Matthew Rothschild: We Came an Inch from Martial Law

[marmar]

from The Progressive:



We Came an Inch from Martial Law, Bush Justice Department Memos Reveal
By Matthew Rothschild, March 3, 2009


It turns out that some of our most paranoid fears about the Bush Administration had a basis in reality.

The Bush Justice Department, if you can call it that, issued legal opinions in late 2001 asserting that the President had the authority to use the military within the US against suspected terrorists, and that he could use the military to barge into your home without a warrant.

“The warrant and probable cause requirements . . . are unsuited to the demands of wartime and the military necessity to successfully prosecute a war against an enemy,” said an October 23, 2001, memo.

The authors were John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general, and Robert Delahunty, who was special counsel at the Justice Department. And they sent the memo to Alberto Gonzales, then the counsel to the President. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.progressive.org/mag/wx030309.html

[FiveGoodMen]

1. K&R

[katty]

2. K&R

[PDJane]

3. The trouble with conspiracy theories is that

there are such things as conspiracies and they are often reality.

[Gregorian]

4. It looks like I'm not tinfoil enough. I never believed Martial law was a possibility.

Now I'm beginning to think that Bush was beyond threat and coercion.

Man, talk about naive. I cannot imagine where this twobit loser's little mind thought this would eventually end up. What, with him king? Come on.

At best maybe he thought he could create civil war.

I'm lost. I honestly don't get it. I'm just not dictator material

[Salviati]

5. I guess it's the flip side of Rahms quote about not letting a crisis go to waste...

only this is what happens when you use that crisis to promote personal advantage and power rather than working towards the welfare of all...

[tom_paine]

6. Some of us tried to speak out about it as early as pre-9/11 2001

No one would listen. Everyone thought we few were crazy tinfoillers. Many gave us the "Hannity Treatment" of sneer and smear. yes, here on DU.

Surpise. We were right about it all along.

From one Cassandra to one who's eyes have just been opened.

Obama's election does NOT end this totalitarian threat. It is VERY possible the Bushies are playing on a wholly different field.

After all, politically what they are doing makes ZERO SENSE in the wake of a staggering electoral defeat.

Getting MORE CRAZY?

But it DOES make perfect sense if you cnsider it from a totalitarian point of view. They are amping up the crazy because they don't need the votes or because the coming Bush Greater Depression, like the last one, makes Bushies and Nazis seem much more appealing.

Something to consider, doubly so now that your eyes are opened to the truth of us "Cassandras".

Consider this, too. Regarding your prescient line, At best maybe he thought he could create civil war.

Remind me again, what are the Bushies pushing to their crazies, even on Fox News?

www.newshounds.us/2009/02/23/fox_news_suggests_america_is_doomed_civil_war_may_be_justified.php

[reggie the dog]

8. I have been saying we were not far off

since the mid 90's and cited the war on drugs as the proof. Even in grad school, studying history, I was told that the war on drugs was there to protect me from myself and that it was good to sacrafice freedom to be saved......

[pipi_k]

12. Given all that we suspected then...

and all we're just now finding out, I hope the people who called us tinfoilers are at least considering the possibility that certain crises were either manufactured...or at least allowed to happen.

It just seems way too convenient that the Bushies were so well prepared with their plans after 9/11

[Gregorian]

13. I remember those warnings.

And I believed there might have been truth to them. My eyes have been open. After all, I come from a family of long sighted people. Within hours of the WTC attack, my sister said one word: "Bush". And I still think he did it.

And yes, I to predicted a scorched earth policy so that what was done to Jimmy Carter would be done tenfold to the president following the wake of destruction of the Bush empire.

Argh. It's hard to sit and watch. And I mean, watch American citizens be so god damned stupid. Although, I now believe that many more Americans are brighter than I thought. Perhaps too many of us have dropped out. I did. The drug war sidelined me.

And then there are troubles that ecclipse this stuff. But those might actually unify the human race.


I think it was the repealing of the 4th amendment for "enemy combatants" that really made their intentions clear. I knew that was not for people outside of our borders.

[Mnemosyne]

14. I knew there was trouble ahead when they started running DUI "checkpoints" back in the mid-eighties.

I agree, we are no where past the danger yet, not even close.

The right wing "media" players are pushing their bs hard, worse than I've ever seen, even during Clinton crap.

A bit scary.

[Earth Bound Misfit]

20. ***sits at desk in stunned silence at what he just read***

"After all, politically what they are doing makes ZERO SENSE in the wake of a staggering electoral defeat"

"They are amping up the crazy because they don't need the votes"

"Remind me again, what are the Bushies pushing to their crazies, even on Fox News?"


:scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared:

"From one Cassandra to one who's eyes have just been opened"

Make that two.

[peacetalksforall]

7. I did not mark the minute I stopped believing the 9-11 story, but it was

very early starting with the Ashcroft statement that they found Atta's passport on the pavement and when I looked up the measurements of a 757. I stopped worrying about another foreign attack and start worrying about attacks inside the U.S. by our own.

