By: Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, May 19, 2010

In July 1987, during the Iran-Contra Hearings grilling of Oliver North, the American public got a glimpse of “highly sensitive” emergency planning North had been involved in. Ostensibly these were
emergency plans to suspend the American constitution in the event of a
nuclear attack (a legitimate concern). But press accounts alleged that
the planning was for a more generalized suspension of the constitution.

As part of its routine Iran-contra coverage, the following exchange was printed in the New York Times, but without journalistic comment or
follow-up:

[Congressman Jack] Brooks: Colonel North, in your work at the N.S.C. were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of
government in the event of a major disaster?

Both North’s attorney and Sen. Daniel Inouye, the Democratic Chair of the Committee, responded in a way that showed they were aware of the issue:

Brendan Sullivan [North's counsel, agitatedly]: Mr. Chairman?

[Senator Daniel] Inouye: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch upon
that?

Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same
agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend
the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and
wondered if that was an area in which he had worked. I believe that it
was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can
be made for an executive session.[1]

But we have never heard if there was or was not an executive session, or if the rest of Congress was ever aware of the matter. According to James
Bamford, “The existence of the secret government was so closely held
that Congress was completely bypassed.”[2] (Key
individuals in Congress were almost certainly aware.)

Brooks was responding to a story by Alfonzo Chardy in the Miami Herald. Chardy’s story alleged that Oliver North was involved with the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in plans to
take over federal, state and local functions during a national
emergency. This planning for “Continuity of Government” (COG) called for
“suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over
to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency appointment of
military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration
of martial law.”[3]

To my knowledge no one in the public (including myself) attached enough importance to the Chardy story. Chardy himself suggested that Reagan’s
Attorney General, William French Smith, had intervened to stop the COG
plan from being presented to the President. Seven years later, in 1994,
Tim Weiner reported in the New York Times that what he called “The
Doomsday Project” – the search for “ways to keep the Government running
after a sustained nuclear attack on Washington” –had “less than six months
to live.”[4]

To say that nuclear attack planning was over was correct, But this statement was also very misleading. On the basis of Weiner’s report, the first two
books on COG planning, by James Bamford and James Mann, books otherwise
excellent and well-informed, reported that COG planning had been
abandoned.[5] They were wrong.

Mann and Bamford did report that, from the beginning, two of the key COG planners on the secret committee were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld,
the two men who implemented COG under 9/11.[6]
What they and Weiner did not report was that under Reagan the purpose of
COG planning had officially changed: it was no longer for arrangements
“after a nuclear war,” but for any "national security emergency." This
was defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “any occurrence,
including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or
other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the
national security of the United States.”[7]

In other words extraordinary emergency measures, originally designed for an America
devastated in a nuclear attack, were now to be applied to anything the
White House considered an emergency. Thus Cheney and Rumsfeld continued
their secret planning when Clinton
was president; both men, both Republicans, were heads of major
corporations and not even in the government at that time. Moreover,
Andrew Cockburn claims that the Clinton
administration, according to a Pentagon source, had “no idea what was
going on.”[8] (As I shall explain later, this
sweeping claim needs some qualification.)

The expanded application of COG to any emergency was envisaged as early as 1984, when, according to Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan,

Lt. Col. Oliver North was working with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency . . . to draw up a secret contingency plan to surveil
political dissenters and to arrange for the detention of hundreds of
thousands of undocumented aliens in case of an unspecified national
emergency. The plan, part of which was codenamed Rex 84, called for the
suspension of the Constitution under a number of scenarios, including a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua.[9]

Clearly 9/11 met the conditions for the imposition of COG measures, and we know for certain that COG planning was instituted on that day in 2001,
before the last plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. The 9/11 Report confirms
this twice, on pages 38 and 326.[10] It was under
the auspices of COG that Bush stayed out of Washington
on that day, and other government leaders like Paul Wolfowitz were
swiftly evacuated to Site R, inside a hollowed out mountain near Camp David.[11]

