The first thing that struck me this morning was a link from Cabaret Apocalypto, and I learned that beginning October the 1st, 2008, the Posse Comitatus Act has been effectively obliterated. The Army is assigning the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team (BCT) to duty within the continental United States; this unit has spent the last 35 of 60 months patrolling Iraq and are seasoned fighters, not the type of personnel that I prefer to be “helping-out” within the United States. Marine and Army infantry units have been trained to kill, they do it well, and in Iraq they had to adopt a “shoot first”, ask questions later mentality. Old habits can often be hard to break…
Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1
3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army
By Gina Cavallaro - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Sep 8, 2008 6:15:06 EDTBeginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.
But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities. MUCH MORE
We know that more experienced troops are needed in Afghanistan, so it is peculiar for us to pull-out a seasoned unit for deployment at home. Further down in the Army Times, two more paragraphs leap off the page and we all have to ask ourselves exactly “what” this President is planning for???
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.
Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the “jaws of life” to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.
The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
Based on the above statements, it appears the government is anticipating some extremely serious public outrage and protests - large enough to need the help of the Army and other branches of the military who have been called upon to help in this “mission”.
What is the Bush administration preparing itself for, and what action will trigger these protests they anticipate will require military intervention to quell?
There’s no question the White House has been planning this for some time, and now that we know the “bailout plan” was drafted while Bush assured the nation our “economy was strong”, the web of deceit and lies is spilling-out and we know that the Bush administration has known this financial “emergency” would materialize - and like the Patriot Act - materialized almost immediately after the 9-11 attacks even though it was a document that obviously took weeks, perhaps even months to prepare.
The Bush administrations response to the financial crisis has been so shrill that today, China’s Banks were ordered to stop lending to American financial institutions:
China banks told to halt lending to US banks-SCMP
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