USE OF MILITARY FOR CIVILIAN POLICING IS DANGEROUS

Soldiers are trained to kill; policemen, to use force as a last resort.
Accordingly, there's a deep-rooted American hostility to the idea of using
the military for domestic law enforcement.

But all that may be about to change.

After repeatedly denying that they plan to undermine or alter the 1878
Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it a criminal offense to use U.S. military
forces "to execute the laws," Bush administration officials are starting to
change their tune. The national strategy for homeland security, which the
administration released on July 16, suggests that the time may have come to
weaken the protections provided by the Act. As it's phrased in the national
strategy proposal, "the threat of catastrophic terrorism requires a
thorough review of the laws permitting the military to act within the
United States."

But does it? Current law hardly hamstrings the military with regard to
helping fight terrorism on the home front.

The Posse Comitatus Act is riddled with exceptions. Federal law already
provides that in the event of an emergency situation involving a possible
terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction, the Department of
Defense can assist civilian authorities with material, expertise, and
personnel. Unsatisfied with the broad authority federal statutes already
provide it, the Bush administration seems to be looking at something closer
to the normalization of military law enforcement.

That is a dangerous idea and one that's unlikely to make us any safer from
terrorist attacks.

The Army is a blunt instrument: effective for destroying enemy troops en
masse, but ill-suited to the fight on the home front, which requires
subtler investigative and preventative skills. Many of the uses of troops
for domestic security after Sept. 11 appear ill-adapted to the threats we
actually face. For instance, authorities in Florida stationed a tank
outside of Miami International Airport last Thanksgiving, as if the next
terror attack would come in the form of an Al Qaeda mechanized column,
rather than a shoe-bomb or a smuggled box cutter.

And the bluntness of the military instrument makes its use all the more
dangerous within our borders.

More widespread use of military personnel to do police work would do little
to protect us from Al Qaeda; but it would increase the chances of
collateral damage: innocent American citizens harmed by those who are
supposed to protect them. From suppression of strikers in the 19th Century,
to the deaths at Kent State, to the 1997 Marine Corps killing of an
American high school student at the Mexican border, deviation from our
tradition of civilian law enforcement has had grave consequences throughout
American history.

The problem is not, despite what the administration seems to think, that
the legal barriers to the militarization of law enforcement are too high,
but that they're far too low. In 1981 Congress weakened the Posse Comitatus
Act substantially to allow military involvement in the war on drugs.

Misuse of the "drug exceptions" to the act helped lead to the worst
disaster in U.S. law enforcement history--the 1993 tragedy in Waco, Texas.
Federal law-enforcement authorities used false allegations of
methamphetamine trafficking by the Branch Davidians to obtain military
hardware and personnel.

Indeed, it was U.S. Army Delta Force commanders who advised federal agents
to launch a tank assault against the Branch Davidians' dwellings.

The result was more than 80 dead, including 27 children.

If anything needs review and revision, it's the ill-considered exceptions
to the Posse Comitatus Act.

Instead, in its new National Strategy for Homeland Security, the
administration threatens to weaken the act. It's a threat that Congress
ought to resist.

Normalization of military law enforcement would have grave consequences for
our political culture.

We do not want to become a society where armed soldiers patrolling the
streets are part of everyday life. The America we're fighting to preserve
is a free, democratic republic--not a banana republic.