern Command distributed a “Congressional Fact Sheet” entitled “Legislative Proposal for Activation of Federal Reserve Forces for Disasters.” That proposal would amend current law, thereby “authorizing the Secretary of Defense to order any unit or member of the Army Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Navy Reserve, and the Marine Corps Reserve, to active duty for a major disaster or emergency.”

Taken together, these reserve units would amount to “more than 379,000 military personnel in thousands of communities across the United States,” explained

Paul Stockton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and America’s Security Affairs, in a letter to the National Governors Association, dated July 20.

The governors were not happy about this proposal, since they want to maintain control of their own National Guard forces, as well as military personnel acting in a domestic capacity in their states.

“We are concerned that the legislative proposal you discuss in your letter would invite confusion on critical command and control issues,” Governor James H. Douglas of Vermont and Governor Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the president and vice president of the governors’ association, wrote in a letter back to Stockton on August 7. The governors asserted that they “must have tactical control over all . . . active duty and reserve military forces engaged in domestic operations within the governor’s state or territory.”

According to Pentagon public affairs officer Lt. Col. Almarah K. Belk, Stockton has not responded formally to the governors but understands their concerns.

“There is a rub there,” she said. “If the Secretary calls up the reserve personnel to provide support in a state and retains command and control of those forces, the governors are concerned about if I have command and control of the Guard, how do we ensure unity of effort and everyone is communicating and not running over each other.”

Belk said Stockton is addressing this problem. “That is exactly what Dr. Stockton is working out right now with the governors and DHS and the National Guard,” she said. “He’s bringing all the stakeholders together.”

Belk said the legislative change is necessary in the aftermath of a “catastrophic natural disaster, not beyond that,” and she referred to Katrina, among other events.

But NorthCom’s Congressional fact sheet refers not just to a “major disaster” but also to “emergencies.” And it says, “Those terms are defined in section 5122 of title 42, U.S. Code.”

That section gives the President the sole discretion to designate an event as an “emergency” or a “major disaster.” Both are “in the determination of the President” alone.

That section also defines “major disaster” by citing plenty of specifics: “hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, wind-driven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought,” as well as “fire, flood, or explosion.”

But the definition of “emergency” is vague: “Emergency means any occasion or instance for which, in the determination of the President, Federal assistance is needed to supplement State and local efforts and capabilities to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in any part of the United States.”

Currently, the President can call up the Reserves only in an emergency involving “a use or threatened use of a weapon of mass destruction” or “a terrorist attack or threatened terrorist attack in the United States that results, or could result, in significant loss of life or property,” according to Title 10, Chapter 1209, Section 12304, of the U.S. Code. In fact, Section 12304 explicitly prohibits the President from calling up the Reserves for any other “natural or manmade disaster, accident, or catastrophe.”

So the new proposed legislation would greatly expand the President’s power to call up the Reserves in a disaster or an emergency and would extend that power to the Secretary of Defense. (There are other circumstances, such as repelling invasions or rebellions or enforcing federal authority, where the President already has the authority to call up the Reserves.)

The ACLU is alarmed by the proposed legislation. Mike German, the ACLU’s national security policy counsel, expressed amazement “that the military would propose such a broad set of authorities and potentially undermine a 100-year-old prohibition against the military in domestic law enforcement with no public debate and seemingly little understanding of the threat to democracy.”

At the moment, says Pentagon spokesperson Belk, the legislation does not have a sponsor in the House or the Senate.

by Gene Healy

It’s not hard to understand why President Barack Obama appalls supporters of traditional American liberties.

In the first six months of his presidency, he’s fought for radically expanded federal power, while asserting a quasi-royal prerogative to control the auto industry and pushing for a government takeover of the health care sector, as well as a cap-and-trade scheme that would regulate virtually every human activity that emits carbon dioxide.

But if you’re inclined to thank God for small favors, there’s this at least: Obama hasn’t yet proposed turning the U.S. military against American citizens. Last week, the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration seriously considered doing just that.

According to former administration officials, at a top-level meeting in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies lobbied hard for sending U.S. troops onto the streets of a Buffalo, NY suburb to kick down doors and kill or capture a group of terrorist suspects, the so-called Lackawanna Six.

In that debate, Cheney relied on a legal memo by DOJ official John Yoo, who, because of his belief that the president could do no constitutional wrong, was sardonically dubbed “Dr. Yes” by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Yoo’s memo insisted that neither the Fourth Amendment nor the Posse Comitatus Act, the longstanding federal statute that restricts the use of standing armies to keep the peace at home, could check the commander-in-chief’s power to use the military domestically.

To his credit, President Bush ultimately rejected Cheney’s scheme for a gratuitous show of force. The Lackawanna Six were arrested without incident by the FBI, and Americans were spared the kind of spectacle usually associated with militarized banana republics.

As Lackawanna’s police chief put it, “If we had tanks rolling down the streets of our city, we would have had pandemonium down here.”

There’s good reason to resist turning the machinery of war inward. From the violent suppression of strikers in the 19th century to the 1997 Marine Corps killing of an American high school student at the Mexican border, deviation from our tradition of civilian law enforcement has had grave consequences.

Even when it doesn’t lead to collateral damage, the use of standing armies at home can, as Jefferson put it, “overawe the public sentiment,” and acclimate Americans to a militarized home front inconsistent with democratic life.

The Times’ revelation is just the latest piece of evidence demonstrating the previous administration’s dangerous flirtation with domestic militarism. The Bush team repeatedly insisted that the Posse Comitatus Act was a dead letter when it came to using the Army for homeland security.

And in Katrina’s aftermath, Bush pushed through new exceptions to the act that, until they were repealed in 2008, gave him the power to fight a militarized federal war on hurricanes, declaring himself supreme military commander in any state where he thought emergency conditions warranted it.

Obama seems less inclined than his predecessor to reach reflexively for the military option at home. But unless it’s actively resisted, “mission creep” can lead to domestic militarism all the same.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was the first to fight their way into Baghdad, and last fall they became the first unit assigned to the U.S. Army’s domestic Northern Command to serve as “an on call federal response force” for natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

Initial statements–later retracted by the Defense Department–suggested that they’d have a hands-on law enforcement role, Posse Comitatus notwithstanding.

And the Pentagon recently announced plans for military task forces to work with FEMA in the event of a Swine Flu outbreak. How much we should worry about that depends on what tasks the soldiers will be assigned, and few details are available thus far. But it’s worth remembering that during 2005′s Avian Flu scare, Bush officials explored the idea of military-enforced quarantines, a disturbing prospect.

Perhaps, instead of relentlessly extending federal power over the economy and the environment, Congress could exercise its legitimate oversight functions, investigate whether these domestic military missions are needed, and ensure that they remain firmly within the law. Or would that be too much to ask?

CNN Blog Wire

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. military wants to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus — the swine flu — this fall, according to Defense Department officials.

The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The officials would not be identified because the proposal from the U.S. Northern Command’s Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.