By Andy Sullivan
Thu Mar 12, 2009 3:34pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI raided the former office of Obama administration official Vivek Kundra and arrested two people in a corruption probe on Thursday, but Kundra is not a target of the investigation, a spokeswoman for Washington’s mayor said.

The FBI searched the offices of the District of Columbia’s chief technology officer, a post formerly held by Kundra, as it investigates employee corruption there, spokeswoman Mafara Hobson said.

President Barack Obama named Kundra, 34, last week to be the federal government’s chief information officer, responsible for overseeing the government’s computer systems.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called the investigation a “serious matter” and declined further comment.

Yusuf Acar, who works in the city’s technology office, and another man, Sushil Bansal, were arrested, FBI spokeswoman Lindsay Godwin said.

Godwin declined to say whether the two were arrested on bribery charges, as reported by The Washington Post. The charges remain under seal, Godwin said.

Acar describes himself as the information office’s chief security officer in a video posted on its website.

Bansal is a former Washington government employee who heads Advanced Integrated Technologies Corp., a technology firm that has won contracts from the city’s technology office.

He won the Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2008 from an association of Indian-Americans. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.

(Additional reporting by Jim Vicini and Ross Colvin, Editing by Patricia Zengerle)

Obama official not a target in FBI raid: spokesperson

By Michael Filozof
March 08, 2009

In 1945, the United Kingdom implemented a program of change at the hands of a new left wing government. The structure of support built up in previous decades, the way change was sold to the public, outcomes themselves have much to teach us about America’s future.

To most Americans, the iconic image of British strength, resolve, and power is that of the cigar-chomping, bulldog-faced Winston Churchill defiantly growling “we shall never surrender” and “this is our finest hour” as Nazi bombs rained down on London every night during the summer of 1940.

Churchill almost single-handedly saved Britain from defeat at the hands of the Nazis, stepping up to become Prime Minister after Neville Chamberlain resigned in disgrace after diplomatic attempts to achieve “peace in our time” with Hitler proved folly.

But relatively few Americans may be aware that, despite his historic victory over one of the most evil regimes in history, Churchill was unceremoniously booted by British voters when his Conservative Party was defeated within weeks of Germany’s surrender.

What followed marked the beginning of the end for the greatest empire since Rome.

The election of 1945 was a decisive victory for Britain’s Labour Party. Labour gained 394 seats in the 640-seat House of Commons, named Clement Attlee as Prime Minister, and implemented historic changes in Britain, turning a once-great empire into a second-rate socialist welfare state in a span of 20 years.

The Labour government nationalized key industries in Britain, including rail, mining, air transport, utilities, and communications. Labour also created a “cradle-to-grave” welfare state and nationalized medicine with the creation of the National Health Service. Oppressive taxation was enacted to pay for the massive increase in government spending; by the 1970s income and estate taxes on the wealthy had skyrocketed to 80%.

In foreign policy, the Labour government engaged in wholesale decolonization, and the world is much worse off as a result. In 1947 British India was decolonized and partitioned into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The resulting chaos displaced 12 million refugees and caused a million deaths. Sixty years and several wars later the former colonies are nuclear-armed powers, still locked in chronic tension over control of the mountain region of Kashmir.

Burma, Ceylon, and the Palestinian Mandate were also decolonized in the immediate postwar period. Burma — now Myanmar — is home to one of the most repressive military dictatorships in the world. Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, is experiencing a decades-long guerrilla war, and the 60-year Arab-Israeli conflict in the former Palestinian Mandate knows no end. In subsequent decades, Britain also withdrew from East Africa, leaving in its wake the oppressive 30-year dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and a tribally-divided Kenya, recently wracked by election violence. Sudan, another former East African possession of the British Empire, is home to the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

By the 1960s, the Labour Party had overturned nearly all of the traditional aspects of a British culture that had been historically staid, stoic, and reserved. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government decriminalized abortion and homosexuality, abolished capital punishment, and revised immigration laws to allow large numbers of Third World emigrants to Britain for the first time. Consequently, today’s Britain is a land of social dysfunction, including high rates of drunkenness, property crime, welfare dependency, racial strife, promiscuity and irreligiosity. The illegitimate birth rate in the U.K. hit 50% in 2008, while a mere 10% of the population regularly attends church. Such behavior would have been unimaginable in prim Victorian society a century ago.

