MANY PEOPLE, myself not included, fear the imposition of martial law on New Year's Day, perhaps even sooner. Personally, 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) 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 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 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 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 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 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." 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 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. 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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