The Last Roundup, By Christopher Ketcham

The Last Roundup

For decades the federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention under martial law?
By Christopher Ketcham

05/05/08 "Radar Magazine" -- 28/04/08 -In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man," sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men. "There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—"without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

Continued:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19871.htm

More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."

"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.' "

As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)

In a while this will seem normal, expected. Maybe that's the plan, repeat until it becomes reality.
Maybe because people are so inured to the apparent ineffectiveness of the Democratic Party.

At the very least I would expect the usual bunch of haters and conspiracy deniers to begin hurling epithets.

What I find "unnerving " is that more folks in DU and in other blog/groups
do understand the danger, and are forseeing scenarios which Bush could use to declare martial law.
2 of the most common scenarios discussed since last year are another 9-11 type attack, most likely with a dirty bomb, and/or cancelling the elections.
Of late, the concern is also an assassination of Obama.

You should know by now how shy and reticent I become when confronted with these kinds of issues. I just get all atwitter and end up with the vapors.

:toast:


wp

Take all the time you need to recompose yourself, friend ... there ya go, the color is beginning to come back to your face ;-)

Yeah, but it's mostly red, as in embarrassment. Must be that 15 years in Catholic schools, shame factories that they are.


:evilgrin:


See...? It doesn't get much redder than that.


:grr:


Or that.


Good catch on the article, btw. And as you said in various "kick" posts, it's a little disturbing that people, even here on DU, don't really seem to take this stuff very seriously.

I'm now at the point where I'll be both relieved and blown away if they don't pull some sort of false flag operation fairly soon. They'll immediately brand the perps as Iranian Muslim radicals, rumored to be acting on orders issued by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself.

They'll of course have to be murdered within seconds of the actual event. If left alive, they'd turn out to be scared innocents, borderline nerds, apolitical computer science or electrical engineering exchange students, serious international soccer fans, underpaid service industry workers and devout Catholics who know absolutely nothing and care less about Islam, the Prophet Muhammad or the Koran. Can't have that kind of nonsense screwing up an otherwise solid black op.

Next step: Launch a 24/7 PR/media blitz, starting on Fux Nudes and CNN and quickly migrating to the rest of the usual incompetents and their alleged news organizations, to plant the fairy tale that the Iranian radicals couldn't have pulled it off without the help of American leftist radicals and Al Qaeda sympathizers. Enlist the rest of the suet-brained corporate suck-ups, AKA "on air talent," who have the gall to play actual journalists on TV, to link the Iranian perps involving logistical support and other critical assistance from a US terrorist "sleeper cell" with suspected ties to Al Qaeda.

And if that's not bad enough, it turns out there are hundreds of these cells out there where you least expect them, hiding in plain sight from sea to shining sea, overflowing with "violent far left radicals and domestic terrorists" who share Al Qaeda's passion for wiping "the great satan" off the face of the earth once and for all.

You can imagine the next few moves: HR 1955/S 1959 -- the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" -- is pushed through the Senate at warp speed, passed by unanimous voice vote (Hillary's voice among the loudest) and signed by a panting, salivating dictator-in-waiting, who's also trying to cover up an excited little bulge that just barely stretches the fabric right next to the zipper.

But he can be forgiven his little display of overt ecstasy; he's just overcome with bliss at the thought that another vital piece of the fascist infrastructure is ready to go live and that the Constitution's death rattle is very close.

He's an excitable guy when there's domestic repression in the air and he can almost hear the thunder of a hundred thousand jackboots crashing down onto the pavement, the roaring crowds of reactionary maniacs, the liquid thwack of saps and riot sticks on soft tissue, the crack of clubs on bone.

With the official story firmly in place, supported uncritically by corporate mass media and burned into the consciousness of mainstream America, our governmental massuhs can use this whole bullshit scenario as intended: Supplying the final excuse to attack Iran, possibly with tactical nukes. A return to the heady days of 92 percent support. The return of rabid patriotism that fueled the anger and blood lust of those Americans who waved the flag and cheered aloud over the shock and awe attack on Iraq, and the commensurate slaughter of up to half a million innocents in just two or three days.

They'll probably figure out a way to link single-payer, universal health care to Islamic terrorism, too, so they can double their mileage without straining the black ops budget.

Best of all for the Bushies: the consciousness of the country, if there is such a thing, will again be controlled by the same bunch of reliable dullards who will apparently buy just about anything from these manipulative bastards as long as it doesn't require critical thought, common sense or the application of logic.


Ooops. As usual, I've exceeded my target word count by a mere 500 words.

See ya, Echo.


wp

Although much of that depends on the severity of the hypothetical false flag and its outcome: the powers that be understand all too well how to manipulate the collective consciousness, and under extreme emotional duress, within the fog of shock, rational, moral individuals can quickly lapse into perverse groupthink, allowing for all sorts of horrifying things they wouldn't under otherwise normal conditions. Let's hope this doesn't come to pass as those powers that be certainly have laid the infrastructure for it to become reality ... and something tells me they wouldn't bother doing so if it were merely an obscure, remote possibility.

this is scary and all too plausible.

In July 2007 and again last August, Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.

I know that it's a LONG AND TEDIOUS ARTICLE FOLKS,
BUT IT IS VERY VERY DETAILED AND VERY VERY IMPORTANT

At least bookmark it and read it later or, as I did,
save it to your HD so you can, at least, pull it out when it happens
to prove to others that you watched it come down (not that anything could be done)

Kicked and Rec'd!

:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:
Whaddya gonna do?

The train has officially left the track and people
still think a hacked election will turn it all around.

WE be fucked and that's that.

BHN

:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:
Whaddya gonna do?

The train has officially left the track and people
still think a hacked election will turn it all around.

WE be fucked and that's that.

BHN

Maddening to realize the other audience members
have not noticed the charred rafters falling around us, eh?

Remember America?
I miss her, how about you?

BHN:hug:

nt

doesn't have exposing all this secret Bu$gCo crap as one of his/her top priorities for the first year in office, I think we all need to be very concerned. At least concerned enough to demand that what is not absolutely necessary for national security be declassified and released to the public.

:kick: