The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (37 page)

With members of the military being called upon to combat terrorism and illegal drugs, many fear military control over the civilian population, even in times of “national emergency,” will lead to draconian measures such as the establishment of large concentration camps.

The original creation and maintenance of such camps has been lost in a bewildering maze of executive orders (EOs) dating back to World War II. Other relocation EOs can be traced to the Kennedy presidency and were issued under the duress of the cold war and the Cuban missile crisis.

A brief search of the FEMA website shows that even now the government has many plans to evacuate major cities—whether it be because of tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, or a nuclear or biological strike. Where are those people to go? Who will feed them? How will they live? The answers to these questions remain elusive. And in the meantime, dozens of large military installations sit, mutely awaiting future inhabitants.

Alongside many former military bases that are technically closed but still being maintained, a growing number of civilian locations are being prepared for any “emergency.” One such facility is the State Fair of Virginia’s new home in Caroline County, designated as an emergency shelter in any emergency requiring a mass evacuation. The fair opened in late September 2009 on a new 360-acre site. Formerly known as Meadow Farm, the fair was a result of a 2007 deal between the State Fair of Virginia Inc. and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. The twenty-year agreement was reached after the state agreed to appropriate about $2.4 million to help build the main exhibition hall, which officials said could house almost fifteen hundred people in the event of an emergency.

Under the agreement, the facility is required to have a kitchen capable of preparing up to sixty-five hundred meals a day, restrooms that can accommodate more than twenty-two hundred people, backup generator power, ten acres of parking lots suitable for emergency-response operations, and two twenty-thousand-square-feet paved pads that could be used for tents or other temporary structures to include sheltering household pets.

In case doubts remain that the government is building and maintaining internment camps, the U.S. Army advertised jobs in 2009 for “internment/resettlement specialists.” These “specialists,” according to an army description, “are primarily responsible for day-to-day operations in a military confinement/correctional facility or detention/internment facility. I/R Specialists provide rehabilitative, health, welfare, and security to U.S. military prisoners within a confinement or correctional facility; conduct inspections; prepare written reports; and coordinate activities of prisoners/internees and staff personnel.”

Why are all these specialists needed? Clearly, there is no pressing need for additional personnel to intern or resettle the mere handful of al Qaeda members caught to date. Citizens should ask themselves who the quarantine centers are being prepared for and what sort of resettlement program these specialists will administer.

AMERICAN POLICE FORCE

A
DDING TO CONCERNS OVER
a police state presided over by FEMA or the military came word of what appeared to be the growth of private security contractors, similar to Blackwater (now Xe Services, LLC) and DynCorp.

In September 2009, representatives from the American Police Force (APF) held a news conference to announce plans to create a $27 million high-security prison and police training facility in Hardin, Montana. A spokesperson declined to name the force’s parent company. “Confusion and secrecy about American Police Force has grown during the last few weeks,” noted reporters Nick Lough and Katie Ussin of KURL8 TV News. “While they gave details for the site, other questions went unanswered. Where will the prisoners come from? What experience does APF have in prisoners and training police officers?”

APF spokesperson Becky Shay denied there was any secrecy involved. “APF has been here for 10 months but it has never been stealth,” said Shay, who had only days before taken the job of APF public relations director after covering the detention facility story for the
Billings Gazette.
Shay assured the media that the private police group would not house terror suspects from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a rumor that persisted in the area after the Hardin City Council approved the plan.

Associated Press reporter Matthew Brown wrote that the Two Rivers Detention Center was promoted “as the largest economic development project in decades in the small town of Hardin when the jail was built two years ago. But it has been vacant ever since.” Brown noted that the bonds used to finance the facility fell into default and that questions had arisen over the legitimacy of the APF.

“Government contract databases show no record of the company,” wrote Brown. “Security industry representatives and federal officials said they had never heard of it. On its Web site, the company lists as its headquarters a building in Washington near the White House that holds ‘virtual offices.’ A spokeswoman for the building said American Police Force never completed its application to use the address.”

On its website, the APF claimed to sell assault rifles, weapons, and military supplies internationally while providing security, investigative work, and other services to clients “in all 50 states and most countries.” APF literature also boasted “rapid response units awaiting our orders worldwide” capable of fielding a battalion-size team of special forces soldiers within seventy-two hours.

Maziar Mafi, a personal injury and medical malpractice attorney who was hired by APF, said APF was a new spin-off of a major security firm founded in 1984. He declined to name the parent firm.

Oddly, the APF’s logo is the double-headed eagle with fleur-de-lis emblem of the Republic of Serbia. Today, Serbia is a member of the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council of Europe and is a candidate for membership in the European Union. Could there be a connection between the APF and the globalists?

Writing anonymously due to fear of retaliation, one Hardin resident posted this on the Internet: “We have found out that our little town of Hardin is the ‘test town’ for President Obama’s new law to privatize the police force of local communities. Last night [September 4, 2009], the city council voted to disband our sheriff’s department and to bring in a private security company to police the town. Interestingly, earlier in the day, the mayor when asked in an interview about the privatization of our police department completely denied it and said that would not be done without a council meeting. Then that evening, a council meeting was held in regards to that very thing. At the beginning of this month, our local prison signed an agreement with the American Police Force which is a subsidiary of a larger private security force that the U.S. used in the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina.

