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B. FEMA, WHICH REMOVED THE WTC EVIDENCE BEFORE IT COULD BE INDEPENDENTLY EXAMINED, MAINTAINS
A BLACK-OP SHADOW GOVERNMENT DESIGNED TO REPLACE THE ELECTED GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
114. A supposedly definitive technical study concerning the collapses of World Trade Center 1 and 2 (the North Tower and South Tower) appeared just two days after 9-11, but the actual evidence (the rubble from the destroyed buildings, especially the structural steel) was kept under the exclusive control of FEMA, removed from the site, and shipped overseas with haste that dismayed engineers, and astonished everyone. Called by its right name, this was the destruction of evidence, and an obstruction of justice, brazenly carried out in plain view.
115. SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1The predominant public view of FEMA is that it is a well-intentioned if lethargic service bureaucracy that parcels out rebuilding funds after floods and earthquakes. FEMA does perform some useful disaster-relief functions, but its principal (and largely secret and “black budget”) function is and always has been “Continuity of Government.” Its main objective is to make sure that centralized federal control – if need be, in the hands of executives neither elected by, nor indeed known to, the electorate, who already function as a “shadow government” – continue, no matter what. To that end, it has constructed dozens of secret underground bunkers, capable of sustaining the select few admitted to them following any catastrophe. It has budgets with millions for disaster relief, but billions for unspecified “other purposes.” Like the CIA, it receives unknown sums in black-budget appropriations and, also like the CIA, upon information and belief finances its secret operations in significant part by drug dealing, gun running, and assassinations.
116. If and when martial law comes to America at large, it will be under the auspices of the shadowy Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”), a massive, secretive agency operated from a huge, fortified bunker in Virginia, and established by unconstitutional means to carry out an unconstitutional and indeed anti-constitutional program.
117. Many Americans who listened to the televised hearings of the (limited) investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal were surprised to hear a committee member inquire about an article alleging secret White House plans to suspend the Constitution. Even more surprising was that committee chair Sen. Daniel Inouye interrupted the speaker, demanding that all discussion on that question take place in closed session, out of public hearing.
118. Lest Plaintiff’s allegations concerning a parallel government be dismissed as sheer paranoid fantasy, Plaintiff annexes as Exhibit “B” the full text of an article that appeared in the “mainstream” Miami Herald for July 5, 1987. That article alleges a secret, parallel government from the earliest days of the Reagan Administration, its activities extending far beyond the secret arms sales to Iran and aid to the Nicaraguan “Contras” then under investigation, and plans drawn by Lt. Col. Oliver North and others to suspend the Constitution in the event of a “national crisis” including “widespread dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.”
119. Today, a large number of the Reagan and Bush I Administration’s most controversial personnel, including several notable figures convicted of crimes relating to Iran-Contra, have joined the Bush II Administration. There being credible allegations (raised by, among others, General Wesley K. Clark) that the Bush II Administration envisages a series of wars and violent “regime changes” around the globe, it is fitting to ask if the Iran-Contra plans for the mass internment of dissenters or opponents of empire are again being taken seriously, and to look more closely at FEMA.
120. Established without Congressional advice, consent or objection, wholly by a series of Presidential Executive Orders of doubtful constitutionality, FEMA had its origins in Kennedy-era orders that granted the federal government the power to seize a variety of private or local functions in event of emergency. President Nixon consolidated and enlarged those powers in 1969, with Executive Order 11490.
121. President Ford signed Executive Order #11921, which, in the words of Dr. Henry Kliemann, political scientist at Boston University, “was understood by FEMA to mean that one day they would be in charge of the country. As these bureaucrats saw it, FEMA’s real mission was to wait, prepare, and then take over when some ‘situation’ seemed serious enough to turn the United States into a police state.”
