Bush’s Critics Say Threat of Martial Law in The United States is ‘Real’

[babylonsister]

I think the frequency of these articles popping up is alarming; do they 'know' something we don't?

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/29/2845/

Bush’s Critics Say Threat of Martial Law in The United States is ‘Real’
by Kaleem Omar

Two issues are being debated concurrently in the United States these days. On the one hand, critics of the Bush administration say that, from the look of things, the Bush/Cheney regime has been working assiduously to pave the way for a declaration of military rule in the US, such that at this point, in the words of one critic, “it really only lacks the pretext to trigger a suspension of Constitutional government.” In an article published by CommonDreams.org on July 27, 2007, Dave Lindorff, author of the book “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), says that Bush and Cheney “have done this with the support of Democrats in Congress, though most of the heavy lifting was done by the last Republican-led Congress.”

On the other hand, talk of impeachment is getting louder. In an article published by the Seattle Post Intelligencer on July 27, 2007, Hubert G. Locke, former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, says that “on the eve of a congressionally mandated assessment of the unending madness in Iraq, strange and ominous signs are beginning to appear in all sorts of odd and curious quarters that this nation (the US) should not have to endure another 18 months of the George W. Bush administration and that, if we do, it might well be at the nation’s peril.”

As Locke notes, “Much of the current dismay swirls around Vice-President Dick Cheney, who is busily ignoring rules of government he doesn’t like and declaring his office to be beyond the purview of anyone’s scrutiny, while actively setting about to demolish any government agency that has the impertinence to suggest otherwise.”

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Former Reagan-era associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein is not an alarmist. He says he doesn’t see martial law in the US 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.”

Bush claims that the 2001 AUMF makes him commander-in-chief of a “borderless, endless war on terror.” It may be significant that Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate for president, has called for the revocation of the 2002 AUMF against Iraq, but not for the revocation of the 2001 AUMF.

As Locke notes in his article in The Seattle Post Intelligencer, the US “media are also speaking these days of a looming constitutional crisis as committee chairs in the House and Senate confront a White House refusal to provide requested documents regarding the firings of US attorneys by the Justice Department.”

© 2007 The International News