{"id":1111,"date":"2009-07-28T11:16:21","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T16:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2009-07-28T11:44:33","modified_gmt":"2009-07-28T16:44:33","slug":"martial-law-and-the-war-on-terrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/28\/martial-law-and-the-war-on-terrorism\/","title":{"rendered":"Martial Law and the War on Terrorism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Future of Freedom Foundation<\/a> is shotgunning out the following oped today….
\n***
\nMartial Law and the War on Terrorism
\n Or \u201cOne White House Memo Away From Dictatorship\u201d<\/strong>
\nby James Bovard <\/p>\n

\tThe New York Times reported last week that the Bush administration considered sending in the U.S. military to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six in 2002. Ironically, one of the worst prosecutorial overreaches by the Justice Department in the war on terror almost resulted in a temporary period of martial law. <\/p>\n

\tThe Lackawanna Six was a group of half-a-dozen Yemeni-Americans from a Buffalo suburb who traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 2001 and attended an al-Qaeda training camp. Some members of the group asserted that they fled the camp after they heard appeals for violence against America. <\/p>\n

\tAfter the six were arrested by the FBI and local police in September 2002, the Justice Department announced that it had identified, investigated and disrupted an al-Qaeda-trained, terrorist cell on American soil. President Bush hyped the arrests of an \u201cal-Qaeda cell\u201d in Buffalo in his State of the Union address a few months later. <\/p>\n

\tWhile the president, the Justice Department, and legions of federal officials speaking anonymously to the media touted the Lackawanna Six as terrorists, the feds never dared make such a suggestion in court. Salon noted that \u201cprosecutors never offered evidence that the Lackawanna defendants intended to commit an act of terrorism.\u201d A secret FBI report in early 2005 admitted: To date, we have not identified any true ‘sleeper’ agents in the U.S. nor any \u201cevidence of concealed cells or networks acting in the homeland as sleepers. <\/p>\n

\tBut the feds did \u201cpersuade\u201d the defendants to plead guilty to \u201cmaterial support of terrorism\u201d \u2014 an amorphous charge that could mean something as simple as paying for their food at the camp. The feds coerced the plea bargain by threatening to label the men \u201cenemy combatants\u201d and send them to Guantanamo \u2014 and to charge them with treason, for which they could be executed. Neal Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants, observed: The [Lackawanna] defendants believed that if they didn’t plead guilty, they’d end up in a black hole forever. There’s little difference between beating someone over the head and making a threat like that. <\/p>\n

\tGeorgetown University law professor David Cole commented: It’s the first time in American history where people are going to prison for going to a training camp.\u201d Virginia lawyer and human rights activist Elaine Cassel commented: \u201cThe idea is, ‘Let’s go out and arrest people before they actually commit a crime, or even think of a crime.'”<\/p>\n

\tThe Bush team considered sending in the military in part because of the lack of evidence.. The New York Times noted that the Justice department was concerned \u201cthat there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna.\u201d Vice President Cheney reportedly \u201cargued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tIn other words, the idea was that it would require less evidence to totally nullify all of a person\u2019s rights (including the \u201cright\u201d not to be tortured) then to arrest him on a felony charge. This judicial philosophy keeps getting stranger and stranger.<\/p>\n

\tSome Pentagon officials supported Cheney\u2019s proposal to send in the troops to grab the Lackawanna Six. Other administration officials objected, and Bush eventually decided to avoid the overt appearance of martial law for this roundup. <\/p>\n

\tCheney was invoking a secret memo from Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel\u2019s John Yoo, who had written: \u201cThe president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tSince some of Yoo\u2019s memos leaked out in recent years, we have heard that they are irrelevant because they were only academic-type posturing. But the New York Times article makes it clear that Cheney and others wanted to seize new powers and fundamentally change the nature of the United States. <\/p>\n

\tThis case illustrates how there are no idle pro-Leviathan legal errors. Instead, any such error is like a ticking time bomb \u2014 waiting to be exploded under the people\u2019s rights and liberties.
\nBut apologists for Bush would insist that it would not have been a dictatorship because one lawyer in the Justice Department assured the vice president that the White House was entitled to such power. Supposedly, it only takes one weasel lawyer to nullify all the constitutional checks-and-balances accumulated over centuries. <\/p>\n

\tSome Bush administration officials viewed using the military for the Lackawanna arrests as \u201ctesting the Constitution.\u201d In reality, it would have tested how much dictatorial power Americans would permit the Bush team to seize. And the mainstream media might have raised scant protest. As one wag quipped online: \u201cIf the tanks rolled down the streets on the same day the American Idol winner was named, you’d never even hear about the tanks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tagline: Bovard James Bovard serves as a policy advisor for the The Future of Freedom Foundation and is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, Terrorism and Tyranny, and other books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Future of Freedom Foundation is shotgunning out the following oped today…. *** Martial Law and the War on Terrorism Or \u201cOne White House Memo Away From Dictatorship\u201d by James Bovard The New York Times reported last week that the Bush administration considered sending in the U.S. military to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[22,659,6,10,19,656,7,26,661],"class_list":{"0":"post-1111","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"tag-attention-deficit-democracy","8":"tag-bovard","9":"tag-bush","10":"tag-cheney","11":"tag-dictatorship","13":"tag-terrorism"},"yoast_head":"\nMartial Law and the War on Terrorism - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/28\/martial-law-and-the-war-on-terrorism\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Martial Law and the War on Terrorism - 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