Bush barred plan to send troops to Lackawanna
Rejected 2002 proposal to arrest terror suspects
Published: July 25, 2009, 12:30 am
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The Bush Administration considered sending U. S. troops into the streets of Lackawanna in 2002 to arrest suspects who had been suspected of training and plotting with al-Qaida, the New York Times reported on its Web site late Friday.
Former administration officials, who spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity, said Vice President Dick Cheney was among advisers to then-President George W. Bush who argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil.
The Times said Bush made the decision to not use military force. Doing so would have raised serious questions of constitutionality, the Times reported.
The discussions did not proceed far enough to put military units on alert.
On the night of Sept. 13, 2002, FBI agents conducted raids on several houses and a store and arrested several men of Yemeni descent. They came to be known as the Lackawanna Six and eventually admitted that in the spring of 2001, they traveled to Afghanistan, received training at a camp run by the al-Qaida terrorist network and heard speeches by al-Qaida’s leader, Osama bin Laden.
Cheney and others had argued that using the military on domestic soil against al-Qaida was legal “because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose,” the Times reported.
“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” an Oct. 23, 2001 Justice Department memorandum said. The memo was declassified earlier this year.
While those in favor of using troops in Lackawanna cited the memo, other Bush aides were dead set against using the military on domestic soil.
“What would it look like to have the American military go into an American town and knock on people’s door?” a former official in the debate told the Times.
Lackawanna Police Chief James L. Michel agreed that keeping troops out was a good idea. “If we had tanks rolling down the streets of our city, we would have had pandemonium down here,” Michel told the Times. He could not be reached by The Buffalo News Friday.
High level Bush aides were among those who opposed the proposed military maneuver, including Condoleeza Rice, then the national security adviser; John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, the Times said.
“Frankly, it was a bit of a turf war,” a former senior administration official told The Times. “For a number of people, crossing the line of having intelligence or military activities inside the United States was not worth the risk.”
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