Dear friends,
It was 58 years ago today that Japanese planes flew over the
very spot I am writing from, here on the north shore of
Kauai. They used the Kilauea light house as a landmark on
their path to Honolulu. A few days earlier lookouts on the
north shore had been dismissed from their posts - apparently
to guarantee that Pearl Harbor would get no warning. Prime
Minister Churchill had alerted British military units many
days earlier that the Japanese were moving toward Hawaii,
but Roosevelt did not pass that information on to his own
commanders. Instead, a week before the attack on Pearl
Harbor, a meeting was held in the White House to discuss how
the U.S. could be brought into the war and how that could be
justified to the American people. A Day of Infamy indeed.
That may be the most dramatic incident - but it was neither
the first nor the last time that the U.S. government has
lied to its people in a big way. In fact, I don't think
there has been a single war involving America without a
staged or sensationalized propaganda incident being
employed. Vietnam had the fabricated Tonkin Incident. The
Mexican War - according to the U.S. commander involved - was
provoked by American troops on the Mexican border. The
Lusitania - whose sinking clinched America's support for
Britain in WW I - was intentionally sent into waters where
the Germans had announced any shipping would be considered
hostile. Saddam was given an official go-ahead to enter
Kuwait by the U.S. Secretary of State - Desert Storm was a
planned trap. The alleged massive genocide in Kosovo (we
found out later) simply didn't happen - but the U.S. got
its chance to bomb Yugoslavia back to the stone age.
For my money, the biggest of the U.S. government lies were
about Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler was funded and
encouraged by U.S., British, and French industrialists.
They didn't give a damn about human rights or persecution of
the Jews, but they were pleased that Hitler was
anti-socialist and that he hated the Russians and other
Slavs. His "Mein Kampf" made it clear that his primary
agenda would be the invasion of the USSR, which of course
turned out to be the case.
American corporations - such as Ford, Grumman, and General
Motors - operated throughout the war in Germany,
manufacturing armaments for profit for the Nazis. After the
war top American officials such as Allen Dulles made it
their mission to see that this information was covered up
and that no American business leaders were prosecuted for
collaboration with the enemy. Meanwhile, thousands of S.S.
butchers and other Nazi officials were smuggled by U.S.
Intelligence and the Catholic Church out of Germany. The
Nurenburg trials were a public-relations sham.
While on semi-holiday here on Kauai I've been reading a book
by Louis Lochner, "What About Germany?", published in 1942.
He was the bureau chief for the Associated Press in Berlin
from before Hitler came to power and (as near as I can tell)
up until the end of 1941. What I find most interesting
about this book is the fact that Hitler went to great
lengths to build the Nazi stranglehold over Germany. We
tend to assume - from our own historical and Hollywood
propaganda - that Germans loved Hitler and his rise to power
was easy. Not true.
The intrigue by which he became Chancellor is one story.
Another story is what he did after being elected. In a
matter of days, he replaced thousands of officials - from
the national level down to the town level - with loyal
Nazi-party functionaries. People showed up to work and
found themselves locked out of their offices. With similar
swiftness, Hitler invaded labor-union offices and
confiscated funds and records. Goebbel's propaganda films
lead us to believe most Germans were happy with this state
of affairs - it ain't necessarily so.
Germany was actually a very civilized and progressive
nation. Before Hitler it had one of the most free presses
in the world. A lot of planning and a lot of force was
required to turn Germany into a fascist state. Dissent was
not silenced until Hitler came to power, the Gestapo was
established, and concentration camps became an implicit
threat to all who might speak their minds.
I could not watch the disgusting footage from Seattle
without thinking of the SS Nazis with their similar black
uniforms. The only difference I could see is that the SS
didn't have flack jackets, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and
plastic face shields. In terms of hatred, brutality, and
general stupidity, it could have been Goering or Himmler who
were the Mayor and police chief of Seattle. Clinton, with
his pseudo-liberal sensitive-sounding voice only makes me
puke every time I see him. At least Hitler was more-or-less
honest.
Here are some excerpts from the article below:
...At the Cable Splicer II conference, Chief Deputy Attorney
General Charles O'Brien argued that if the Constitution
prevents the police from gathering political intelligence
then, the Constitution goes too far. Deputy Attorney General
Buck Compton declared that "free speech, civil rights,
rights to assembly" had all become "clichés."...
