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The Posse Comitatus Act is a federal law of the United States (18 U.S.C. § 1385) passed in 1878, after the end of Reconstruction, and was intended to prohibit Federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states. It generally prohibits Federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under Federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The original act only referred to the Army, but the Air Force was added in 1956 and the Navy and Marine Corps have been included...

The activities of the Able Danger project by US military intelligence appear to be at odds with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which forbids use of military personnel in domestic policing actions. Apparently some "intelligence support" is permitted under court and executive interpretations of the act. There was anger on the left in the early 1970s when it was learned that military intelligence kept files on (left-leaning) protest (or revolutionary) groups. There was anger on the right in the 1990s when it was learned that military advisors were present at Waco.

The US military is for the first time making its own plans for dealing with domestic terrorist attacks. Under the plans, quick-reaction forces will be prepared to deal with 15 potential scenarios, including simultaneous bomb attacks. The civilian authorities would usually expect to plan for and provide the vast majority of the resources and personnel for major domestic emergencies. Now military resources such as sniffer dogs will be easier to deploy. The Department of Defense has not traditionally taken a major role in domestic operations. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prevents the military from taking part in any law...

COLORADO SPRINGS -- The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans. The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams. The possible scenarios range from "low end," relatively...

Pentagon Plans Could Mean Troops for Homeland Defense Secret plans being considered by the Pentagon could lead to a relaxation of the Posse Comitatus Act’s restrictions on the use of U.S. military forces in the enforcement of laws within the country. The plans under discussion would reduce the emphasis on fighting conventional wars and devote more resources to defending American territory and anti-terrorism efforts within our borders. Consideration of the shift is at the center of an in-depth review of U.S. military strategy now being conducted at the Pentagon, as ordered by Congress every four years. The Posse Comitatus Act...

Commandos Get Duty on U.S. Soil By ERIC SCHMITT ASHINGTON, Jan. 22 - Somewhere in the shadows of the White House and the Capitol this week, a small group of super-secret commandos stood ready with state-of-the-art weaponry to swing into action to protect the presidency, a task that has never been fully revealed before. As part of the extraordinary army of 13,000 troops, police officers and federal agents marshaled to secure the inauguration, these elite forces were poised to act under a 1997 program that was updated and enhanced after the Sept. 11 attacks, but nonetheless departs from how the...

KERRY: "And what I would like to do is see the National Guard and Reserve be deployed differently here in our own country. There's much we can do with them with respect to homeland security."

IN A LITTLE-NOTICED side effect of the war on terrorism, the military is edging toward a sensitive area that has been off-limits to it historically: domestic intelligence gathering and law enforcement. Several recent incidents involving the military have raised concern among student and civil-rights groups. One was a visit last month by an Army intelligence agent to an official at the University of Texas law school in Austin. The agent demanded a videotape of a recent academic conference at the school so that he could identify what he described as "three Middle Eastern men" who had made "suspicious" remarks to...

The US military: A creeping civilian missionBy David Isenberg It seems that the United States military coup of 2012 has arrived about 10 years early. Well, okay, not the full-fledged classic coup, led by a general on horseback. But, as they say, close enough for government work. First, more about that coup. In 1992, a then little-known deputy staff judge advocate lieutenant-colonel by the name of Charles J Dunlap Jr published an article titled "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012" (1) in the US Army War College's military journal Parameters. In a plot that was a cross...

Will Democrats Select The General Of The Waco Siege As Its Presidential Nominee? By Chuck Baldwin Food For Thought From The Chuck Wagon November 11, 2003 An October 28 report in Insight magazine reminded us that the Democratic presidential candidate and now-retired four-star general, Wesley Clark, was the Army commander who used U.S. soldiers and military hardware against American civilians in the federal assault against the Branch Davidians which violated the Posse Comitatus Act and resulted in the massacre of nearly ninety lives, including old men, women, and children. To be sure, General Clark possesses a plethora of great distinctions....