What few have recognized is that, nearly a decade later, some aspects of COG remain in effect. COG plans are still authorized by a proclamation of
emergency that has been extended each year by presidential authority,
most recently by President Obama in September 2009. COG plans are also
the probable source for the 1000-page Patriot Act presented to Congress
five days after 9/11, and also for the Department of Homeland Security’s
Project Endgame -- a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to
expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007
alone.[12]

At the same time we have seen the implementation of the plans outlined by Chardy in 1987: the warrantless detentions that Oliver North had planned
for in Rex 1984, the warrantless eavesdropping that is their logical
counterpart, and the militarization of the domestic United States
under a new military command, NORTHCOM.[13] Through NORTHCOM the U.S. Army now is engaged with
local enforcement to control America,
in the same way that through CENTCOM it is engaged with local
enforcement to control Afghanistan
and Iraq.

We learned that COG planning was still active in 2007, when President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51). This, for
the sixth time, extended for one year the emergency proclaimed on
September 14, 2001. It empowered the President to personally ensure
"continuity of government" in the event of any "catastrophic emergency."
He announced that NSPD 51 contains "classified Continuity Annexes"
which shall "be protected from unauthorized disclosure." Under pressure
from his 911truth constituents, Congressman Peter DeFazio of the
Homeland Security Committee twice requested to see these Annexes, the
second time in a letter signed by the Chair of his committee. His
request was denied.

The National Emergencies Act, one of the post-Watergate reforms that Vice-President Cheney so abhorred, specifies that: “Not later than six
months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the
end of each six-month period thereafter that such emergency continues,
each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint
resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated” (50
U.S.C. 1622, 2002). Yet in nine years Congress has not once met to
discuss the State of Emergency declared
by George W. Bush in response to 9/11, a State of Emergency that remains in effect
today. Appeals to the Congress to meet its responsibilities to review
COG have fallen on deaf ears.[14]

Former Congressman Dan Hamburg and I appealed publicly last year, both to Obama to terminate the emergency, and to Congress to hold the hearings
required of them by statute.[15] But Obama,
without discussion, extended the 9/11 Emergency again on September 10,
2009;[16] and Congress has continued to ignore its
statutory obligations. One Congressman explained to a constituent that
the provisions of the National Emergencies Act have now been rendered
inoperative by COG. If true, this would seem to justify Chardy’s
description of COG as suspension of the Constitution. Are there other
parts of the Constitution that have been suspended? We do not know, and
the Chair of the Homeland Security Committee has been told he cannot
find out.

Plans drafted by a secret committee, including corporation heads not in the government, have provided rules that allegedly override public law and
the separation of powers that is at the heart of the Constitution.
Congress is derelict in addressing this situation. Even Congressman
Kucinich, the one Congressman I have met, will not answer my
communications on this subject.

Yet as I see it, the only authorization for the COG planning was a secret decision by President Reagan (NSDD 55 of September 14, 1982) which in
effect federalized the counterinsurgency planning (called Cable
Splicer), which he had authorized in California when governor there.

It is clear that the planning by Cheney, Rumsfeld and others in the last two decades was not confined to an immediate response to 9/11. The 1000-page
Patriot Act, dropped on Congress as promptly as the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution had been back in 1964, is still with us; Congress has never
seriously challenged it, and Obama quietly extended it on February 27 of
this year.

We should not forget that the Patriot Act was only passed after lethal anthrax letters were mailed to two crucial Democratic Senators – Senators Daschle and Leahy – who had initially
questioned the bill. After the anthrax letters, however, they withdrew
their initial opposition.[17] Someone -- we still
do not know who – must have planned those anthrax letters well in
advance. This is a fact most Americans do not want to think about.

Someone also must have planned the unusual number of war games taking place on 9/11. COG planners and FEMA had been involved in war games planning over
the previous two decades; and on 9/11 FEMA was again involved with
other agencies in preparing for Operation Tripod, a bioterrorism
exercise in New York City.
[18]

Someone also must have planned the new more restrictive instructions, on June 1, 2001, determining that military interceptions of hijacked aircraft
had to be approved “at the highest levels of government” (i.e. the
President, Vice-President, or Secretary of Defense).[19]
The Report attributes this order to a JCS Memo of June 1, 2001,
entitled “Aircraft Piracy (Hijacking) and Destruction of Derelict
Airborne Objects.” But the written requirements had been less
restrictive before June 1, 2001, and I am informed that the change was
quietly revoked the following December.

