The business end of government: It always comes down to the barrel of a gun or the edge of an Executioner's blade."As some day it may happen that a victim must be found, I've got a little list -- I've got a little list, of society offenders who might well be underground, and who never would be missed -- who never would be missed!...
There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs [or, as we call them now, blogs]; all people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs....
All funny fellows, comic men, and clowns of private life-- they'd none of 'em be missed--they'd none of 'em be missed..... The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you. But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list, for they'd none of 'em be missed--they'd none of 'em be missed!"
For a long time, filed in the category of "Things We Always Knew But Couldn't Prove" we could find the assumption that the Regime has a Little List -- a database of people who would be subject to questioning, detention, or worse, in the event of a "national emergency."
We now can file that assumption in the category of "Awful Things We Know For Sure."
According to "The Last Roundup," a diligently researched and carefully written investigative piece in Radar magazine, The List is not an artifact of overheated imagination, but rather a tangible and portentious reality.
Although several former high-ranking government officials are cited by name in the Radar piece (some of whom spoke to the publication directly), the most important source is a "former senior government official who served with high level security clearances in five administrations." He chose to remain anonymous for reasons his key disclosure should make obvious:
"There exists a database of Americans who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived `enemies of the state' almost instantaneously."
The "List" is actually a database called Main Core that reportedly contains the names of at least 8 million Americans. Based on what is known of previous lists compiled by the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Radar speculates -- quite responsibly -- that Main Core "includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people."
As we can see, this is not the first time that the Feds have undertaken to assemble a master list of Troublesome People, to the extent existing technology made this possible.
In 1950, coincident with the Korean War, J. Edgar Hoover proposed the arrest and mass imprisonment of thousands suspected of disloyalty as a means of protecting the government from "treason, espionage and sabotage."
He had a Little List: J. Edgar Hoover, a key architect of the National Security State. For many years prior to that proposal, Hoover had been compiling his Little List, which he called a "Security Index. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote in a message to Sidney W. Souers, a special assistant for national security to President Truman.
Rounding up these purported troublemakers would be quite simple, Hoover continued; a "master warrant" could be attached to a list naming those subject to arrest, coupled with a presidential declaration suspending the habeas corpus guarantee. Then the FBI, working in collaboration with the military, would make arrangements for the indefinite detention of those people in military facilities around the nation.
Hoover initially sought permission to compile his Little List in 1946; two years later Attorney General Tom Clark consented. While his proposal wasn't acted on, it took root within the national security establishment, mutating into various similar proposals over the following decades.
At about the time Hoover (who, ironically enough, opposed the WWII-era roundup and detention of Japanese-Americans) was poring over his list of potential detainees, the security establishment was beavering away at "Operation High Point," a crash program to build a sprawling underground survival complex at Mount Weather, a tract of federally owned land near Bluemont, Virginia.
Mount Weather is the central node of the Regime's "Continuity of Government" network. Virtually impregnable, the facility has its own secure supplies of food, water, and power, as well as most of the amenities to which our "public servants" have become accustomed. (I don't know whether this would include a Strangelovian stable of nubile young playthings, but I would be surprised if it didn't.)
The true priorities of our ruling class can be deduced from this fact: While it has undertaken a detailed, expensive plan to ensure the continuity of government, there is no corresponding effort to ensure the continuity of freedom. In fact, a crisis of sufficient magnitude to justify activation of "continuity of government" plans would be perceived as a good and sufficient justification to dispense with the troublesome business of individual liberty outright.
What Lurks Beneath: Mount Weather -- the visible portion thereof -- in its verdant Virginia setting.
Alluded to in the 1962 novel (and 1964 film) Seven Days in May, the Mount Weather complex was the subject of a 1975 investigation by California Senator John V. Tunney, an unauthorized expose via a 1976 article in The Progressive, a controlled-release profile in a 1991 Time magazine piece, and a bizarre cameo in the atrocious 2002 film adaptation of Tom Clancy's exceptional novel The Sum of All Fears.
During his 1975 investigation of government surveillance activities, Senator Tunney discovered that Mount Weather also hosted a master electronic database compiled by FEMA on 100,000 Americans.
In its expose the following year, The Progressive reported that Mount Weather's computer systems could "obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers" -- which, Radar helpfully explains, was "a reference to other classified facilities." The FEMA/Mount Weather surveillance program was run entirely outside the law, and its information was inaccessible even to House and Senate "oversight" committees.
