The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (38 page)

Only one year later, Bob Dole promised on the presidential campaign trail to heighten the military’s role in the war on drugs. Another primary contender, Lamar Alexander, suggested that a new branch of the military be created to substitute for the INS and Border Patrol.

By 2010, the Posse Comitatus Act was about finished after it was announced that for the first time an active U.S. Army unit—the Third Infantry Division’s First Brigade Combat Team—was to be redeployed inside the United States under the Northern Command (NORTHCOM). After spending sixty months in Iraq quelling insurgents, the team was available when 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 (CBRNE) attack…subdue unruly or dangerous individuals.” They carry equipment to construct roadbloacks and install spike strips for slowing and stopping or controlling traffic, as well as shields, batons, and beanbag bullets for nonlethal crowd control.

“The need for reaffirmation of the PCA’s principle is increasing,” wrote legal scholar Matthew Hammond in the
Washington University Law Quarterly,
“because in recent years, Congress and the public have seen the military as a panacea for domestic problems.”

He added, “Major and minor exceptions to the PCA, which allow the use of the military in law enforcement roles, blur the line between military and civilian roles, undermine civilian control of the military, damage military readiness, and inefficiently solve the problems they supposedly address. Additionally, increasing the role of the military would strengthen the federal law enforcement apparatus that is currently under close scrutiny for overreaching its authority.”

In the weeks following 9/11 and before the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), military troops patrolled airports and the streets of Washington and New York without protest. Such scenes were a brief glimpse of life under martial law. In 2005, President Bush announced that he would use military troops in the event of a national pandemic. In 2009, the military was an integral part of the swine flu general vaccination process. Why is it that the military’s role in daily life has kept steadily increasing when the nation hasn’t been attacked again? Could it be that martial law was planned years ago?

Those who doubt the veracity of this should just ask the residents of Kingsville, Texas.

On the night of February 8, 1999, a series of mock battles using live ammunition erupted around the town of twenty-five thousand. As part of a military operation named Operation Last Dance, eight black helicopters roared over the town. Ferried by the choppers, soldiers of the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, staged an attack on two empty buildings using real explosives and live ammunition. One of the helicopters nearly crashed when it hit the top of a telephone pole and started a fire near a home. Additionally, an abandoned police station was accidentally set on fire and a gas station was badly damaged when one or more helicopters landed on its roof.

Citizens of Kingsville were terrified during the drill. Police chief Felipe Garza and Mayor Phil Esquivel were the only ones notified of the attack in advance. Both men refused to give any details of the operation, insisting they had been sworn to secrecy by the military. Only Arthur Rogers, the assistant police chief, would admit to what happened. “The United States Army Special Operations Command was conducting a training exercise in our area,” he said. He refused to provide any details.

The local emergency management coordinator for FEMA, Tomas Sanchez, was not happy with the attack and with the lack of information and warning. When asked what the attack was all about, Sanchez, a decorated Vietnam veteran with thirty years’ service in Naval Intelligence, replied that, based on his background and knowledge, the attack was an operational exercise. The scenario of the exercise was that “Martial law has been declared through the Presidential Powers and War Powers Act, and some citizens have refused to give up their weapons. They have taken over two of the buildings in Kingsville. The police cannot handle it. So you call these guys in. They show up and they zap everybody, take all the weapons and let the local PD clean it up.” Sanchez and other military experts told World Net Daily that the night attack indicated the use of Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 25, a top-secret document that apparently authorizes military participation in domestic police situations. Some speculated that PDD 25 may have surreptitiously superseded the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.

Asked for comment, George W. Bush, then Texas governor, said it was not his job to get involved in the concerns over the Night Stalkers and the use of live ammunition in a civilian area of his state.

Just in case one might be tempted to think that the events in Kingsville were simply some aberration from the distant past, a similar military exercise took place in 2009. Soldiers from Fort Campbell, including the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and other infantry brigades, performed a training air assault in Troy, Tennessee, on September 29–30. It was called Operation Diomedes, after the ancient Greek warrior who wounded Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

After being helicoptered from Fort Campbell, soldiers were dropped into multiple locations throughout the town. Once on the ground, the troops were to clear predetermined buildings in four different objective areas based on a combat scenario.

Military spokesmen said this air assault was the first time that soldiers from the 101st Airborne had conducted such training in the area. The purpose of the exercise was to provide the troops with “pertinent realistic training in unfamiliar terrain to prepare them for possible contingency operations around the world.” Some saw this exercise as practice for the military capture of small towns in the United States.

Exercises similar to those in Troy and Kingsville may have occurred as early as 1971, when plans were drawn up to merge the military with police and the National Guard. In that year, Senator Sam Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights discovered that military intelligence had established an intricate surveillance system to spy on hundreds of thousands of American citizens. Most of the citizens were antiwar protesters. This plan to merge the police with the military included exercises that were code-named Garden Plot and Cable Splicer. Britt Snider, who was lead researcher on military intelligence for Ervin’s subcommittee, said the plans seemed too vague to get excited about. “We could never find any kind of unifying purpose behind it all,” he told a reporter. “It looked like an aimless kind of thing.”

