The Martial Law threat is real

I have thought about this possibility for years. Now an article has put my fears into words, and it's well worth reading. Even now, the Bush administration can disappear anyone they want, and have done. Then another thought comes to mind, why is it that the Senate and House are not in any hurry to impeach? Do they want to leave these executive powers open for the next President?

Check out the excerpts from David Lindorf's article found on Buzzflash.

From the looks of things, the Bush/Cheney regime has been working assiduously to pave the way for a declaration of military rule, such that at this point it really lacks only the pretext to trigger a suspension of Constitutional government. They have done this with the active support of Democrats in Congress, though most of the heavy lifting was done by the last, Republican-led Congress.

The first step, or course, was the first Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in September 2001, which the president has subsequently used to claim -- improperly, but so what -- that the whole world, including the U.S., is a battlefield in a so-called "War" on Terror, and that he has extra-Constitutional unitary executive powers to ignore laws passed by Congress.

The 2001 AUMF was followed by the PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, which undermined much of the Bill of Rights. Around the same time, the president began a campaign of massive spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, conducted without any warrants or other judicial review. It was and remains a program clearly aimed at American dissidents and at the Administration's political opponents...

The other thing we saw early on was the establishment of an underground government within a government, though the activation, following 9-11, of the so-called "Continuity of Government" protocol...

It was also during the first year following 9-11 that the Bush/Cheney regime began its programs of arrest and detention without charge -- mostly of resident aliens, but also of American citizens --

Meanwhile, last October Bush and Cheney, with the help of a compliant Congress, put in place some key elements needed for a military putsch. There was the overturning of the venerable Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which barred the use of active duty military inside the United States for police-type functions, and the revision of the Insurrection Act, so as to empower the president to take control of National Guard units in the 50 states, even over the objections of the governors...

Put this together with the wholly secret construction now under way -- courtesy of a $385 million grant by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc -- of detention camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people, and a recent report that the Pentagon has a document, dated June 1, 2007, classified Top Secret, which declares there to be a developing "insurgency" within the U.S, and which lays out a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign against legal dissent, and you have all the ingredients for a military takeover of the United States.

Bruce Fein isn't an alarmist. He says he doesn't see martial law coming tomorrow. But he is also realistic. He says, "This is all sitting around like a loaded gun waiting to go off. I think the risk of martial law is trivial right now, but the minute there is a terrorist attack, then it is real. And it stays with us after Bush and Cheney are gone, because terrorism stays with us forever."

Fein argues that the only real defense against the looming disaster of a martial law declaration would be for Congress to vote for a resolution determining that there is no "War" on terror. "But they are such cowards they will never do that," he says.

That leaves us with the military.

If ordered to turn their guns and bayonets on their fellow Americans, would our "heroes" in uniform follow their consciences, and their oaths to "uphold and defend" the Constitution of the United States? Or would they follow the orders of their Commander in Chief?

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