Hat tip to Steve Hynd at Newshoggers.
Yes, I know....that kind of headline makes one think of Teabaggers or Patriot Militia mindsets. Well, maybe I just have had a tad too much Health Care Reform(yea, right) this week and needed a break.
The post refers to an article that will appear in this Sundays Washington Post and is titled what I titled this dairy.
He leads with:
We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian government. Our Constitution is at risk.
He goes on to say:
While serving the State Department in several senior capacities over the past four years, I witnessed firsthand the quiet, de facto military takeover of much of the U.S. government. The first assault on civilian government occurred in faraway places -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- and was, in theory, justified by the exigencies of war.
and follows later with:
As military officers sought to take over the role played by civilian development experts abroad, Pentagon bureaucrats quietly populated the National Security Council and the State Department with their own personnel (some civilians, some consultants, some retired officers, some officers on "detail" from the Pentagon) to ensure that the Defense Department could keep an eye on its rival agencies. Vice President Cheney, himself a former secretary of defense, and his good friend Rumsfeld ensured the success of this seeding effort by some fairly forceful means.
The scary stuff usually attributed to teabagger/militia types:
The encroachment within America's borders continued with the military's increased involvement in domestic surveillance and its attempts to usurp the role of the federal courts in reviewing detainee cases. The Pentagon also resisted ceding any authority over its extensive intelligence operations to the first director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte -- a State Department official who eventually gave up his post to Mike McConnell, a former Navy admiral...Now the Pentagon has drawn up plans to deploy 20,000 U.S. soldiers inside our borders by 2011, ostensibly to help state and local officials respond to terrorist attacks or other catastrophes. But that mission could easily spill over from emergency counterterrorism work into border-patrol efforts, intelligence gathering and law enforcement operations -- which would run smack into the Posse Comitatus Act, the long-standing law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement. So the generals are not only dominating our government activities abroad, at our borders and in Washington, but they also seem to intend to spread out across the heartland of America.
Now, do I believe this stuff? Well, I can believe there are those that would like this to be the way it all goes down. Do I think this is what is going to happen? No, but I have enough doubts about the abuse of authority that I'd pay attention to this.
He ends with recommendations as how President Obama can put the brakes on this power grab:
If President-elect Obama wants to reverse this trend, he must take four steps -- and very quickly:
- Direct -- or, better yet, order -- Gates, Jones, Blair and the other military leaders in his Cabinet to rid the Pentagon's lower ranks of Rumsfeld holdovers whose only mission is to increase the power of the Pentagon.
- Turn Gates's speeches on the need to promote soft power into reality with a massive transfer of funds from the Pentagon to the State Department, the Justice Department and USAID.
- Put senior, respected civilians -- not retired or active military personnel -- into key subsidiary positions in the intelligence community and the National Security Council.
- Above all, he should let his appointees with military backgrounds know swiftly and firmly that, under the Constitution, he is their commander, and that he will not tolerate the well-rehearsed lip service that the military gave to civilian agencies and even President Bush over the past four years.
In short, he should retake the government before it devours him and us -- and return civilian-led government to the people of the United States.
Take it with a grain of salt but it's better to be informed than to be ignorant. Maybe in cases of something like this, we liberals have a whole lot more in common with Libertarians than we are usually inclined to admit.
Enjoy your holidays now. Don't get too wrapped up in what we can't do anything about but don't let that stop any of us from doing right on those things we can effect.