Yet four years later the plans began to come into sharper focus. In the
New Times
magazine, Ron Ridenhour and Arthur Lubow reported that “[C]ode named Cable Splicer cover[s] California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona, [and is] under the command of the Sixth Army…. [It] is a plan that outlines extraordinary military procedures to stamp out unrest in this country…. Developed in a series of California meetings from 1968 to 1972, Cable Splicer is a war plan that was adapted for domestic use procedures used by the US Army in Vietnam. Although many facts still remain behind Pentagon smoke screens, Cable Splicer [documents] reveal the shape of the monster that the Ervin committee was tracking down.”

During the time when Cable Splicer was being carried out, several full-scale war games were conducted with local officials and police working side by side with military officers in civilian clothing. Many policemen were taught military urban pacification techniques. Afterward, they returned to their departments and helped create the early SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams.

Representative Clair Burgener of California, a staunch Reagan Republican who had attended the Cable Splicer II kickoff conference, was flabbergasted when shown Cable Splicer documents. “This is what I call subversive,” he said. Subcommittee chief counsel Doug Lee read through the documents and blurted out, “Unbelievable. These guys are crazy! We’re the enemy! This is civil war they’re talking about here. Half the country has been designated as the enemy.” Britt Snider agreed, stating, “If there ever was a model for a takeover, this is it.”

The war on terrorism and the more recent flu alarms have provided the pretext for the activation of plans like Cable Splicer, which is a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

Diana Reynolds, formerly an assistant professor of politics at Bradford College and a lecturer at Northeastern University, wrote a paper entitled “The Rise of the National Security State: FEMA and the NSC in 1990.” In the paper, Reynolds argued:

In 1984, the military’s involvement with civilian authorities inspired then attorney general William French Smith to write a critical letter stating, “…In short I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on the revised Executive Order exceeds its proper function as a coordinating agency for emergency preparedness.”

In January 2005, fears that secretive, overreaching agencies with military connections might violate the Posse Comitatus Act were substantiated. During this time, news outlets reported that since 2002 the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had operated an intelligence-gathering and support unit called the Strategic Support Branch (SSB) with authority to operate clandestinely anywhere in the world to support antiterrorism and counterterrorism missions. The SSB previously had been unknown, operating under an undisclosed name.

Military involvement in daily life has even reached the halls of education. In 2002, the principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, Vermont, was shocked to receive a letter from military recruiters demanding a list of all students, including names, addresses, and telephone numbers. Because the school’s privacy policy prevented the disclosure of such individual information, the principal told the recruiters no. However, the principal was soon shocked to learn that buried deep within President Bush’s new No Child Left Behind Act, public schools must provide their students’ personal information to military recruiters or face a cutoff of federal funds.

Republican representative David Vitter of Louisiana, who sponsored the recruitment requirement in the education bill, noted that in 1999, more than nineteen thousand U.S. schools denied military recruiters access to their records. Vitter said such schools “demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive.” What could be offensive about wanting to protect the privacy of the nation’s students?

“I think the privacy implications of this law are profound,” commented Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. “For the federal government to ignore or discount the concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school students is not a good thing, and it’s something we should be concerned about.”

Not only are high school students being bothered by Homeland Security, but also mere kindergarten students who only want to play outside. In May 2002, Scott and Cassandra Garrick sued the Sayreville School District in New Jersey after their six-year-old child and three classmates were disciplined for playing cops and robbers. Apparently, other students saw the youngsters playing on the school yard pretending to use their fingers as guns. The other students told a teacher and the kindergartners were suspended from school.

U.S. District Judge Katharine S. Hayden dismissed the parents’ civil suit, claiming school authorities have the right to restrict violent or disruptive games. Yet the parents’ attorney, Steven H. Aden, remarked, “They have the right to be children. The school and the courts shouldn’t censor their play [even if] it’s politically incorrect.”

Incidents like this are rarely covered in the corporate mass media. They are never distributed to a large audience, but they often worry thoughtful people.

“I’m terrified,” said Ellen Schrecker, author of
Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
. “What concerns me is we’re not seeing an enormous outcry against this whole structure of repression that’s being rushed into place….”

ACLU president Nadine Strossen also voiced concern. “I’ve been talking a lot about the parallels between what we’re going through now and McCarthyism. The term ‘terrorism’ is taking on the same kind of characteristics as the term ‘communism’ did in the 1950s. It stops people in their tracks and they’re willing to give up their freedoms. People are too quickly panicked. They are too willing to give up their rights and to scapegoat people, especially immigrants and people who criticize the war.” Paul Proctor, a columnist for NewsWithViews.com and periodicals across America, added, “Besides being unconstitutional and un-American, snooping on innocent people in a free society is cowardly, divisive and just plan evil…. But, you see—terrorists don’t want your freedom—they want your life. It is tyrants and dictators that want your freedom.”