(...and for Haitians)
I'm sure many of you are aware of the new book by James Mann titled Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, perhaps from last weekend's interview with the author by Liane Hansen on NPR. Fascinating, scary stuff.
However, in these giddy days of declining poll numbers for Bush and hints of a reawakening media, I want to put my tinfoil hat on (a green one for March) and draw attention to an article by Mann in the
March issue of Atlantic Monthly titled "The Armageddon Plan", adapted from his book. (the article is available online only to premium content subscribers. Or, one could always
buy a copy of the magazine or book, as they intend). A few
very brief excerpts follow - there's
lots more good stuff in the full article:
At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area... Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld.
...Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role.
....The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration in the hours, days, and months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Vice President Cheney urged President Bush to stay out of Washington for the rest of that day; Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to get out of town; Cheney himself began to move from Washington to a series of "undisclosed locations"; and other federal officials were later sent to work outside the capital... All these actions had their roots in the Reagan Administration's clandestine planning exercises.
...The Constitution makes the Vice President the successor if the President dies or is incapacitated, but it establishes no order of succession beyond that. Federal law, most recently the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, establishes further details....The Reagan Administration, however, worried that this procedure might not meet the split-second needs of an all-out war with the Soviet Union.
..."One of the awkward questions we faced," one participant in the planning of the program explains, "was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." ...if Congress did reconvene, it might elect a new speaker of the House, whose claim to the presidency might have greater legitimacy than that of a Secretary of Agriculture or Commerce.
...Within Reagan's National Security Council the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal.... It had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
...After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the rationale for the exercises changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was obviously no longer plausible... It seemed that no enemy in the world was still capable of decapitating America's leadership, and the program was abandoned.
There things stood until September 11, 2001, when Cheney and Rumsfeld suddenly began to act out parts of a script they had rehearsed years before... Explaining these actions a few days later, Cheney vaguely told NBC's Tim Russert, "We did a lot of planning during the Cold War with respect to the possibility of a nuclear incident."...
Their participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men... They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States - inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go...
James Mann, former Washington correspondent for the the Los Angeles Times, is senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington,D.C. This article is adapted from his book Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, to be published this month.
Ah yes, that cumbersome and awkward congress, representing all those annoying citizens. Of course, in her New Yorker article on Cheney and Halliburton, Jane Mayer wrote: "As Defense Secretary, Cheney developed a contempt for Congress, which, a friend said, he came to regard as `a bunch of annoying gnats.'"
And just to emphasize - during this time, Rumsfeld wasn't even in the damn government! (There is a interview with Mann on the subject of Rumsfeld here.)
I have no quarrel with contingency planning of this type having been carried out during the Cold War. We were rational to fear what the Soviets could do with their nuclear arsenal - just as the world today is rational to fear what the U.S., a lone superpower, could do.
But trust these guys to come up with a super-secret, ridiculously expensive version that evades constitution, statute, and congress.
All together now, on with your tinfoil hats.
These are people who view the country's internal security apparatus, financial institutions, and armed forces merely as tools to be manipulated. They show zero respect for the constitution or international rule of law. They honor neither regulation, precedent nor custom, they practice no compromise. They are predators, and they will consume us, suck out our grandchildren's wealth, decimate biodiversity, turn government into a giant one-way mirror, stuff low-earth orbit full of weaponry, and build a global gated community strong enough to keep climate change out.
They have an agenda, and they're not finished. In fact they are behind schedule, as they did not plan on the Clinton Interruption - thus the frantic sliming effort, which turned off enough voters to be one of several factors in Gore's "losing".
This is a Philip K. Dick dystopia come to life. They are the Lilistar and the yance-men; they are Palmer Eldritch, Arnie Kott, Ferris Fremont, and the Party Leader.
They own far too much of the media - and the voting technology.
And they will cling to the levers of power like octopi on steroids.
I keep expecting to wake up and find I can't access any progressive websites, can't get a letter published, can't protest in public, there are troop movements and jet overflights, then there is finally an announcement about the necessity for certain emergency measures...
[/tinfoil hat]
Nah. They're just a bunch of delusional incompetents who stumbled into power and lucked out when 9-11 happened. They can't run the occupation of a WMD-less third-world country, much less carry out a successful subversion of democracy, no matter how much time and how many tax dollars they spend practicing.
Right?