Shortly before the midterm elections, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 made it through Congress. This went so far as to permit the indefinite imprisonment of anybody who happened to give money to a charity on the Terror Watch List, or even someone who spoke out against these kinds of policies.

Several more unbelievable dictums took effect in 2007, even after the Democrats regained control of Congress. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorist Prevention Act of 2007 passed the House, 404 to 6, aimed at setting up a commission to examine and report upon the facts and causes of domestic extremism. The National Counterterrorism Center already has more than 775,000 terror suspects on its list. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act expands the definition of terrorism to include those who engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights. Section 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act provided the executive branch power to impose martial law in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order. And the White House itself quietly put in place National Security Presidential Directive 52 to make sure Continuity- of-Government was intact, providing authority to cancel elections or suspend the Constitution in the event of a national emergency.  [Watch Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura on truTV]

(UPI/Landov)Then what did we see in the course of the 2008 presidential election year? First of all, mass arrests at the Republican Convention in St. Paul, including journalists arbitrarily thrown in the clink while filming the demonstrators. The 3rd Infantry Division 1st Brigade Combat Team was trained to do crowd control in Iraq, but on October 1, between 3,000 and 4,000 of them got deployed in the U.S., ready to manage unruly individuals in case of a national emergency. One scenario envisioned by the Pentagon was civil unrest as a result of financial meltdown. Theyd cooperate with FEMA on plans with code names like Vibrant Response and EXCALIBUR.

In November 2008, the U.S. Army War College came out with a study saying the military should be ready for a violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States that could be provoked by unforeseen economic collapse, purposeful domestic resistance, pervasive public health emergencies (swine flu?) or the loss of functioning political and legal order. The widespread civil violence would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups.

And guess what, friends, its already happening. There was a story recently in the Salinas, California, paper, about how violence and terrorism experts from the Naval Postgraduate School had been recruited to help combat the gang subculture in the agricultural town. U.S. Representative Sam Farr, a Democrat, was quoted: The Naval Postgraduate School is trying to figure out how to stop violence anywhere in the world, why not start in our own backyard. Except for one thing, Congressman: its illegal.