FLE

In event of emergency ... call out the military? New federal legislation shows the Bush administration has begun systematically putting in place authorization for the president to federalize the National Guard and use the U.S. military in domestic emergency situations. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (H.R. 1585) requires the secretary of defense to prepare and submit to Congress by March 1, 2008, and each subsequent March 1 a plan to coordinate the use of the National Guard and members of the Armed Forces on active duty when responding to natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other man-made disasters. Section 1806 of H.R. 1585 requires the secretary of defense to prepare two versions of the plan, one using only members of the National Guard, and one using both members of the National Guard and members of the regular components of the armed services. WND also has reported Section 1076 of the John Warner Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2007 grants the president the right to commandeer federal troops or state National Guard to use them domestically. The language of Section 1076 appears to nullify the Posse Comitatus Act, in that the language allows the president to federalize the National Guard or use the U.S. military in a wide range of emergencies, including natural disasters, epidemics, or other public health emergencies, terrorist attacks, insurrections, or domestic violence, including conspiracies to commit domestic violence. Critics are concerned that when legal infrastructure for the president to involve the military in a domestic emergency situation, or to federalize the National Guard, is in place, a president intent on a power grab could declare a national emergency under NSPD-51 or HSPD-20, and impose federal martial law, by-passing civilian control....
General would deploy troops on U.S. soil The commander of USNORTHCOM says he's prepared to obey any order from the president to deploy U.S. troops on American soil in response to a domestic emergency. "If he were to choose to declare a national emergency, then clearly we at USNORTHCOM would be able to operate in that environment, in response to direct orders from the secretary of defense," Gen. Victor E. "Gene" Renuart told WND at his Peterson Air Force Base headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo. "But, I'm not sure that would ever be a routine event, and certainly it would be a minority event," he added in an interview conducted during a simulation of a multi-pronged terrorist attack. USNORTHCOM was established in 2002 with responsibility for a "homeland defense" area that includes the U.S., Canada, Mexico, parts of the Caribbean and waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans contiguous to the U.S....
Drug smuggler arrested for 2nd marijuana load Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, the drug smuggler who testified for the prosecution during the trials for Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, has been arrested on charges of bringing more than 750 pounds of marijuana into the United States. Aldrete-Davila was arrested today at the El Paso border crossing on charges involving what has become know as the "second load," in which he smuggled a second 750-pound load of marijuana into the U.S. after he was given immunity by the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, for the first load. As WND reported, Cipriano Ortiz-Hernando, the stash house operator in the "second load" brought across the border by Aldrete-Davila, pleaded guilty in El Paso in August to federal drug charges. WND also reported on a Nov. 21, 2005, memo by DHS Special Agent Christopher Sanchez indicating DEA investigators conducted a "knock and talk" with Ortiz-Hernandez in Clinton, Texas, Oct. 23, 2005, in which they learned of Aldrete-Davila's second operation....
U.S. Thwarts 19 Terrorist Attacks Against America Since 9/11 Criticisms of post-9/11 efforts to protect the United States from attack range from claims that America is more vulnerable than ever to the contention that the transnational terrorist danger is vastly over-hyped.[1] A review of publicly available information on at least 19 terrorist conspiracies thwarted by U.S. law enforce­ment suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between these two arguments. U.S. agencies are actively combating individuals and groups that are intent on killing Americans and plot­ting mayhem to foster violent extremist political and religious agendas. A review of the data suggests several important conclusions: * Combating terrorism is essential for keeping Amer­ica safe, free, and prosperous. * Counterterrorism operations have uncovered threats that in some cases, although less sophisticated than the 9/11 attacks and at most loosely affiliated with "al-Qaeda" central, could have resulted in signifi­cant loss of life and property if they had been con­ducted successfully. * The best means to prevent terrorist attacks is effective intelligence collection, information sharing, and coordinated, determined counterterrorism opera­tions that can stop attacks before they are mounted. * Effective operations often require federal, state, local, and international cooperation....
Secret trials for terrorists, says US judge A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being "hog-tied" by the US constitution. Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had "over-invested" in them. His proposed "big brother" solutions flabbergasted delegates at the Australian Bar Association's biennial conference, where David Hicks's lawyer, Major Michael Mori, is to be awarded honorary life membership. "We have to fight terrorism with our strengths, and our strengths evolve around technology, including the technology of surveillance," said Justice Posner, a prolific legal scholar who sits on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. "Are there terrorist plots that are at a formative stage among the large US Muslim community of two to three million people? In the 600,000 Canadian Muslim population, are there people planning attacks on the US? "What we have to do is discover the extent of the terrorist threat to the US. There is a danger, and it demands a rethinking of some of our conventional views on the limits of national security measures....
FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found. The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup. In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading." Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence." A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis. But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau's managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show....