[PeaceNet forward from AML (ACTIV-L) -- see bottom for more info] ------------------------------------------------------------------
/** mideast.forum: 216.5 **/ ** Written 8:11 pm Jan 17, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:mideast.forum ** An excellent book which deals with the REX 84 detention plan is:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver
[Oliver]
Yet more terrifying is the plan hatched by
When then-Attorney General William French Smith got wind of the plan,
he killed it. After Smith left the administration,
Where was it all heading? The book's answer: "REX-84 Bravo, a National Security Decision Directive 52 that would become operative with the president's declaration of a state of national emergency concurrent with a mythical U.S. military invasion of an unspecified Central American country, presumably Nicaragua.''
Bradlee writes that the Rex exercise was designed to test FEMA's readiness to assume authority over the Department of Defense, the National Guard in all 50 states, and "a number of state defense forces to be established by state legislatures.'' The military would then be "deputized,'' thus making an end run around federal law forbidding military involvement in domestic law enforcement.
Rex, which ran concurrently with the first annual U.S. show of force in Honduras in April 1984, was also designed to test FEMA's ability to round up 400000 undocumented Central American aliens in the United States and its ability to distribute hundreds of tons of small arms to "state defense forces.''
Incredibly, REX 84 was similar to a plan secretly adopted by Reagan while governor of California. His two top henchmen then were Edwin Meese, who recently resigned as U.S. attorney general, and Louis Guiffrida, the FEMA director in 1984.
If the review makes you nervous, you should read the book!
--Chip Berlet ** End of text from cdp:mideast.forum **
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[PeaceNet forward from AML (ACTIV-L) -- see bottom for more info] ------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the front-page article of the Jan. 16 issue of "The Guardian," which describes some of the U.S. government's planning for martial law in the event of the Gulf war. This is truly a scary scenario that should concern all civil libertarians and patriots. ------------------------------------------------------------------
WILL GULF WAR LEAD TO REPRESSION AT HOME? by Paul DeRienzo and Bill Weinberg
On August 2, 1990, as Saddam Hussein's army was consolidating control over Kuwait, President George Bush responded by signing two executive orders that were the first step toward martial law in the United States and suspending the Constitution.
On the surface, Executive Orders 12722 and 12723, declaring a "national emergency," merely invoked laws that allowed Bush to freeze Iraqi assets in the United States.
The International Emergency Executive Powers Act permits the president to freeze foreign assets after declaring a "national emergency," a move that has been made three times before -- against Panama in 1987, Nicaragua in 1985 and Iran in 1979.
According to Professor Diana
According to
She adds that national emergency powers "permit the stationing of the military in cities and towns, closing off the U.S. borders, freezing all imports and exports, allocating all resources on a national security priority, monitoring and censoring the press, and warrantless searches and seizures."
The measures would allow military authorities to proclaim martial law
in the United States, asserts
A report called "Post Attack Recovery Strategies," about rebuilding the country after a nuclear war, prepared by the right-wing Hudson Institute in 1980, defines martial law as dealing "with the control of civilians by their own military forces in time of emergency."
The federal agency with the authority to organize and command the government's response to a national emergency is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This super-secret and elite agency was formed in 1979 under congressional measures that merged all federal powers dealing with civilian and military emergencies under one agency.
FEMA has its roots in the World War I partnership between government and corporate leaders who helped mobilize the nation's industries to support the war effort. The idea of a central national response to large-scale emergencies was reintroduced in the early 1970s by Louis Giuffrida, a close associate of then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan and his chief aide Edwin Meese.
Reagan appointed Giuffrida head of the California National Guard in 1969. With Meese, Giuffrida organized "war-games" to prepare for "statewide martial law" in the event that Black nationalists and anti-war protesters "challenged the authority of the state." In 1981, Reagan as president moved Giuffrida up to the big leagues, appointing him director of FEMA.
According to
Bush assembled a group of hawkish outsiders, called Team B, that released a report claiming the CIA ("Team A") had underestimated the dangers of Soviet nuclear attack. The report advised the development of elaborate plans for "civil defense" and post-nuclear government. Three years later, in 1979, FEMA was given ultimate responsibility for developing these plans.
Aware of the bad publicity FEMA was getting because of its role in organizing for a post-nuclear world, Reagan's FEMA chief Giuffrida publicly argued that the 1865 Posse Comitatus Act prohibited the military from arresting civilians.