“Yesterday, a convoy of twelve ‘blacked out’ Mercedes-Benz SUV’s were brought into town. They were already painted with Hardin’s colors and ‘Hardin Police Force’ was already painted on them! Hardin’s sheriff’s department will no longer be in operation after the month of October. During October, the Sheriff’s Department is to train this new security force in all the logistics of running the town of Hardin. If you go on the American Police Force site, you might notice that the logo they use is actually a Russian [Serbian] logo. I have been told that the man who came with this new security force as the captain has a thick Russian accent.”

The story of Hardin and the APF reached the national media and prompted Montana attorney general Steve Bullock to launch an investigation after it was learned that the man representing the APF, “Captain” Michael Hilton, was a Serbian immigrant with a long list of aliases. Apparently, Hilton had served time in U.S. prisons for fraud and had more than $1 million in judgments against him.

While the corporate mass media only publicized the jobs that would be created in Hardin and speculated that the APF could be a con, the alternative media noted that the APF claimed to run the U.S. Training Center in Moyock, North Carolina, the same center connected to Blackwater, the controversial recipient of large U.S. government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Officials at Xe/Blackwater tried to distance the company from the APF, stating the force was using its name illegally. Xe spokeswoman Stacy DeLuke said, “It’s bizarre. They have nothing to do with us. We have nothing to do with them.” However, the contact address in Moyock for both the U.S. Training Center (formerly the Blackwater Training Center) and the American Police Force was the same.

Paul Joseph Watson, a researcher and columnist for talk-show host Alex Jones’s web page, PrisonPlanet.com, wrote, “The fact that APF’s training center plans to recruit foreign assets who could then be patrolling the streets of America bossing U.S. citizens is obviously a frightening prospect, completely unconstitutional, and another reason why APF needs to abandon its plans to act as a private police force completely.”

William N. Grigg, writing on the Internet blog Pro Libertate, observed there was “something utterly surreal about the Hardin case; it’s as if some kind of martial law melodrama were being played out as an enhanced ‘reality’ program—something like
Red Dawn
meets
Jericho
with a touch of the Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast added for good measure.”

THE POSSE COMITATUS ACT

L
ESS THAN A MONTH
after the 9/11 attacks, former governor of Pennsylvania Tom Ridge arrived in his new office steps away from the Oval Office of President Bush, the man who created his job. Ridge’s new job was to head up the recently created Office of Homeland Security, which would coordinate forty-six different federal government agencies in an effort to protect the American people from terrorists. From its inception, the position was designed to become a permanent government department.

By 2006, Ridge had used his power as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to create a vast network of small suburban and rural counties that had their own Homeland Security departments and that were all answerable to the national department. This concentration of so much power into the DHS under a leader with a controversial past has been cause for concern by many Americans. During the Vietnam War, Tom Ridge participated in the infamous Phoenix Program, a “pacification” program responsible for the assassination of forty-five thousand Vietnamese and the torture and abuse of thousands.

Douglas Valentine, author of
The Phoenix Program,
wrote in a posting on the website Disinfo.com, “During the Vietnam War, under the CIA’s Phoenix program—which is the model for the Homeland Security Office—a terrorist suspect was anyone accused by one anonymous source. Just one. The suspect was then arrested, indefinitely detained in a CIA interrogation center, tortured until he or she (in some cases children as young as twelve) confessed, informed on others, died, or was brought before a military tribunal (such as Bush is proposing) for disposition.

“In thousands of cases, innocent people were imprisoned and tortured based on the word of an anonymous informer who had a personal grudge or was actually a Viet Cong double agent feeding the names of loyal citizens into the Phoenix blacklist. At no point in the process did suspects have access to due process or lawyers, and thus, in 1971, four U.S. Congresspersons stated their belief that the Phoenix Program violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteed to protect civilians in time of war….”

When Ridge was appointed, the White House announced that he would work in conjunction with Bush’s deputy national security adviser, U.S. Army general Wayne Downing. This announcement indicated to the public that the military would play a prominent role in counterterrorism activities. Few thought to ask if this was a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA), the law that prohibits the U.S. military from conducting law enforcement duties against the American public.

The PCA has never really been challenged in this nation’s history because it addresses a grievance that was used to proclaim the American Revolution when early colonists were forced to feed and quarter King George’s troops while submitting to the troops’ authority. The act embodies the traditional principle of separation of military and civilian authority, one of the fundamental precepts of a democratic government and a cornerstone of American liberty. Posse Comitatus, Latin for a support group of citizens for law enforcement (i.e., a posse), wasn’t passed until 1878. The act was a direct result of the outrage over Southern states being at the mercy of inept or corrupt military authorities during Reconstruction. The Posse Comitatus Act specifically prohibits most members of the armed services (the Coast Guard is exempted for its coastal protection duties) from exercising police powers on nonfederal property within the United States.

Posse Comitatus has been slowly shredded since 1981, when Congress allowed an exception to be made for the war on drugs. The military was allowed to be used for drug interdiction along the nation’s borders. This small, and what appeared to be sensible, action at the time soon grew out of proportion. Congress, still unable to come to grips with the true social causes of drug abuse, in 1989 designated the Department of Defense as the lead agency in drug interdiction.

In the tragedy at Waco on April 19, 1993, military snipers were on hand and General Wesley Clark used tanks from Fort Hood to bulldoze the burning Branch Davidian church. Clark’s command was authorized because federal officials used the pretext that the Davidians were involved with drugs. No evidence of drugs was ever found.

On April 19, 1995, the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, and President Bill Clinton proposed yet another circumvention of the PCA to allow the military to help civilian investigators look for weapons of mass destruction. Around the same time, Congress considered legislation to allow troops to enforce customs and immigration laws at the borders. This legislation didn’t pass.