Mount Weather: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 119-124

Back in my conspiracy theorist days I knew the FEMA conspiracy theory. This was the theory that FEMA the "Federal Emergency Management Agency" could suspend civil rights at any instant for whatever reason it wanted. The reason, according to the increasingly extremist NRA magazine "American Rifleman" (I was reading in the 1990s before they called all federal law enforcement 'jack-booted thugs' causing President George HW Bush to turn in his membership in protest), would be to seize all the American guns. This was inevitable and it was always just about to happen. I know this theory, what I didn't know (or perhaps I have forgotten) is where the headquarters of FEMA was, luckily Cooper is going to remind us, "Just outside of a sleepy little town called Bluemont, Virginia, about 46 miles west of Washington D.C., in an area of wilderness covering what has been called the toughest granite rock in the eastern United States. The area is surrounded by signs marked 'Restricted Area' and 'This installation has been declared a restricted area..."

Cooper does a good job setting the atmosphere, it has a very "horror movie" set up to it. I can hear the trailer's voice, "It was a sleepy little town and little did the citizens know that underneath it lies FEMA." I can see us finally getting the movie star duo of the Rock and Nic Cage, soundtrack by Taylor Swift. Maybe we get Fincher to direct, I've got ideas once the strike is over. FEMA is an unusual organization because it was not created by Congress, created by executive order in 1978 then recognized as an agency in 2002. 

FEMA's powers are difficult to ascertain. For example, we discovered during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that FEMA can do very little if they are not asked. It takes a special invitation for FEMA to enter an area. They cannot just go in and do whatever they want. Most of the conspiracy theorists citing FEMA (such as the first X-Files movie) seem to forget that there are legal restrictions on what FEMA can and cannot do. The most important restriction it has is that it is like a vampire, it cannot come in unless you explicitly tell it to. 

Cooper, and the conspiracy theorists of this time, either didn't understand this or they didn't care. The latter is very likely since, in their worldview, the law doesn't apply to people like the Rothschilds, and Rockefellers, or to agencies like FEMA. FEMA was created in 1978 but Cooper has General Leslie Bray telling a Senate subcommittee in 1975 that he cannot say what goes on at Mt. Weather. There is, of course, a difference between not knowing and not being able to say. Without the question, it's difficult to know how this exchange went. The problem that I have is that Cooper's full quote from Bray is this, "I am not at liberty to describe precisely what is the role and the mission and the capability that we have at Mount Weather or at any other precise location."

We move from Bray to Sen. John Tunney of California who chaired a subcommittee on Constitutional Rights in 1976. This is what Cooper is referring to with Bray's testimony. Here, Cooper is claiming that Tunney claimed that the US government was holding 100k dossiers on American citizens, that the Mt. Weather computes were the best in the world, and could gather millions of pieces of information on any American citizen it wanted. Let's be clear about what Cooper is doing. He claims not that Tunney said these dossiers existed but that he alleged they did, then Cooper says that during his days in ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence), he not only saw these dossiers but also that they were solely about American Patriots, those who would resist the coming New World Order. He's doing an old conspiracy theorist tactic of postulating that something could exist and then speaking about it not only as though it does exist but also that he has personal experience with it. 

The trouble is that I have access to the entire report. The first mention of secret dossiers is in a warning by Alan Westin who was one of the first people to warn of the dangers of technology, privacy, and freedom in his "Privacy and Freedom (1967)" and "Databanks in a Free Society (1972)." Westin's concern is that technology might be employed to keep records on people the way that totalitarian states did. Westin isn't recommending it, he's warning about the dangerous road that a state could go down. The rest of the mentions of dossiers is related to what Cooper is discussing. However, he needs to read the report. The military has dossiers on its own people for security reasons, and the government agencies have dossiers on their own people for security reasons, what Cooper is claiming is something different. I think we can set aside those accusations. Cooper wants to discuss the dossiers on Americans that the government thinks are going to resist.  

For this, we know these exist. We know that the FBI under J Edgar Hoover collected files of individuals he considered "radicals." We know that the HUAC and Sen. McCarthy kept files on alleged Communists. The list goes on, that dossiers exist is not the question, the important thing is what happens with them. In 1971, according to the report the US Army was ordered to destroy a substantial portion of its dossiers and then failed to do so. From the report, it's hard to say whether they were kept for nefarious reasons or just incompetence. From the people that I know who have been in the Army, I'm leaning toward the latter. The bureaucracy is too big for malice to be effective, like MK Ultra's files I'm sure that someone just forgot to do it. 

Now, I don't think that Cooper read this report, and usually I just figure that he heard something on an abandoned USENET post. However, this report actually contains the source that I am very certain Cooper used, a Washington Post article "The Loss of Privacy" by William Raspberry June 18th 1975 (pg 1037 in the report). This is an op-ed discussing the coming loss of privacy as the result of the use of these supercomputers that may exist in the facility in Mt. Weather. This is all supposition, the ARPA-Net was barely a thing at the time, and while the futurists would talk of a spiderweb of interconnected computers the problem for Cooper is that he has to establish these things exist. The dossiers that everyone is afraid of are only important with these computers. I agree that the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence should not be compiling dossiers on citizens just because they protest the government; but Cooper isn't making a new accusation here, this was common knowledge, especially with Hoover's FBI. 

What is Mt. Weather? Cooper gives us the cover story--it's a continuity of government facility, like the Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia. Cooper doesn't seem to understand the purpose. He points out that there is a room for the president and his cabinet at Mt. Weather but then asks who voted for this president and who appointed the cabinet. No one did you idiot, the place is for the president to evacuate to in the event of a nuclear war. There isn't a secret president there, it's just where he will go in case the worst happens. I cannot decide if Cooper is being purposefully obtuse or if he is legitimately this ignorant. 

Finally, Cooper claims that he "CANNOT FIND A PLAN OR EXECUTIVE ORDER ANYWHERE WHICH OUTLINES ANY PROCEDURE OR ALLOWANCE FOR THE RESTORATION OF THE CONSTITUTION AFTER A NATIONAL EMERGENCY HAS ENDED. THIS LEADS TO THE OBVIOUS CONCLUSION THAT NO RESTORATION OF THE CONSTITUTION IS CONTEMPLATED OR DESIRED BY THOSE IN POWER."

You of course would not be able to find those, just as you would not find a federal directive on the disposal of unicorn bodies. The FEMA conspiracy exists because it is said that FEMA can suspend your constitutional rights. Yet no one ever expands on what that means. If they declare an emergency FEMA can forcibly evacuate you from your home and they'll sort out the legality of that later. They can also create curfews if needed. They can't suspend your right to free speech or take away your guns. The conspiracy leaves out the details for which this could happen. Oddly enough, it is the adoption of this conspiracy into the X-Files: Fight the Future movie that made it much more plausible, but we need an already established alien invasion for that plot to work out.