Did you know that the United States Army has a field manual on the internment of civilians?
Titled FM 3-19.40 Military Police Internment/Resettlement Operations, the field manual was first published in 2001, during the George W. Bush administration.
Like you no doubt, I immediately thought: “Though difficult to justify, the Army manual on internment must be because of the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the resultant Patriot Act!”
Wrong.
You see, the manual was published on August 1, 2001 — one month ten days BEFORE those two passenger jets flew into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
Nor is the manual something for which Democrats can blame only Republicans.
Why is that?
Because there is an updated, revised, and more extensive 326-pages version of the same U.S. Army field manual, FM 3-39.40, published on February 12, 2010, under Democrat Barack Hussein Obama’s administration.
Although the cover page of FM 3-39.40 states that:
- Distribution of the field manual is “restricted,” being “authorized to the DOD and DOD contractors only to protect technical or operational information from automatic dissemination”;
- Requests for the manual “must be referred to the Commandant, U.S. Army Military Police School, ATTN: ATZT-TDD-M, 320 MANSCEN Loop, Suite 270, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri 65473-8929″; and that
- FM 3-39.40 is to be “destroy[ed] by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document”
Happily, an anonymous patriot or patriots leaked FM 3-39.40, so that the American people can read it for ourselves.
The Preface of the revised 2010 version of FM 3-39.40 says:
“Field manual (FM) 3-39.40 is aligned with FM 3-39, the military police keystone FM. FM 3-39.40 provides guidance for commanders and staffs on internment and resettlement (I/R) operations. [...] FM 3-39.40 discusses the critical issue of detainee rehabilitation. It describes the doctrinal foundation, principles, and processes that military police and other elements will employ when dealing with I/R populations. As part of internment, these populations include U.S. military prisoners, and multiple categories of detainees (civilian internees [CIs], retained personnel [RP], and enemy combatants), while resettlement operations are focused on multiple categories of dislocated civilians (DCs).
[...] All military police units are specifically manned, equipped, and trained to perform I/R operations across the spectrum and those identified as I/R units are the specialists within the Army for this role.”
This is how FM 3-39.40 defines civilian “internment” and “settlement”:
“Internment and resettlement operations are conducted by military police to shelter, sustain, guard, protect, and account for populations (detainees, U.S. military prisoners, or dislocated civilians) as a result of military or civil conflict, natural or man-made disaster, or to facilitate criminal prosecution. Internment involves the detainment of a population or group that pose some level of threat to military operation. Resettlement involves the quartering of a population or group for their protection. These operations inherently control the movement and activities of their specific population for imperative reasons of security, safety, or intelligence gathering.”
In its “Introduction,” FM 3-39.40 seems to say that the “civilians” targeted for “internment” are the civilian populations of FOREIGN countries:
“In light of persistent armed conflict and social turmoil throughout the world, the effects on populations remain a compelling issue. The world population will increase from 6 billion to 9 billion in the next two decades, with 95 percent of the growth occurring in the developing world. By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Coexisting demographically and ethnically, diverse societies will aggressively compete for limited resources.
[...] The goal of military police conducting detainee operations is to provide stability within the population, its institutions, and its infrastructure. In this rapidly changing and dynamic strategic environment, U.S. forces will compete with local populations for the same space, routes, and resources. The modular force’s ability to positively influence and shape the opinions, attitudes, and behaviors of select populations is critical to tactical, operational, and strategic success.
An adaptive enemy will manipulate populations that are hostile to U.S. intent by instigating mass civil disobedience, directing criminal activity, masking their operations in urban and other complex terrain, maintaining an indistinguishable presence through cultural anonymity, and actively seeking the traditional sanctuary of protected areas as defined by the rules of land warfare. Such actions will facilitate the dispersal of threat forces, negate technological overmatches, and degrade targeting opportunities. Commanders will use technology and conduct police intelligence operations to influence and control populations, evacuate detainees and, conclusively, transition rehabilitative and reconciliation operations to other functional agencies. The combat identification of friend, foe, or neutral is used to differentiate combatants from noncombatants and friendly forces from threat forces.
FM 3-39.40 is written with the acknowledgement that today’s OEs are much more variable than the environments addressed in previous doctrine. Military police must be prepared to deploy into any OE and conduct I/R operations in support of the commander while dealing with a wide range of threats and other influences.”
Though Field Manual 3-39.40 Internment Resettlement Operations seems to be a manual for the U.S. Army Military Police’s internment and resettlement of civilians in foreign countries, the manual does NOT say U.S. civilians are excluded.
In fact, FM 3-39.40 (p. 24 of the PDF document) specifies that the “agencies concerned with internment and resettlement” are comprised of “international agencies” of the UN, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), International Organization of Migration, but also of “U.S. agencies” that include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
To my knowledge, neither DHS nor FEMA has ever been deployed outside of the United States.
