American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (26 page)

I imagine few of you have heard of InfraGard. A year ago, I was happily ignorant that it existed. Their brochure describes a “collaborative effort” between government and private industry to protect our “critical infrastructures” like banking and finance, agriculture and food, telecommunications, transportation systems, and the like. “An InfraGard member is a private-sector volunteer with an inherent concern for national security,” says the brochure. Their members connect to a national network of Subject Matter Experts, SMEs for short, and communicate through local chapters with federal law enforcement and government agencies.
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It looks completely up-and-up. As of early 2008, InfraGard had 86 chapters around the country, representing more than 23,000 figures in private industry. Over 350 of the Fortune 500 companies are said to be involved. If they follow what the pamphlet says, these are patriotic Americans who meet with agents from the FBI and Homeland Security to help protect the rest of us. Okay, fine and dandy. But I see this as ripe for massive abuse, and I despise the premise of members watching other people and reporting what they see to the government. I learned they have a couple of meetings a month, and every group has its own “handler,” who is an FBI agent.

I met personally with two of the upper echelon of InfraGard in Oklahoma City. I posed to them a hypothetical situation: Say your agricultural expert saw something that disturbed him, would the Standard Operating Procedure be for him to call the local police? Nope, it would be the “handler.” Again, a matter of the feds superseding everything else. Maybe these are just a bunch of good-old-boys who want to seem important; they can run around with their InfraGard ID cards and impress their buddies at the club. And maybe the FBI sits back and says, “Well, this saves us a ton of money, we don't need agents out there because we've got these knuckleheads doing it.”

But this “handler” business is right out of CIA cloak-and-dagger. As head of a corporation, say you have someone working for you that happens to take a different political viewpoint, you can then call your “handler” and the FBI will begin systematic harassment of that person? InfraGard members supposedly receive warnings about alleged terrorist threats before the rest of us, and in return can ask the FBI to investigate disgruntled or annoying employees.

