Where is fema concentration camps

These air tight seal containers would be perfect to bury victims of plague or biological warfare in, wouldn't they? FACT: The black polypropylene products purported to be coffins are grave liners, or burial vaults, manufactured by Convington, Ga. In this case, they are examples of the company's Standard Air Seal model. The use of a burial vault, which prevents the collapse of cemetery ground and protects the casket, is a common requirement when a body is interred.

The filmed lot in Madison, Ga. Of the , or so in-ground burials in the U. According to company Vice President of Operations Michael Lacey, there are approximately 50, vaults in storage in Madison. Furthermore, Lacey has said the company maintains detailed records of product ownership and is audited annually, to insure all vaults are accounted for. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation.

Kennedy signed a series of executive orders that outlined the basic framework for agency responsibilities during a national emergency. Most of those have since been revoked, or rolled into a single, more comprehensive executive order signed by President Reagan.

Safeguards were written into the current framework of responsibilities, declaring that any emergency preparation or actions "shall be consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States. According to Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale Law School, "The question of whether executive power could be abused so as to act inconsistently with the law has been a central constitutional concern for years.

But the question in this case is whether it's right to look at year-old executive orders without studying what came after them. Pitzer gives the example of a refugee camp: if people are not allowed to leave, and are systematically denied their rights, then it starts to resemble more sinister creations. As authoritarians and rightwing populists reach positions of power in various parts of the world, liberals are voicing fears that history is repeating itself.

There is no shortage of threats in the current century — from environmental catastrophe to the unfolding coronavirus pandemic — that are creating such conditions.

I t is tempting to regard the concentration camp as an anomaly, but for some observers, such camps are a grim reflection of the way modern states work. After the second world war, as knowledge of the Holocaust became widespread, leading theorists sought to offer explanations for the genocide that had taken place, and the methods used to carry it out. Concentration camps were indeed colonial in origin. Their earliest uses came at the turn of the 20th century — by the Spanish in to put down a rebellion in Cuba, by the US in to do similar in the Philippines, and by the British empire in southern Africa during the Boer war of The first use of concentration camps for a deliberate policy of extermination was not in Europe but in German South West Africa — modern-day Namibia — between and Germany only recently officially acknowledged its treatment of the Herero and Nama tribes as genocide.

The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt also turned her attention to camps after the war. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt pointed out that when France was occupied by Nazi Germany, for instance, the Gestapo was able to make use of draconian police powers already in existence to round up and detain civilians. These existed because France, like many other states in Europe, had been unable to deal with the mass displacement of people in the aftermath of the first world war and had instituted harsh measures to deal with unwanted migrants.

In , Arendt had her own direct experience of this relatively novel form of containment. After fleeing Germany for France, she was placed in an internment camp at Gurs, near the Pyrenees.

The inmates had to endure overcrowding, disease and insufficient food rations, and were made to live together regardless of the fact that some were Nazi party members and others, like Arendt, were Jewish refugees. That the British, Americans, Spanish, French and Germans, among other nations, had all used concentration camps led some thinkers to ask whether such camps were inevitable features of the modern state.

Perhaps the most provocative answer comes from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose ideas have grown in prominence in the past two decades.

For Agamben, the existence of the concentration camp reveals something fundamental about power — who holds it, and what gives them the authority to wield it. Sovereignty, as Agamben sees it, is founded on absolute power over human life, and has been since ancient times.

In the past, sovereignty would have been concentrated in the figure of the monarch; modern states are supposed to have improved upon monarchy by restraining the arbitrary use of power through democratic checks and balances.

But, according to Agamben, the tendency to banish and dehumanise keeps on coming back in the form of the concentration camp: a space where people are outside the law, yet more subject to its power than anywhere else.

For Agamben, this reveals the basis on which power is exercised by modern states. By seeking to identify common patterns across specific societies, at different moments in history, they warn that all modern states have the potential to set up concentration camps. Misconstrued, however, they can end up obscuring crucial differences — such as the distinction between camps used in a deliberate policy of extermination, and those where people die through neglect.

Holocaust deniers, for instance, or people who seek to downplay the severity of colonial massacres, often try to muddy these distinctions. When theory becomes dogma, it can also limit our understanding of the present. The low-tech film featured only illustrations and animations of stick figures—no live action—because by the s civil defense planners had grown tired of retaping propaganda films every time fashion or car styles changed.

