USA being patrolled by Sea Smurfs

According to this article in the Army Times, US troops are being deployed domestically without any known or admitted clear and present danger to law and order. Their mission is to be an "on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks."

"They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack."

And..."the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced “sea-smurf”)."

So, I am not making this up when I say that soon your streets may be patrolled by sea-smurfs.

Okay, now that I've gone over the funny bits, lets get to the creepy bits.

1 - They're really being outfitted pretty specifically for crowd control with “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded.”

We're talking tasers and bean-bag guns, folks.

The only reason I can think of for the army to be deployed in America with non-lethal weapons is if they expect to be using them on Americans.

So that's creepy thing number one. Instead of your local police force or state national guard unit being called in to deal with civil unrest, it could be an army unit under the command of the president.

And this is happening right before the election. They deploy October 1st. I'm less of a conspiracy theorist than I used to be, but this creeps me out.

2 - Another creepy thing is that the Army Times article keeps referring to The Homeland; "homeland defense" and "homeland mission" and "homeland scenarios", instead of much more typical military jargon like "domestic operation" or "stateside deployment" or "domestic incident".

For the record, I hate the word "homeland". I would really, really prefer that the DHS was the Department of Domestic Security or somesuch. "Homeland" is just so Orwellian.

3 - One more creepy thing: All of this is against the law.

One of the last acts of the Republican congress before the 2006 elections was a modification to the Insurrection Act of 1807 (as part of the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill, also known as the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007). Basically this gave the president the ability to deploy the armed forces domestically if he saw fit.

The good news is that this ability was taken away again in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. The Insurrection Act was changed back to its original wording.

The bad news is that when Bush 43 signed the act into law he did so while accompanying it with a signing statement that says:

• "Today, I have signed into law H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. The Act authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, for military construction, and for national security-related energy programs.
• Provisions of the Act, including sections 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the President's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.
• GEORGE W. BUSH
• THE WHITE HOUSE,
• January 28, 2008."

As with many presidential signing statments, it is unclear if the president believes he is actually constrained in any meaningful way by the law he is signing.

Oh well. Welcome Sea Smurfs!