122. A few years after President Carter, again by Executive Order, made FEMA “official,” President Reagan appointed as its head Gen. Louis Giuffrida, who had written a paper advocating the declaration of martial law in response to black militancy. His plan could have sent millions of African-Americans to detention camps. Giuffrida also wrote “Martial rule comes into existence upon a determination (not a declaration) by the senior military commander that civil government must be replaced because it is no longer functioning anyway.”
123. Indeed, the author for President Carter of Presidential Memorandum 32 was Harvard Prof. Samuel P. Huntington, who wrote in the mid 1970s that democracy and economic development are outdated ideas. As co-author of the book Crisis in Democracy, Mr. Huntington said:
We have come to recognize that there are potential desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy. A government, which lacks authority, will have little ability short of cataclysmic crisis to impose on its people the sacrifices that may be necessary.
124. In an interview in the December 2003 issue of Cigar Aficionado, Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the U.S. military operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein, asserted that, were there to occur another mass-casualty attack, the “grand experiment that we call democracy” would come to an end, and the Constitution would be discarded in favor of a military government.
125. In a joint statement dated September 30, 1973, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Charles McMathias (R-Maryland) stated: “While the danger of a dictatorship arising through legal means may seem remote...recent history records Hitler seizing control through the use of the emergency powers provisions contained in the laws of the Weimar Republic.” Although, to be sure, non-Enterprise terror and terrorism exist, and are evils to be combated, the Enterprise and the Bush II Administration are embarked on a program to exaggerate the threat of terrorism, and to aggrandize their own power and wealth via measures that would not be accepted absent a perceived emergency, but which are succeeding because of a climate of fear, created in part by acts of terror sanctioned and carried out by or with the approval of the Enterprise itself.
126. It is intriguing, and circumstantial proof of Enterprise foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks, that on September 7, 2001, just four days before 9-11, the President’s brother Jeb Bush, as Governor of Florida, issued an Executive Order (#01-261) delegating to the Adjutant General of the state of Florida, “all necessary authority . . . to order members of the Florida National Guard into Active Service.” Immediately after the collapse of the South Tower on 9-11, Governor Jeb Bush signed Executive Order #01-262, declaring a state of emergency in Florida that upon information and belief remained in effect for a year or longer, despite the fact that no acts of terrorism have occurred in Florida. Under an open-ended state of emergency, the Director of the Division of Emergency Management has (among others) all of the following martial-law powers:
To suspend the effect of any statute or rule governing the conduct of state business;
To suspend the effect of any order or rule of any government entity;
To seize and utilize any and all real or personal property as needed to meet this emergency;
To order the evacuation of any or all persons from any location in the State; and
To regulate the return of the evacuees to their home communities.
127. Upon information and belief, FEMA directly or indirectly received funds from “Operation Watchtower,” a drug smuggling operation including U.S. Army Special Forces personnel. “Operation Watchtower” entailed the placement and operation of low-frequency radio beacons to guide low-flying pilots from Colombia to Panama. It also consisted of making available to the drug pilots the radio frequencies and schedules of drug interdiction aircraft so as to enable them to avoid detection.
128. According to an affidavit made by Colonel Edward P. Cutolo, a purported copy of which is annexed as Exhibit “D,” numerous individuals met their deaths under suspicious circumstances who had posed a threat to “blow the whistle” on yet another U.S. government exercise in funding “black ops” with laundered proceeds from drug dealing.
129. Col. Cutolo himself died in a one-car accident near Skullthorpe, England, in 1980. His affidavit states that Mossad agents associated with Operation Watchtower were protected by CIA Director Stansfield Turner and George H. W. Bush, and Washington military authorities had approved the drug trafficking operation. Cutolo stated that he was told by CIA operative Edwin Wilson that Operation Watchtower was but one of a number of similar operations around the world, and that 70% of its proceeds were laundered through banks in Panama.