Members also learn what their responsibilities are during periods of an emergency or even martial law. I asked one fellow I talked to, a former sheriff: “At any of your meetings, have you ever been told of a circumstances where you guys could use lethal force?” He said, no, that's never been discussed. But we were told by a whistleblower that, in the event martial law was ever declared, they would be granted that capability. They could protect whatever aspect of the infrastructure they were involved with, and have permission to shoot to kill, without fear of prosecution. So we're going to potentially turn loose a bunch of cowboys with guns, who don't even know Miranda rights? That's a pretty scary proposition.
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And it's another step down the road to something like this: A month after Bush left office, a memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States” came to light. Soon after 9/11, the Justice Department secretly gave the go-ahead for the military to attack apartment buildings or office complexes inside the country and, if necessary to combat the terror threat, suspend press freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. “Military action might encompass making arrests, seizing documents or other property, searching persons or places or keeping them under surveillance, intercepting electronic or wireless communications, setting up roadblocks, interviewing witnesses or searching for suspects.” As Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies think tank, put it bluntly: “In October 2001, they were trying to construct a legal regime that would basically have allowed for the imposition of martial law.”
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Constitutional scholar Michael Ratner was even more blunt. He called the legal arguments “Fuhrer's Law” and added: “The memos revealed how massive the takeover of our democracy was to be.... [they] lay the groundwork for a massive military takeover of the United States in cahoots with the president. And if that's not a coup d'etat then nothing is.”
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Such plans date back a ways. During an earlier period of racial unrest and anti-Vietnam War protests, in 1968 the Pentagon came up with Operation Garden Plot. It was updated most recently in 1991, and activated briefly during the L.A. riots in 1992. The idea was for flexible “military operations in urban terrain,” using various kinds of high-tech weaponry and in concert with “elite” militarized police units, that would be ready to stop “disorder,” “disturbance,” and “civil disobedience” in America.
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Then, during the Reagan years, Oliver North organized Rex-84—short for “readiness exercise” 1984 (I guess somebody had been taking their Orwell seriously)—that envisioned using the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, created in 1979) to round up and detain in camps as many as 400,000 “refugees” in case of “uncontrolled population movements” coming across our border from Mexico.
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When North was asked during the Iran-Contra hearings about his work on “a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution,” chairman Daniel Inouye ruled that this “highly sensitive and classified”matter shouldn't be discussed in an open hearing.
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So who do you think was doing some of the top-level planning of this along with North? Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, along with Vice President Poppa Bush, under something called the National Program Office.
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“Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration.” Congress would have no role in the event of a “national security emergency.”
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Ten months
before
9/11, immediately upon the second Bush Administration taking control, Pentagon chief Rumsfeld approved an updated version of the Army's COG plan. COG stands for Continuity-of-Government. The idea has been around since the Fifties and the possibility that the Russians would drop a nuke on us.
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In May 2001, Bush put Cheney in charge of a terrorism task force and opened a new Office of National Preparedness within FEMA.
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The guy Bush had named to head FEMA was Joe Allbaugh, who'd managed the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 and helped out with the dirty tricks “19th Floor Riot” that brought a halt to the ballot recount going on in Miami-Dade County.
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After 9/11, the COG plans went operational. Here's what the
Washington Post
reported six months later: “President Bush has dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time longstanding plans to ensure survival of federal rule after catastrophic attack on the nation's capital.... Known internally as the COG, for ‘continuity of government,' the administration-in-waiting is an unannounced complement to the acknowledged absence of Vice President Cheney from Washington for much of the past five months.”
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Under the new Homeland Security office, another plan called ENDGAME was established. Its goal was to place “all removable aliens” and “potential terrorists” in detention facilities.
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Attorney General John Ashcroft came right out and announced his wish that such “enemy combatants” be put in camps scattered around the country. In January 2002, the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on our streets and, that April, the Northern Command (NORTHCOM) was set up to implement this.
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“The command will provide civil support not only in response to attacks, but for natural disasters,” according to the Pentagon's announcement.
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(In September 2005, NORTHCOM conducted a highly classified exercise in D.C. called Granite Shadow.)
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Bear in mind that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 specifically outlaws the military acting like cops on our own soil. Bush also put through an executive order that changed the 1807 Insurrection Act, giving himself much greater powers in the event of something he might label as “insurrection.” (The Constitution lets habeas corpus be suspended during such an occurrence.)
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This marked “a fundamental change in military culture,” according to Paul McHale, an assistant secretary for homeland defense. Before 9/11, he says, this “would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable.”
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All through the Bush years, this kind of “preparedness” kept building. Early in 2006, as part of ENDGAME, Homeland Security awarded a $385 million contract to KBR—a subsidiary of Cheney's old company, Halliburton—to get going on “temporary detention and processing facilities” in case there was “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” with a natural disaster.
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(Think Katrina, which saw the first “round-up” of citizens, held not only in the football stadium in New Orleans but shipped out to other detention centers.)

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.
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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.
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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.
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One scenario envisioned by the Pentagon was civil unrest as a result of financial meltdown. They'd cooperate with FEMA on plans with code names like Vibrant Response and EXCALIBUR.
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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.”
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And guess what, friends, it's 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: it's illegal.
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Another story, in the
Washington Post
no less, tells of how the military anticipates having 20,000 uniformed troops inside the U.S. by 2011, trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terror attack or some other domestic catastrophe. This is part of a “long-planned shift in the Department of Defense's role in homeland security.”
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Already, an active-duty unit called the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and Explosive Consequence Management Response Force is stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
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And do you know about the “fusion centers?” These are much like InfraGard, but more blatant. There are about seventy “fusion centers” around the U.S.—places where local law enforcement, the private sector and the intel community can share information in the fight against terrorism. One in West Texas finds it “imperative” to report on lobbying groups. Another in Virginia has declared that American universities, singling out several black colleges, have become “radicalization nodes” for potential terrorist activity. In September 2009, Homeland Security announced that these “fusion centers” would now have access to classified military intelligence in Pentagon databases.
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