In The Road to 9/11 I suggest the change in the JCS memo came from the National Preparedness Review in which President Bush authorized
Vice-President Cheney, together with FEMA, “to tackle the… task of
dealing with terrorist attacks.”[20] Not noticed
by the press was the fact that Cheney and FEMA had already been working
on COG planning as a team throughout the 1980s and 1990s.[21]

As I wrote above, it is necessary to qualify a Pentagon official’s claim (to author Andrew Cockburn) that the Clinton administration had “no idea
what was going on” in COG. Let me quote from my
response to Cockburn’s book in my own, The Road to 9/11:

[Weiner’s] article persuaded authors James Mann and James Bamford that Reagan’s COG plans had now been abandoned, because “there was, it seemed, no longer
any enemy in the world capable of . . . decapitating America’s
leadership.” [22] In fact, however, only one phase
of COG planning had been terminated, a Pentagon program for response to
a nuclear attack. Instead, according to author Andrew Cockburn, a new
target was found:

Although the exercises continued, still budgeted at over $200 million a year in the Clinton era, the vanished Soviets were now replaced by terrorists. . . . There were other
changes, too. In earlier times the specialists selected to run the
“shadow government” had been drawn from across the political spectrum,
Democrats and Republicans alike. But now, down in the bunkers, Rumsfeld
found himself in politically congenial company, the players’ roster
being filled almost exclusively with Republican hawks. . . .“You could
say this was a secret government-in-waiting. The Clinton
administration was extraordinarily inattentive, [they had] no idea what
was going on.”

Cockburn’s account requires some qualification. Richard Clarke, a Clinton Democrat, makes it clear that he participated in the COG games in the 1990s and
indeed drafted Clinton
’s Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 67 on “Enduring Constitutional
Government and Continuity of Government.” But COG planning involved
different teams for different purposes. It is quite possible that the
Pentagon official was describing the Department of Defense team dealing
with retaliation.

The Pentagon official’s description of a “secret government-in-waiting” (which still included both Cheney and Rumsfeld) is very close to the standard
definition of a cabal, as a group of persons secretly united to bring
about a change or overthrow of government. In the same era Cheney and
Rumsfeld projected change also by their public lobbying, through the
Project for the New American Century, for a more militant Middle East policy. In light of how COG was
actually implemented in 2001, one can legitimately suspect that, however
interested this group had been in continuity of government under
Reagan, under Clinton
the focus of Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s COG planning was now a change of
government.[23]

Understandably there is great psychological resistance to the extraordinary claim that Cheney and Rumsfeld, even when not in government, were able to help
plan successfully for constitutional modifications, which they
themselves implemented when back in power. Most people cannot bring
themselves even to believe the second, known half of this claim: that on
September 11, 2001, COG plans overriding the constitution were indeed
implemented. This is why the first two print reviews of The Road to
9/11, both favorable and intelligently written, both reported that I
speculated that COG had been imposed on 9/11. No, it was not a
speculation: the 9/11 Commission Report twice confirms that COG was
instituted on the authority of a phone call between Bush and Cheney of
which they could find no record. No record, I did speculate, because it
took place on a secure COG phone outside the presidential bunker – with
such a high classification that the 9/11 Commission was never supplied
the phone records.

A footnote in the 9/11 Report says

“The 9/11 crisis tested the U.S. government’s plans and capabilities to ensure the continuity of constitutional government and
the continuity of government operations. We did not investigate this
topic, except as needed to understand the activities and communications
of key officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice Chair, and senior staff were
briefed on the general nature and implementation of these continuity
plans.[24]

The other footnotes confirm that no information from COG files was used to document the 9/11 report. At a minimum these files might resolve the
mystery of the missing phone call which simultaneously authorized COG,
and (in consequence) determined that Bush should continue to stay out of
Washington
. I suspect that they might tell us a great deal more.