However,
FEMA Inspector General John Brinkerhoff has written a memo contending
that the government doesn't need to suspend the Constitution to use
the full range of powers Congress has given the agency. FEMA has
prepared legislation to be introduced in Congress in the event of a
national emergency that would give the agency sweeping powers. The
right to "deputize" National Guard and police forces is included in
the package. But
Giuffrida has written that "Martial Rule comes into existence upon a determination (not a declaration) by the senior military commander that the civil government must be replaced because it is no longer functioning anyway." He adds that "Martial Rule is limited only by the principle of necessary force."
According to
DOMESTIC SPYING
Throughout the 1980s, FEMA was prohibited from engaging in intelligence gathering. But on July 6, 1989, Bush signed Executive Order 12681, pronouncing that FEMA's National Preparedness Directorate would "have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work." Recent events indicate that domestic spying in response to the looming Middle East war is now under way.
The New York Times reports that the FBI has ordered its agents around the country to question Arab-American leaders and business people in search of information on potential Iraqi "terrorist" attacks in response to a Gulf war.
A 1986 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) document entitled "Alien Terrorists and Other Undesirables: A Contingency Plan" outlines the potential round-up and incarceration in mass detainment camps of U.S. residents who are citizens of "terrorist" countries, chiefly in the Middle East. This plan echoed a 1984 FEMA nationwide "readiness exercise code-named REX-84 ALPHA, which included the rehearsal of joint operations with the INS to round up 40000 Central American refugees in the event of a U.S. invasion of the region. One of the 10 military bases established as detainment camps by REX-84 ALPHA, Camp Krome, Fla., was designated a joint FEMA-Immigration service interrogation center.
Recently, FEMA has been criticized in the media for inadequate response to the October, 1989 San Francisco earthquake. What the mainstream press has failed to cover is the agency's planned role in repressing domestic dissent in the event of an invasion abroad.
Source: The Guardian, Jan 16 1991
The Guardian is an independent radical news weekly. Subscriptions are available at $33.50 per year from The Guardian, 33 West 17th St., New York, NY 10011
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DATE OF UPLOAD: November 17, 1989 ORIGIN OF UPLOAD: Omni Magazine CONTRIBUTED BY: Donald Goldberg
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PARANET INFORMATION SERVICE BBS
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Although this article does not deal directly with
THE NATIONAL GUARDS (C) 1987 OMNI MAGAZINE MAY 1987 (Reprinted with permission and license to ParaNet Information Service and its affiliates.)
By Donald Goldberg
The mountains bend as the fjord and the sea beyond stretch
out before the viewer's eyes. First over the water, then a sharp
left turn, then a bank to the right between the peaks, and the
secret naval base unfolds upon the screen.
The scene is of a Soviet military installation on the Kola
Peninsula in the icy Barents Sea, a place usually off-limits to
the gaze of the Western world. It was captured by a small French
satellite called SPOT Image, orbiting at an altitude of 517 miles
above the hidden
**The Pentagon has created a new category of "sensitive" but
unclassified information that allows it to keep from public
access huge quantities of data that were once widely accessible.
**Defense Department officials have attempted to rewrite key laws
that spell out when the president can and cannot appropriate
private communications facilities.
**The Pentagon has installed a system that enables it to seize
control of the nation's entire communications network -- the
phone system, data transmissions, and satellite transmissions of
all kinds -- in the event of what it deems a "national
emergency." As yet there is no single, universally agreed-upon
definition of what constitutes such a state. Usually such an
emergency is restricted to times of natural disaster, war, or
when national security is specifically threatened. Now the
military has attempted to redefine emergency.
The point man in the Pentagon's onslaught on communications
is Assistant Defense Secretary Donald C. Latham, a former NSA
deputy chief. Latham now heads up an interagency committee in
charge of writing and implementing many of the policies that have
put the military in charge of the flow of civilian information
and communication. He is also the architect of National Security
Decision Directive 145 (NSDD 145), signed by Defense Secretary
Caspar Weinberger in 1984, which sets out the national policy on
telecommunications and computer-systems security.
First NSDD 145 set up a steering group of top-level
administration officials. Their job is to recommend ways to
protect information that is unclassified but has been designated
sensitive. Such information is held not only by government
agencies but by private companies as well. And last October the
steering group issued a memorandum that defined sensitive
information and gave federal agencies broad new powers to keep it
from the public.
According to Latham, this new category includes such data as
all medical records on government databases -- from the files of
the National Cancer Institute to information on every veteran who
has ever applied for medical aid from the Veterans Administration
-- and all the information on corporate and personal taxpayers in
the Internal Revenue Service's computers. Even agricultural
statistics, he argues, can be used by a foreign power against the
United States.
In his oversize yet Spartan Pentagon office, Latham cuts
anything but an intimidating figure. Articulate and friendly, he
could pass for a network anchorman or a television game show
host. When asked how the government's new definition of
sensitive information will be used, he defends the necessity for
it and tries to put to rest concerns about a new restrictiveness.
