Permanent Emergency Leading To Dictatorship?
November 26th, 2010 Permanent state of emergency. That rings of a historical truth. During the late Roman Republic it was torn with sectarian violence that led to civil war, first between the forces of Marius and Sulla, and later between the forces of Caesar and Pompey. After the assassination of Caesar there was initiated a dictatorship of the Triumverate which ended up with the Imperium of Augustus. External forms of republican rule were kept but the real power was in the hands of the Imperator and the Senate became a mere rubber stamp and source of bureaucratic support for the imperial empire.
This was not the sort of crisis management the Romans were used to. When faced with an external threat or rebellion, a dictator would be selected for a short period, normally no more than six months and only within Italy. Sulla had the Senate create a new form of dictatorship for constitutional reform and held the post for a year. Later Caesar had himself selected as dictator for 10 consecutive years and then just before he was assassinated was nominated dictator in perpetuity.
This is from the Wikipedia Article on triumvirates.
"The Second Triumvirate was recognized as a triumvirate at the time. A Lex Titia formalized the rule of Octavian, Mark Antony, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The legal language makes reference to the traditional triumviri. This "three-man commission for restoring the constitution of the republic" (triumviri rei publicae constituendae) in fact were given the power to make or annul law without approval from either the senate or the people; their judicial decisions were not subject to appeal, and they named magistrates at will. Although the constitutional machinery of the Republic was not irrevocably dismantled by the Lex Titia, in the event it never recovered. Lepidus was sidelined early in the triumvirate, and Antony was eliminated in civil war, leaving Octavian the sole leader."
This is from Wikipedia article on Dictators.
"After Caesar's murder on the Ides of March, his consular colleague Mark Antony introduced the lex Antonia which abolished the dictatorship. The office was later offered to Augustus, who declined it, and opted instead for tribunician power and consular imperium without holding any magisterial office other than imperator and princeps Senatus — a politic arrangement which left him as functional dictator without having to hold the controversial title. This novel - though not unconstitutional - arrangement of offices and powers would in time evolve into the office of Roman emperor. Thus, dictatorship, as defined by the republican institution, was not a feature of the principate or dominate."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumvirate
Could we be seeing the same happening now in our Republic? Are we becoming a sham democracy with an oligarchy ruling? Have we ever been anything else?
This is from Global Research.
"Continuity of Government: Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution?
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, November 24, 2010
Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Address to Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, November 23, 2010)
In July 1987, during the Iran-Contra Hearings grilling of Oliver North, the American public got a glimpse of "highly sensitive" emergency planning North had been involved in. Ostensibly North had been handling plans for an emergency response to a nuclear attack (a legitimate concern). But press accounts alleged that the planning was for a more generalized suspension of the constitution at the president's determination.
As part of its routine Iran-contra coverage, the following exchange was printed in the New York Times, but without journalistic comment or follow-up:
[Congressman Jack] Brooks: Colonel North, in your work at the N.S.C. were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?
Both North's attorney and Sen. Daniel Inouye, the Democratic Chair of the Committee, responded in a way that showed they were aware of the issue:
Brendan Sullivan [North's counsel, agitatedly]: Mr. Chairman?
[Senator Daniel] Inouye: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch upon that?
Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was an area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.
Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.
Brooks was responding to a story by Alfonzo Chardy in the Miami Herald. about Oliver North's involvement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in planning for "Continuity of Government" (COG). According to Chardy, the plans envisaged "suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis."
Reagan had installed at FEMA a counterinsurgency team that he had already assembled as governor of California. The team was headed by Army Col. Louis Giuffrida, who had attracted Reagan's attention by a paper he had written while at the US Army War College, advocating the forcible warrantless detention of millions of black Americans in concentration camps." Reagan first installed Giuffrida as head of the California National Guard, and called on him "to design Operation Cable Splicer. … martial law plans to legitimize the arrest and detention of anti-Vietnam war activists and other political dissidents."[3] These plans were refined with the assistance of British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, who had used massive detention and deportations to deal with the 1950s Communist insurgency in what is now Malaysia.
At the time few people (including myself) attached much importance to the Chardy story about COG. Chardy himself suggested that Reagan's Attorney General, William French Smith, had intervened to stop the COG plan from being presented to the President, and in 1985 Giuffrida was forced out of office for having spent government money to build a private residence. But COG planning not only continued, it expanded.
The Implementation of COG on 9/11
Clearly 9/11 met the conditions for the implementation of COG measures, and we know for certain that COG plans were implemented on that day in 2001, before the last plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. The 9/11 Report confirms this twice, on pages 38 and 326. It was under the auspices of COG that Bush stayed out of Washington on that day, and other government leaders like Paul Wolfowitz were swiftly evacuated to Site R, inside a hollowed out mountain near Camp David.
But the implementation of COG went beyond short-term responses, to the installation of what Professor Shirley Anne Warshaw calls a ninety-day alternative "shadow government" outside Washington.
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. The shadow government, as a result, needed to be ready to take over the government from the bunkers.
These ninety days saw the swift implementation of the key features attributed to COG planning by Gelbspan and Chardy in the 1980s: warrantless detentions, warrantless deportations, and the warrantless eavesdropping that is their logical counterpart. The clearest example was the administration's Project Endgame — a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone. This implemented the central feature of the massive detention exercise, Rex 84, conducted by Louis Giuffrida and Oliver North in 1984.
On September 20, 2001, Bush launched the war on terror in a televised address to a joint session of congress, when he said, "Our `war on terror' begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." Today we now have about 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan, to deal with an officially estimated 60 members of Al Qaeda. The predictable result has been an expansion of terrorist activities in Somalia, Yemen, and above all Pakistan.
The war on terror was administratively implemented in three National Security Presidential Directives, NSPDs 7, 8, and 9. All three are classified, and the topics of two of them are unknown. The third, NSPD 9 of October 25, 2001, directed the Secretary of Defense to plan military options against both Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan.
The October date is misleading. A version of the directive calling for covert action in Afghanistan had been approved by principals on September 4, 2001, one week before 9/11. An enhanced plan for military action in Afghanistan, had been approved by Bush on September 17; and the same document "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq."
Perhaps the most significant domestic product from Cheney's trimester mirabilis was the Patriot Act of October 25, 2001. Congress was given only one week to pass this 340-page bill, which in the opinion of researchers "was already written and ready to go long before September 11th." In 2007 the Justice Department acknowledged that FBI agents had abused the Patriot Act more than 1000 times.
We should not forget that the Patriot Act was only passed after lethal weapons-grade anthrax letters were mailed to two crucial Democratic Senators – Senators Daschle and Leahy – who had initially questioned the bill. After the anthrax letters, however, they withdrew their initial opposition. Someone — we still do not know who – must have planned those anthrax letters well in advance. This is a fact most Americans do not want to think about."
For more of this article see link below.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22089
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