Red List, Blue List, Black List, You List…James Wesley, Rawles!
Survivalblog.com
February 8, 2016
There has been a lot of conjecture in the past 40 years in patriot circles about the existence of government “round up lists”. Large-scale disaster and war planning exercises, like REX-84 (Readiness Exercise-1984) and Jade Helm 2015, have stimulated endless discourse about whether or not the government maintains a so-called “red list” and “blue list” of people that they deem to be dissidents who they might target for harassment, travel restrictions, or even detention without due process of law. Because any such lists would presumably be developed and updated under the wraps of a security classification and the Need To Know rule, this topic is understandably rife with conjecture, speculation, and even downright fabrication. So, in this essay, I will do my best to restrain my inner John Bircher and just stick to the facts. I’ll simply state the facts and add a bit of well-reasoned extrapolation, based on known technological trends.
The Real Face of FEMA
The centerpiece of all the speculation is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In my estimation, most of the chit chat on the Internet about “secret FEMA camps” is highly sensationalized. Civil internment is probably the lowest priority of any of FEMA’s contingency missions, and some would describe it as an almost hypothetical contingency.
Most Americans don’t realize it, but FEMA’s key mission is not disaster relief to the general public. Instead, their highest priority mission is assuring Continuity of Government (COG) following an external attack or following a widespread disaster that disrupts command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) assets and processes. If FEMA’s budget were ever drastically slashed, then the very last of their missions to be de-funded would be COG. In FEMA-speak, the COG part of their mission is listed under “National Continuity Programs”. They prefer to use the term Continuity of Operations (COOP), and that same term is used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These taskings fall under the purview of FEMA’s National Continuity Programs Directorate and are organized per the National Continuity Policy Implementation Plan (NCPIP).
The COG/COOP mission was further clarified in 2007, under the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20. Therein, the term COG morphed into “Enduring Constitutional Government” (ECG).
A wiki article on NSPD 51 notes: “Conservative activist Jerome Corsi and Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild have said that [NSPD 51] is a violation of the Constitution of the United States in that the three branches of government are separate and equal, with no single branch coordinating the others.”
A 2009 document prepared for the transition of the executive branch of government to the incoming Obama administration used the following euphemistic vanilla wording to describe FEMA’s COG/COOP mission:
“FEMA provides continuity services, not only for FEMA, but also for the entire Federal government, across the Nation, for common and asymmetric threats alike. It is essential for FEMA to maintain high-performance continuity services in the form of exercises, planning, standards, training, communications, and resiliency measures.”
The Rest…HERE
