Patriot Watch discusses the erosion of the Posse Comitatus Act and explains why it's a bad idea.

Back in April Senator John Warner (R-VA), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee indicated he would like to revisit Posse Comitatus....The White House has also weighed in, "The threat of catastrophic terrorism requires a thorough review of the laws permitting the military to act within the United States in order to determine whether domestic preparedness and response efforts would benefit from greater involvement of military personnel and, if so, how."

Military analyst William Arkin criticized the erosion of the Act in an op-ed this week in the LA Times:

It's not that we're heading toward martial law. We're not. But outside the view of most of the public, the government is daily expanding military operations into areas of local government and law enforcement that historically have been off-limits. And it doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that those charged with assembling "actionable intelligence" will slowly start combining databases of known terrorists with seemingly innocuous lists of contributors to charities or causes, that membership lists for activist organizations will be folded in, that names and personal data of anti-globalization protesters will be run through the "data mine." After all, the mission of Northern Command and other Pentagon agencies is to identify groups and individuals who could potentially pose threats to Defense Department and civilian installations.

Ret. General Tommy Franks weighed in this week as well:

Meanwhile, another military expert, ret. Gen. Tommy Franks, who ran the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, told Cigar Aficionado magazine of his concern that another major terrorist attack on the order of 9/11 could cause citizens to "question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid another mass casualty-producing event."

More excerpts from Franks' interview can be found here.

Patriot Watch will keep us all posted. Our views and explanation of the Act with some good reference links are set out here.