The White House has directed the Justice and Defense departments to review the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, along with other laws that bar the armed forces from conducting arrests, searches, seizure of evidence, and other police-type actions on U.S. soil, and to come up with proposals on how to change the statutes to give greater powers to the Pentagon to deploy troops inside the country.

The 1878 act bars the use of "any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws" of the United States.

Until recently the Pentagon’s military command structure covered all parts of the globe except for North America. Since the latter part of the administration of William Clinton, who officially established a North American Command, the U.S. rulers have been openly preparing to set up a homeland command within the U.S. armed forces, establishing the structure while testing the waters for a change in the law. Picking up the ball from his predecessor, Bush has appointed a four-star general to head up the homeland command.

Now named the Northern Command, with authority to cover Canada, the United States, Mexico, and parts of the Caribbean, the new outfit will begin operations from Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado October 1.

"We need to be talking about military assets, in anticipation of a crisis event," said homeland security chief Thomas Ridge on July 21. "If you’re talking about using the military, then you should have a discussion about Posse Comitatus."

Sen. Joseph Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, agreed that changes need to be made to allow the military to be deployed inside the United States. "The law has to be amended, but we’re not talking about general police power," he said.

The general appointed to head the new military command, Ralph Eberhart, also favors changing the laws to grant more domestic powers to the armed forces. "We should always be reviewing things like Posse Comitatus and other laws to see if we think it ties our hands," he said. "There are some situations where there’s no other alternatives, and federal forces have to be used."

Eberhart said that the military’s domestic activities could involve the use of remote-controlled surveillance blimps, flying at 70,000 feet, and of unmanned Predator drones to patrol U.S. coast lines.

In the aftermath of the September 11 events the U.S. government deployed National Guard troops on the Canadian border and mobilized 5,000 federal troops at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. According to the New York Times, White House lawyers opined that the president would have violated Posse Comitatus if he had called up National Guardsmen for deployment at airports nationwide, so he requested governors to use their authority for the mobilization. The Coast Guard and National Guard troops under the jurisdiction of state governors are excluded from the law.

The Posse Comitatus law was enacted in 1878 to end the use of federal troops in guarding voting stations and in enforcing other rights in the former Confederate states. It came into being as a result of opposition by reactionary forces, including former slaveholders and growing layers of the U.S. ruling class, to the use of soldiers in defense of Radical Reconstruction governments in the South.

In the decade following the Civil War Congress had expanded the role of the military in the former slaveholding states where federal troops also arrested Ku Klux Klan members who sought to terrorize freed slaves, small farmers, and other working people.

The Posse Comitatus law was amended by Congress in 1981 and 1989 to allow U.S. Marines to patrol and conduct drug raids on U.S. soil. The National Guard is also now permitted to fly over rural property to conduct surveillance under these amendments.
 
 
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