Military force reconfiguration may be necessary for homeland defense By Tanya N. Ballard tballard@govexec.com Defense Department officials may need to rework the structure of the military to meet additional homeland defense missions, according to a new report by the General Accounting Office. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, enacted to preclude federal troops from doing the bidding of local politicians in the occupied South following the Civil War, prohibits the military from conducting domestic law enforcement operations. But the law also allows Congress and the president to make exceptions, and after the Sept. 11 attacks the Defense Department picked up...

Are YOU one of the MILLIONS of AMERICANS who are... seeing your community destroyed by drugs brought into this country across our open borders? angry that the absurd immigration policies which contributed to the attacks of September 11 and the DC sniper have still not been corrected? tired of hearing the mantra that illegal aliens only take jobs Americans won't do?

For Americans, it's a jarring sight: Uniformed soldiers, armed and dangerous, patrolling the train stations of New York, the bridges of San Francisco Bay and the streets of dozens of cities in between. It's a sight common in much of the rest of the world, but one that American leaders as far back as the Founding Fathers have scrupulously tried to avoid except in disaster areas and desolate stretches of the U.S.-Mexican border. Now, it could become even more common, according to Fox News. Fox reports that a handful of U.S. senators and some in the Bush administration are calling ...

The Posse Comitatus Act has been traditionally viewed as a major barrier to the use of U.S. military forces in planning for homeland defense. In fact, many in uniform believe the Act precludes the use of U.S. military assets in domestic security operations in any but the most extraordinary situations. As is often the case, reality bears little resemblance to the myth for homeland defense planners. Through a gradual erosion of the Act’s prohibitions over the past twenty years, Posse Comitatus today is more of a procedural formality than an actual impediment to the use of U.S. military forces in ...

Spintech - American Crazy Quilt: Posse Comitatus - October 12, 2000 Spintech: October 12, 2000 American Crazy Quilt: Posse Comitatus by Diane Alden The history of Posse Comitatus goes back into America's English past. Under King Alfred the Great, who assumed the chief warlord status in Britain in 871, the constabulary of the shire, or shire-reeve, eventually became known as the sheriff. It was his duty to maintain order in his tun, or grouping of ten families. Nonetheless, it was the citizen's duty in the shire to help the sheriff in nabbing criminals and maintaining order. The sheriff would ...

It seems an odd first step. Why would the head of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, recommend a repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act as a first measure towards fighting terrorism? The Posse Comitatus Act was approved by Congress on June 18, 1878. The measure was a response to the disputed election of 1876 where Rutherford B. Hayes went to bed the loser, but eventually found his way into the Oval Office. The troops who President Grant had stationed at polling places may have had an undue influence over the ballot boxes and stolen a victory for Hayes. Whether the election...

<p>HEATON, N.D. -- A set of footprints leads to Gordon Kahl's snow-covered grave, adorned with freshly planted plastic flowers that battle a bitter wind. It has been 20 years since Kahl was buried in Heaton, N.D., the town where he grew up and farmed. People around these parts can't forget what put him here for good.</p>

Title 18 USC., Part I, Chap. 67 Sec. 1385. - Use of Army and Air Force as posse comitatus "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."Circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution....Article I. Section 8. The Congress shall have power to... ...provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; ...define and punish...

It's not often we agree with liberals. But, when the topic is Liberty versus stronger centralized government controls, we tend to agree with whoever is on the side of Liberty. For instance, the grossly misnamed Patriot Act is about to get totally shredded by the courts as unconstitutional. Even so, Attorney General John Ashcroft and others are going forward with it as if it were something Americans would actually respect. Fact is, the only ones who want that stupid Patriot Act are those who love big government control of everything in our lives -- and we already have too much...