The next significant disclosure regarding the existence of The List and the role it would play in continuity of government planning came in the mid-1980s, when Oliver North's Rex 84 program received some unexpected -- and unwelcome -- scrutiny. In the event of a national emergency (whether in the form of a natural disaster, military crisis, mass terrorism, or some other catastrophe) Rex 84 envisioned the effective suspension of the Constitution, the appointment of regional military commanders to run state and local governments, and the detention of hundreds of thousands of people -- illegal aliens, criminal suspects, and sundry non-criminal troublemakers -- in a system of at least 10 military facilities across the country.
Radar points out that this element of Rex 84 grew out of existing federal contingency plans calling for "large-scale detention" of Americans in the event of widespread unrest. "Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of`militants' and `American negroes,' who were to be held at `assembly centers or relocation camps,'" notes the magazine.
Keeping tally of kills? That seems to be the purpose of the figures drawn on the side of this APC used by the Midland County Sheriff's Department in its terrorist assault on the FLDS community. (Hat tip: Infowars.com)
All of this helps underscore one reason why I have spent so much time examining the ongoing atrocity committed by the State of Texas against the FLDS community at Eldorado:
The assault on the YFZ Ranch by militarized police units; the subsequent seizure of children and mothers and their detention in facilities described by outraged medical professionals as "concentration camps"; the use of what could be called a "master warrant" -- obtained through what has to be conscious fraud on the part of law enforcement -- to place an entire community under arrest; the effective nullification (through judicial indifference) of the habeas corpus guarantee as it applies to the abducted children -- all of these outrages are part and parcel of the martial law system that has been developed over the past six decades. Indeed, the Eldorado Atrocity could be seen as that system in microcosm.
Therefore the question is not whether, but rather how extensively, that system will be put into use.
In order to illustrate how the Master Core database could be used, Radar sketches out the following scenario:
"[C]oordinated bombings in several American cities [culminate] in a major blast -- say, a suitcase nuke -- in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a `parallel government' that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state."
I must point out that what is described above fails to terrify me, since it is not noticeably removed from where we are now. Yes, there has been no mass evacuation of government personnel to Weather Mountain and its sister facilities, or any large-scale round-up of dissidents. But the Bush Regime has treated the other branches of government as if they were constitutional nullities -- both in matters of war and peace and domestic security.
It doesn't seem that likely to me that overt martial law will descend on our country as the result of one discrete catastrophic event. Instead, I see it as already realized in principle, and becoming a more tangible reality as opportunities present themselves. Our rulers don't need a second 9/11-style incident in order to grab more power than they have already claimed, although such a disaster would be useful in terms of cultivating public acceptance for the undisguised exercise of those powers. But that acceptance is being won incrementally, and at a remarkably accelerated rate.
To understand how this works, consider the case of former Texas Congressman Jack Brooks, featured in the film clip above trying to drag Rex 84 out of tenebrous realm of contingency planning. During the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, Brooks demanded that Col. North defend Rex 84 and its provisions for suspending constitutional government -- only to be slapped down by Committee Chairman Daniel Inoyue.
That happened, as I noted, in 1987. By 1993, Brooks -- by then Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee -- had become a craven apologist for the exercise of the very powers he had denounced, as least when "cultists" like Waco's Branch Davidians were on the receiving end. Speaking in the aftermath of the Mt. Carmel Holocaust, Brooks sneeringly said of the victims:
"Those people got what they deserved."
Why did those people "deserve" to be penned into a building and burned alive, or shot by paramilitary forces as they attempted to flee the flames? From the perspective of Brooks and his ilk, this was condign punishment for the supposed crime of resisting the lawless lethal violence of the State, in this case the unjustified initial assault by the ATF on the Mt. Carmel sanctuary.
Today, as FLDS parents are being told that they must, in effect, plead guilty to unspecified charges of child abuse as a condition of being permitted to associate with their own kidnapped children, tens of millions of Americans are giving voice to variations on the same incredibly cruel sentiments expressed by Jack Brooks fifteen years ago.
How many of those Americans could find their names on the Main Core list of potential "troublemakers"? How many of them, when given an opportunity to help the Regime's Willing Executioners with the task of "filling up the blanks," would do so with indecent eagerness?
His name was on a list, too: Patriot hero John Hancock. It's something akin to a certainty that anybody who has made himself conspicuous by opposing the Regime and its crimes, both foreign and domestic, has already inscribed his name on the Main Core list. Anybody worthy of our heritage should already be doing something that will have that result, and treat that prospect with the same insouciance displayed by John Hancock, who signed his name large enough "so that fat King George can read it without his glasses."
Such is the perverse temper of our times that genuine patriots shouldn't let their eyes close in well-earned slumber each night without doing something to earn the hostility of the Keepers of The List.
On sale now!
Dum spiro, pugno!
They Have a Little List
Reviewed by MCH
on
May 21, 2008
Rating:
Reviewed by MCH
on
May 21, 2008
Rating:
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