130. Wilson, according to Cutolo, described to him an additional secret operation, Operation Orwell, which spied on politicians for purposes of blackmail. Allegedly, information gathered on politicians was forwarded to Washington, D.C. and disseminated to private corporations who were developing weapons systems for the Department of Defense. Those corporations were encouraged to use the sensitive information gathered from surveillance of U.S. senators and representatives as leverage, which is to say blackmail, to induce them to vote to approve whatever costs the weapons systems incurred. Upon information and belief, such blackmail has continued and is ongoing at the present time.
131. The extraordinary, police-state powers granted to FEMA and to other federal bodies by Executive Orders (“EOs”) include but are not limited to the following:
To take over all modes of transportation, and control of highways and seaports (EO 10990);
To seize and control the communications media (EO 10995);
To take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals (EO 10997);
To take over all food resources and farms (EO 10998);
To mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision (slave labor) (EO 11000);
To take over all health, education and welfare functions (EO 11001);
To compile and to operate, acting through the Postmaster General, a national registration of all persons (EO 11002);
To take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft (EO 11003);
To relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations (EO 11004);
To take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities (EO 11005);
To put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis (through the Office of Emergency Planning);
Through the Department of Justice, to enforce plans set out in Executive Orders, institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, control all aliens, operate penal and correctional institutions, and advise and assist the President (EO 11310); and
To develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, energy resources, wages, salaries, credit and the follow of money in U.S. financial institutions in any undefined national emergency. (EO 11921) This Executive Order provides further that, when the President declares a state of emergency, Congress cannot review the action for six months.
General Frank Salzedo, then Chief of FEMA’s “Civil Security Division,” stated in a 1983 conference that he saw FEMA’s role as including the denial of “access to U.S. opinion” to “dissident groups” in times of crisis. In other words, if the President declares a state of emergency, the First Amendment is a dead letter, and FEMA’s role includes the suppression of dissent.
132. In 1979, President Carter consolidated FEMA’s powers to include:
The National Security Act of 1947, which allows for the strategic relocation of industries, services, government and other essential economic activities, and to rationalize the requirements for manpower, resources and production facilities;
The 1950 Defense Production Act, which gives the President sweeping powers over all aspects of the economy;
The Act of August 29, 1916, which authorizes the Secretary of the Army, in time of war, to take possession of any transportation system for transporting troops, materiel, or any other purpose related to the emergency; and
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national.
133. The ideological inspiration for what we know as FEMA today can be typified by a few noteworthy U.S. government pronouncements. In February 1948, for example, George Kennon of the U.S. State Department Planning Staff stated in Policy Planning Study No. 23 that:
[T]he U.S. must devise a pattern of relationships that will permit them to maintain 50% of the world’s wealth while only having 6% of the world’s population. The U.S. must cease to talk about unreal objectives such as human rights, raising of the living standard and democratization.
134. In National Security Memorandum No. 200, Henry A. Kissinger stated in 1975 that:
[A] reduction of the rate of population of these states [third world countries] is a matter of vital U.S. security since the U.S. will require large and increasing amounts of materials from abroad, especially from Less Developed Countries (LDC’s). That fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political, economic and social stability of these supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population can increase the prospects of such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources supplied and to the economic interest of the United States.
135. While many Americans, whatever their racial background, will no doubt be shocked and repelled that genocide in the interests of white economic supremacy is an unacknowledged bedrock of U.S. international policy, a report commissioned by President Carter, “Global 2000 – Report to the President” (1978) asserted that:
There will be zero population growth for the whites on the earth by the year 2000, and in order to preserve the survival of the white race, lands that contain resources that the U.S. needs must be freed of its surplus population.
136. In the short term, it has suited the Enterprise and the extreme right wing to allow huge numbers of undocumented and largely Hispanic and nonwhite immigrants to enter and remain in the U.S., to depress wages and working conditions here, and to “divide and conquer” the majority of the population, by fueling tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants. The Enterprise has long recognized, however, that a program of empire and even genocide aimed at the nonwhite nations and economies of the third world, intensifying as U.S. demand for resources – especially oil and other fossil fuels – grows more acute, could well lead to restiveness on the part of nonwhite persons living in the U.S., and a great many others as well. Thus, quietly, a parallel government, in its essentials a police state readying “all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule,” has been erected alongside the Constitutional government to provide for the day when the governing elite deems it useful to jettison the Constitution. That day may be fast approaching.
