The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (36 page)
Read The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy Online
Authors: Jim Marrs
M
UCH OF THE MONEY
paid to government informants comes from the Asset Forfeiture Fund (AFF), a controversial program that confiscates real assets, such as property, homes, cars, aircraft, boats, jewelry, financial instruments, and even whole businesses, from those convicted of a crime. In 2005 alone, $614.5 million worth of assets were deposited into the AFF.
Under the AFF, there are two types of forfeiture—criminal and civil. In a criminal forfeiture case, the defendant is always innocent until proven guilty, and it is the responsibility of the prosecution to prove that the defendant should forfeit his or her property. In civil forfeiture proceedings, the court presumes the defendant is guilty and the property owner has the burden of proving the property was not involved in any wrongdoing. Critics have complained that the AFF can seize an innocent person’s property even if it is used by someone else to commit a crime without the owner’s permission or knowledge. Forfeiture laws have now been used by local law enforcement in connection with local issues, including unsafe housing, prostitution, and even drunk driving.
The AFF’s property seizures prompted chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Henry Hyde to state, “They don’t have to convict you. They don’t even have to charge you with a crime. But they have your property.” Bob Barr, a Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 2008, noted, “In many jurisdictions, it has become a monetary tail wagging the law enforcement dog.” The practice of confiscating property has prompted protests from civil libertarians and attorneys, but in today’s fearful society, the protests have not worked.
I
N
A
PRIL
2009, P
RESIDENT
Obama’s science adviser John P. Holdren stated publicly that the federal government was going to increase geoengineering, perhaps to include spraying “pollutants” into the upper atmosphere to retard global warming. Some suspicious researchers saw this as the first public acknowledgment of what many people believe is a controversial aerial spraying program known as Chemtrails. Holdren gave no details on what the “pollutant” particles might be, nor did he explain how they would be dispersed into the sky. Some scientists, including the late Dr. Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” a founder of the “Star Wars” missile defense system, and the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film of that name, have proposed using balloons or military aircraft to seed the sky with millions of tons of sulfur or heavy metals to create a cloud cover to deflect sun rays and prevent further heating of the Earth. Some scientists warned such a program would turn blue skies milky white and perhaps cause droughts and further ozone depletion.
Holdren conceded the possibility of “grave side effects,” but said, “We might get desperate enough to want to use it.”
Many researchers and bloggers believed that Holdren’s proposed program has been secretly under way since about 1997. “Reports of chemtrails, jet plumes emitted from planes that hang in the air for hours and do not dissipate like condensation trails, often blanketing the sky in criss-cross patterns, have increased dramatically over the last 10 years. Many have speculated that they are part of a government program to alter climate, inoculate humans against certain pathogens, or even to toxify humans as part of a population reduction agenda,” stated one such article entitled “Weather Wars and Chemtrails.” “The project is closely tied to an idea by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who ‘proposed sending aircraft 747s to dump huge quantities of sulfur particles into the far-reaches of the stratosphere to cool down the atmosphere.’ Such programs merely scratch the surface of what is likely to be a gargantuan and overarching black-budget funded project to geo-engineer the planet, with little or no care for the unknown environmental consequences this could engender.”
Obama augmented this potential public hazard by appointing people to the Department of Agriculture who were fully aligned with genetic engineering, the use of fluoride, and the irradiation of food. As usual, this was done in the name of the public health.
A
DDING TO CONTROVERSIES OVER
the environment was the fact that the scientific community hasn’t even reached a consensus about whether or not the planet is warming. As it stands, scientists may be arguing forever. Contradicting reports further complicated the debate. In the spring of 2009, news headlines proclaimed, “Antarctic Ice Melting Faster Than Expected.” Only one week later, there were headlines reading, “Antarctic Ice Spreading.” Both events were blamed on an increase in man-made gases. Clearly something is happening to the planet, because data continue to indicate that something is quickly changing the planet’s Arctic regions. The latest satellite observations of sea ice in the Artic show the ice cover appears to be shrinking and the ice cap is getting smaller, and thinner as well. The ice has been receding more in the summers and not growing back to its previous size and thickness during the winters.