...Anyone who attacks the state, even verbally, becomes an
enemy of the state by definition. In dealing with enemies of
the state, anything goes. This strategy requires more than
funding, organization, and the turning of a blind eye by the
courts. It requires the training of men to carry it out...
ignore at your peril,
rkm
============================================================================
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 12:01:20 +1300
From: Robert Gregory <•••@••.•••>
Organization: Massey University
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: sfbg.com | The Nessie Files | A man-made disaster
A man-made disaster
Is the real "emergency" that FEMA is preparing for martial law?
By <mailto:•••@••.•••>nessie
MANY PEOPLE, myself not included, fear the imposition of
martial law on New Year's Day, perhaps even sooner.
Personally, <http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/worry.html>I'm not
worried. But if, hypothetically speaking of course, martial
law were to be declared, there is a branch of government
specifically designed to administer it. Don't be surprised
to find out how little you know about it. There are sound
reasons you've been kept in the dark. They date back
decades.
In October 1984, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported
that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA for
short, had prepared ominous "standby legislation" that
would, in the event of a national crisis, "suspend the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, effectively eliminate
private property, abolish free enterprise, and generally
clamp Americans in a totalitarian vise." Such a document
could easily be called a blueprint for a coup d'état. FEMA
called it "national security planning."
Before Anderson's column, most Americans had never even
heard of this obscure government agency. They had apparently
not been paying attention. FEMA had been around since Jimmy
Carter established the agency as a catchall for natural
disaster relief and civil defense planning. President
Carter's Executive Order 12148, of July 20, 1979,
retroactively made effective July 15, brought FEMA to life.
It revoked 13 previously issued Executive Orders and amended
19 others. But as we shall see, FEMA's roots go deeper than
that – very much deeper.
Many Americans too young to remember 1984 know FEMA only
from the rant of a seemingly deranged character in the movie
X-Files: Fight the Future. Dr. Kurtzweil spells it out:
"FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional
government upon declaration of a national emergency. It
allows creation of a nonelected national government. Think
about that, Agent Mulder!"
Media intentionally blurs fact and fiction. But far from
being a fantastic construct of Hollywood, FEMA is all too
real. Some people refer to it as America's "secret
government." It really does have more power than Congress or
the President of the United States. It really can suspend
laws. It can move entire populations. It can arrest and
detain citizens without a warrant and hold them without
trial. It can seize property, food supplies, transportation
systems. It can, at will, suspend the Constitution. That is
indeed worth thinking about, particularly these days.
FEMA, the most powerful entity in the United States, was not
even created under constitutional law by Congress. It was a
product of a Presidential Executive Order. It is not an
elected body. We the people have no say whatsoever in who
runs it or what it does. It has a quasi-secret budget in the
billions of dollars and does not involve itself in public
disclosures. We don't even know what all of its plans are.
But we can make certain educated extrapolations about them
if we first look at a few of the players and some of their
previous planning behavior.
FEMA as we know it today really took shape during the Reagan
administration. Reagan and presidential counsel (later U.S.
attorney general)
<http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/meese.html> Edwin Meese III
tapped their old friend Louis O. Guiffrida to head the
agency. Guiffrida was a former California National Guard
officer who was obsessed with security. He liked to be
prepared for <http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/camps.html>all
contingencies and had himself deputized so he could pack a
side arm at the office. During the late sixties and early
seventies, when Reagan was governor of California, Guiffrida
had served as his terrorism advisor. It was Guiffrida who
founded the
<http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/ctsii.html> California
Specialized Training Institute, in San Luis Obispo, a school
for police and military commandos. Out of CSTI came the
modern Special Weapons and Tactics team, admittedly an
adaptation of long-range search-and-destroy patrol
techniques applied to urban America. Alumni of this and
similar programs include the law officers who slaughtered
Patty Hearst's comrades in the Symbionese Liberation Army by
burning them alive on live TV. This happened just six months
after the November 1973 graduation of the first 40 students
of the San Luis Obispo school's SWAT program.
During this period Meese was Governor Reagan's chief
assistant. He and Guiffrida organized and conducted
"domestic counterinsurgency" throughout California.