"The debate that somehow the DoD and NSA are going to
monitor or get into private databases isn't the case at all,"
Latham insists. "The definition is just a guideline, just an
advisory. It does not give the DoD the right to go into private
records."
Yet the Defense Department invoked the NSDD 145 guidelines
when it told the information industry it intends to restrict the
sale of data that are now unclassified and publicly available
from privately owned computer systems. The excuse if offered was
that these data often include technical information that might be
valuable to a foreign adversary like the Soviet Union.
Mead Data Central -- which runs some of the nation's largest
computer databases, such as Lexis and Nexis, and has nearly
200000 users -- says it has already been approached by a team of
agents from the Air Force and officials from the CIA and the FBI
who asked for the names of subscribers and inquired what Mead
officials might do if information restrictions were imposed. In
response to government pressure, Mead Data Central in effect
censured itself. It purged all unclassified government-supplied
technical data from its system and completely dropped the
National Technical Information System from its database rather
than risk a confrontation.
Representative Jack Brooks, a Texas Democrat who chairs the
House Government Operations Committee, is an outspoken critic of
the NSA's role in restricting civilian information. He notes
that in 1985 the NSA -- under the authority granted by NSDD 145
-- investigated a computer program that was widely used in both
local and federal elections in 1984. The computer system was
used to count more than one third of all votes cast in the United
States. While probing the system's vulnerability to outside
manipulation, the NSA obtained a detailed knowledge of that
computer program. "In my view," Brooks says, "this is an
unprecedented and ill-advised expansion of the military's
influence in our society."
There are other NSA critics. "The computer systems used by
counties to collect and process votes have nothing to do with
national security, and I'm really concerned about the NSA's
involvement," says Democratic congressman Dan Glickman of Kansas,
chairman of the House science and technology subcommittee
concerned with computer security.
Also, under NSDD 145 the Pentagon has issued an order,
virtually unknown to all but a few industry executives, that
affects commercial communications satellites. The policy was
made official by Defense Secretary Weinberger in June of 1985 and
requires that all commercial satellite operators that carry such
unclassified government data traffic as routine Pentagon supply
information and payroll data (and that compete for lucrative
government contracts) install costly protective systems on all
satellites launched after 1990. The policy does not directly
affect the data over satellite channels, but it does make the NSA
privy to vital information about the essential signals needed to
operate a satellite. With this information it could take control
of any satellite it chooses.
Latham insists this, too, is a voluntary policy and that
only companies that wish to install protection will have their
systems evaluated by the NSA. He also says industry officials
are wholly behind the move, and argues that the protective
systems are necessary. With just a few thousand dollars' worth
of equipment, a disgruntled employee could interfere with a
satellite's control signals and disable or even wipe out a
hundred-million-dollar satellite carrying government information.
At best, his comments are misleading. First, the policy is
not voluntary. The NSA can cut off lucrative government
contracts to companies that do not comply with the plan. The
Pentagon alone spent more than a billion dollars leasing
commercial satellite channels last year; that's a powerful
incentive for business to cooperate.
Second, the industry's support is anything but total.
According to the minutes of one closed-door meeting between NSA
officials -- along with representatives of other federal agencies
-- and executives from AT&T, Comsat, GTE Sprint, and MCI, the
executives neither supported the move nor believed it was
necessary. The NSA defended the policy by arguing that a
satellite could be held for ransom if the command and control
links weren't protected. But experts at the meeting were
skeptical.
"Why is the threat limited to accessing the satellite rather
than destroying it with lasers or high-powered signals?" one
industry executive wanted to know.
Most of the officials present objected to the high cost of
protecting the satellites. According to a 1983 study made at the
request of the Pentagon, the protection demanded by the NSA could
add as much as $3 million to the price of a satellite and $1
million more to annual operating costs. Costs like these, they
argue, could cripple a company competing against less expensive
communications networks.
Americans get much of their information through forms of
electronic communications, from the telephone, television and
radio, and information printed in many newspapers. Banks send
important financial data, businesses their spreadsheets, and
stockbrokers their investment portfolios, all over the same
channels, from satellite signals to computer hookups carried on
long distance telephone lines. To make sure that the federal
government helped to promote and protect the efficient use of
this advancing technology, Congress passed the massive
Communications Act of of 1934. It outlined the role and laws of
the communications structure in the United States.
The powers of the president are set out in Section 606 of
that law; basically it states that he has the authority to take
control of any communications facilities that he believes
"essential to the national defense." In the language of the
trade this is known as a 606 emergency.
There have been a number of attempts in recent years by
Defense Department officials to redefine what qualifies as a 606
emergency and make it easier for the military to take over
national communications.
