The Pentagon Targets the "Far Right"

by Will Grigg
Jan. 23, 2013

During a visit to Ft. Leavenworth’s Battle Command Training Program in the mid-1990s, author Robert D. Kaplan attended several round-table discussions involving the officers who now occupy the highest echelons in the Pentagon.

As Kaplan recorded in his book An Empire Wilderness, one consistent theme of those discussions was the likely repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the U.S. military from acting as a domestic law enforcement agency.

Although the Posse Comitatus Act remains on the books, a paper published by West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center suggests that the Pentagon considers it to be a dead letter. The paper, which is entitled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right,” claims that people who “espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical,” are potential terrorists akin to al-Qaeda.

Similar assumptions were woven into a recent homeland security drill in Portsmouth, Ohio, in which elements of the Ohio National Guard’s 52nd Civil Support Unit play-acted an incident in which two school employees angered by the government’s crackdown on gun rights plotted a terrorist attack.

A government determined to treat its population as the enemy will usually create some excuse to do so.