Although Britain’s Conservatives managed to form governments in the postwar period, they were unable to fully reverse the changes implemented by Labour. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did manage to lower tax rates and privatize some industries in the 1980s, but Conservatives never abolished the welfare state, the NHS, or reversed the social decline that had taken place in the postwar period.

The Britain that strode across the world as an economic and military colossus during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - bringing technology, learning, literature, order, and an unprecedented creation of wealth — was gone forever by the 1960s, its culture replaced by a trite and ephemeral trendiness epitomized by Beatlemania, punk rock, and “Cool Britannia.”

The Ideological Clique Behind the Change

These changes did not take place by accident. They were planned by British cultural elites, particularly by members of the Fabian Society, who had worked for over a half-century to promote the policies finally implemented by Labour governments after 1945.

The Fabians advocated a gradual, democratic socialist takeover rather than violent revolution. Fabians sought control over more banal aspects of life — transport, utilities, medicine — that were far less threatening to the general public than the prospect of armed revolution.

The society was named after the Roman general Fabius Maximus, whose tactic was to wait for the ideal opportunity. The society’s motto — “For the right moment you must wait… but when the right moment comes you must strike hard” — is eerily similar to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s sentiment that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” because “crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that [we] could not do before.”

Fabian Society membership was a Who’s Who of prewar British intellectuals, writers and artists who had rejected classical free-market economics, traditional religion, nationalism and imperialism. They included nerdy academic socialists like Harold Laski and G.D.H. Cole, as well as a motley collection of misfits, pacifists, deviants and utopian radicals.

The writer H.G. Wells, advocate of eugenics and a utopian global state, was a Fabian. Noted for his infidelity, he had an affair with the American eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw, an advocate of feminism, socialism, and vegetarianism, was a Fabian; he opposed British involvement in World War I but became an admirer of the USSR in the 1930s. “Sexologist” Havelock Ellis, who married a lesbian and was said to only become aroused when watching women urinate, was a member, as was Edward Carpenter, a vegan gay-rights activist and nudist. Economist John Maynard Keynes, whose theories influenced the policies of nearly all Western governments since the 1930s and are in vogue in the Obama administration today, was briefly a member.

The Fabian Society was disproportionately influential in the Labour government of 1945; though the Society numbered only several thousand, more than half of the Labour Party MPs were members. Nearly all leaders of the postwar Labour Party have been members, including Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair.

Just as the Fabians influenced the Labour Party agenda, today’s Democratic Party reflects the disproportionate influence of a clique of elite cultural and academic leftists now seeking to implement a socialist agenda they have been promoting since the 1960s. This agenda includes nationalized health care, taxpayer-funded abortion, federal control of education, gay marriage, openly-practicing homosexuals in the military, and much, much higher taxes.

Like the Fabian-influenced Labour government, the Obama administration has embarked on a course to “remake” America. The administration will effectively nationalize transportation and utilities through its “green energy” initiatives (indeed, Congresswoman Maxine Waters recently advocated nationalizing the oil industry) openly seeks to nationalize health care (the $787 billion “stimulus” bill includes billions of dollars to begin centralizing health care records) and is using the mortgage and banking crisis to effectively nationalize the financial services and banking sector.

In foreign policy, the Obama administration has announced a deadline to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq, and indicated a willingness to cease implementation of a missile-defense shield in Europe. Obama, who campaigned as a “citizen of the world” and effectively apologized to Middle Eastern audiences for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in his first televised interview as president, seeks to curtail American military hegemony and replace it with reliance upon global institutions such as the U.N.

On immigration, Obama and the Democratic Party support citizenship for 12 million mostly Spanish-speaking illegal aliens currently residing in the U.S.; such a plan would invariably allow those new citizens to sponsor even more non-English speaking family members to emigrate to the U.S.

The agenda of the American Left bears an uncomfortable similarity to that of the Fabian Society intellectuals that reshaped British society. If this agenda is successfully implemented by Barack Obama, the election of 2008 in the United States will be a watershed event, much like the British election of 1945.