Suspected radicals were spied upon, as were their friends
and acquaintances. Maximum force was marshaled to crush both
riots and legitimate demonstrations. During one week in
Berkeley, while a near-continuous pall of gas hung over the
city, more than 200 people were shot. One, an innocent
bystander, died of his wounds. Another, a painter, also a
bystander, lost both his eyes.
In 1971 Sen. Sam Ervin's Subcommittee on Constitutional
Rights revealed that military intelligence had set up an
intricate surveillance system that covered hundreds of
<http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/3.html> thousands of American
citizens. Committee staff members had been shown a master
plan, called Operation Garden Plot, that gave an overview of
the Army police strategy. The staffers said they found the
plan to be alarming. Four years later, Britt Snider, the
subcommittee's point man on military intelligence, told a
reporter, "We could never find any kind of unifying purpose
behind it all. It looked like an aimless kind of thing."
Nevertheless the subcommittee issued a report that condemned
the Pentagon's monitoring of the "peaceful activities of
non-violent citizens" whose only offense had been "to stand
on their hind legs and exercise the rights they thought the
Constitution guaranteed."
An order to cease and desist would have been more
appropriate, but perhaps the subcommittee's inadequate
response is forgivable on grounds of ignorance. While they
had a copy of the Garden Plot master plan, they hadn't been
shown any of the more detailed subplans. In 1975 two
journalists, Ron Ridenhour and Arthur Lublow, uncovered one
of those subplans. It was named Operation Cable Splicer. To
understand the FEMA of today, the FEMA that Louis Guiffrida
and his friends created, you must understand Operation Cable
Splicer.
To understand Cable Splicer, you must understand its
context. The late 60s and early 70s were a turbulent era. In
1965, as America's troop strength in Vietnam was rising
dramatically, Watts exploded in rioting before it was
completely suppressed 36 people had been killed and more
than 1,000 had been injured. In 1966 racial discrimination,
economic injustice and the Vietnam War sparked 21 major
riots and civil disturbances. In 1967 there
<http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/mutt.html>83 such incidents. A
third of the 83 were marked by incidents of sniping. In more
than half of them, looting took place. The National Guard
was required to suppress 25.
One incident stands out above all. The Detroit uprising was
the most destructive civil disturbance of the decade. It
went on for two weeks. For the first time, significant
numbers of working-class whites joined in the fighting.
Before it was eventually suppressed, 43 people died, several
hundred were wounded, and 5,000 were left homeless.
Detroit was a turning point. After the smoke cleared
President Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders headed by then Governor
<http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/kerner.html> Otto Kerner of
Illinois. One week later, Harold K. Johnson, Chief of Staff
of the Army, set up another task force to study "every
aspect of the Army's role in civil disturbances." The task
force assisted the Kerner Commission. It also issued its own
report that was acted upon by the Pentagon. Its first
prescribed remedy was greater intelligence.
Military Intelligence, working with local, county, and state
police forces, and the FBI, undertook and directed a massive
domestic intelligence gathering operation. A sophisticated
computer center kept track of all public outbursts of
political dissent. Sen. Ervin's subcommittee was at work for
a full year before they discovered it.
"At no time during the first year of the Subcommittee
investigation," stated its staff report, "did either the
Army or the Department of Defense admit that a computer
(record) on civilian political activity existed within the
Pentagon's domestic war room." When it was discovered, the
staff found 18,000 files, including some on ordinary people,
who had quite unknowingly become "associated with known
militant groups." It also included Sen. George McGovern.
McGovern was defeated a few years later by a landslide in
the election best known for the Watergate break-in. The
Watergate break-in was definitely not the first intelligence
gathering op against McGovern.
The Senior Officers Civil Disturbance Course (SEADOC) was
instituted at the Military Police Academy in Ft. Gordon,
Georgia, to train senior military, National Guard, and
police officers.
Contingency plans were prepared for every city in the
country that had a potential for student, minority, or labor
unrest. Forces ranging from regular Army troops to local
police were trained to implement them. Seven Army infantry
brigades 21,000 troops were available for riot duty.
The Army task force that had designed this program changed
its name to the Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning
and Operations. It became a national coordinating center for
these various efforts. The Directorate's headquarters in the
Pentagon basement was called "the domestic war room." It was
there that the supposedly nonexistent computer records were
found. There, too, was found a full-time staff of 180,
including around-the-clock "watch teams." The teams were
surrounded by acetate maps, and they used teletype,
telephones, and radios to maintain constant contact with
every state National Guard headquarters and all major
military installations in the continental United States. It
was, indeed, a war room. We, the citizens of America, were
the enemy.
