CUM A IMPLICAT CHENEY ARMATA S.U.A. IN TREBURILE INTERNE ! >> Cheney pressed Bush to test Constitutional limits by using military force on US soil

• July
• 25

8:23 pm Atentie !, Important, Info, MARTIAL LAW, Marea Manipulare, U.S. ARMY

Muriel Kane
Raw Story
Saturday, July 25, 2009

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 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.

The October 2001 Yoo memorandum was declassified last March, but the accounts given to the Times by anonymous Bush administration officials are the first indication that there was serious consideration of actually using it.

Cheney’s legal advisor David Addington and some Defense Department officials supported Cheney’s position, but several aides to President Bush opposed it, along with then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and FBI Director Robert Mueller. President Bush ultimately turned the plan down and ordered the FBI to make the arrests.

The full registration-restricted Times story can be read here.