Word: comitatus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...remember the primacy of infantry. But undergraduates who enjoy the game grow familiar not just with action and masquerading but with betrayal and protection from betrayal, and in time join the ranks of men--nowadays people I suppose--of good will, what the law still calls the posse comitatus. As I finish a book on this subject now, I find myself marveling at the trust contemporary undergraduates put in vague authority, at the undergraduate willingness to expect authority to by just around the corner when needed. In the absence of authority, when ordinary order goes askew, someone who plays Assassin...
...remember the primacy of infantry. But undergraduates who enjoy the game grow familiar not just with action and masquerading but with betrayal and protection from betrayal, and in time join the ranks of men--nowadays people I suppose--of good will, what the law still calls the posse comitatus. As I finish a book on this subject now, I find myself marveling at the trust contemporary undergraduates put in vague authority, at the undergraduate willingness to expect authority to be just around the corner when needed. In the absence of authority, when ordinary order goes askew, someone who plays Assassin...
Traditionally, U.S. military forces have been forbidden to take part in domestic law enforcement, the result of a post-Civil War law, the Posse Comitatus Act. But in the 1980s, in response to a growing drug problem on the border, the law was loosened to allow military units to help the U.S. Border Patrol catch drug smugglers. A Department of Defense entity called Joint Task Force Six, based in El Paso, Texas, has since 1989 coordinated 3,300 missions on the border; 746 of them involved listening or observation posts like the one Banuelos and three other Marines established several...
Though the common-law-courts movement is loosely organized, with no strict hierarchy, the first arrests were big ones. Schweitzer became a leader of the Freemen after a tax dispute in the late 1970s. Using ideas common to the Posse Comitatus and other rightist fringe groups, they cobbled a doctrine out of bits and pieces of the Magna Carta, the Bible, the Constitution and other sources to argue that the Federal Government represents an illegal usurpation of the common-law power of localities. The ideas are now spread by groups under a variety of names--Freemen, We the People, People...
...armed services" to control illegal drugs and immigration is even more gimmicky. It's also not new. Senator Al D'Amato, the Republican from New York, led a similar charge in the mid-1980s, which the Reagan Administration rebuffed. Long-standing military tradition, codified in the Posse Comitatus Act after the Civil War, bars soldiers from actions that could spill over into arrests and seizures of U.S. citizens. Says Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan Assistant Defense Secretary: "We train them to vaporize, not Mirandize." Alexander says he knows this but offers no details, bridling at the very thought...