Poised for A COUP

Bush regime struggles to retain power in an increasingly alienated America

by Rodger Herbst

On May 2, New York Times correspondent David Sanger wrote of "obsessive" discussion in Washington circles of the impact of a "nightmarish, unpredictable" terrorist attack that could shift the November elections, and noted Bush has begun to talk more openly about such an event.(NYT 05/02/04) Several weeks later, the White House announced "We assume an attack will happen leading up to the election... it will happen here".(Washington Whispers 05/17/04) Almost predictably, on May 26, John Ashcroft announced "al Qaeda's specific intention to hit the United States hard... an al Qaeda spokesman announced 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on the United States were complete." (www.cnn.com/2004/US/05/26/terror.threat/index.html)

This, like other Bush Regime alerts, suspiciously provides astonishing quantitative detail about plans for some hellish event which is otherwise qualitatively unknown. Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the Committee had received no word of any new information of the type Ashcroft described. Understandably, a majority of those polled by the San Francisco Chronicle a few days later viewed the most recent alerts as government and media hype.

The government, on the other hand, seems to be taking its most recent alerts very seriously. On May 19, Florida television station WFTV covered the story of a massive mock terror drill which spanned three Florida counties. The Newsday newswire nynewsday.com reported on May 16th that Lower Manhattan was swamped with 1,000 police, firefighters, and land emergency personnel responding to a simulated bombing involving scores of casualties. (inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php? storyid=355) [A similar large drill was recently conducted in Seattle.--Ed]

On the economic front, financial analyst Robert McHugh noted on May 30 that the US Federal Reserve had inflated the US money supply by a whopping $155 billion over a four week period, the largest ever recorded. Noting that money floods have typically indicated coming crises, McHugh asks: "What awful calamity do they see? The amazing thing is, the Fed's actions mean they know what is about to happen. They are aware of a terrible, horrific imminent event."(www.safehaven.com/article-1597.htm)

The mainstream media has indulged the notion of martial law as the aftermath of devastating ABC (Atomic Biological Chemical) terrorist attacks. Former counter-terror czar Richard Clarke spoke of the "need" for martial law in the event of an attack on congress.(Ted Koppel's Nightline broadcast, April 7, 2004) General Tommy Franks went further, noting that It may be a weapon of mass destruction "that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event." (www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml)

Ready to Roll

Bush insiders are reportedly most concerned about the possibility that a new terror attack might "boomerang" against the White House incumbent.(NYT 05/02/04) But would that matter, if martial law were declared?

According to an article in the March 16, 2003 South Jersey News, "If the nation escalates to 'red alert,' you will be assumed by authorities to be the enemy if you so much as venture outside your home", New Jersey's anti-terror czar Sid Caspersen says. A red alert would also tear away virtually all personal freedoms to move about and associate. (www.southjerseynews.com/issues/march/m031603e.htm)

In other words, the government can declare martial law by merely assessing a "red alert" threat level, thus stopping all potential "boomerang" effects, such as the probability of losing an election.

Through passage of the Patriot Act, the Bush machine is now ready for martial law. In early 2002 it was revealed that in order to assure Continuity of Government (COG), about 100 top Bush officials had been sent to live and work in two fortified locations on the East Coast. (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26212-2002Mar1.html and www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26212-2002Mar1.html)

Tom Daschle soon noted that arrangements had also been made to move the work of Congress to "another location."(Washington Post 3/2/2002)

Decades in the Planning

Although Congress expressed surprise on hearing of the COG program shortly after the attacks of 9/11, the political and physical infrastructure for COG and martial law has been in place for decades. According to Christopher Simpson, associate professor of communications at American University in Washington DC, Continuity of Government was originally a plan to keep the government operating in the event of nuclear war. From there, via Executive Order 11490, signed by President Nixon in October 1969, it was expanded to keep the government operating in the event of a domestic rebellion or act of terrorism or other unspecified crisis or natural disaster.

Likely COG sites include Mount Weather in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) operates the Mount Weather Emergency Assistance Center (MWEAC).

The Mysterious Mountain, an article appearing in the March 1976 issue of The Progressive, was based on the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights hearings in 1975, and several off-the-record interviews. The article noted that Mount Weather at that time contained a parallel "government-in-waiting" ready to take control of the United States upon word from the President or his successor. The subcommittee learned that Congress has almost no knowledge and no oversight--budgetary or otherwise--on Mount Weather, and that the "facility held dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans." (www.parascope.com/mx/articles/mountweather.htm)

From 1982-84 Colonel Oliver North assisted FEMA in drafting its civil defense preparations. Details of these plans emerged during the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal. They included executive orders providing for suspension of the Constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the president and FEMA. Reagan's Attorney-general, William French Smith, wrote to the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane: "...this department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an 'emergency czar' role for FEMA."