I did not mark the minute I started believing that we were near martial law, but all I could think of was that if there were enough protesters to tip their anger point - we would have been there. They demonstrate martial law in smaller ways - the way they treated Code Pink, the RNC Convention, the hi-jacking of all our telephone and computer communications, the prisons they were building, the innuendoes.

What does that say about the great country of the U.S. of America? It says that we lost it all. That the citizens of this country could be taken over by peer citizens - citizens with an ownership agenda.

Then, I also did not mark the minute I realized that Democrats were helping the WH.

How it was piled on. And how we were still told that terrists hated us for our democracy, therefore some people couldn't fly and didn't have to be told why and others were told to xxxx up when they asked for documents.

Well, I am still counting the minutes that the media was bought out by war corporations and war cooperators. We're sinking in its quicksand - the latest being Limbaugh as a black shirted President outside the WH and the Republican campaign to destroy Obama's recovery from within the marketplace.

We are fully in their stranglehold - present tense. They delivered 9-11 for the WH, they delivered the war for the WH, they delivered the vote theft for the WH, they delivered the abuse of the military and cover-ups for the WH. They refused to investigate for the WH.

They will give the Republicans anything they want - and right now it is to use Limbaugh for cohesive-centered hate spreading, Rove for the persuasion, and the marketplace and market movers to attempt to destroy Obama. It is never still. It has started all over again.

We did become a police state, but all that was missing was the full announcement and round up. I think we'll learn that the military stopped their full blown call out. There is no other way to explain why Cheney-Bush did not go the rest of the way.

I never minded being called a paranoid. There was no other way to extrapolate what was going on.

[reggie the dog]

9. well said

you explain our nightmare quite well.....

[FiveGoodMen]

10. Hear, hear!

[PDJane]

11. There is another possibility.

I think that W. lost interest in the project, and Cheney wasn't well enough to continue. By that time, Rumsfeld had left the main picture and the martial law thing takes a strong hand at the helm.

[peacetalksforall]

15. Yes, that is a possibility. A variation on Bush losing interest is that he became

consumed with his legacy and someone with guts told him to let go of the dictator goal.

[tavalon]

16. W. lost interest because he has early onset dementia related to

too much alcohol and cocaine. He made a decent patsy at first, totally uninterested in governing and so was easily led, but yeah, it's Dick Cheney who lost his health before he could finish the takeover.

[leveymg]

17. They did break into houses without warrants - it was called "sneak n' peek" - including mine

It happened. It's not an almost - we were living in an Americanized version of East Germany.

The "sneak and peek" provision of the original USA-PATRIOT Act, Sec. 213, permitted federal agents to repeatedly enter people's homes in order to search for evidence of "terrorism-related" activities without notice. It also opened the door to warrantless NSA wiretapping of everybody. Read this Congressional testimony: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_cr/h072203.html

We have the opportunity to revisit these sections of the USA PATRIOT
Act and to correct these mistakes from those first frenzied weeks after
September 11, 2001.
One provision, section 213, allows delayed notification of the
execution of a search warrant. It authorizes no-knock searches of
private residences, our homes, either physically or electronically. By
putting off notice of the execution of a warrant, even delaying it
indefinitely, section 213 of the USA PATRIOT Act prevents people, or
even their attorneys, from reviewing the warrant for correctness in
legalities.
These "sneak and peek" searches give the government the power to
repeatedly search a private residence without informing the residents
that he or she is the target of an investigation. Not only does this
provision allow the seizure of personal property and business records
without notification, but it also opens the door to nationwide search
warrants and allows the CIA and the NSA to operate domestically.
American citizens, whom the government has pledged to protect from
terrorist activities, now find themselves the victims of the very
weapon designed to uproot their enemies.

[smoogatz]

18. I would argue that in fact we were under a soft form of martial law

for most of the Bush presidency. The only thing missing were the roundups of "enemies of the state."

[Two Americas]

19. we have those

Hundreds of thousands of suspected "illegal aliens" have been, and are being, rounded up.

[Hawkowl]

21. That will happen after Obama

Rounding up enemies of the state and American Death Camps will come with the next right wing whack job president IF we don't prosecute Bushco. I really, really believe that. These rethuglicans are like mythical vampires that just keep returning from the dead. Cheney, Rumsfeld from Nixon. Poindexter and Negropointe from Reagan. Bush from a long line of fascist traitors.

These people need to be imprisoned forever. It takes every fiber of my liberal being not to call for hangings a la Nuremberg post WWII.

[Demeter]

22. Wish I Could Rec Your Post

You are 100% right.

[comtec]

23. What do you mean WERE?!

The soft martial law regulations are still in effect, as far as I know.
The BS at the airport and borders?
I am rapidly loosing my enthusiasm for the Obama administration.
I admit it isn't *co....but what is?

but to quote Jean luc Picard "The villian is rarely twirling his mustache, but cloaks himself in righteousness and Sate justice" or something like that :)