What is the first step out of this current state of affairs, in which the constitution has in effect been superseded by a higher, if less
legitimate authority? I submit that it is to get Congress to do what the
law requires, and determine whether our present proclamation of
emergency “shall be terminated” (50 U.S.C. 1622, 2002).

An earlier polite, judiciously worded appeal to this effect failed. It may be necessary to raise the issue in a larger, albeit more controversial
context: the scandal that a small cabal was able to supersede the
Constitution, and Congress has failed, despite repeated requests, to do
anything about it. I would hope that Americans concerned about this
matter would raise it with all the congressional candidates in the
forthcoming elections. At a minimum, candidates should promise to call
for a full discussion of the proclaimed national emergency, as the law
requires.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War,
The Road to 9/11,
and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11,
and the Deep Politics of War. His book, Fueling
America's War Machine: Deep Politics and the CIA’s Global Drug
Connection is in press, due Fall 2010 from Rowman & Littlefield.

Notes

[3] Miami Herald, July 5, 1987. In October 1984 Jack Anderson reported that FEMA’s plans would “suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,
effectively eliminate private property, abolish free enterprise, and
generally clamp Americans in a totalitarian vise.”

[4] Tim Weiner, New York Times, April 17, 1994.

[5] Bamford, A Pretext for War, 74; cf. James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New
York: Viking, 2004), 138-45.

[6] Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University
of California
Press, 2007), 183-87.

[7] The provisions of Executive Order 12656 of Nov. 18, 1988, appear at 53 FR 47491, 3 CFR, 1988 Comp., p. 585, http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-ord....
The Washington Post (March 1, 2002) later claimed,
falsely, that Executive Order 12656 dealt only with “a nuclear attack.”
Earlier there was a similar misrepresentation in the New York Times
(November 18, 1991).

[8] Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy ( New York : Scribner, 2007), 88.

[9] Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats, and the FBI (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 184; cf. New York Times, November 18, 1991.

[10] 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, Road to 9/11, 228-29.

[11] Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington: Department of Defense, 2007), 132.

[12] Scott, Road to 9/11, 238, 240-41.

[13] U.S. Department of Defense, “U.S. Northern Command,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/northcom.htm. Cf. John R. Brinkerhoff, PBS, Online Newshour, 9/27/02: “The United States
itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of
war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of
command structure in the United States that we apply
in other theaters of war.” Brinkerhoff had earlier developed the martial
law provisions of REX 84 in the Reagan era.

[14] Cf. Peter Dale Scott and Dam Hamburg , “To All Readers: Help Force Congress To Observe the Law on National Emergencies!!!,” 911Truth.org, March 24, 2009, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848).

[15] Peter Dale Scott, "To All Readers: Help Force Congress To Observe the Law on National Emergencies!!!" (with Dan Hamburg), http.//www.truth.org, March 24, 2009,
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r7.

[16] White House Press Release, September 10, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Notice-of-continuation-from-the-president-regarding-the-emergency-declared-with-respect-to-the-September-11-2001-terrorist-attacks/. A press briefing by Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs the same day did not mention the extension.

[17] Cf. Time, Nov. 26, 2001: "While Daschle, the Senate majority leader, could have been chosen as a representative of all Democrats or of the entire Senate, Leahy is a less
obvious choice, most likely targeted for a specific reason. He is head
of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is involved in issues ranging
from antitrust action to antiterror legislation”
[emphasis added]. See also Anthony York, “Why Daschle and Leahy?” Salon,
November 21, 2001,
http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2001/11/21/anthrax/inde....

[18] Brian Michael Jenkins and Frances Edwards-Winslow, “Saving City Lifelines: Lessons Learned in the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks” (San Jose, CA: Mineta Transportation Institute, San José State University,
2003).

[19] 9/11 Report, 17; cf. fn. 101, 458.

[20] Houston Chronicle, May 9, 2001; Road to 9/11, 209.

[21] James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 139; James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11,
Iraq, and the Abuse
of America’s
Intelligence Agencies (New
York: Doublesday, 2004).

[22] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 144.

[23] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 186-87.

[24] 9/11 Commission Report, 555.

Peter Dale Scott is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global
Research Articles by Peter Dale Scott