137. Presidential powers were further increased with successive Crime Bills (particularly those enacted in 1991 and 1993). This legislation increased the power to suspend rights guaranteed under the Constitution, and to seize the property of persons including suspected drug dealers, and individuals who participate in a public protest or demonstration.
138. Notwithstanding the real dangers posed by non-Enterprise terrorists, justification for substantially all of the “emergency” powers now held by FEMA (a black-budget agency existing thanks to Executive Orders and minimally subject to Congressional oversight) is manifestly weaker today, years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, than during the Cold War, when thousands of nuclear warheads were aimed at United States territory.
139, Although the fact is no doubt unknown to ninety percent or more of the population of the United States, “emergency” plans are in existence, for which expansive logistical preparations have been made for suspending the Constitution, turning the reigns of government over to FEMA, and appointing military commanders to run state and local governments. FEMA would further be empowered to order the detention, indefinitely and without trial, of anyone whom it believes “might” engage in, or conspire with others to engage in, espionage or sabotage. A national police force, with the euphemistic name of the Multi Jurisdictional Task Force, wearing black uniforms and composed of specially-selected US military personnel (those willing to fire on Americans), foreign military units with UN identification cards and specially-trained police groups from larger U.S. cities, will enforce martial law, under the direction and control of FEMA.
140. Even short of full-scale police-state measures, the “war on terror” can be used as a pretext for draconian powers. For example, on March 16, 2003, a Gannett News Service article reported that Sid Caspersen, Director of the Office of Counter-Terrorism for the State of New Jersey, stated at a news conference that “If the nation escalates to ‘red alert,’ which is the highest in the color-coded readiness against terror, you will be assumed by authorities to be the enemy if you so much as venture outside your home.” The article also stated, “A red alert would also tear away virtually all personal freedoms to move about and associate.” Caspersen was quoted as saying “You literally are staying home, is what happens, unless you are required to be out.”
141. A February 14, 2003 article in the Washington Post reported that Washington, D.C. area schools were planning to prevent parents from picking up their own children in the event of a terrorist attack. A parent from Bolton, Massachusetts telephoned a radio talk-show, saying he had received a letter from the Nashoba Regional School District, telling parents they would not be allowed to pick up their children during a “red alert” and that the children would in such event be bused to a secret location that cannot be disclosed to parents.
142. Reportedly, children attending the Milbourne Elementary School in the rural community of Milbourne, Arkansas, were held on Friday, March 21, 2003 beyond their release time, forced to watch terrifying videos of terrorist attacks, and locked in their classrooms (as were their teachers) by men in dark blue uniforms with rifles. The children were then marched outdoors where they saw prison-style school buses with US ARMY written on the side. The children were then returned to their classrooms, the armed men and buses disappeared, and only then were the children permitted to go home.
143. In March 1999 – before 9-11 -- Marines and elements of the U.S. Coast Guard took over the Hobbs Middle School in Milton, Florida. The Marines told terrified children that the mock takeover “was a way to illustrate what martial law is all about.” Why, plaintiff asks, is there the need to instruct Florida schoolchildren regarding “what martial law is all about”?
144. The foregoing powers are utterly irreconcilable with the Constitution of the United States, including but not limited to Article IV, Section 4, and the Tenth Amendment. They are, simply stated, a prescription for a police state, for a totalitarian state very much like those ruled by Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler.
