'Shadow Government' hid right before Daschle's Eyes

For a few moments on March 1, those who believe in black helicopters and swear that the U.S. never really landed on the moon may have felt some vindication. "Shadow Government Is at Work in Secret," read the Washington Post’s front-page headline.

In fact, the article by Barton Gellman and Susan Schmidt merely told the story of how 100 federal bureaucrats are hiding in secret bunkers, in case Washington is annihilated by a terrorist attack. It was a big story, but it was not a new story. It had been reported, with some detail, months ago—a fact the Post reporters missed.

Nor was it a secret—even to late-night talk show hosts—that Vice President Dick Cheney was spending much of his time in bunkers. According to a White House response to the Post’s "scoop," the plan that put 100 other officials in bunkers was merely "an extension of the policy which has moved Vice President Cheney to various undisclosed locations away from Washington."

Again, the story was hardly new, but Senate demagogues saw a chance to exploit the Post’s unfortunate use of the loaded term "shadow government." And so by the end of the day, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.) and Senate Appropriations Chairman Robert Byrd (D.-W.Va.) were claiming ignorance of the so-called "secret government" Bush had reportedly established, and were complaining loudly they had been "left in the shadow."

Of course, no one was "in the shadow," least of all any U.S. senator. On September 11, Peter Jennings of ABC News reported it to everyone on national television: "Every federal agency has implemented continuity of operations plans to make sure the government continues to function effectively," he said. Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw made similar statements.

At that tragic moment, most Americans probably didn’t think to ask for a definition of "Continuity of Operations Plan." But Washington insiders know of these plans, originally developed in the Eisenhower era after Congress passed the Civil Defense Act of 1950. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency spokeswoman told Human Events, arranges and executes continuity plans with funds appropriated by Congress each year.

COOP was again mentioned on September 11 when Veteran’s Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi announced to reporters that the "VA’s headquarters near the White House was evacuated Tuesday morning, and key management personnel shifted to an undisclosed location."

On October 16, Principi brought up VA’s COOP once again, this time in testimony before the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. "Alternate sites—which serve as command centers and give VA leadership the ability to manage a crisis in the event VA’s headquarters is closed down—were operational and key personnel were deployed within a few hours" of the September 11 attacks, Principi told the Senate.

Then on October 17, Sabrina Eaton of the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, with much detail, that government bureaucrats had been working in far-flung bunkers since September 11. Eaton had been clued in to the story, she told Human Events, because a friend of hers in the Interior Department had suddenly disappeared after September 11. "I was surprised that I was the first one out with it," said Eaton.

She added that she had searched the Lexis-Nexis media database before publishing her story, to see if anything had been written previously on the topic.

Gellman, co-author of the March 1 Post piece, told Human Events that he had failed to search for previous articles using the term "Continuity of Operations Plan"—the technical term featured in the second paragraph of his own story. Otherwise, he said, he would have found and credited Eaton’s much earlier piece.

Gellman maintained, though, that his Post story was the first to mention the administration’s late October decision to continue the COOP indefinitely. "In late October and early November, they had made a new assessment of the risk that al Qaeda has either fissionable material or a nuclear weapon," he said. "At that point they decided to make this thing permanent."

However, even this had already been mentioned—though briefly—in a short item in the Nov. 5, 2001 edition of U.S. News and World Report. The item gave only a very incomplete description of COOP, but it nonetheless reported for the first time that the bureaucrats "have been told to stay in the bunkers indefinitely."

The truly new contribution the Post piece made was the term "shadow government." The Post’s use of that term—and its uncritical adoption by hundreds of newspaper editorial boards in their subsequent pontifications about government secrecy—only served to fuel another round of Washington demagoguery as the news cycle unfolded.

"I frankly failed to anticipate how charged the term ‘shadow’ was going to be," said Gellman, who added that he has received several e-mails and calls from conspiracy theorists since publishing the article. He said that when he adopted the term, he was thinking of the opposition "shadow cabinet" of British parliamentary tradition.

But by standards of American usage, "shadow government" is clearly a sinister term. Before the Post piece of March 1, the term "shadow government" was used:

l By Louis Farrakhan, referring in veiled terms to a supposed Jewish conspiracy working to bring the U.S. into a war against Iraq (February 18).

l To describe the semi-official rule of regional Afghan warlords, who, like the mafia, collect protection taxes from and provide services to those in their domain (January 21).

l By the Washington Post’s own Michael Dobbs, to describe the terrorist network al Qaeda (September 27).

In spite of the term’s pejorative meaning, Gellman did not agree that it was inappropriate for his story. "I now know that some people read it differently than I would expect, and so I might reconsider," he said. "But I don’t know whether I would come up with a better shorthand for what I was talking about."

After Gellman’s story appeared, other reporters rushed to match it. An Associated Press spokesman told Human Events that AP editors made a decision to use the words "shadow government" only in quotation marks. The spokesman said AP had not followed the Post in using the term, but that their source—an anonymous senior government official who apparently knew about Gellman’s and Schmidt’s piece already—had used it himself.

Unlike Gellman, Senators Byrd and Daschle apparently knew how people would interpret the term "shadow government." And they fully exploited it.

Taking his cue from the Post article and the many follow-ups aping its sensationalist terminology, Daschle complained that Bush had established a "secret government that no one in Congress knew about." He appeared to be describing an impeachable offense, even though he was actually referring to 100 second-string bureaucrats in hiding.

Daschle actually tried to use the so-called "shadow government" to scare viewers in a March 3 Fox News interview. "No, I don’t think they’re governing right now—," he said of the "shadow government." He continued: "—that I know of. That’s the thing, we don’t know. We were left in the shadow, so to speak."

In a March 12 op-ed in the New York Times, Byrd said: "And oh, yes, we also learn from news reports that we have a shadow government in our own backyard, composed of unknown bureaucrats, up and running at undisclosed locations, for an indeterminate length of time."

But Byrd’s claim of ignorance is even less credible than Daschle’s. Byrd, chairman and longtime member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has voted on funding for COOP every year since he was first elected to the Senate in 1958. Moreover, on February 26, a week before the Post article appeared, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft testified before an Appropriations subcommittee, requesting $109.4 million in technology development for, among other things, "continuity of operations for FBI Headquarters and offsite facilities."

Byrd spokesman Tom Gavin said he was unaware of Ashcroft’s testimony, but told Human Events that Byrd—who as Senate President Pro Tempore is third in line to succeed Bush—had not been specifically briefed on the continued implementation of COOP. However, said Gavin, Byrd had broken off an earlier administration briefing, in which officials may or may not have planned to tell him about the "shadow government."

The Plain Dealer’s Eaton was skeptical of the senators’ professed ignorance. "I don’t believe them," she said. Describing herself as having a limited circle of social contacts in Washington, she asked, "If I figured out about it, why shouldn’t other people?"

Daschle needs to watch CNN more often...

Officials in Washington said a "Continuation of Government" plan was activated. The activation involves a fortified facility at Mount Weather, Virginia. There was no word whether any of the U.S. leadership or ranking military officers were taken to the facility.
CNN.com
Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, Republican leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, Sen. Don Nickles, R-Oklahoma, House Democratic leader Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Missouri, and House Speaker Rep. Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, were taken by helicopter to an undisclosed location.
Source

Also verified here by an eyewitness.

Daschle must have Alzheimer's.

TO SHORT TO SEE IT I GUESS.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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