Road to Martial Law

Yesterday's announcement by the Bush Administration regarding the use of the military to quarantine areas affected by a flu pandemic has come under criticism and rightly so.

From academia:

Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and director of its National Center for Disaster Preparedness, called the president's suggestion an "extraordinarily draconian measure" that would be unnecessary if the nation had built the capability for rapid vaccine production, ensured a large supply of anti-virals like Tamiflu, and not allowed the degradation of the public health system.

"The translation of this is martial law in the United States," Redlener said.
Source

From think tanks:

And Gene Healy, a senior editor at the conservative Cato Institute, said Bush would risk undermining "a fundamental principle of American law" by tinkering with the act, which does not hinder the military's ability to respond to a crisis.

"What it does is set a high bar for the use of federal troops in a policing role," he wrote in a commentary on the group's Web site. "That reflects America's traditional distrust of using standing armies to enforce order at home, a distrust that's well-justified."

Healy said soldiers are not trained as police officers, and putting them in a civilian law enforcement role "can result in serious collateral damage to American life and liberty."
Source

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bans the military from participating in police-type activity on U.S. soil. The role of the military does not include domestic applications, yet we have witnessed the introduction of the military in domestic actions recently with the involvement in New Orleans to deal with the aftermath of the disaster preparedness and response mishandling by FEMA.

We are witnessing an attempt to make use of the military more acceptable as a means to respond to domestic emergencies, when in reality a more responsible action would be to improve the local officials' ability to plan and respond to those emergencies.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy says the military involvement would occur only "in the most extreme circumstances" and when state and local resources are overwhelmed. But, what if the state is ill-prepared to handle the emergency due to National Guard troops being in Iraq instead of at home where they should be, or if there is no funding for emergency equipment and personnel due to budget cutbacks? Perhaps the dire condition of the state and local resources have been deviously planned to be at dangerously low levels in order to welcome a military involvement?

What if, all along, the plan has been to set the stage to allow the corralling of the American population when needed. Why would it be necessary to use the military to "control" a domestic emergency in the first place?

Is there some information which those at the highest levels are privy to that scares them to the point of having to establish measures to control the American populace should some "event" occur? What could said "event" be?

Something wicked this way comes...


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