145. For many years, FEMA denied the existence of its primary bunker, Mount Weather in Virginia. Even after admitting to its existence, FEMA refused to disclose its purpose, even to its ostensible bosses in Congress. At 1975 hearings, retired Air Force General Leslie W. Bray, the director of FEMA’s predecessor, the Federal Prepared Agency, stonewalled a U.S. Senate subcommittee, insisting, “I am not at liberty to describe precisely what is the role and the mission and the capability that we have at Mount Weather, or at any other precise location.” Is that not information to which the people’s elected representatives are entitled?
146. Since Hurricane Andrew and 9-11, however, it has become somewhat more widely known that Mount Weather houses an entire parallel and unelected government – with a president, who by protocol must be addressed as “Mr. President,” and a cabinet not confirmed by the Senate, nor known to the public, all ready to take over the country in an “emergency” which, per President Carter’s order, embraces “any accidental, natural, man-caused, or wartime emergency or threat thereof, which causes or may cause substantial injury or harm to the population or substantial damage to or loss of property.”
147. The foregoing definition, of course, is ample enough to authorize a FEMA takeover based on whatever the President, or the director of FEMA, declares to be sufficient cause. Back in 1975 – the stone age of computer technology – the Senate hearings that failed to learn the purpose of Mount Weather did learn that “... the facility held dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans. [Senator] John Tunney later alleged that the Mount Weather computers can obtain millions of pieces of additional information on the personal lives of American citizens simply by tapping the data stored at any of the other ninety-six Federal Relocation Centers.” The subcommittee concluded that Mount Weather’s databases “operate with few, if any, safeguards or guidelines.” It appears a foregone conclusion that the unelected parallel government’s intrusion into the private lives of Americans could only have increased exponentially in the years since 1975.
148. 9-11 provided the occasion for a practice exercise in “continuity of government.” According to the Washington Post, “Within hours of the synchronized attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Military District of Washington helicopters lifted off with the first wave of evacuated officials.” “Only the executive branch is represented in the full-time shadow administration,” the Post noted, and “[m]any departments, including Justice and Treasury, have completed plans to delegate statutory powers to officials who would not normally exercise them.” Thus, if a disaster can be fabricated sufficient to serve as a pretext to declare martial law, the executive branch could exercise power through persons neither elected by the public nor confirmed by the Senate, and indeed the checks and balances traditionally supplied by the legislative and judicial branches would effectively be nullified. It is no wonder that Republican Party stalwarts such as William Safire have floated “trial balloons” foreseeing terror attacks immediately before the scheduled 2004 presidential election. According to sources with the FBI and the CIA, the White House from some time has been manufacturing terror alerts to keep the issue alive in the minds of voters, and to bolster President Bush’s approval ratings.
149. As recent revelations of the widespread, systematic abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. and British forces (which came to public notice only in April 2004 although at the highest levels allegedly knew of the abuse for many months at least since December 2003), there have again emerged “expert” predictions that a “dirty bomb” will create panic and death in a Western city. On information and belief, these “predictions” are issued at such strategic times to take attention off the horrific, unconscionable offenses that are now coming to light. Indeed, the mere planting of such rumors tends to diminish outrage and demands for accountability among the American public. Why be concerned that Iraqis are being tortured, humiliated, and abused, when a “dirty bomb” might spew deadly radiation in our hometown?
150. Evidence of the moral degradation to which the Bush II Administration is leading America is that Rush Limbaugh, far-right commentator and hero of the Republican Party, with an audience of 20 million, dismissed the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the following terms:
. . . Somebody has to provide a little levity here. This is not so serious as everybody is making it to be . . . We act like . . . “What can we do to make these people feel better? Let’s just pull out of there, and let’s just go.” . . . I mean, it’s ridiculous. . . . This is a pure, media-generated story. . . . we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them [the troops accused of abusing Iraqis] because they had a good time. . . . I’m talking about people having a good time . . . you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?