But this analogy is not an optimistic one. If one wants to know what the United States will look like fifty years after Obama, one need only look at the fall of Britain from its imperial height in 1945 to the Britain of today — a second-rate, secularized “nanny state” whose disarmed citizens are monitored by thousands of police cameras and whose police actively prosecute “hate crimes” and offenses against “multiculturalism.”

Like Britain, the United States will almost certainly remain an important financial center and regional power several decades from now, but the center of global gravity will long since have shifted to the Chinese as the United States abandons it global dominance and becomes preoccupied with a liberal, postmodern, domestic agenda. It does not have to be this way — the United States can still assert itself as global hegemon if it has the will to do so - but the successful implementation of the Obama agenda will assure that it does not.

If Obama achieves the goals articulated in his campaign, his presidency will surely mark the end of “the American Century” just as the election of 1945 signaled the end of Victorian and Edwardian British global dominance.

Obama and the Triumph of the Fabians

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 10, 2009

BRUSSELS: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday the next NATO secretary-general doesn’t necessarily have to be a European.

Biden said it was no longer “a matter of policy (that) any member nation should be ruled out” for the 26-nation alliance’s top position. Since NATO’s creation in 1949 it has always gone to a European while NATO’s military command is headed by a U.S. general.

His comments suggested that a bid by Canada’s Defense Minister Peter Mackay stood a chance.

Canada has around 2,500 combat forces stationed in Afghanistan’s volatile southern region.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been viewed as the front-runner for the job. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski wants to become the first time an official from the ex-Soviet bloc would receive the post.

The vice president added that Washington had not yet made a decision on a candidate but said a successor to current NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer would be picked at a NATO’s leaders summit in April.

De Hoop Scheffer’s term ends at the end of July.

The NATO secretary-general chairs the alliance’s ministerial meetings and summits and oversees the day-to-day running of the alliance.

The main task is to forge consensus on key security challenges of the alliance, which have become larger than during the Cold War, so that the member nations can take unanimous decisions.

NATO has recently taken on military operations far beyond Europe’s borders, most notably in Afghanistan.

De Hoop Scheffer took office in 2004. There is no written limit on the term of secretary general but in recent years NATO nations have informally agreed that the post should be limited to five years to avoid a repeat of the 13-year term of Joseph Luns of the Netherlands.

NATO decisions must be through consensus of all members. U.S. opinion is unofficially heavily weighted by tradition given its military muscle.

Biden suggests non-European can be NATO chief

Posted: January 06, 2009
9:07 pm Eastern

By Drew Zahn
2009 WorldNetDaily

Henry Kissinger

Conflicts across the globe and an international respect for Barack Obama have created the perfect setting for establishment of “a New World Order,” according to Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former secretary of state under President Nixon.

Kissinger has long been an integral figure in U.S. foreign policy, holding positions in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. Author of over a dozen books on foreign policy, Kissinger was also named by President Bush as the chairman of the Sept. 11 investigatory commission.

Kissinger made the remark in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” hosts Mark Haines and Erin Burnett at the New York Stock Exchange, after Burnett asked him what international conflict would define the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

Read “Hope of the Wicked,” where author Ted Flynn reveals the greatest deception in modern history – corporations, foundations and governments converging to bring about a New World Order.

“The president-elect is coming into office at a moment when there is upheaval in many parts of the world simultaneously,” Kissinger responded. “You have India, Pakistan; you have the jihadist movement. So he can’t really say there is one problem, that it’s the most important one. But he can give new impetus to American foreign policy partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. His task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It’s a great opportunity, it isn’t just a crisis.”

Kissinger’s comments are captured at roughly the two-minute mark of the following video:

The phrase ‘new world order’ traces back at least as far as 1940, when author H.G. Wells used it as the title of a book about a socialist, unified, one-world government. The phrase has also been linked to American presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, whose work on establishing the League of Nations pioneered the concept of international government bodies, and to the first President Bush, who used it in a 1989 speech.

“A new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment,” said Bush before a joint session of Congress. “Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a new world order – can emerge: A new era … in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony.”

