Salon Radio: ACLU on the U.S. Army's domestic deployment

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2008/10/27/hafetz/index1.html

Glenn Greenwald
Monday Oct. 27, 2008 11:12 EDT
Salon Radio: ACLU on the U.S. Army's domestic deployment

To listen to this interview, click PLAY on the recorder below:







Glenn Greenwald: My guest today is Jonathan Hafetz, with the national security project of the ACLU. Jonathan, thanks for joining me again.



Jonathan Hafetz: It's great to be here.



GG: Last month, at the end of September, the Army Times published an article which reported that an army brigade, the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division -- which has spent most of its time over the last four years in Iraq patrolling and helping to keep order in Iraq -- would now become the first army brigade to have active duty service with the Northern Command, which was created in 2002 and assigned essentially to the homeland of the United States, to oversee disaster relief and respond to terrorist attacks and the like. Yesterday, the ACLU issued a release expressing serious concerns about this deployment decision, and requested a whole variety of information from the government, and said that depending on what it entails, there may be serious objections that the ACLU would have to this deployment. What are the ACLU's concerns, and why should people care about this deployment?



JH: This is a very concerning issue, which we don't have unfortunately a lot of information about. What we do know is that the military has deployed an active unit for the first time within the United States. And, this goes against the fundamental tradition of this country, that the civilian government, not the military, is what operates in the United States, that performs an array of functions, law enforcement and other functions, and this principle is embodied in a statute that goes back over a hundred years, called the Posse Comitatus Act, which, again, is intended to preserve the line in the United States between civilian and military authority.



GG: Well, I wrote about this article and some of the legal issues when the article came out, and it prompted a lot of angry responses, not only on the right, but some liberal commentators as well who tend to view any criticism of policies involving the military as an attack on the military itself. And the argument that they made, was that there's actually nothing at all unusual or notable about this deployment; that the armed forces have been deployed previously inside the United States, such as in the wake of Katrina, that there's nothing unusual about keeping a brigade assigned with their primary duty to perform functions within the United States.



Is that actually true? Is there anything unique about a permanent deployment of a brigade or an assignment of a brigade to a command the supervises the United States as opposed to an ad hoc deployment in response to, say, some sort of disaster?



JH: Yeah, I think it's a big difference, Glenn, between the permanent and ad hoc deployment. There are instances where you have, for example, in Katrina, after Hurricane Katrina, where you have the military performing something substantial on an ad hoc basis. But this is a permanent deployment, which raises all kinds of different concerns about what it's doing. And the problem is we don't know. In other words, no real public debate; the government has not given any information.



In fact, some of the statements that we've seen are concerning what it refers to as doing things like crowd control, which raises all sorts of issues about what that actually means. And so, what we filed, it's not a lawsuit, it's a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, so that we can get information disseminated to the American public, so people can actually figure out what is happening, why it's happening, and then at that point we could really determine whether there's a significant threat to basic civil liberties, and even to the Posse Comitatus Act. Right now, what we know is concerning and we're in the dark in terms of what this unit's actually going to be doing, and so the public needs to know.



GG: Right. Now, one of the other arguments that was made by those who claim there was nothing at all notable here, and nothing to be even interested in, let alone concerned about, was that it's customary for, say, the National Guard to engage in ongoing regular services inside the United States, and to perform functions inside the United States, and so if the National Guard does it, who cares if a regular U.S. Army brigade does it? What's the difference?

[StarryNite]

1. They must be planning something

big that they know will piss us off enough to where they will need to control us. This is really scary crap. My tinfoil hat is firmly in place on this one. :tinfoilhat:

[upi402]

2. The rightards that claim the ACLU is the enemy of the state

are enemies of the state.

from your link;
"JH: This is a very concerning issue, which we don't have unfortunately a lot of information about. What we do know is that the military has deployed an active unit for the first time within the United States. And, this goes against the fundamental tradition of this country, that the civilian government, not the military, is what operates in the United States, that performs an array of functions, law enforcement and other functions, and this principle is embodied in a statute that goes back over a hundred years, called the Posse Comitatus Act, which, again, is intended to preserve the line in the United States between civilian and military authority."

[Wilber_Stool]

3. When I was playing Army at

Ft. Riley, Kansas, in '71, we received riot training because we were part of the Quick Reaction Force, west of the Mississippi river. Hell, I was almost deployed but I (and others) refused to go. The brass didn't like that much.