20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

9/11, COG, and the 9/11 Commission Report
On 9/11, with Bush away from the capital, Cheney and Rumsfeld implemented the COG plan which they had been secretly planning for two decades. The 9/11 Commission Report confirms this fact, which had immense consequences.[45]
Under COG, according to The Washington Post, Bush

…dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington [to Site R, Raven Rock Mountain Complex]. Known internally as the COG, for “continuity of government,” the administration-in-waiting is an unannounced complement to the acknowledged absence of Vice President Cheney from Washington for much of the past five months.[46]

According to Professor Shirley Anne Warshaw,

Cheney jumped into action in his bunker beneath the East Wing to ensure continuity in government. He immediately began to create his shadow government by ordering one hundred mid-level executive officials to move to specially designated underground bunkers and stay there twenty-four hours a day. They would not be rotated out, he informed them, for ninety days, since there was evidence, he hinted, that the terrorist organization al-Qa’ida, which had masterminded the attack, had nuclear weapons.[47]

Cheney conferring with his lawyer David Addington in the PEOC as he prepares to run his shadow government. [Source: pbs.org]
It would appear that this “shadow government” finalized such long-standing COG projects as

1. warrantless surveillance, in part through the USA PATRIOT Act, whose controversial provisions were already being implemented by Cheney and others well before the Bill reached Congress on October 12.
   
2. the militarization of domestic security under NORTHCOM, so that the Pentagon would be involved in the surveillance of U.S. citizens.
   
3. Department of Homeland Security’s Project Endgame—a ten-year plan to expand detention camps at a cost of $400 million in fiscal year 2007 alone. This means of handling protest movements, which Rumsfeld and Cheney had rehearsed in REX 84, was an important corollary at the time to the decision, already reached, to again conduct a major war in Central Asia.
   

Congress, however, was not told that the U.S. was now under a continuity of government status until February 2002:

Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-SD) said he had not been informed about the role, location or even the existence of the shadow government that the administration began to deploy the morning of the Sept. 11 hijackings. An aide to House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-MO) said he similarly was unaware of the administration’s move.[48]

• Tom Daschle [Source: cnn.com]
  
• Richard Gephardt [Source: gephardtgroup.com]
  

The radical alterations in previous decades of COG planning were now clear. Eisenhower’s project of a successor government was implemented by Cheney and Rumsfeld as a shadow government, one existing alongside the still-existing government, but at a higher level of secrecy to which America’s constitutional government and its citizens were denied access.[49] It was this anomaly that led me to suggest, in The Road to 9/11, that America was now being governed by a “deep state.”
Cheney on 9/11 used COG to sideline, not just Congress, but Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top leaders of the Bush administration. To accomplish his goals, according to Barton Gellman of The Washington Post,

[T]he vice president and his lawyer [David Addington] had to set the government’s legal direction.… By the afternoon of September 11, Addington had made contact with Timothy Flanigan, the deputy White House counsel. Flanigan’s boss, Alberto Gonzalez, was stranded in Norfolk.… Flanigan was in the [White House] Situation Room on September 11. When Addington reached him from the [underground] bunker, Flanigan patched in the Justice Department Command Center across town. There he found [sic] a young attorney named John C. Yoo [who] had taken leave from university life to join the [Justice Department’s] Office of Legal Counsel as a deputy.[50]

The important connection between these two lawyers, who shared extraordinarily similar views on the importance of prerogative powers, did not occur by accident. Yoo, the young deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, with only two months of government experience, was presiding at the Justice command center. Why such a junior official? Because Attorney General Ashcroft and those directly under him (his deputy Larry Thompson, and his assistant David Ayres) had all been ordered by the PEOC under COG rules to go elsewhere.[51]

• John C. Yoo [Source: law.berkeley.edu]
  
• David Addington [Source: militarist-monitor.org]
  
• John Ashcroft [Source: wikipedia.org]
  

The Cheney-Addington-Yoo channel persisted, and was used for Yoo’s still-withheld 50-page memo on torture: “In an interview after leaving government, Yoo said Addington and Flanigan assisted in the preparation of that memo.” [52]
The Shadow Government after 2001
Shortly before leaving office. Reagan officially changed the purpose of COG planning: it was no longer for arrangements “after a nuclear war,” but for any “national security emergency.” This was defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.”[53] It was under this expanded authority for COG that Cheney and Rumsfeld were able to implement it on 9/11. And we appear to be still officially in that state of emergency today.
Three days after 9/11, Bush used his authority under the National Emergencies Act to declare two White House Declarations of Emergency: Executive Order 13223 of September 14, 2001 (“Ordering the Ready Reserve of the Armed Forces to Active Duty”), and Executive Order 13224 of September 23, 2001 (“with respect to persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism).” Both of these EO titles point to foreign concerns; yet somehow, as we shall see in a moment, COG, which authorized Cheney’s shadow government, continues to exist beyond Congressional purview.
George W. Bush on the phone after 9/11. [Source: abcnews.go.com]
One of the post-Watergate restrictions in the Act is that a state of emergency will lapse after a year, unless the president renews it. Year after year, every September, presidents have renewed them: first, Bush, then Obama and Trump. On September 9 of this year, even as I was predicting Joe Biden would soon do the same, Biden renewed EO 13223.[54]