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U.S.
Leaders Consider Military Role in Domestic Defense
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Homeland
chief proposes expanding role of the U.S. military for domestic
police use
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WASHINGTON,
July 22 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Threats from terrorists
require changes to a 19th-century law barring the U.S. military from
domestic law enforcement duties, President George W. Bush's homeland
security adviser and key lawmakers said Sunday, July 21.
The
willingness to consider changes to the law, which Bush has called on
lawmakers to consider, indicates how the September 11 terror attacks
have changed the U.S., which since its creation in 1776 has feared the
prospect of military rule as much as the threat of foreign enemies.
White
House homeland security chief Tom Ridge and senators Joseph Biden and
Carl Levin ruled out wholesale changes to the landmark Posse Comitatus
Act of 1878, which bars the military - Army, Navy, Air Force and
Marines - from making arrests, conducting searches or other police
activity on U.S. soil.
Saying
the wholesale lifting of the Act is not the thrust, because it
"goes against our instincts as a country to empower the military
with the ability to arrest," Ridge called the prospect "very
unlikely."
"We
need to be talking about military assets, in anticipation of a crisis
event," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "And
clearly, if you're talking about using the military, then you should
have a discussion about posse comitatus," reports news agencies.
Instead,
they proposed relaxing the ban to allow a greater role for the
military in homeland defense.
"I
think it is time to revisit it," Biden, chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, told Fox News.
"Let's
say you had word that there was something going on in one of the
tunnels in Amtrak, or you had some major event where they thought
there may have been a weapon of mass destruction involved. Right now,
when you call in the military, the military would not be allowed to
shoot to kill, if in fact they were approaching the weapon, and so on.
"But
we're not talking about general police power."
Levin,
chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the military, said
Posse Comitatus "has served us well for a long time,"
telling CNN he did not think the law needed to be changed.
"It's
kept the military out of law enforcement, out of arresting people
except in the most unusual emergency situations - like a riot or after
some kind of a disaster - where they have to protect against
looting," said Levin.
However,
he added: "I don't fear looking at it to see whether or not our
military can be more helpful in a very supportive and assisting role
even than they have been up to now -- providing equipment, providing
training, those kind of things which do not involve arresting
people."
"The
horror, the tragedy, the suffering that they brought to us on 9/11,
which clearly showed the world that these people, who have hijacked a
religion to justify their evil, to justify their willingness to kill
innocent civilians, is something that we have to accept,
unfortunately, as the new threat of the 21st century," Ridge told
CNN.
U.S.
Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, head of the new military command
charged with defending U.S. territory, told The New York Times
he favors changing the law to grant greater domestic powers to the
military to protect against terror attacks, but did not offer or favor
any specific changes, reports news agencies.
The
U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of states to maintain armed
militias to counterbalance the national army, and requires civilian
control of the military because its authors feared a large standing
army would become an instrument of tyranny.
The
Coast Guard and National Guard - the modern version of those state
militias - is exempt from the Posse Comitatus law.
The
Posse Comitatus Act stemmed from the 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War, when
civilians were tried and in some cases executed by military courts.
U.S. troops occupied the defeated southern states for several years
after the war.
The
U.S. Congress modified the act in 1981 to allow the use of military
troops and equipment to prevent the importation of illegal drugs.
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