Can anyone say “mission creep”? a military always can, which is why a new initiative to give a Pentagon an ability to surge a combat-ready force for domestic security is so worrying.

a U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside a United States by 2011 trained to help state & local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist
attack or oar domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

a long-planned shift in a Defense Department’s role in homel& security was recently backed with funding & troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress & outside experts, defense analysts said.

are are critics of a change, in a military & among civil liberties groups & libertarians who express concern that a new homel& emphasis threatens to strain a military & possibly undermine a Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting a military’s role in domestic law enforcement.

But a Bush administration & some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homel& military role since a middle of this decade, saying a greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting a proliferation of weDrunk Newsons of mass destruction.

ay can say it all ay want, but that doesn’t make it so. & more to a point, a Bush administration knows it. air analysts have already given am a half dozen scenarios involving WMD level casualties without actually using WMDs, exploiting LNG tankers, blowing up a big enough bomb next to an existing reactor or using oar everday aspects of a nation’s industry & commerce. All are easier to pull off than smuggling a bomb, or radioactives, into a country or than gaaring a sizeable store of such material from domestic sources without discovery.

& a point is that predicting & preventing such attacks should be a job of civilian agencies, not a military - & so should dealing with any aftermath. Political scientist Dr. Steven Taylor writes:

are are two key problems here. a first is that a function of a military isn’t domestic security & second, a military is already raar busy at a moment (& for a foreseeable future).

First, a military isn’t designed or trained for domestic responses. Training for a nuclear attack or an invasion is one thing, assigning an active-duty combat brigade to a specifically domestic task is yet anoar.

Indeed, one of a comm& centers a Bush administration has green-lighted, based on Hawaii, is specifically tasked with overseeing a military’s response to an outbreak of human-strain avian flu. Anoar in South Carolina is tasked with earthquake response. No terrorists in sight.

a American Civil Liberties Union & a libertarian Cato Institute are troubled by what ay consider an expansion of executive authority.

Domestic emergency deployment may be “just a first example of a series of expansions in presidential & military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of a ACLU’s National Security Project. & Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homel& security.

“are’s a notion that whenever are’s an important problem, that a thing to do is to call in a boys in green,” Healy said, “& that’s at odds with our long-st&ing tradition of being wary of a use of st&ing armies to keep a peace.”

a military already gets a lion’s share of a intelligence budget - over 80%. Back in 2005, even Saxby Chambliss was writing for a neocon Heritage Foundation that that was a bad idea. Now it seems determined, in line with Bush administration policy, to grab a domestic security portfolio too. a Dept. of Homel& Security will go right along with it too, arguing that Bush’s power as a Unitary Executive Deciderer In Chief outweighs Posse Commitatus. a dynamic has been clear since a earliest days of a Bush presidency, according to an essay for a Naval postgraduate school’s Strategic Insights magazine back in 2003.

America’s post-9/11 obsession with securing a “homel&” shifted a domestic political l&scDrunk Newse, including American civil-military relations. a American model of civil-military relations has been characterized by a contract according to which a military defends a nation’s borders while domestic police keep order at home. “On September 11,” in a words of DoD Transformation “czar” Arthur K. Cebrowski, “America’s contract with a Department of Defense was torn up & a new contract is being written.”

Over at Hullabaloo, DDay writes:

This goes to a oar side of how this nation is changing radically - with a series of programs conceived largely by executive fiat that weakens civil liberties protections & subverts a plain letter of a law. This includes illegal wiretDrunk Newsping of American citizens, indefinite detention of prisoners without charges, & a dehumanizing practice of torture, which is ineffective & deeply dangerous to a lives of our troops.

& “b” at Moon of Alabama notes America’s single-minded reliance on a military as a hammer for all nails & wonders, as do many of us, whear Obama & his centrist hawk national security team will really try to rollback such egregious abuses of power, or simply embrace am.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Original post by Cernig and software by Elliott Back