But what if it’s the case that politics, and not solid science, is behind the endless global warming debate? The debate intensified in 2006 with the release of former vice president Al Gore’s documentary
An Inconvenient Truth.
Since its release Gore has traveled the world forcefully arguing that human-generated carbon emissions from automobiles, aircrafts, and factories are the cause of the earth’s warming trend.
But Gore’s critics have pointed out that huge profits can be made from being a global warming alarmist and that Gore heads a firm that is in line to reap the benefits of Gore’s eco-conservatism. According to online reports, Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, which invests in solar, wind, and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe. Critics claim that as chairman of the firm, Gore stands to profit handsomely from his global environmental crusade.
With great irony, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research (TCPR) criticized Gore by pointing out that Gore’s Tennessee home used “Twenty times as much electricity as the average household nationwide.” Gore supporters pointed out that Gore’s “home” of twenty rooms needed special security measures and that the Gore family bought energy produced from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. However, the TCPR reported that, according to its analysis, the Gores still consumed 10 percent more yearly energy than before their home was equipped with eco-friendly energy-saving devices. Despite news reports on his home as an “energy hog” by Fox News and
BusinessWeek,
a Gore spokeswoman defended his lifestyle by countering that his investments in renewable energy compensated for his power consumption.
When Texas Republican representative Joe Barton tried to question Al Gore’s carbon emissions statistics during testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the former vice president compared scientists who question global warming to indicted stock swindler Bernie Madoff.
“It is important to look at sources of science you rely on,” Gore told Barton. “With all due respect, I believe you have relied on people you have trusted who have given you bad information. I don’t blame the investors who trusted Bernie Madoff but he gave them bad information.”
Confusion over the global warming issue’s legitimacy continued with the news that, in August 2009, the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) admitted it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature research because of an alleged lack of storage space. CRU data served as the foundation for several major international studies claiming that the earth’s global warming crisis is a real issue. These studies were used to gain support for the cap-and-trade legislation passed by Congress in mid-2009, officially called the American Clean Air and Security Act. “CRU’s destruction of data, however, severely undercuts the credibility of those studies,” stated a news release from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a Washington-based public interest group dedicated to free enterprise and limited government.
In October 2009, the advocacy group petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review its policies based on the CRU research. CEI general counsel Sam Kazman said, “EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data. But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable. If EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”
Some critics claim that Gore is operating on bad information as well and note that the current warming trend may include our entire solar system—polar caps on Mars are shrinking, ice is melting on the moons of Jupiter, and the outer planets appear more luminescent, which is an indication that they too are warming. Speculation over why the solar system is warming systemwide ranges from lack of sunspot activity to the approach of some celestial object.
If the entire solar system is warming, then this theory calls into question the idea that global warming on Earth is only induced by humans. On May 19, 2009, record low spring temperatures were recorded in twenty-eight states. “If there had been record warmth in 28 states, you would have seen ‘we’re-causing-global-warming’ headlines plastered across the front page of almost every newspaper in the country, and TV hosts would have gleefully announced the dire news…. But had you even heard about this?” asked author and attorney Alfred Lambremont Webre who, along with former Fairchild Industries corporate manager Dr. Carol Rosin, founded the Institute for Cooperation in Space.
Proponents on both sides of issues such as the global warming argument accuse each other of using fearmongering tactics to impose a police state on the public.
The federal EPA pointed to the combustion of fossil fuels in vehicles, gas and coal plants, and industry as the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide (CO
2
), or greenhouse gas, emissions. This conclusion remains controversial. In December 2009, the EPA went so far as to declare carbon dioxide—a product of normal human expiration (we all breath out CO
2
)—a health hazard, paving the way for more regulation of emissions. Adding to the argument that the government is using fearmongering to achieve control over a dumbed-down public, Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT, pointed out that CO
2
is not a pollutant. “[I]t’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving—I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality,” he said.
