Thanks. That LA Times article at the link cut the last few paragraphs regarding the shift in planning from DHS to the administration. I pasted them below. Truly frightening that FEMA/DHS was “handling” this. I’m sure that after 9/11, all the top levels of the executive branch have/had their plans in place. But the rest of the government underneath them is another matter. You cannot keep a country of 300 million people together for long with a just few hundred people bunkered down in military facilities. That isn’t a functioning government. That’s Baghdad in 2003.
The fact that Congress did nothing to close the fatal constitutional vulnerability exposed by 9/11 has in fact, continued to make it (and all of DC) an extremely attractive target. There is a long line of constitutional succession for the Presidency, and Senators can be replaced within 24 hours by gubernatorial appointment, but House members cannot be replaced except by special elections which (in the best of circumstances) takes months.
Without a quorum to constitute a legitimate House of Representatives, you have a recipe for constitutional chaos and no fully functioning legislative branch to either legitimize, amend, check or expand executive power in time of martial law (for those who think this is not a problem at the moment, Pelosi is now second in line to the Presidency and Bobby Byrd is third - - and we will have a new President in 18 months). Imagine any individual with unchecked power in time of unprecedented national crisis and you see the problem of legitimacy.
They could have reduced this threat by passing legislation to allow for appointed replacements as with the Senate, but in the name of ideological purity, the GOP leadership refused to do so. So the bullseye remains.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR2007050902719_pf.html
Bush Changes Continuity Plan
Administration, Not DHS, Would Run Shadow Government
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 10, 2007; A12 (excerpt)
. . . Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to an independent Continuity of Government Commission, said the order “is a more explicit embrace of what has been since 9/11 an implicit but fairly clear set of assumptions.”
He added, “My frustration is that those assumptions have not gripped the Congress in the same way.”
Other former Bush administration officials said the directive formalizes a shift of authority away from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House.
Under an executive order dating to the Reagan administration, responsibility for coordinating, implementing and exercising such plans was originally charged to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and later DHS, the Congressional Research Service noted in a 2005 report on a pending DHS reorganization.
The new directive gives the job of coordinating policy to the president’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism — Frances Fragos Townsend, who will assume the title of national continuity coordinator — in consultation with Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, with the support of the White House’s Homeland Security Council staff. Townsend is to produce an implementation plan within 90 days. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will continue to coordinate operations and activities, the directive said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/11/AR2007071102079_pf.html
Government In Denial
No Branch Is Prepared For a Decapitating Strike
By Norman Ornstein
Thursday, July 12, 2007; A23 (excerpted)
During the Cold War, elaborate top-secret plans existed, including bunkers for the president, vice president, Supreme Court justices and members of Congress. If nuclear missiles were launched by the Soviet Union, there would be 30 to 90 minutes’ notice to evacuate top officials by plane, train or automobile.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the era of notice preceding attacks ended. This underscored the fact that none of our branches of government had plans to keep operating if hit in a serious way. An attack on Congress that killed or incapacitated a large number of members would mean no Congress for months. Each house needs half of its members to be present for a quorum to do any official business. The House of Representatives can replace deceased members only by special elections that take, on average, four months. The Senate, under the 17th Amendment, allows states (usually governors) to appoint replacements to fill vacancies, but neither house has a mechanism for replacing incapacitated members. . .
There were, and are, straightforward ways to do so: creating temporary appointments to ensure a representative legislative branch that can function until real and meaningful elections can occur to fill vacancies; revamping presidential succession to ensure that some designated figures are geographically dispersed; creating a temporary Supreme Court, consisting of the chief judges of the federal appeals courts, to adjudicate key constitutional issues until a regular court can be reconstituted. . .
The lack of interest in continuity may stem from the same reasons some smart people refuse to create wills, even though failure to do so leaves behind horrific messes for their loved ones. Yet the threat is real. Our leaders’ failure to establish plans to ensure that our Constitution survives is irresponsible. Do we really have to wait until the nightmare scenario becomes a reality to do something?
The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3403101
Natl. Intel Director Worried About Terror Sleeper Cells in U.S.
Believes Small Numbers of al Qaeda Operatives Are in This Country Raising Funds
By JOHN HENDREN
July 22, 2007 — (excerpt)
The nation’s top intelligence official today went further than ever before in outlining what he described as a heightened threat of an al Qaeda attack on American soil. “Their attempt is to cause mass casualties,” said Adm. Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “Second [priority] is political and possibly economic disruption.”
Just days ago, a new National Intelligence Estimate found al Qaeda has strengthened its ability to attack the United States. McConnell said al Qaeda is seeking the means to launch chemical, biological and possibly nuclear attacks. But the likeliest threat is harder to detect.
“What we see currently is primarily a focus on explosives — explosives that can generate a large explosion, but they’re put together with commercially available material,” he said. McConnell says small numbers of al Qaeda operatives are in this country raising funds. But he said he knows of no al Qaeda cells in the country that are capable of launching a strike at this time. “I worry that there are sleeper cells in the U.S.,” McConnell said. “I do not know.”
Michael Scheuer, who once ran the CIA’s al Qaeda desk, says the Bush administration is not merely fear mongering. “The intelligence community is being very frank about what it knows so it doesn’t get Shanghaied or blamed for something that wasn’t its fault, as it did after 9/11,” Scheuer said. . .