The vast subterranean fortress at Mount Weather, Virginia,
appears to be the current nerve center. It is the real life
counterpart of the fictional "Mount Thunder," where coup
plotters holed up in the thriller Seven Days in May. In
1975, California Sen. John Tunney charged that Mount Weather
held dossiers on 100,000 or more Americans. Tunney claimed
that the computer system there gives the installation access
to detailed information on the lives of virtually every
American citizen. Predictably, Mount Weather personnel
stonewalled question after question in two Senate hearings.
The seven-level deep facility, built during the cold war
years, has been expanded and is lavishly maintained by and
for FEMA executives and national officials. One source
reports that the agency has spent approximately 94 percent
of its budget not on disasters, but on this and dozens of
other mostly secret underground installations.
In May 1968, barely a month after the Army task group became
the Directorate, the workshop and seminar on civil
disturbance control, called Cable Splicer I, was held at the
California National Guard's training academy at the San Luis
Obispo camp. Three hundred and seven law enforcement and
military officials attended. It was a prelude to Cable
Splicer II, which was to be a much bigger affair.
Part II began on Feb. 10, 1969. The Governor's Orientation
Conference kicked off a series of joint military-police
training sessions across California. There were 500 people
in the audience. They included a dozen Military Intelligence
officers, generals from the Pentagon, the Sixth Army, and
the National Guard, along with dozens of lesser officers.
Police chiefs and sheriffs came from as far east as
Washington, D.C. California state legislators attended as
did executives from telephone, utility, and defense contract
companies.
Governor Reagan took the stage. A week earlier he had
promised to keep California's universities open at the point
of a bayonet, if necessary. "You know," he began, "there are
people in the state who, if they could see this gathering
right now and my presence here, would decide that their
worst fears and convictions had been realized: I was
planning a military takeover."
The Cable Splicer II war games were played a month later.
They were, in fact, dress rehearsals for a military
takeover. They were organized around 23 existing political
jurisdictions across California, at city, county, or
regional levels. Controllers, players, monitors, and
observers gathered in "emergency operations centers." This
was usually the radio room of the county sheriff or the
largest participating police department in a given area.
Senior National Guard officers and their Army advisors
attended. So did senior police and sheriffs officers, as did
telephone and utility company executives. In every way, on
every level, the military men worked closely with the police
officers. The soldiers took all precautions to disguise the
military's cooperation with the police, including the use of
civilian clothing.
Anywhere between six weeks and six months of prep work had
already been done when the game began. This included the
preparation by the California National Guard of two special
intelligence documents entitled "Special Intelligence
Summary" and "Organizations and Personalities."
<http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/frank.html> Lt. Col. Frank
Salcedo,a public information officer for the California
National Guard, was asked if the National Guard supplied
intelligence data on California citizens and political
organizations. He replied, "Well, how else could you do it?"
At the Cable Splicer II conference, Chief Deputy Attorney
General Charles O'Brien argued that if the Constitution
prevents the police from gathering political intelligence
then, the Constitution goes too far. Deputy Attorney General
Buck Compton declared that "free speech, civil rights,
rights to assembly" had all become "clichés." "Dissidents,"
he stated, "go beyond ... honest dissent, honest and proper
use of the right of free speech."
To understand the concept of "dishonest dissent" is to
understand the planners of Operation Garden Plot, Operation
Cable Splicer, and all the other derivative operations that
have come after them in the decades since, and all the
various organizations and agencies set up to carry them out.
To these men any political activity outside of electoral
party politics is revolution. "A civil disturbance anywhere
in this state," said O'Brien, "is an attack on the state
itself." Anyone who attacks the state, even verbally,
becomes an enemy of the state by definition. In dealing with
enemies of the state, anything goes. This strategy requires
more than funding, organization, and the turning of a blind
eye by the courts. It requires the training of men to carry
it out. That's where Louis Guiffrida came in.
Concluding reports for both Cable Splicer I and II call for
the creation of another school, in addition to SEADOC, that
would offer a "long range training program" to provide
exchange of law enforcement officers and military officers
with the goal of establishing "a nucleus of officers (both
law enforcement and military) at every level of government
who were conversant with the doctrine, tactics, of each
other."