Fears over global warming resulted in the controversial American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, legislation that requires a limit, or cap, of how much CO
2
a company may emit into the air. Companies that reduce CO
2
more rapidly than others may conduct emission trading, selling or trading their emission credits to firms that overproduce. Opponents of cap and trade voiced fears over loss of jobs and federal control not only over businesses but private homes. Despite a narrow House victory (219 to 212), Speaker Nancy Pelosi pronounced, “We passed transformational legislation which takes us into the future.” She took congratulatory phone calls from Obama, Al Gore, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
Obama had joined the global warming chorus in April 2007, with a plan for a national low-carbon fuel standard (NLCFS). Speaking to students at the University of New Hampshire’s Durham campus, then-senator Obama proclaimed, “This is our generation’s moment to save future generations from global catastrophe by creating a market for clean-burning fuels that can stop the dangerous transformation of our climate. In states like New Hampshire and California, people are taking the lead on producing fuels that use less carbon. It’s time we made this a national commitment to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and take the equivalent of 32 million cars’ worth of pollution out of the atmosphere.”
His fervent support for reducing vehicle pollution indicated that Obama either did not truly understand what is causing solar-system-wide warming or has fallen in line with the globalist attempt to control the lives of individuals through the scare tactics of global warming.
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
—A
LEKSANDR
S
OLZHENITSYN
,
Nobel Prize–Winning Novelist and Survivor of the Communist Gulag System
F
EARMONGERING HAS ALWAYS BEEN
a favored tool of despots and tyrants trying to limit public freedom. Only dazed zombies accept increasing social control by allowing threats of terrorism and depression to be held over their heads.
MODEL STATE EMERGENCY HEALTH POWERS ACT
I
MAGINE A PIMPLE-FACED EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD
dressed in camouflage and armed with a fully loaded M-16 at your door informing you that you must leave your home because the authorities fear a pandemic in your city. If you protest and say you’ll stay and take your chances, you are in violation of the law and subject to arrest, fine, and imprisonment. After seeing the boy’s armed companions, you decide to join your neighbors in a military truck destined for a “relocation camp” many miles from your home. At the camp, you are instructed to stand in line for a vaccination against flu, smallpox, anthrax, or whatever the latest threat might be. You recall how, in past years, so many vaccines were proven to be tainted. Yet if you refuse the inoculation, you are again subject to fine and jail.
If this sounds like a paranoid view of an Orwellian nightmare, it should be noted that since 2002 laws authorizing such action had already been passed in thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia. Under this act, named the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, authorities would be able to federalize all medical personnel, from EMTs to physicians, and enforce quarantines. They would have the right to vaccinate the public, with or without its consent, seize and destroy private property without compensation, and ration medical supplies, food, fuel, and water in a declared emergency.
The legislation was drawn up as a model law for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention following the anthrax attacks that occurred in the Capitol after 9/11. Not much has been mentioned in recent years about these attacks. What many don’t know is that investigations showed that the anthrax pathogens from the attacks were military grade and unavailable outside the U.S. Armed Forces. To date, one suspect was exonerated after several years, and the next man named in those attacks died while in federal custody.
After being passed, the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act was then sent to each state legislature with a federal endorsement. Federal officials claimed the laws were needed to provide local authorities the legal right to make quick decisions in an emergency involving contagious or deadly pathogens.
Though many states modified or outright rejected this legislation, no one should relax just yet.
T
HE CREATION OF INTERNMENT
or relocation camps in times of crisis is nothing new.
During the War Between the States, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a critical mainstay of American justice that allows defendants the right to face their accusers. This action was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because Lincoln did not previously obtain approval from Congress to suspend habeas corpus.
