Lackawanna residents happy 'crazy' Cheney plan was axed

Officials and residents in Lackawanna, New York -- the Buffalo suburb that was the home of the Lackawanna Six convicted terrorists -- are happy that Vice-President Dick Cheney's push to use the US military to arrest the men was shot down.

In an article in the Buffalo News, Lackawanna Mayor Norman L. Polanski Jr. said he “wouldn’t expect anything less of the Bush administration ... We didn’t need the military coming in.”

RAW STORY reported Friday that Vice-President Dick Cheney wanted to use the military to arrest the five members of the Lackawanna Six who were on US soil in 2002, when the terrorist cell was disrupted.

“If you bring in the military, you create a panic,” Lackawanna Police Captain Ronald Miller told the News. “If you look at our history, the military, the National Guard, are brought in during times of extreme emergency, like [Hurricane] Katrina and securing New York City after 9/11.”

Cheney's idea was "kind of crazy," resident Bobby Green told the News.

'MILITARY JUSTICE VS. THE RULE OF LAW'

Peter J. Ahearn, a retired FBI agent who was in charge of the bureau's Buffalo office at the time of the Lackawanna Six arrests, told the News that he and then-US Attorney Michael Battle both "strenuously disagreed" with the notion that the Lackawanna Six should be designated as "enemy combatants."

“There was a lot of armchair quarterbacking going on, people outside the FBI who just didn’t understand the process and the law, and that included the Department of Defense, the CIA and others,” the News quoted Ahearn as saying.

He said the issue boiled down to "military justice versus the rule of law.”

Ahearn said the use of military forces to arrest the suspects -- all US citizens -- would have violated the law, specifically the long-standing Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the use of the US military on domestic soil.

“There was the Department of Justice and the FBI that were basically saying this was an issue of rule of law. Why would we be doing this when we are inside the borders of the United States and this is domestic? Treating them as combatants, to me, was unnecessary. They were American citizens.”

But Ahearn gave credit to President George W. Bush, who he said was "in the middle" of the tug-of-war over Cheney's proposal, and ultimately decided against it.

"The president absolutely made the right decision," Ahearn said.

-- Daniel Tencer