"Private Army Designated by Bush"
Published in the Augsburg College Echo, 10/31/08.
"NORTHCOMM and Urban Warfare"
Published in Women Against Military Madness newsletter, December '08
(http://www.worldwidewamm.org/newsletters/2008/12080109/northcomm.html)
If you’ve heard rumors about martial law in America, you may wonder how it would ever be possible, and what the supra-military force, NORTHCOMM, has to do with it.
Northern Command is a special military and intelligence joint task force that helps local, state, and tribal authorities in times of crisis on the North American continent. When the I-35 W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007, the US Navy was there to help, under a Region Defense Coordinating Officer of the US Northern Command. According to Northern Command’s timeline on its website, www.northcom.mil, the US division of NorthComm also helped states to mitigate flood damage in the Midwest last June. Here is why its new troops may be coming to a city near you in the near future, regardless of natural or manmade disasters in your area.
Deployment of NORTHCOMM
When a leader secures an army and security force dedicated to him and not to any Constitution, he lifts his own office above its prescribed role in the Constitution. That is what happened to the office of the President on October 1, as it has happened several times since George W. Bush took office.
On that day, the homeland tours of a 3,000-4,000 person army, the 1st Brigade Combat Team, began. NORTHCOMM leads this Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division and it answers only to the President and the Secretary of Defense, not Congress, because the President established it on Oct. 1st 2002.
Congress has been funding it through bills like the Defense Authorization Act of 2007, but because of the secrecy of NORTHCOMM, Congress has even less oversight of it than it does over the five military branches.
The troops currently touring under NorthComm are the first to have ever been given a dedicated assignment to it. The 1st BCT had just returned from fighting in Iraq, and will tour America for 12 months, after which a different division will be assigned to this permanent mission, according to the Army Times. The Army Times’ article of September 30, “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” says that the 1st BCT will
“learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it. They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.”
A CBRNE attack is any chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive situations.
The article by Gina Cavallero can yet be found at http://www.armytimes.com/news/
Urban Warfare
Controlling unrest could mean anything from fencing and guarding private property to demanding citizens' guns, house by house, as the National Guard and NorthComm did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina's devastation. ARMYNORTH, under NORTHCOMM, is not the first military division to have been trained in urban warfare in the U.S. However, the 1st BCT is also trained to use a special package of non-lethal weapons that will be stored at their tour sites: America’s cities. The above article was corrected so that readers understand the new non-lethal weapons packages can only be used in a war zone. But President Bush and his lawyers made the whole world a war zone with his unofficial declaration of the war on terror.
Appeasement
It didn’t take long for the active BCT to be used as a threat against the American people, as Representative Brad Sherman confessed on the House floor on October 2. During debate on H.R. 1424, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, he explained before his colleagues and C-SPAN that
“Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill, on Monday, that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day, another couple thousand the second day, and a few Members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted ‘no.’”
On October 3 the bill, nicknamed the corporate bail-out bill, was passed 263 to 171.
Emergencies
What does that threat of force have to do with the BCT’s mission to help in “potentially horrific scenarios?” Look at National Security Directive 51, which applies to natural and manmade emergencies. President Bush established his claim on emergency rule with National Security Directive 51 in May 2007. At this time America is not in a state of emergency. However, NSD 51 gives the President the power to determine what and where American emergencies are.
With only his own authority, he signed the executive directive so that, in a catastrophic emergency, “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.” It’s hard to determine what that means when only Annex A of that Directive is available at the President’s website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/
Peter Dale Scott looked into this in his article “The Showdown" on CounterPunch, March 31, 2008. He wrote, concerning members of the House Homeland Security Committee’s request to read the directive,
NSPD 51 contains "classified Continuity Annexes" which shall "be protected from unauthorized disclosure." Congressman DeFazio twice requested to see these Annexes, the second time in a letter cosigned by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Carney. It was these requests that the White House denied.
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For more, please research:
The US government’s Continuity of Operations plan, from 1946 to the present, and Donald Rumsfeld’s changes to it.
http://www.wikileaks.org/leak/
The 2007 House Report 110-477, NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008, Section 1821.
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