151. In 1984, the Iran-Contra affair spurred planning to suppress a possible flow of refugees in the event the United States were to go to war against the Sandinista regime of Nicaragua. “Readiness” exercises under the code name REX-84 were conducted on the assumption that FEMA might have to detain a large number of refugees. Detention centers were set up at least ten military bases to provide for such a contingency.
152. REX-84 coordinated 34 federal departments and agencies in “readiness exercises” held from April 5-13, 1984. The training exercise included the use of the military to control civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes. It also included exercises in conducting large population movements, and imposing martial law.
153. REX-84 was so secretive that special metal security doors were placed on the fifth floor of the FEMA building in Washington, D.C., and many long-standing Civil Defense employees were denied entry. The emergency plan was vehemently opposed by then-Attorney General William French Smith. It was drawn in large part by Lt. Col. Oliver North, infamous for his Iran-Contra exploits, and for his blatant perjury before Congress. This “dry run” for fascism advocated the roundup and transfer to “assembly centers or relocation camps” of at least 21 MILLION African-Americans in the event of large-scale rioting or disorder, a proposal Hitlerian in inspiration and stunning in its scale.
154. “Operation Garden Plot,” or United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, provides for federal military assistance to be given to local and state law enforcement agencies during times of civil disturbances to control the civilian population. This operation will target people or groups that the government considers “disruptive elements,” defined very broadly to include resistance groups, tax protesters, right-wing extremist groups, non-conformists, or people protesting the imposition of martial law. It expressly authorizes the use of deadly force to suppress civil disorder. Operation Garden Plot came into play, for example in 1992, at the time of the riots in Los Angeles, California, following the acquittal of the white police officers who had beaten black motorist Rodney King.
155. Under the host of Executive Orders that give the President dictatorial powers in the event of an emergency, the President can declare martial law, give FEMA the authority to take control of the economy and infrastructure of the United States, and suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
156. Under Executive Order 12919 and DODD 3025.12, FEMA would be empowered to hold civilian detainees in concentration camps. It could also use the detainees as forced labor, which would be monitored by the Department of Defense, but supervised by the FBI.
157. There are a number of fully-prepared “detention centers” ready to receive large numbers of civilian detainees. Those established in the early 1980s included Fort Drum (NY), Fort Indian Town Gap (PA), Camp A. P. Hill (VA), Fort Benning (GA), Fort Stewart (GA), Eglin AFB (FL), Fort Chaffee (AR), Fort Huachuca (AZ), Oakdale (CA), Fort McCoy (WI), Batwood (PA), Florence (AZ), Wicksburg (AZ), El Rio (OK), Tooly Lake (CA), Maxwell AFB (AL), Camp Krome Detention Center (FL), Alderson (WV), Greenville (SC), Fort Jackson (SC), Avon Lake AFB (CA) and Elmundorf AFB (AK). Upon information and belief, many more detention facilities are located on active military bases that have been closed and converted to that purpose, and a remarkable number of them are located in Texas. Upon information and belief, the construction and expansion of concentration camps has accelerated greatly during the Bush II administration, with camps being constructed mostly in remote locations, in secret, and under tight security.
158. Although reports of FEMA concentration camps (and foreign troops training in remote national forest areas declared off-limits to the public, ostensibly to protect endangered species) are scoffed at by many as “urban legends,” many photographs of what certainly appear to be recently-constructed facilities have appeared on the Internet, and there are a large number of former U.S. military installations which, while inactive (some of them for years) for their traditional defense purposes, remain secured out of the public’s view.
