By GottaLaff



I just heard Rachel Maddow mention this, so I had to share. She believes that this story is payback for Cheney's recent smackdown of Bush for the Scooter Libby non-pardon, and that it will be a big deal. And since we're into big deals here at TPC:



Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials. Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

How sick is it that we consider that kind of BushCo thinking "par for the course"?



Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force .

Probably because he couldn't pronounce Lackawanna.



A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests would be nearly unprecedented in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property .

As if that would stop His Dickiness.



The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity .

I seem to remember posting about this possibility back when. Nobody seemed to notice. But you know what they say: Good things come to those who wait.



In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

That would be the same Justice Department that wrote up those spiffy little torture memos.



“ The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

Of course it did, because that's what Boy Georgie's DoJ deemed. The United Deem of America. Deem and Deemer?



The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales , then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States .

Ding!



The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests. [...]

Former officials in the administration said this debate was not as bitter as others during Mr. Bush’s first term. The discussions did not proceed far enough to put military units on alert.

See how they could all get along when they put their minds to it?



Still, at least one high-level meeting was convened to debate the issue, at which several top Bush aides argued firmly against the proposal to use the military, advanced by Mr. Cheney, his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials.

Reminder: Read The Dark Side by Jane Mayer. Learn all about Addington, His Dickiness, and their band of merry despots.



Among those in opposition were Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser; John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division. [...] Scott L. Silliman, a Duke University law professor specializing in national security law, said an American president had not deployed the active-duty military on domestic soil in a law enforcement capacity, without specific statutory authority, since the Civil War.

That, of course, was when His Dickiness was just a young boy.



Senior military officials were never consulted, former officials said. Richard B. Myers, a retired general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a recent interview that he was unaware of the discussion. [...]

Despite this guidance, some Bush aides bristled at the prospect of troops descending on an American suburb to arrest terrorism suspects. “What would it look like to have the American military go into an American town and knock on people’s door?” said a second former official in the debate.

Um, like Iraq?



Chief James L. Michel of the Lackawanna police agreed. “ If we had tanks rolling down the streets of our city,” Chief Michel said, “we would have had pandemonium down here .”

Um, like Iraq?

