Top advisers, including vice-president Dick Cheney, strongly urged in 2002 that the military be used to apprehend men suspected of plotting with al-Qaeda.
Former US president George W Bush's government considered using American troops to arrest a group of terror suspects in what would have been an unprecedented deployment of the military within the country.
Top advisers of Bush, including vice-president Dick Cheney, in 2002 strongly urged that the military be used to apprehend men who were suspected of plotting with al-Qaeda.
The terror suspects, who were hiding in Buffalo, a suburb of New York City, later came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, The New York Times reported citing former administration officials.
The decision to despatch troops into the streets has few precedents in US history, as both the Constitution and the laws restrict the use of the military within the country.
The paper said the proposal reached an advanced stage before president Bush shot it down.
Six young Yemeni-American men from Lackawanna were arrested in September 2002 after investigators learned that they had received military-type training at Osama bin Laden's al-Farooq training camp in Afghanistan. All pleaded guilty and received sentences ranging from seven to 10 years.
According to the Times, Cheney in a memo gave broad presidential authority to allow the use of the military domestically to tackle al-Qaeda men.
Besides Cheney, others who argued for use of the military were his legal adviser David S Addington and some senior defence department officials, the paper reported.
Opposing the idea were Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser; John B Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council; FBI director Robert Mueller; and Michael Chertoff, then head of the justice department's criminal division.
Bush ultimately rejected the proposal and, instead, ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to make the arrests in Lackawanna.
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