The phrase “New World Order” causes alarm for many Americans, particularly those concerned about an international governing body trumping U.S. sovereignty or those that interpret biblical prophecy to foretell the establishment of a one-world government as key to the rise of the Antichrist. Conspiracy theorists, too, have latched on to the phrase, concerned that powerful financial or government figures are secretly plotting to rule the world.

Kissinger’s ties to government and international powers – as well as his use of the phrase – have made him suspect in the eyes of many who are wary of what “new world order” might actually mean.

“There is a need for a new world order,” Kissinger told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose last year, “I think that at the end of this administration, with all its turmoil, and at the beginning of the next, we might actually witness the creation of a new order – because people looking in the abyss, even in the Islamic world, have to conclude that at some point, ordered expectations must return under a different system.”

As WND reported, Kissinger was also part of last year’s super-secret Bilderberg Group, an organization of powerful international elites, including government, business, academic and journalistic representatives, that has convened annually since 1954.

According to sources that have penetrated the high-security meetings, the Bilderberg meetings emphasize a globalist agenda and promote the idea that the notion of national sovereignty is antiquated and regressive.

CNBC’s Haines concluded the Kissinger interview by asking, “Are you confident about the people President-elect Obama has chosen to surround him?”

Kissinger replied, “He has appointed an extraordinarily able group of people in both the international and financial fields.”

Kissinger: Obama primed to create ‘New World Order’

There is an old social theory that in order to create a healthier planet, people everywhere must learn the value of collectivism. Its many proponents insist that individual rights and liberties pose a real threat to the health and safety of the “community at large. If we will just put the community before self-centered concerns, mankind can eliminate war and poverty. To many, it is our evolutionary destiny and our moral duty to comply with the spirit of community.

The founders of the Communitarian Network began “shoring up the moral, social and political environment” in the early 1990s. Today the communitarian theory is the basis for hundreds of new global rules and regulations eliminating individual rights, yet fewer than one percent of the affected population knows about it.

Communitarianism was embraced by leaders in every nation after it was financed by the international banking elite. Today the theory of community influences all aspects of life: news, science, money, law, land use, health, education, policing and employment, not to mention the arts, fashion, fundraising, causes and entertainment. Community is the buzzword on everybody’s lips these days.

Economist John Maynard Keynes

News & Opinion
Friday, March 13, 2009

More than half a century after his death, British economist John Maynard Keynes is back in vogue. Can Keynesian economics pull the world out of its slump?

Who was John Maynard Keynes?
The 20th century’s guiding light of liberal economic theory. Born in 1883, Keynes was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and became a prolific writer on subjects ranging from philosophy to probability. He joined the British Treasury during World War I, representing it in negotiations in Versailles over the treaty that ended the war. His experience in Versailles led him to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he condemned the onerous reparations imposed on Germany and sagely predicted the ruin that loomed ahead for Europe. Such unconventional views left him out of political favor for much of the 1920s. But the market crash of 1929 increased demand for his theories—and counsel—on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1936, he published his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which for decades exerted a profound influence on economic thinking and practice.

What was the core of his economic theory?
Disputing the classical free-market belief in an “invisible hand” that guides economies in a natural cycle, Keynes viewed recessions and depressions as symptoms of economic distress that must be treated. He also challenged the prevailing view that governments should always strive to balance budgets. Keynes said the proper response to economic slowdowns was to boost demand in the marketplace, and if the private sector was not investing sufficiently to create demand—as was the case throughout the 1930s—then government should fill the void by spending. It mattered not whether the government was building trains or pyramids—the point was to create jobs so citizens would have more money in their pockets, which would increase demand for goods and services and propel the economy forward.

Did this theory get a real-world test?
Yes. It was called the Great Depression. With the country’s economy in collapse, President Roosevelt followed Keynesian principles by spending heavily on public-works projects. In response, unemployment rates slowly declined through the 1930s, and the economy began to revive. But it wasn’t until the largest public-spending program of all—World War II—that the Great Depression came to an end. After the war, most mainstream economists were more or less “Keynesians.” Time magazine wrote in 1965 that Keynes’ ideas had become so widely accepted “that they constitute both the new orthodoxy in the universities and the touchstone of economic management in Washington.”