But then during World War I, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the president to seize the property of enemy aliens without a hearing. The court stated, “National security might not be able to afford the luxuries of litigation and the long delays which preliminary hearings traditionally have entailed.” These words led to the Supreme Court consent for the rounding up, incarceration, and property seizure of Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Even former attorney general Janet Reno, who headed the U.S. Department of Justice during the tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Waco, expressed concern over the creation of a martial state. “I have trouble with a war that has no endgame and I have trouble with a war that generates so many concerns about individual liberties,” she told an audience at Old Dominion University in 2002.
Reno asked Americans to remember the lessons learned from the unjust imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II and added that the government would be hard-pressed to find a legal basis for prosecuting many of the Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
Initially, most Americans thought little of jailing terrorism suspects in Cuba. It was only after the prosecutions that followed the horrors at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq that the average American began to question the American military’s methods.
Democratic senator Richard J. Durbin, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, tried for more than two years to conduct hearings on the treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners. Durbin had spent six and a half years as a prisoner in North Vietnam. “This is not a new question,” he told fellow Congress members in 2005. “We are not writing on a blank slate. We have entered into treaties over the years, saying this is how we will treat wartime detainees. The United States has ratified these treaties. They are the law of the land as much as any statute we passed. They have served our country well in past wars. We have held ourselves to be a civilized country, willing to play by the rules, even in time of war. Unfortunately, without even consulting Congress, the Bush administration unilaterally decided to set aside these treaties and create their own rules about the treatment of prisoners.”
Durbin pointed out that President Bush and his appointees had unilaterally created a new detention policy based on the belief that prisoners in the war on terrorism have no legal rights—no right to a lawyer, no right to see the evidence against them, no right to challenge their detention. In fact, the U.S. government has claimed detainees have no right to challenge their detention, even if they claim they were being tortured.
“For example,” he explained, “they [the Bush administration] have even argued in court they have the right to indefinitely detain an elderly lady from Switzerland who writes checks to what she thinks is a charity that helps orphans but actually is a front that finances terrorism.”
Senator Durbin shocked his colleagues and angered Bush supporters when he cited an FBI account of how Guantanamo prisoners had been chained to cells in extreme temperatures and deprived of food and water. Durbin stated, “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”
It is disturbing to note that some days later, Durbin was forced to issue an apology. A tearful Durbin told his fellows, “Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line. To them, I extend my heartfelt apologies.” Is this what happens to a person who brings reason and compassion to the table amid fearmongering?
There are those who claim that the quarantine centers such as the one at Guantanamo are simply unsubstantiated theory. These people should think again.
One of former attorney general John Ashcroft’s visions was to have the power to strip American citizens of their constitutional rights, including access to the court system. Ashcroft wanted to indefinitely imprison those citizens considered “enemy combatants” in internment camps.
“The proposed camp plan should trigger immediate congressional hearings and reconsideration of Ashcroft’s fitness for this important office,” declared Jonathan Turley, a professor of constitutional law at George Washington University Law School. Turley, who previously actively supported Ashcroft during his contentious nomination hearing, reflected, “Whereas al Qaeda is a threat to the lives of our citizens, Ashcroft has become a clear and present threat to our liberties.”
Apparently, Ashcroft’s plan to build camps was continued after he left office in February 2005. In January 2006, the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton Co., KBR, announced it was awarded a contingency contract from the Department of Homeland Security to construct emergency facilities in support of its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit. The maximum total value of the contract is $385 million and consists of a one-year base period with four one-year options. KBR had been working under similar grants since 2002.
This call for contractors to build holding camps only increased the anxiety of conspiracy theorists. Such facilities, whether in the form of empty but maintained military bases or newly built accommodations, do exist in the United States. They only await inmates.
T
HE
F
EDERAL
E
MERGENCY
M
ANAGEMENT
A
GENCY
(FEMA) is designated as the lead agency concerned with detention centers under the Department of Homeland Security. This organization has plans in its files to evacuate cities and use sprawling temporary camps to house evacuees.
