What is perhaps most alarming to many conspiracy theorists are powers that the President and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can assume during a state of national emergency, which the President can (and has) declared at any time. Each president going back in recent history declared 75-200+ national emergencies to justify issuing executive orders that have the power of legislation. Most of these executive orders have to do with the operation of government and foreign policy; one of Bill Clinton's executive orders, for example, required Federal buildings to become more energy-efficient. Other executive orders, however, are more ominous, which rendered into law powers of the Federal government during a national emergency. On September 30, 1973, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Charles McMathias (R-Maryland) made a joint statement regarding these orders:"The President has the power to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, call reserve forces amounting to two and a half million men to duty, institute martial law, seize and control all means of transportation, regulate all private enterprise, restrict travel and in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of Americans . . ."Most [of these laws] remain a potential source of virtually unlimited power for a President should he choose to activate them. It is possible that some future President could exercise this vast authority in an attempt to place the United States under authoritarian rule.
"While the danger of a dictatorship through legal means may seem remote to us today, recent history records Hitler seizing control through the use of emergency powers provisions contained in the laws of the Weimar Republic."
How did the President gain these broad and dramatic powers? Again, by granting them to himself via executive order. In current times, despite the present wave of patriotism (with the Michigan Militia reportedly offering to help President Bush with homeland security), these powers, coupled with genuine emergencies now and in the future, could make one concerned. Coupled with ECHELON, a vast global intelligence-gathering network (and Carnivore, the FBI capability to read emails), they could make one nervous. Even paranoid.
I believe that Earling Carothers "Jim" Garrison, District Attorney for New Orleans who put local businessman Clay Betrand on trial in connection with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, sums it all up perfectly in the October 1967 Playboy interview:
PLAYBOY: Many of the professional critics of the Warren Commission appear to be prompted by political motives: Those on the left are anxious to prove Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy within the establishment; and those on the right are eager to prove the assassination was an act of "the international Communist conspiracy." Where would you place yourself on the political spectrum--right, left or center?JIM GARRISON: That's a question I've asked myself frequently, especially since this investigation started and I found myself in an incongruous and disillusioning battle with agencies of my own Government. I can't just sit down and add up my political beliefs like a mathematical sum, but I think, in balance, I'd turn up somewhere around the middle. Over the years, I guess I've developed a somewhat conservative attitude--in the traditional libertarian sense of conservatism, as opposed to the thumbscrew-and-rack conservatism of the paramilitary right--particularly in regard to the importance of the individual as opposed to the State and the individual's own responsibilities to humanity . . .
I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I've always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers. I'm concerned about all of this because it isn't a German phenomenon; it's a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change, there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow men.
What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly eroding into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it's based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the State. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we've built since 1945, the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and the Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.
In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn't the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here the process is more subtle, but the end results are the same. I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the State and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own long experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