A Miami Herald article on July 5, 1987 reported that then FEMA director Louis Guiffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff, handled the martial law portion of the planning. The plan was said to be similar to one Mr. Giuffrida had developed earlier to combat a national uprising by black militants, which provided for the detention "of at least 21 million American Negroes." (www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/1027497418339.html) Today the same John Brinkerhoff is with the highly influential Anser Institute for Homeland Security. Following a request by the Pentagon in January 2002 that the US military be allowed the option of deploying troops on American streets, Mr. Brinkerhoff supported the request by arguing that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which has long been accepted as prohibiting such deployments, had simply been misunderstood and misapplied. By April, the US military had created a Northern Command exclusively for domestic operations, headed by General Ralph Eberhart. (www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/1027497418339.html)

Foreign Policy Accounts Coming Due

According to a memo issued by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales on January 25, administration officials might eventually be prosecuted for war crimes because of the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, based on the War Crimes Act passed by Congress in 1996.

And of course there is Iraq. The war crimes, atrocities, and prison abuse carried out in Iraq have wrecked the moral credibility of the United States and its allies, and have served as excellent recruitment tools for terrorist organizations. The ad hoc "Coalition of the Willing" assembled by the Bush regime has begun to disintegrate, with Spain, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Kazakhstan, and Norway either leaving Iraq or announcing their departure.

It seems that Ahmed Chalabi, who received as much as $40 million in official US government funding, and was the source of reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, betrayed a vital US state secret to his patrons in Iran. The FBI is now investigating who in the Bush administration could have given Chalabi highly classified information. According to the June 13 LA Times, a group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials plans to issue a joint statement arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November. The Times termed the issuing of such a statement unprecedented. The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush's foreign policy, according to several of those who signed the document. Bush sympathizers claim this group failed to recognize how the 9/11 attacks required significant changes in American foreign policy. (www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-diplo13jun13,1,1142936. story)

However, there are signs that the "official version" of the events of 9/11 is unraveling. Although the Kean-Hamilton Commission has refused to ask any hard questions, it has unavoidably produced a number of damaging revelations. The appearance of several new books and Michael Moore's Farenheit 911 suggest continued unraveling.

Military Fed Up

Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who headed Central Command before becoming President Bush's personal emissary to the Middle East, said recently that our nation's current course is "headed over Niagara Falls." In his upcoming book, Zinni blames the current catastrophe on the Bush team's incompetence early on. "In the lead-up to the Iraq war, and its later conduct," he writes, "I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption." (www.moveon.org/pac/gore-rumsfeld-transcript.html)

According to Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "The war itself has led to, rightly or wrongly, the feeling among many in the military that they're not receiving competent direction, that it is too ideological, and that a lot of their military efforts have been wasted by what they regard as poor, inept planning for the stability phase." (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040530/pl_nm /iraq_rumsfeld_pentagon_dc)

A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to US wars with states that pose no serious threat. The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point." (www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8435-2004Jan11?language= printer and www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8435-2004Jan11?language=printer)

Sidney Blumenthal, former advisor to the Clinton Administration quoted one military figure as saying that Rumsfeld was "detested" and that "if there's a sentiment in the army it is: support our troops, impeach Rumsfeld." Blumenthal then referenced an essay by Lt. Col. Charles Dunlap which had received a prize in 1992 from then General Colin Powell. The title of the piece was "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012," which was a cautionary tale of how the US military launched a coup because of the failures of the government.(Guardian, May 13, 2004) One account suggested that, given the degree of military hatred against the administration, any other country would have already witnessed a military coup.

CIA PO'ed

Bush is also in hot water with the CIA. A special prosecutor is investigating the "outing" of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to journalist Robert Novak. Sources familiar with the investigation say Bush knew, but took no action to stop the release of Plame's name. This would make him an accessory to a serious federal crime, for which even the President may be denied immunity. (www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4629.shtml)

According to The Guardian, a senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy. The book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, which is vetted by the CIA, argues that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands. (www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1242638,00.html)

A Call For the Question

Aides are privately expressing growing concern over Bush's erratic behavior and wide mood swings. "We're at war, there's no doubt about it. What I don't know anymore is just who the enemy might be," says one troubled White House aide. "We seem to spend more time trying to destroy John Kerry than al Qaeda and our enemies list just keeps growing and growing." (www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4636.shtml)

In a June 4, 2004 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, Ray McGovern expressed deep fear that this administration is desperate to stay in office and will resort to "extra-legal" methods.

Our government has virtually guaranteed more "terrorist" attacks, which may well result in martial law. How ironic that the Bush regime has admonished us to support its agenda of global preemptive invasion in the name of "defending freedom", only to find that they are now poised to take that freedom away, allowing the "terrorists" to win after all. If Bush is already breaking the Army with Iraq, the military must realize that a forced continuation of the Bush administration will guarantee US forces will be fed into meatgrinders far worse than Iraq. In addition to Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba, eventual collision with China and/or Russia would be inevitable.

Will the Bush administration dare to play the martial law card to secure it's stay in the White House, against the will of the public, trusting its implementation to an increasingly alienated military and intelligence community?