U.S. Army Puts Soldiers on the Street in Alabama in Response to Shootings

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 11, 2009

The U.S. Army dispatched soldiers to patrol the streets of Samson, Alabama, a small southern town where a rampaging gunman killed 10 people on Tuesday. This obvious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the federal uniformed services from exercising state and local law enforcement was completely ignored by the corporate media with the exception of Reuters and the London Telegraph (see photo and video).

	From Reuters: “U.S. Army soldiers from Ft. Rucker patrol the downtown area of Samson, Alabama after a shooting spree March 10, 2009.”

On September 30, 2008, the Army Times reported the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, a component of Northern Command, would be “on-call” in response to “natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” The Army Times article reported the military would be used for “crowd and traffic control” and be issued “nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.” According to the article, “expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one..” (Emphasis added.)

In early 2006, the 109th Congress passed a bill containing controversial provisions granting the president the ability to use federal troops inside the United States in emergency situations. These changes (in Section 1076) were included in the John Warner Defense Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2007.

[efoods]In 2008, Congress restored many of the earlier limitations on the president’s ability to deploy troops within the United States, but Bush issued a signing statement indicating he was not bound by the changes.

“The story of how Section 1076 became law vivifies how expanding government power is almost always the correct answer in Washington,” James Bovard wrote for the American Conservative on April 23, 2007. “Some people have claimed the provision was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night. In reality, the administration clearly signaled its intent and almost no one in the media or Congress tried to stop it.”

The dispatch of troops to Alabama in response to a local law enforcement situation represents a further erosion of Posse Comitatus and the continued federalization of state and local law enforcement.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

A Telegraph video on the shootings in Alabama propagandizes against the right to own
firearms in the United States and the Second Amendment.

Finally, the corporate media in Britain has exploited the situation in an effort to denigrate the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights. In a transparent propaganda piece (see video above), the Telegraph states that “mass shootings have become a feature of life in the U.S. in recent years. Guns are widely available for purchase in a country that prides itself on the right to own weapons for self defense and hunting.” Britain has some of the most restrictive gun legislation in the world.

After Britain’s government banned guns in 1997, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. “A recent study of all the countries of western Europe has found that in 2001 Britain had the worst record for killings, violence and burglary, and its citizens had one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime,” historian Joyce Lee Malcolm wrote for the fall 2004 issue of Journal on Firearms & Public Policy.

This article was posted: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 10:02 am

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