June 19: 4,000 gov workers will say bye to families for bunker

more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/02/AR2006060201410_pf.html

BACK TO THE BUNKER

By William M. Arkin
Sunday, June 4, 2006; B01


On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups -- to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington.

But for all the BlackBerry culture, the outcome is still old-fashioned black and white: We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on alternate facilities, data warehouses and communications, yet no one can really foretell what would happen to the leadership and functioning of the federal government in a catastrophe.

I hope I'm not the only one :scared:

just like those concentration camps in the southwest, you know, "just in case"

martial law to be declared-they can't stop the outta control train they're on.

...and refuse to let them out? That would solve half of America's problems at a stroke.

I know because my father was involved with it. They would take government officials to bunkers to make sure the govt. survived nuclear war.

They did it so much he missed my senior year in high school as the army stationed him in utah for a year.