by James Wesley Rawles
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 almosthypothetical 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).
