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NORTHCOMM and Urban Warfare
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by Rebecca Reilly, W A M M
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Here is why its new troops may be coming to a city near you in the near future, regardless of natural or man-made disasters in your area.
If you’ve heard rumors about martial law in America, you may wonder how it would ever be possible, and what the supra-military force, NORTHCOMM, has to do with it. Northern Command is a special military and intelligence joint task force that helps local, state, and tribal authorities in times of crisis on the North American continent. When the I-35 W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007, the U.S. Navy was there to help, under a region defense coordinating officer of the U.S. Northern Command. According to Northern Command’s timeline on its website, www.northcom.mil, the U.S. division of NorthComm also helped states to mitigate flood damage in the Midwest last June. Here is why its new troops may be coming to a city near you in the near future, regardless of natural or man-made disasters in your area.
Deployment of NORTHCOMM
When a leader secures an army and security force dedicated to him and not to any Constitution, he lifts his own office above its prescribed role in the Constitution. That is what happened to the office of the president on October 1, as it has happened several times since George W. Bush took office. On that day, the homeland tours of a 3,000-4,000-person army, the 1st Brigade Combat Team (BCT) began. NORTHCOMM leads this brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division and it answers only to the president and the Secretary of Defense, not Congress, because the president established it on Oct. 1, 2002.
Congress has been funding it through bills like the Defense Authorization Act of 2007, but because of the secrecy of NORTHCOMM, Congress has even less oversight of it than it does of the five military branches.
The troops currently touring under NORTHCOMM are the first to have received a dedicated assignment. The 1st BCT had just returned from fighting in Iraq, and will tour America for 12 months, after which a different division will be assigned to this permanent mission, according to the Army Times. The Army Times’ article of September 30, 2008, “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” says that the 1st BCT will learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it. They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.” A CBRNE attack is any chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive situation.
(The article by Gina Cavallero can yet be found online.)
Urban Warfare
Controlling unrest could mean anything from fencing and guarding private property to demanding citizens’ guns, house by house, as the National Guard and NorthComm did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. Army North, under NORTHCOMM, is not the first military division to have been trained in urban warfare in the U.S.
However, the 1st BCT is also trained to use a special package of nonlethal weapons that will be stored at their tour sites: America’s cities. The above article was corrected so that readers understand that the new nonlethal weapons packages can only be used in a war zone. But President Bush and his lawyers made the whole world a war zone with his unofficial declaration of the war on terror.
Appeasement
It didn’t take long for the active BCT to be used as a threat against the American people, as Representative Brad Sherman confessed on the House floor on October 2. During debate on H.R. 1424, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, he explained before his colleagues and C-SPAN: “Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill, on Monday, that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day, another couple thousand the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted ‘no.’” On October 3, the bill, nicknamed the corporate bailout bill, was passed 263 to 171.
Emergencies
What does that threat of force have to do with the BCT’s mission to help in “potentially horrific scenarios?” Look at National Security Directive (NSD) 51, which applies to natural and man-made emergencies. President Bush established his claim on emergency rule with National Security Directive 51 in May 2007. At this time America is not in a state of emergency. However, NSD 51 gives the president the power to determine what and where American emergencies are.
With only his own authority, he signed the executive directive so that, in a catastrophic emergency, “the President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.” It’s hard to determine what that means when only Annex A of that directive is available at the president’s website online.
Peter Dale Scott looked into this in his article “The Showdown” on CounterPunch, March 31, 2008. He wrote, concerning members of the House Homeland Security Committee’s request to read the directive, that NSD 51 contains “classified Continuity Annexes” which shall “be protected from unauthorized disclosure.” Congressman DeFazio twice requested to see these annexes, the second time in a letter cosigned by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Carney. It was these requests that the White House denied.
For further information, please research these two items:
1) The US government’s Continuity of Operations plan, from 1946 to the present, and Donald Rumsfeld’s changes to it: www.wikileaks.org/leak/us-army-reg-500-3-continuity-2001.pdf
2) The 2007 House Report 110-477, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, Section 1821.
Rebecca Reilly is studying media writing at Augsburg College. She is a student and facilitator in the Twin Cities’ Experimental College and an anti-torture activist in the WAMM group, “Tackling Torture at the Top”. |
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CO$T of WAR
That’s the name of Robert Gates’ proposal to turn universities into militarized factories producing knowledge, research and personnel in the interest of Homeland Security. The willingness of citizens to assume the roles of informer, soldier and consumer willing to enlist in or be conscripted by the totalizing war on terror, threatens the very idea of the university as a site of critical thinking, public service and socially responsible research. The 17 million students who pass through the halls of academe must be educated to recognize creeping militarization. Higher education may be forced to rethink not merely the space of the university as a democratic public sphere, but also the global space in which intellectuals, students, artists, labor unions and other social actors and movements can form transnational alliances to oppose the death-dealing ideology of militarization and its effect upon the world.
—Truthout, 11/20/08
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© 2008 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete December 2008/January 2009 Index - click here
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