Monday, October 06, 2008

US Army Troops Have Begun Serving Inside US

utterli-image
So, while we're all watching the stock market's ride to hell, we may be missing another important story.



Back on September 23, 2008, I posted (here: http://thepete.com/…de-the-us/ ) about how Democracy Now was reporting that US military troops would begin training for domestic duty here, inside the US on October 1. This, in theory, violates the Posse Comitatus Act which prohibits the use of the military as any type of law enforcement. From the Wikipedia article on the PCA (here: http://en.wikipedia.org/…itatus_Act ): "The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act."



Yet, the following comes from the CNN.com article (original here: http://www.cnn.com/…index.html ) I screencapped above: "They will be based in Fort Stewart, Georgia, and focus primarily on logistics and support for local police and rescue personnel, the Army says."



Huh, so guys who have been trained to fire automatic weapons at enemies are now going to provide "logistics and support" for police and local rescue? Seems like the police should just hire more people for that--that is unless the soldiers will be doing more than just providing support.



It's a little bit like hiring a professional sniper to shut your kid up during dinner. Obviously inappropriate overkill.



But there's more from the CNN article of interest: "The plan is drawing skepticism from some observers who are concerned that the unit has been training with equipment generally used in law enforcement, including beanbag bullets, Tasers, spike strips and roadblocks."



That sounds suspiciously like law enforcement duties...



And more from the article: "That kind of training seems a bit out of line for the unit's designated role as Northern Command's CCMRF (Sea Smurf), or CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force. CBRNE stands for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive incidents."



Isn't that adorable? They're trained to deal with chemical. biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive incidents and they're called "Sea Smurf"!



Hrm... that sounds way worse than just Army soldiers trained to kill supporting cops. If they've been previously trained to deal with all that heavy crap, it means they're *paranoid* Army soldiers trained to kill.



Do I even need to say how not cool that is?



Funny how this is happening right on top of a huge economic crisis. Is the USG expecting other things to go wrong, too?
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