...and it asserts the president's authority to deploy ground combat forces on U.S. territory "to intercept and defeat threats."
The document, titled "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support," was signed June 24 by acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and is now a basis for organizing troops, developing weapons and assigning missions. It was released late last week without the sort of formal news conference or background briefing that often accompanies major defense policy statements.
Military Expands Homeland Efforts
In case you haven't been paying attention:
Police, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, and the Pentagon are now essentially one-- under the direction of John Negroponte and Porter Goss, who answer directly to the White House.
Feeling safer?
- glassfrequency
"The move toward a domestic intelligence capability by the military is troubling," said Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute, a nonprofit libertarian policy research group in Washington. "The last time the military got heavily involved in domestic surveillance, during the Vietnam War era, military intelligence kept thousands of files on Americans guilty of nothing more than opposing the war," Healy said. "I don't think we want to go down that road again."
1 comment:
I have to say I am flabbergasted that someone at the _Cato Institute_ has a problem with military spying on Americans. These right-wing think tanks have been moving us in the direction of unchecked corporate power for over a generation now, and today what controls the government but the corporations? I can only suppose this fastidious person thinks that only _private entities_ should be free to spy on everyone _for profit only_. But "profit" surely includes defending one's private interests from other people's plans.
Unless that is we have values that are not all about maximizing wealth, and grant that there is such as thing as the public, which wants and needs public government. Then we have a basis for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitmate ways for that government to gather information. Then ordinary citizens can reasonably hope that the data they _do_ authorize the state to collect will be used for genuine purposes of guarding national security in the sense of keeping people safe from illegal violence, and not merely another kind of profitable pork for insiders.
In fact some of us think 9/11 was done precisely to enable the agenda of these same corporate think-tanks, to panic the nation into accepting open police-state methods (and a foreign policy based on violent conquest of foreign assets), precisely to shut down lots of trends in politics and public opinion that were legal, non-violent--but inconvenient to the continued rule of these same private interests. Therefore a Reichstag fire was required.
What is amazing is how slowly this brutal plan is being carried out, and how nasty it looks to the perpetrators now that they see what they have been building. The Cato Institute has been fighting for years to discredit and silence liberal opposition--now they realize that they've come for the Communists and the pacifists and the labor leaders, and soon there will be no one left to cover their white rear ends when the corporations turn on each other?
Ah well, you go into a class war with the allies you've got, not the ones you wish you had. Well, we didn't _start_ this war.
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