More disturbing still is that pages 30 and 78 of the PDF version of FM 3-39.40 are blank, except for this message: “This page intentionally left blank.”
Maybe now we know why on the last day of the year 2011, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act — a bill passed by a bipartisan majority of both houses in Congress, which authorizes the President and the military to arrest and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without cause or trial.
Maybe now we know why the construction company Kellogg Brown & Root is tasked to provide services for FEMA camps scattered across the five regions of the United States. (See my post of December 14, 2011, “There Really Are FEMA Camps.”)
Maybe now we know why a DHS informant leaked the information that the Obama administration is preparing for a massive civil war in America.
I belong to an e-mail list that includes active and retired U.S. military and federal government employees. The reaction thus far, predictably, is a dismissive “Pffft”:
- “The federal government has contingency plans on EVERYTHING, as it should. Be glad that our government is prepared.”
- “The U.S. government is under civilian, not military control. Besides, the U.S. military is sworn to protect the Constitution and will never turn against the American people.”
- A retired Defense Intelligence officer who’s now a practicing attorney, however, observes: “USMIL forces are not supposed to be deployed inside the US on law enforcement missions. Called the Posse Comitatus law and it’s a century and a half old. It’s bad news if U.S. agencies like Homeland Security and FEMA are deployed. It’s really bad if international agencies are unleashed inside U.S. borders.”
Our military strategists have a guiding principle for the formulation of defense policy toward other countries: “It’s not intention that matters, it’s capabilities.”
Indeed, intent changes with the wind. But if a powerful entity has the capability to do harm, that means if and when it decides to wield that might against us, it has the ability to do that.
What is true about other countries is true about our own government. Whatever the intent of the Obama or future administrations, we now know that the United States Army has a detailed field manual on civilian internment. And the vast majority of Americans are civilians.
Read FM 3-39.40 for yourself here or, if that site’s been scrubbed, in FOTM’s archives.
H/t May, Mike, Tina, and Joseph.
~Eowyn
But look at what you get: free rent, free food, and lots of nap time! What could be better than that! Well, maybe one with an ocean view. Keep electing communists into government, and this is what you’re going to get.
Homeland Security is looking FORWARD to free sex and snuff movies.
The Stomping Mare of Ravensbruk would be elated.
In America, it’s time to recall the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.”
The concern over this manual is silly to the max. The Army has a manual on how to make a field expediant toilet. This manual, if you read it, shows how to set up a prison camp and refugee camps. It outlines the chain of command, who has the needed supplies and every little detail required to safely house our own prisoners, EPOWs, and civilians displaced persons and refugees. This is done in compliance with US and international laws.
To Don, in Kellogg, Idaho:
I do not appreciate your tone of contempt.
Give us the names of the US and international laws, and in the case of the US law(s), the year when Congress passed the legislation.
This is ridiculous….. Who do you think wrote this FM? Well it wasn’t a group of elite high up secret squirrels. It was written by the Military Police School comprised of Soldiers who had experience in Detention Operations from Iraq, Afghanistan, and GTMO Cuba. I was one of these people and we never, not once discussed using it on U.S. Citizens. Although, any of the Military FM’s could be applied to any and all situations in any country, FM3-19.40 was not written for use on Americans…..
Angry MP,
What is truly ridiculous is that you didn’t even read my post, for if you had you would have read this:
Although the original field manual FM 3-19.40 was published on August 1, 2001, that is, BEFORE the 9-11 attacks,
“there is an updated, revised, and more extensive 326-pages version of the same U.S. Army field manual, FM 3-39.40, published on February 12, 2010, under Democrat Barack Hussein Obama’s administration…. Though Field Manual 3-39.40 Internment Resettlement Operations seems to be a manual for the U.S. Army Military Police’s internment and resettlement of civilians in foreign countries, the manual does NOT say U.S. civilians are excluded. In fact, FM 3-39.40 (p. 24 of the PDF document) specifies that the “agencies concerned with internment and resettlement” are comprised of “international agencies” of the UN, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), International Organization of Migration, but also of “U.S. agencies” that include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). To my knowledge, neither DHS nor FEMA has ever been deployed outside of the United States.”
The U.S. Dept of Homeland Security was formed on November 25, 2002, 1 year 1 month 14 days AFTER the first version of the field manual was published.
Now tell me that this field manual was not written for use on Americans.
On the surface, this appears to be for foreign detentions. The problem I have is where they list the collection of SSN’s…we are the ONLY countries to have SSN’s. Therefore, if it was meant for outside the US only…this would be unnecessary. However, one thing someone need not be concerned about is the “This page left blank” remarks. Whoever thinks this is sinister doesn’t understand how military regs are written. EVERY reg, AFI, FM, even career development courses has this remark printed when it’s a blank page. It’s meant to show the reader that they are missing something.
Thanks, Air Force Guy!