Continuity of Government or Change of Government?

[reprehensor]

In this exclusive excerpt from his powerful new book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), UC Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott asks whether there is a connection between America’s historical use of terror as a political weapon and the recent moves by the Bush administration to suspend the Constitution and create a “shadow government” in the wake of the next terrorist attack: (longer excerpt here: http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3242/Exclusive_excerpt_The_Road_to_9_11_Wealth_Empire_and_the_Future_of_America )

Cheney, Rumsfeld and COG Planning in the 1980s

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have been associated since the 1980s with a parallel planning structure in the United States. The formal goal of this planned parallel structure was called “continuity of government” (COG), but the name is misleading. The Progressive Review referred more descriptively to plans for “a possible military/civilian coup.”

The plans for what journalist James Bamford has called the “secret government” of COG had been slowly developing, chiefly but not only under Republican administrations, since the 1950s. As mentioned in chapter 4, a major step was the creation in 1979 of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But FEMA’s emergency planning was radically politicized under President Reagan. By 1984, in the words of journalist 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. . . . But in addition to groups opposing United States policies in Central America, the FEMA plan reportedly included environmental activists, opponents of nuclear energy and refugee assistance activists.”

Earlier, Governor Reagan in California had authorized the development of a counterinsurgency plan (known as Cable Splicer) and exercises to deal with such crises, in conjunction with the U.S. Sixth Army and the Pentagon (Operation Garden Plot). The cadres developing Cable Splicer (headed by Louis Giuffrida), were with Reagan’s elevation to the presidency transferred into FEMA. As head of FEMA, Giuffrida pursued plans for massive detention of dissidents; these became so extreme that even Reagan’s attorney general, William French Smith, raised objections.

As developed in the mid-1980s by Oliver North in the White House, the plans called for not just the surveillance but also the potential detention of large numbers of American citizens. During the Iran-Contra hearings North was asked by the congressman Jack Brooks about his work on “a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution.” The chairman, Democratic senator Daniel Inouye, ruled that this was a “highly sensitive and classified” matter, not to be dealt with in an open hearing. This dramatic exchange was virtually ignored by the establishment media.

Continued...
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3242/Exclusive_excerpt_The_Road_to_9_11_Wealth_Empire_and_the_Future_of_America