In 1981 the Senate considered amendments to the 1934 act
that would allow the president, on Defense Department
recommendation, to require any communications company to provide
services, facilities, or equipment "to promote the national
defense and security or the emergency preparedness of the
nation," even in peacetime and without a declared state of
emergency. The general language had been drafted by Defense
Department officials. (The bill failed to pass the House for
unrelated reasons.)
"I think it is quite clear that they have snuck in there
some powers that are dangerous for us as a company and for the
public at large," said MCI vice president Kenneth Cox before the
Senate vote.
Since President Reagan took office, the Pentagon has stepped
up its efforts to rewrite the definition of national emergency
and give the military expanded powers in the United States. "The
declaration of 'emergency' has always been vague," says one
former administration official who left the government in 1982
after ten years in top policy posts. "Different presidents have
invoked it differently. This administration would declare a
convenient 'emergency.'" In other words, what is a nuisance to
one administration might qualify as a burgeoning crisis to
another. For example, the Reagan administration might decide
that a series of protests on or near military bases constituted a
national emergency.
Should the Pentagon ever be given the green light, its base
for taking over the nation's communications system would be a
nondescript yellow brick building within the maze of high rises,
government buildings, and apartment complexes that make up the
Washington suburb of Arlington, Virginia. Headquartered in a
dusty and aging structure surrounded by a barbed-wire fence is an
obscure branch of the military known as the Defense
Communications Agency (DCA). It does not have the spit and
polish of the National Security Agency or the dozens of other
government facilities that make up the nation's capital. But its
lack of shine belies its critical mission: to make sure all of
America's far-flung military units can communicate with one
another. It is in certain ways the nerve center of our nation's
defense system.
On the second floor of the DCA's four-story headquarters is
a new addition called the National Coordinating Center (NCC).
Operated by the Pentagon, it is virtually unknown outside of a
handful of industry and government officials. The NCC is staffed
around the clock by representatives of a dozen of the nation's
largest commercial communications companies -- the so-called
"common carriers" -- including AT&T, MCI, GTE, Comsat, and ITT.
Also on hand are officials from the State Department, the CIA,
the Federal Aviation Administration, and a number of other
federal agencies. During a 606 emergency the Pentagon can order
the companies that make up the National Coordinating Center to
turn over their satellite, fiberoptic, and land-line facilities
to the government.
On a long corridor in the front of the building is a series
of offices, each outfitted with a private phone, a telex machine,
and a combination safe. It's known as "logo row" because each
office is occupied by an employee from one of the companies that
staff the NCC and because their corporate logos hand on the wall
outside. Each employee is on permanent standby, ready to
activate his company's system should the Pentagon require it.
The National Coordinating Center's mission is as grand as
its title is obscure: to make available to the Defense
Department all the facilities of the civilian communications
network in this country -- the phone lines, the long-distance
satellite hookups, the data transmission lines -- in times of
national emergency. If war breaks out and communications to a
key military base are cut, the Pentagon wants to make sure that
an alternate link can be set up as fast as possible. Company
employees assigned to the center are on call 24 hours a day; they
wear beepers outside the office, and when on vacation they must
be replaced by qualified colleagues.
The center formally opened on New Year's Day, 1984, the same
day Ma Bell's monopoly over the telephone network of the entire
United States was finally broken. The timing was no coincidence.
Pentagon officials had argued for years along with AT&T against
the divestiture of Ma Bell, on grounds of national security.
Defense Secretary Weinberger personally urged the attorney
general to block the lawsuit that resulted in the breakup, as had
his predecessor, Harold Brown. The reason was that rather than
construct its own communications network, the Pentagon had come
to rely extensively on the phone company. After the breakup the
dependence continued. The Pentagon still used commercial
companies to carry more than 90 percent of its communications
within the continental United States.
The 1984 divestiture put an end to AT&T's monopoly over the
nation's telephone service and increased the Pentagon's obsession
with having its own nerve center. Now the brass had to contend
with several competing companies to acquire phone lines, and
communications was more than a matter of running a line from one
telephone to another. Satellites, microwave towers, fiberoptics,
and other technological breakthroughs never dreamed of by
Alexander Graham Bell were in extensive use, and not just for
phone conversations. Digital data streams for computers flowed
on the same networks.
These facts were not lost on the Defense Department or the
White House. According to documents obtained by Omni, beginning
on December 14, 1982, a number of secret meetings were held
between high-level administration officials and executives of the
commercial communications companies whose employees would later
staff the National Coordinating Center. The meetings, which
continued over the next three years, were held at the White
House, the State Department, the Strategic Air Command (SAC)
headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and at the