If Bill Clinton were still in the White House, Republicans would be on the march against Bigger Government and Bigger Spending. Unfortunately, too many prominent Republicans are cottoning up to increased federal control and the increased spending that goes with it. One of the five components of the Citizen Corps, created by the President in January, is Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System). This is designed to be "a nationwide program to help thousands of American truck drivers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, and utility workers report potential terrorist activity." Operation TIPS calls on Americans, in their daily...

Friday, July 26, 2002 Soldiers shouldn’t be cops The Posse Comitatus Act is more doctrine than law. It was passed in 1878 to prevent civil authorities from pressing federal troops into service on posses. Since then, it has grown into a general prohibition against using the U.S. military to perform domestic police functions. It does not cover the National Guard, whom governors frequently call on for riot control or preventing looting after a flood, or the U.S. Coast Guard. The law was amended slightly in 1981 to allow military logistical support for drug-interdiction efforts. The act does not restrict the...

Posse Comitatus and Nuclear Terrorism CHRIS QUILLEN © 2002 Chris Quillen From Parameters, Spring 2002, pp. 60-74. Few constraints, if any, remain on what terrorists are capable of and willing to do. In the past decade terrorists have released sarin gas on a Tokyo subway, buried radiological materials in a Moscow park, delivered anthrax through the US mail, and killed thousands in a well-coordinated suicide attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Terrorists have proven themselves to be both more bloodthirsty and more innovative than previously imagined. The possibility that state sponsorship of these groups could include providing...

President George W. Bush has just about used up all the slack his conservative supporters can cut him. They accepted it when he sold out to Ted Kennedy on the education bill, they stood fast when he elected to retain most of Bill Clinton's last-minute environmental regulations, the gulped and swallowed the Patriot Act with its increased surveillance of innocent citizens, they rode with him when he signed the atrocious campaign finance reform -- the reincarnation of the Alien and Sedition Acts. They didn't much like it when he proposed a uniform driver's license that all states would have to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite the specter of new attacks on the United States, the U.S. military opposes any move to give civilian police powers to the armed forces to protect Americans, a top Army general said on Wednesday. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane spoke as the government began to examine possible changes in an 1878 "posse comitatus" law that forbids the military from making arrests and undertaking other law enforcement duties except in dire emergencies. "We don't see any reason to change," the Army's No. two ranking officer told reporters, adding that the armed forces would continue...

<p>Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, yesterday strongly endorsed giving soldiers the power to arrest American civilians.</p> <p>Interviewed yesterday on "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Biden, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prevents the military from exercising police powers in this country, should be re-examined and "has to be amended."</p>

AUDIO n VIDEO President Eisenhower's historic farewell address to the Nation Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together." Listen to the entire speech » - President Eisenhower - January 1961

Northern Command General Endorses Posse Comitatus Review Although Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said the Pentagon would not seek any changes in the venerable Posse Comitatus Act that restricts the use of the military in domestic operations, President Bush's new plan for domestic security included a notable provision calling for Justice and Defense attorneys to review it. Now Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, the officer charged with defending the continental U.S., has gone on record that he’s all for it and would endorse changes in the law if that translated into a better-defended country. "My view has been that Posse...

Biden backs letting soldiers arrest civilians Joyce Howard Price THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published 7/22/2002 Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, yesterday strongly endorsed giving soldiers the power to arrest American civilians. Interviewed yesterday on "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Biden, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prevents the military from exercising police powers in this country, should be re-examined and "has to be amended." Such a change will happen soon, he said. However, Tom Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, said in several appearances on political talk shows yesterday that...

U.S. Mulls Military's Domestic Role The Associated Press Jul 21 2002 7:14PM WASHINGTON (AP) - Homeland security chief Tom Ridge says the threat of terrorism may force government planners to consider using the military for domestic law enforcement, now largely prohibited by federal law. President Bush has called on Congress to thoroughly review the law that bans the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines from participating in arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other police-type activity on U.S. soil. The Coast Guard and National Guard troops under the control of state governors are excluded from the Reconstruction-era law, known as...