This school was indeed established, in May 1971, in San Luis
Obispo. It was the
<http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/ctsiii.html> California
Specialized Training Institute, assembled under Guiffrida,
who retired as a full colonel in the military police academy
at Ft. Gordon in order to take his new job. He was
accompanied by a SEADOC instructor named Robert L. Wyngard.
Small wonder that the new school appeared from the very
beginning to resemble its predecessor. They also shared a
funding source, the Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration. A cohesive, coherent, and evolving federal
plan can be seen at work here.
The trend toward rampant militarization of the police and
the ever-deepening involvement of the military in domestic
law enforcement took a quantum leap forward when Guiffrida
was tapped to head FEMA. His experience, expertise, and
politics not only shaped the organization into what it is
today, but they also attracted like-minded talent.
Iran Contra point man Lt. Col. Oliver North found a home
away from home in Guiffrida's FEMA. As White House National
Security Council liaison to FEMA, he reportedly collaborated
with Guiffrida in drawing up secret wartime contingency
plans, allegedly including elements that went far beyond
Garden Plot and Cable Splicer. North denied helping draft
such a plan, but he was never adequately grilled by
Congressional Iran Contra investigators on the matter. Texas
Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about his work for FEMA, but
Senate panel Chair Daniel Inouye gaveled him to silence,
insisting that the question dealt with classified material.
FEMA's wartime crisis strategy was tested in a series of
simulated war games conducted in conjunction with Pentagon
maneuvers. In early 1984 President Reagan signed
Presidential Directive Number 54 that allowed FEMA to engage
in a secret national "readiness exercise" under the code
name of Rex-84. Rex-84 was coordinated by FEMA with the
military's Night Train 84 operations. In Operation Night
Train thousands of troops were deployed in Honduras near
Contra supply bases.
Daniel Sheehan, attorney with the Christic Institute law
firm, suspected that Rex-84 served as cover for illegal arms
shipments to the Nicaraguan Contras. Sheehan claimed that
FEMA distributed "hundreds of tons of small arms and
ammunition" to civilian militiamen in "state defense forces"
in the United States. He cited unnamed sources, including
one described as a member of FEMA's legal division. Sheehan
never got a chance to argue his case in court. A judge threw
out the Christic Institute's sweeping lawsuit, calling it
"frivolous."
According to an August 1985 article in Penthouse magazine,
coauthored by Donald Goldberg, who also helped research Jack
Anderson's column on the subject, during the exercise FEMA
would simulate rounding up and some 400,000 fictional
"aliens" in a six-hour period and detain them in military
camps throughout the United States. The theory behind the
simulation was that an international crisis, presumably a
U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, would set off what one
declassified FEMA document called "uncontrolled population
movements" as hordes of "refugees" swarmed over the Mexican
border into the United States. FEMA apparently justified the
not unprecedented use of concentration camps by presuming
that the refugees would include enemy agents.
The Mexico border's terrain can be deadly. A sudden influx
of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants was highly
unlikely. More than one critic has suggested that Rex-84 was
yet another drill to practice rounding up large numbers of
American citizens. The Miami Herald obtained a heavily
censored FEMA memo that described the Alpha Two phase of the
exercise as a test of "emergency legislation, assumption of
emergency powers ... etc." In other words: martial law.
Many people find the idea of martial law, even of FEMA
itself, very disturbing. FEMA has taken note. On June 24,
1998, the Washington Post reported that FEMA officials
issued a "public affairs guidance" to help agency employees
deal with "the potential for an increase in queries from the
general public and the news media" that X-Files: Fight the
Future was expected to generate. "Some moviegoers may not
understand that they are watching a fictional portrayal of
the agency," the document said.
<http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/harry.html>Some Americans have
come to "believe we have a somewhat sinister role," it
astutely noted, admitting "it is not realistic to think that
we can convince them otherwise and it is advisable not to
enter into debate on the subject."
While the guidance advised against a war of words with
suspicious citizens, it did urge FEMA officers to make one
thing clear: "You may emphatically state that FEMA does not
have, never has had, nor will ever seek, the authority to
suspend the Constitution."
Yeah, right. That's why they've been planning for decades
and staying in practice by conducting regular training
exercises.
Tell us another one.
_____________________________
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