Why did Keynes fall out of favor?
In the 1970s, global economic distress defied a lot of Keynesian thinking. Keynesian models projected that the ills of inflation and unemployment had an inverse relationship—if one was high, the other would be low. Government could supposedly keep both at modest levels by adjusting both monetary policy (interest rates and the money supply) and fiscal policy (taxation and spending). But in the 1970s, unemployment in the U.S. hit 8 percent and was accompanied by 16 percent inflation. Inflation in the U.K. and Japan rose even higher, and out-of-control government spending was blamed. Keynesian theory lost its mojo, replaced by the conservative policies identified with economist Milton Friedman. While Keynes emphasized demand, Friedman stressed adjustment of interest rates and the money supply as the primary lever of economic policy. Rather than trying to micromanage the economy, Friedman said governments should lower taxes, lower interest rates, and get out of the way, letting the pursuit of wealth drive a return to economic health.

Why is Keynes suddenly back?
Because of the mess we’re now in. In the current economic crisis, monetary policy has been pushed to its limit. The interest rate charged to lenders is near zero, but lending remains stalled and economic activity has plummeted along with employment. With no tools left in the monetarist kit, many economists favor a government boost to aggregate demand—just as Keynes would have advised. That’s the idea behind the $787 billion stimulus package.

How will the stimulus work?
It will spend billions on public-works projects, health care, education, law enforcement, and other programs in an effort to create jobs and put money in people’s pockets. The key goal is to goose consumer spending and counter the effect that Keynes called “the paradox of thrift.” If everyone tries to save money in an economic downturn, the reduction in spending only accelerates the spiral. With a burst of public spending, the White House hopes to break the cycle and restore confidence, the key psychological factor that Keynes called the “animal spirits.”

Will it succeed?
Nobody knows. Economics can be mystifying. Back in the Great Depression, Keynes said, “We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.” Eighty years later, the experts’ collective understanding of economies is greater than it was in Keynes’ hour of despair. But while the White House can point to broad support for the stimulus among economists, not everyone thinks it will work. Critics contend that government spending is inherently wasteful and that the resulting deficits will suppress private investment by driving up interest rates. They prefer balanced budgets, and their lower risk of inflation, saying that such sound policies will lead to a recovery—perhaps not immediately, but in the long run. To such critics, Keynes once famously said, “In the long run, we are all dead.”

Keynes’ bohemian side
Keynes was at home among the rarefied Bloomsbury set, the collection of artists and intellectuals that cohered in pre–WWI London. He appreciated Bloomsbury’s disdain for convention—he had a lengthy and fairly open homosexual affair with painter Duncan Grant before the war. But despite his bohemian tendencies, he found no attraction in radical politics. Squarely labeling himself a “bourgeois economist,” he used his financial acumen to amass a fortune, including one of the world’s great collections of 20th-century art. Keynes married a popular Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, in 1925; the couple had no children. As a don at Cambridge, he influenced a generation of young intellectuals, establishing himself as one of the most formidable minds of the century. “Every time I argued with Keynes,” said philosopher Bertrand Russell, “I felt that I took my life in my hands and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.”

Keynes’ comeback

John Maynard Keynes and Economic Fascism

By Matthew D. Jarvie
October 31, 2008
SovereignSentience.blogspot.com

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

The Fabian Society, Communitarianism and the New World Order

This video is a very brief, six-minute introduction to the British Fabian Society, which was established on orders from the Crown in 1884, with the purpose of creating a movement to usher in by stealth a one world government.

The ideology promoted by Fabians and Fabian thinkers is called communitarianism, which is also sometimes referred to (by people like Tony Blair) as the ‘Third Way’. The Third Way refers to the synthesis of capitalism and socialism in the dialectic scheme.

This dialectical synthesis, or outcome, is to be a collectivist form of government where all individualism is forcibly relinquished in the name of “unity” and complete and unwavering allegiance to the state under a scientific, socialistic dictatorship run by “experts.”

