I knew there was a piece missing to this puzzle. Something just didn't make sense. Leave it to Michael Ruppert to explain things: Now FEMA will be given much more money, made a separte agency, etc. Why? See below.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/090605_greeks_gifts.shtml<snip>
. . .Intelligent critics from both left and right have for years painstakingly documented FEMA’s paramount leadership role in Continuity of Government (COG) operations and planning. Better described, COG is what will happen if Congress is nuked, if a major catastrophe makes “normal” government operations impossible, or if there is major civil unrest (or total economic collapse). Much of FEMA’s infrastructure is really dedicated to this task and not to disaster relief. The COG function and authority has been greatly expanded since 9/11. At FTW we have written about FEMA many times and discussed it at length in my book Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.
There is no shortage of verifiable government records confirming all this including about two score Executive Orders, The Patriot Act, The Homeland Security Bill, and a couple of pieces of legislation having to do with biological warfare enacted in the post-9/11 climate. COG work was initially begun way back in the late 1970s, and involved early input from the likes of Iran-Contra criminal Oliver North. That’s where FEMA actually came from.
If this thinking is not curtailed, then as the economic collapse of the United States becomes ever harder to conceal, FEMA will have been given a green light to impose the most draconian and heartless of measures in our country. FEMA will have the ability to divide the US up into ten autonomous regions, independently governed. Denver will be key to that decentralization and I note with irony that the CIA recently announced it was moving its National Resources (formerly Domestic Operations) Division to Denver (Washington Post, May 5, 2005) . FEMA will have the authority to confiscate any private property, food, medicine, personal vehicles, water supplies and even to impress citizens into forced labor and relocation as needed. FEMA will be able to override all local governments in a declared national emergency, quarantine neighborhoods and compel people to receive untested (for efficacy) vaccinations of drugs which may be dangerous (remember the smallpox vaccines?) and which will only enrich the pharmaceutical companies. FEMA will have the authority to confiscate firearms and gold held by private individuals. The government records proving what I say here are available in abundance and have been widely circulated over the internet for years. The little that remains of our Bill of Rights will simply cease to exist with a Code Red terror alert or another Katrina. And global warming makes another Katrina somewhere inevitable.
In short, what is being set up here is a massive, misguided and stupid effort to take convenient retribution for Katrina in a way that only ensures the more rapid demise of this once great nation. Do not put the blame on FEMA or believe that giving FEMA more money and power will solve anything. Too many of the bad decisions which cost lives in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama were made at the White House, probably by Dick Cheney who has yet to make a public appearance. Condi’s been too busy shopping for $7,000 shoes in New York to do anything. . . (more)