-Caveat Lector-
January 28, 1999
Pentagon Seeks Command for Emergencies in U.S.
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and JUDITH MILLER
The Pentagon has decided to ask President Clinton for the power to
appoint a military leader for the continental United States because of
what it sees as a growing threat of major terrorist strikes on American
soil, Defense Department officials say.
The plan calls for the military leader to be ready, if necessary, to do
such things as order thousands of doctors, stretchers and emergency
personnel quickly sent to stricken areas, much as American commanders
abroad are now prepared to do.
The Pentagon, which currently has no organization for such crisis work,
has quietly discussed the plan for about a year and recently decided to
press ahead and ask for Presidential approval.
Top White House officials have reacted favorably, characterizing the
proposed step as a relatively minor adjustment of the lines of military
authority and organization.
But civil libertarians and some Administration officials fear that such
military power could slowly expand to threaten the privacy, liberty and
lives of private citizens. Defenders of the plan, including Pentagon
officials, insist that it would do no such thing and that the nation
needed homeland defense to deal with terrorists armed with deadly germs,
chemicals and skills for attacking the nation's key computer networks.
Military officials added that they had no intention of usurping
civilian control.
"Our only appropriate role is in support of civil agencies that have
the primary responsibility for law and order and emergency response,"
John J. Hamre, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said in an interview.
Still, a senior Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, warned that a major terrorist attack had the potential to be
"the most threatening event to civil liberties since Pearl Harbor."
His reference was to how, after Japan's attack on the United States in
World War II, the American military locked up some 120,000 Americans of
Japanese ancestry, an act some historians have characterized as
reckless. The official said the current plan would help prevent such an
overreaction.
The official said Defense Secretary William S. Cohen had recently
signed off on a plan to create a Joint Task Force for Civil Support,
whose commander would develop ways for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air
Force to aid Federal agencies in time of domestic crisis.
The step requires approval by the President. In an interview on Jan. 21
with The New York Times, Clinton said he was carefully weighing the
issue and was deeply aware of the potential abuses of expanded military
power. And the next day, in unveiling his $10 billion program to build
up antiterror defenses, he emphasized the importance of protecting
personal freedom.
"It is essential," Clinton told Federal officials and military officers
gathered at the National Academy of Sciences, "that we don't undermine
liberty in the name of liberty."
Many Americans have a deep mistrust of the military. That uneasiness is
evident in "The Siege," a recent movie in which terrorist attacks
prompt martial law in New York City and the Army general in charge
turns out to be a loose cannon.
Allusions to the Pentagon's new organizational plan emerged quietly
last year when Dr. Hamre of the Defense Department gave a speech
saying the appointment of a domestic military leader was all but
inevitable and would be essential in helping stave off chaos.
"If there's a bona fide chemical attack in the subway system in New
York, it's going to quickly go beyond what the local police can
handle," Dr. Hamre told military officials. "If there is a biological
attack, you can easily see regional governors calling out the National
Guard to quarantine the highways. It could get crazy very fast."
Critics of the plan say the risks of military help outweigh the
benefits.
"The danger is in the inevitable expansion of that authority so the
military gets involved in things like arresting people and
investigating crimes," said Gregory T. Nojeim, legislative counsel on
national security for the American Civil Liberties Union, based in
Washington.
Soldiers are trained to kill, not to respect the nuances of law
enforcement, Nojeim added.
"It's hard to believe that a soldier with a suspect in the sights of
his M-1 tank is well positioned to protect that person's civil
liberties," he said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Nojeim said, already has the
money, authority and manpower to handle such crises.
But Fred C. Ikl, an Under Secretary of Defense in the Reagan
Administration, applauded finding ways for the military to deal better
with terrorism on American soil.
"Only the armed services have the managerial and logistical
capabilities to mount the all-out defensive effort," Dr. Ikl said in a
report on homeland defense being prepared for the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, a private policy group in Washington.
By law, the military cannot make arrests or act in civil law
enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed after the Civil War to
rein in the military, bars Federal troops from doing police work within
United States borders.
The division of powers that bars the military from domestic law
enforcement is similar to that between the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. The former does
surveillance work at home and the latter abroad.
Though venerable, the dominance of civil power under posse comitatus
(Latin for "power of the country") has seen a growing number of
exceptions. One, widely viewed as having mixed results, concerns drug
interdiction. Nojeim of the A.C.L.U. said that in 1997 that exception
resulted in death when troops in Texas accidentally shot a teen-age to
death.
Former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, who specializes in national
security issues, said another exception became law in the Reagan
Administration when Congress permitted posse comitatus to be waived in
the event of nuclear terrorism.
Congress later widened the exception, Nunn added. After the Soviet
Union fell apart and Western experts grew worried about the possible
spread of powerful weapons into unfriendly hands, he helped sponsor a
little-noticed provision that gives the Pentagon power to step in
domestically in the event of chemical and germ attacks.
"They already have the authority," Nunn said of the armed services in
an interview.
The new question, he said, is whether the services will become properly
organized and trained and their actions well coordinated in advance of
any mayhem.
A senior Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition on anonymity,
cast examples of the domestic work in strictly humanitarian terms. Only
the military services, the official said, have the ability to transport
3,000 hospital cots, tons of clean water or "10,000 people who have been
inoculated against anthrax" to the site of a biological attack where
civilians are sick, dead or dying.
"The issue is how we organize ourselves to provide meaningful support
and not to threaten civil liberties," the official said.
In the aid work, he added, the Pentagon would report to the Department
of Justice, which has the lead not only in law enforcement but in
coordinating the domestic response to terrorism.
The official said the joint task force recently endorsed by Cohen
would, if approved by the President, have a high-level commander.
He and other Pentagon officials said the new post would probably go to
the United States Atlantic Command, which is based in Norfolk, Va.
Formal presentation of the plan to the White House might not occur for
months, and a Presidential decision might not be made public until late
summer, Pentagon officials said.
In his recent interview with The Times, Clinton said he was keeping an
open mind on the subject and called the issue of the military's role
"the last big kind of organizational piece" in strengthening the
nation's defenses against new kinds of terrorism.
"What I want us to do," he said, "is everything within reason we can to
minimize our exposure and risks here, and that's how I'm going to
evaluate this Pentagon recommendation."
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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