So why not just give up, lie down, and die? That idea could bring senseless and useless death to many, for protection is possible. And your own chances of survival will be much greater if you remember these facts about Protection in the Nuclear Age. Then would come detailed evacuation instructions: FEMA would distribute millions of preprinted brochures, perhaps going door to door or perhaps by distributing it with local newspapers.

They also took out ads in local telephone books. Together, FEMA estimated the multimedia campaign would boost survival rates by 8 to 12 percent. Even the evacuation of major cities like New York City were carefully planned. However impractical in reality, there was no faulting the level of detail of the page plan for evacuating New York, which included both a primary plan and 11 alternatives. Each of the five boroughs would rely on different transit modes to evacuate over the course of precisely 3.

The per-hour capacity of each road out of New York had been carefully calculated; prepositioned bulldozers would help ensure smooth travel, quickly removing disabled automobiles.

More than 4. Some 75, Manhattan residents would travel up the Hudson to Saratoga using three round-trips of five requisitioned Staten Island ferries. Another , Manhattan residents would travel by subway to Hoboken and be loaded into boxcars for the trip to upstate New York near Syracuse. Each host area was expected to absorb five times its normal peacetime population in evacuees and, after registering, all evacuees would be directed to and housed in the various government, community, or commercial buildings identified by the FBI in Project Many local leaders were understandingly dubious of the FEMA plans—even on paper they seemed difficult to coordinate and implement.

In October , as the autumn foliage began to turn in the Green Mountains, local officials from Connecticut journeyed north to Vermont to familiarize themselves with the locations where , residents of the Nutmeg State would evacuate if plans were activated.

Across the state line in New Hampshire, locals in Barrington looked at the pitched roof of their congregational church, some 40 feet off the ground, and wondered exactly how Washington bureaucrats expected them to bury the church under a foot of dirt to provide the adequate fallout protection required for a portion of the 8, residents of Monroe, Connecticut, who would be housed in the small town in an emergency.

And what happened if the nuclear attack came during the roughly one-third of the year when the ground was frozen solid? The facility had meeting rooms for the House and the Senate, a cafeteria, medical facilities, and dormitories so elaborately stocked that they even included the prescription eyeglasses for members of Congress. When one Greenbrier executive asked why they were taking away the weapons cache, the head of Forsythe explained that FEMA feared congressional officials would descend on the facility to inspect it—and then raise the obvious question about how FEMA intended to use such weaponry on US soil.

For the Cold War, it had created a special mobile command centers, known as Mobile Emergency Response Support MERS units—eventually building some special vehicles and stationing them across the country at its regional facilities. It tried to repurpose them for natural disasters. Following Hurricane Andrew in , FEMA dispatched MERS units to help the residents of hard-hit Homestead, Florida, but found the vehicles were too high-tech to be of much use—the souped-up tractor-trailers could communicate on encrypted channels with military forces around the world but lacked the basic hand-held radios and telephones necessary to communicate with first responders down the street.

Its inadequate response to those public disasters made it an easy target for attack. We need food. We need water. We need people. James Lee Witt seemed perhaps an odd fit at first. A Skoal-dipping son of a farmer who became known in the capital for his ostrich-skin boots and Southern drawl, he had never graduated from college, but he had a forceful personality and a strong background in emergency management from Arkansas.

It also took over Civil Defense from the Department of Defense, which was in charge of preparing citizens for military attack. It is further alleged that hurricane Katrina was used to test run of a continuity of government program, allowing FEMA to rehearse rounding up and relocating large numbers of people to camps, suspending their constitutional rights and militarizing the region [9] with the help of private military contractors mercenaries.

Readiness Exercise REX is an emergency response program involving the implementation of martial law, the movement of civilian populations and the arrest and detainment of segments of the population. A rehearsal of the program was carried out April , Similar large-scale emergency preparedness drills have taken place regularly since then.

Throughout the s numerous Presidential Executive Orders were issued authorizing Federal agencies to take over essential functions in the case of a declared emergency. The powers include, among many others, the authority of the Federal government to take over transportation infrastructure including highways and seaports , food resources and farms and mobilize citizens into government supervised work brigades Circuit Court of Appeals in a January ruling.