Will recession-induced budget cuts result in the National Guard being deputized as lawmen in Jefferson County, Ala.?
While he may be bluffing for effect, Jefferson County Sheriff Randy Christian didn’t seem to be altogether unserious when he suggested that soldiers might be brought in to supplement policing gaps supposedly left by a $4 million budget cut in August. In fact, Gov. Bob Riley didn’t rule it out, either, probably for the same reason that the sheriff in Geneva County, Ala., didn’t think twice to call upon local U.S. military to help him out in the wake of a murder spree, or why the state of Colorado is now giving the National Guard a cut of federal asset forfeiture booty in exchange for its help in fighting the War on Drugs.
It’s why, when the New York Times revealed recently that former vice president Dick Cheney had wanted to deploy active-duty Army soldiers to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six, a group of wannabe terrorists in Buffalo in 2002, it registered as no more than a titillating blip on the 24-hour news cycle. It’s why no one seems to care that an Army combat team is now deployed on U.S. soil or even blanch at reports that the military might be planning "regional teams" across the U.S. to assist in a "significant outbreak" of swine flu.
It’s becoming disconcertingly clear that post-9/11 America has no trouble swapping out police for soldiers, SWAT teams for combat teams, beat cops for GI Joe. They could be interchangeable, and that’s okay. In fact, most Americans seem convinced that the threat to "homeland security" is now an eternal struggle. Thus, they are easily persuaded to dismiss more than 200 years of history, including posse comitatus and any other bulwark against military mission creep on the home front.