This is to be a system run on complete and total efficiency, where the only purpose of the individual is to serve the state. The so-called “useless eaters,” as people like Kissinger refer to, are seen as only a burden to this efficiency, and therefore will be incarcerated or killed if this system is allowed to be fully implemented. This is precisely why the “Elite” want an 80-90% reduction of the world’s population, with just enough peasants to serve their utopia, described in writings by people such as Huxley and Fabian H.G. Wells, and promoted still today in well-funded works of propaganda such as Zeitgeist, which are designed to promote the New World Order religion.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Fabian Society, Communitarianism and the New World Order

Posted: February 20, 2009
4:24 pm Eastern

By Drew Zahn
2009 WorldNetDaily

DES MOINES, Iowa – Following publicized reports that the Army National Guard was planning a military training exercise on the streets of a rural Iowa town, the commanding officers have called off the mock “invasion.”

The Guard had planned a four-day urban military operation in tiny Arcadia, Iowa, population 443, sending troops to take over the town and search door-to-door for a suspected weapons dealer.

The exercise was designed as a mock scenario to give soldiers the skills needed for deployment in an urban environment, and military officials stressed that only households that consented to be part of the drill would be searched.

“It will be important for us to gain the trust and confidence of the residents of Arcadia,” Sgt. Mike Kots, readiness NCO for Alpha Company, told Carroll’s Daily Times Herald. “We will need to identify individuals that are willing to assist us in training by allowing us to search their homes and vehicles and to participate in role-playing.

“We really want to get as much information out there as possible,” Kots continued, “because this operation could be pretty intrusive to the people of Arcadia.”

Military spokesman Lt. Col. Greg Hapgood, however, told WND that the operation has now been “scaled back” and no longer involves an “invasion” of Arcadia.

And while Hapgood confirmed the Guard had been inundated with objections from citizens concerned about soldiers patrolling the streets of an American town, he said most came from people out of state and unfamiliar with the operation. Iowans, he explained, typically cooperate with the Guard. The change in plans was based on troop evaluation, he said, not public outcry.

“Higher headquarters leadership,” Hapgood told WND, “given the unit’s status of training proficiency, made a decision to scale back the exercise.”

Kots described the original operation to the Herald as set to begin on Thursday, April 2, with reconnaissance and exploratory patrols. On April 4 convoys were to be deployed from the armory in Carroll to nearby Arcadia, where soldiers would knock on doors, showing a picture of the invented “arms dealer.”

“Once credible intelligence has been gathered,” said Kots, “portions of the town will be road-blocked and more in-depth searches of homes and vehicles will be conducted in accordance with the residents’ wishes.

“One of the techniques we use in today’s political environment is cordon and knock,” Kots explained. “We ask for the head of the household, get permission to search, then have them open doors and cupboards. The homeowner maintains control. We peer over their shoulder, and the soldier uses the homeowner’s body language and position to protect him.”

The planned drill had also included overhead supervision from a Blackhawk helicopter, crowd-control measures and simulated extraction of “injured” people, culminating in capture of the “arms dealer.”

“This exercise will improve the real-life operational skills of the unit,” said Kots. “And it will hopefully improve the public’s understanding of military operations.”

“There are no active duty bases in Iowa, so there are no urban warfare training areas of any size,” Hopgood said. “In order to get that larger neighborhood feel or city feel, we have to be creative and partner with our communities.”

Hopgood further told WND that in past cooperative exercises with the community, the people of Iowa have welcomed learning how their sons and daughters operate in action.

Plans for the urban operation training, Hopgood explained, are still set to continue, but will be conducted in a smaller, platoon-by-platoon basis in the near vicinity of the Carroll armory.

National Guard scraps plans to invade rural town

Rep. Brad Sherman Martial Law

Paulson Was Behind Bailout Martial Law Threat !!!

By Spencer S. Hsu and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 1, 2008; A01

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

The long-planned shift in the Defense Department’s role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military’s role in domestic law enforcement.

But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response — a nearly sevenfold increase in five years — “would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable,” Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the realization that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe prompted “a fundamental change in military culture,” he said.