159. Between 1976 and 1983 (from the latter part of the Ford Administration when George H. W. Bush was CIA Director, through the entire Carter Administration and the first three years of the Reagan Administration) the Argentine government conducted a “Dirty War,” which, upon information and belief, was known to and abetted by elements of the government of the United States. Approximately 340 secret detention centers, referred to by the Armed Forces as “Prisoner Assessment Centers,” formed an unofficial Argentine prison system that operated alongside the legal structure. The secret detention camps were intended to hold thousands of people who disappeared in Argentina on the orders of the military dictatorship. Thousands were illegally detained, tortured and murdered as supposed threats to “national security” and the “Western Christian way of life.” Although rationalized as a defense against terrorism of the extreme left, the “Dirty War” targeted dissidents, trade unionists, social reformers, human rights activists, nuns, priests, pacifists, psychologist, journalists, students, teachers, lawyers, actors, workers, housewives – thousands of persons not guilty of any crime whatsoever. Having countenanced such measures in allied countries, there is no reason to suppose that elements of the United States government involved in the Enterprise are incapable of themselves conducting themselves in the same manner toward U.S. residents.
160. A memo from C. Dean Rhody, Director of Resource Management for the Department of the Army, dated July 27, 1994, makes reference to a “Civilian Inmate Labor Oversight Committee” and procedures “to establish civilian inmate labor programs” and “civilian prison camps” on Army installations. The referenced plans have not emerged into public view, but former Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas admitted in an interview, “The truth is, yes, you do have these standby provisions . . . whereby you could, in the name of stopping terrorism . . . invoke the military and arrest Americans and put them in detention camps.”
161. Although the very notion of an “American gulag” might appear incredible, recent reporting by distinguished investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh indicates that Donald H. Rumsfeld has, presumably with the knowledge and consent of President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney, created a worldwide American “Gulag,” consisting of secret prisons whose operations and existence were largely or totally concealed from Congress and the public, in which detainees – arrested without formal charges, held incognito and without access to legal assistance -- are systematically tortured and abused. Reportedly, this Bush II Administration “Gulag” is so repellent to worldwide human rights norms that the CIA, not renowned for its delicacy concerning torture and other human rights abuses, is objecting to it.
162. Similarly, Secretary of State Colin Powell is publicly repudiating the doctrine reportedly set forth in a memo from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales a few months after 9-11, asserting that the attacks created a “new paradigm” under which the Geneva Convention’s limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners had become “obsolete,” and even “quaint.” As a former military officer, Gen. Powell no doubt has concerns that America’s repudiation of the Geneva Conventions might lead to the abuse and torture of American military personnel taken prisoner in current and future conflicts. Conduct at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Gonzalez’ memo and other actions suggest that the Bush II Administration is prepared to scrap fundamental human rights norms overseas “because we can” -because- because there is no power forceful enough to constrain it as the world’s sole superpower. If so, preparations to scrap Constitutional rights at home are not difficult to believe.
163. The turnover of the federal government to FEMA under martial law will be a clear violation of Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which provides that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.” FEMA police-state rule is not a republican form of government. FEMA is not elected by the people to govern the country; it is a largely secret, black-budget operation set up by persons with suspect motives, now in the hands of the Enterprise.
164. The public needs to be made fully aware of the preparations for martial law (a euphemism for a “police state”) and large-scale detentions being made by FEMA, largely under the pretext of a “war on terrorism.” The United States did not need FEMA during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War or, as events proved, the Cold War. Although Like the CIA, which combines legitimate intelligence-coordination activities with criminal “black ops,” FEMA’s activities may include a component of legitimate disaster-relief activities. However, following criticism of FEMA in the wake of its inept relief efforts following Hurricane Andrew, Congress found out that FEMA – long before 9-11 – was spending a dozen times more on secret bunkers and “black operations” than on disaster relief.
165. Further, the blurring of distinctions between the U.S. military and civilian law enforcement should be halted and reversed. Under the Posse Comitatus Act (1879) it is unlawful to employ the Army for the purpose of executing laws, but after 9-11 the U.S. Army established a “Northern Command,” including the entire territory of the United States, under Gen. Ralph Eberhart. This is the same Ralph Eberhart who was in charge of NORAD on 9-11. If the 9-11 attacks were not carried out or approved by the Enterprise, acting as and through the United States government, General Eberhart would have been court-martialed for dereliction of duty.
RICO Complaint Part 8 here |