Under the pretext of planning for a war on terrorism, FEMA has dusted off and augmented contingency plans to counter the effects of nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. In mid-2002, FEMA asked its vendors, contractors, and consultants to envision the logistics of millions of Americans being displaced in the event that American cities come under attack. The firms were given a deadline of January 2003 to be ready to establish displaced-persons camps. FEMA made it known that it already had ordered significant numbers of tents and trailers to be used for housing.
The Internet is full of sites detailing a string of concentration camps across America, many based on ill-informed rumor and speculation. But others are quite real, ready and waiting for lines of detainees or dissidents to be herded inside. While some may cast this off as paranoia, these camps do exist. Most of them are situated in military bases that are reported closed or maintained by skeleton crews. Others are operated by FEMA. Some facilities began as World War II camps for Axis prisoners.
During the Clinton administration, the Base Re-Alignment and Closing (BRAC) program closed several bases but kept them maintained for “future use” in case of “national emergency,” be it war, pandemic, insurrection, or natural disaster. All bases have barracks, dining facilities, latrines, and showers, and can house thousands of people on short notice.
Military installations that have been designated as such centers include Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, an active National Guard training base with hundreds of buildings that include barracks, warehouses, mess halls, motor transport facilities, and a railroad track with loading docks. This facility was converted into a concentration camp within seventy-two hours to house Mariel boatlift refugees from Cuba in 1980 and Vietnamese refugees following the fall of Saigon. Warehouses at Fort Chaffee currently hold massive amounts of barbed wire, fencing material, mattresses, blankets, and other supplies. Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, has also been used to hold various refugees in the past, primarily Cubans. Other military bases designated as potential detention centers include McAlester Ammunition Depot and Fort Sill in Oklahoma; Fort Drum, New York; Fort Irwin and Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Base, California; Fort Lewis, Washington; Fort Bliss, Texas; Fort McCoy, Wisconsin; Camp Grayling, Michigan; Fort Riley, Kansas; and Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota.
Author and retired U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel Craig Roberts said he chased down a number of rumors and thirdhand accounts of American concentration camps and found many untrue or outdated. But he also found some sites fully ready to operate as detention facilities. Roberts explained, “In actuality, there are two true sets of camps. First is the military, which can use any base at will to house detainees…. Fort Chaffee, for instance, has already been used twice for this purpose—first with the Cuban ‘boat people,’ and second for Vietnamese refugees. It continues to have warehouses full of mattresses, bunks, barbed wire rolls, fence posts, etc. All of these were to be used around empty barracks to provide for a detention facility if needed…. Some of the ‘closed’ military bases have been designated as ‘emergency holding facilities’ and already have barracks, mess halls, compounds and latrines in place. All they need are guards, administrators, logistics people and they’re in business. All this can be accomplished in 72 hours…. Operational plans are in existence for the ‘handling of civilian prisoners and laborers on military installations, both male and female.’
“The second category is FEMA. We know they have let a contract for 1,000 ‘emergency relocation camps’ in case of widespread terrorism, biological or chemical attacks on the cities. Again, this can be speedy. The President can declare a national emergency, evoke [Executive Order] 11490, and take over the country without deferring to Congress or the Constitution. Bingo! New World Order in a couple of days.”
Roberts said the worst of these camps is in Alaska. “There is a million acre ‘facility’ near Elmendorf AFB in Alaska that is called the ‘Alaska Mental Health Facility,’” said Roberts. “An exercise by the AF was conducted in the mid-90s where they tested how many cargo aircraft could fly in and out of Elmendorf from all over the country in a three-day period, operating 24/7. To me, there is only one ‘cargo’ that they would be taking from all over the country to Alaska, right next to the mental health facility and that’s people. You can look it up yourself. I think it’s the Alaska Mental Health Act, dated 1955 or ’56. The place has been federalized and still exists. It is our version of Siberia and the gulag.”
On January 22, 2009, Democratic representative Alcee Hastings of Florida moved to legalize relocation camps by introducing H.R. 645, the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act. The purpose of the bill was to direct the secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations. The bill was referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, in addition to the Committee on Armed Services, then later to the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, where it remained as of early 2010.