The Pentagon’s plan calls for three rapid-reaction forces to be ready for emergency response by September 2011. The first 4,700-person unit, built around an active-duty combat brigade based at Fort Stewart, Ga., was available as of Oct. 1, said Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command.

If funding continues, two additional teams will join nearly 80 smaller National Guard and reserve units made up of about 6,000 troops in supporting local and state officials nationwide. All would be trained to respond to a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attack, or CBRNE event, as the military calls it.

Military preparations for a domestic weapon-of-mass-destruction attack have been underway since at least 1996, when the Marine Corps activated a 350-member chemical and biological incident response force and later based it in Indian Head, Md., a Washington suburb. Such efforts accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, and at the time Iraq was invaded in 2003, a Pentagon joint task force drew on 3,000 civil support personnel across the United States.

In 2005, a new Pentagon homeland defense strategy emphasized “preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents.” National security threats were not limited to adversaries who seek to grind down U.S. combat forces abroad, McHale said, but also include those who “want to inflict such brutality on our society that we give up the fight,” such as by detonating a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city.

In late 2007, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive approving more than $556 million over five years to set up the three response teams, known as CBRNE Consequence Management Response Forces. Planners assume an incident could lead to thousands of casualties, more than 1 million evacuees and contamination of as many as 3,000 square miles, about the scope of damage Hurricane Katrina caused in 2005.

Last month, McHale said, authorities agreed to begin a $1.8 million pilot project funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through which civilian authorities in five states could tap military planners to develop disaster response plans. Hawaii, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Washington and West Virginia will each focus on a particular threat — pandemic flu, a terrorist attack, hurricane, earthquake and catastrophic chemical release, respectively — speeding up federal and state emergency planning begun in 2003.

Last Monday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates ordered defense officials to review whether the military, Guard and reserves can respond adequately to domestic disasters.

Gates gave commanders 25 days to propose changes and cost estimates. He cited the work of a congressionally chartered commission, which concluded in January that the Guard and reserve forces are not ready and that they lack equipment and training.

Bert B. Tussing, director of homeland defense and security issues at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership, said the new Pentagon approach “breaks the mold” by assigning an active-duty combat brigade to the Northern Command for the first time. Until now, the military required the command to rely on troops requested from other sources.

“This is a genuine recognition that this [job] isn’t something that you want to have a pickup team responsible for,” said Tussing, who has assessed the military’s homeland security strategies.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Cato Institute are troubled by what they consider an expansion of executive authority.

Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security.

“There’s a notion that whenever there’s an important problem, that the thing to do is to call in the boys in green,” Healy said, “and that’s at odds with our long-standing tradition of being wary of the use of standing armies to keep the peace.”

McHale stressed that the response units will be subject to the act, that only 8 percent of their personnel will be responsible for security and that their duties will be to protect the force, not other law enforcement. For decades, the military has assigned larger units to respond to civil disturbances, such as during the Los Angeles riot in 1992.

U.S. forces are already under heavy strain, however. The first reaction force is built around the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, which returned in April after 15 months in Iraq. The team includes operations, aviation and medical task forces that are to be ready to deploy at home or overseas within 48 hours, with units specializing in chemical decontamination, bomb disposal, emergency care and logistics.

The one-year domestic mission, however, does not replace the brigade’s next scheduled combat deployment in 2010. The brigade may get additional time in the United States to rest and regroup, compared with other combat units, but it may also face more training and operational requirements depending on its homeland security assignments.

Renuart said the Pentagon is accounting for the strain of fighting two wars, and the need for troops to spend time with their families. “We want to make sure the parameters are right for Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. The 1st Brigade’s soldiers “will have some very aggressive training, but will also be home for much of that.”

Although some Pentagon leaders initially expected to build the next two response units around combat teams, they are likely to be drawn mainly from reserves and the National Guard, such as the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade from South Carolina, which returned in May after more than a year in Afghanistan.

Now that Pentagon strategy gives new priority to homeland security and calls for heavier reliance on the Guard and reserves, McHale said, Washington has to figure out how to pay for it.

“It’s one thing to decide upon a course of action, and it’s something else to make it happen,” he said. “It’s time to put our money where our mouth is.”

Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security