26-07-2009, 03:26 PM
Quote:According to a story in Friday's New York Times, Vice-President Cheney advocated in 2002 for the Bush administration to send military troops to Buffalo to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six as enemy combatants.
This would have violated both Fourth Amendment guarantees against search and seizure without probable cause and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it illegal to use the military for law enforcement.
Despite those prohibitions, Cheney argued that the president did have the power to use the military on US soil, citing an October 23, 2001 Justice Department memorandum co-authored by John Yoo which claimed that presidential power extended to the domestic use of the military as long as it served a national security purpose.
The Lackawanna Six were a group of young Yememi-Americans who had attended an al Qaeda training camp in 2001. They were arrested in September 2002, and President Bush bragged of having broken their "cell" in his January 2003 State of the Union address.
However, an investigation by Salon [ http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feat...o_6/index.html ]failed to turn up any evidence that they were actually a "sleeper cell" or that they had been planning any kind of violent attack. Most of them were convicted merely of providing material aid to terrorists.
According to Salon, all six were very ordinary young men who had been led to believe they were traveling to Afghanistan for religious studies. The evidence against them was tenuous -- which was one reason Cheney pressed for them to be held as enemy combatants instead of being arrested -- and many of their Muslim neighbors told Salon they believed the entire case against them was a scam.
It certainly looks as if Dick "Dr Strangelove" Cheney was striving very hard to construct a legal precedent for the use of US troops on American soil for "law enforcement" purposes.
Using a false flag incident to create the precedent.
This does, of course, beg all sorts of questions.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war