White House Revises Post-Disaster Protocol

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/02/1623/

White House Revises Post-Disaster Protocol
by Charlie Savage

snip//


The unexpected arrival of the new policy has received little attention in the mainstream media, but it has prompted discussion among legal specialists, homeland security experts and Internet commentators — including concerns that the policy may be written in such a way that makes it too easy to invoke emergency presidential powers such as martial law.

Specifically, the policy creates a new “National Continuity Coordinator” inside the White House who is charged with ensuring all executive agencies have a plan by Aug. 4 to keep functioning if their leadership perishes in an attack. The coordinator is also directed to help Congress, the Supreme Court, and state and local leaders prepare for a worst-case scenario.

The policy designates the president’s top adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism — currently Frances Townsend — as the national continuity director. It also directs Townsend to consult National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The public portion of the new “National Continuity Policy” contains few details about how surviving officials would invoke emergency powers, or when emergency powers should be deemed to be no longer necessary so that the elected democracy can resume. The answers to such questions may be contained in a classified appendix which has not been made public.

The unanswered questions have provoked anxiety across ideological lines. The conservative commentator Jerome Corsi , for example, wrote in a much-linked online column that the directive looked like a recipe for allowing the office of the presidency to seize “dictatorial powers” because the policy does not discuss consulting Congress about when to invoke emergency powers — or when to turn them off.

In addition, specialists at both the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, and the American Civil Liberties Union said they have taken calls and e-mails from people who are worried about what the new policy may portend.


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[papau]

1. We discuss this grab of power and dissing of the Consitution for last 3 weeks - and now

we finally get a Boston Globe "Washington News" article!

:-)

And this was scary:

"The policy says that it "shall be implemented consistent with applicable law," but it does not say which laws are "applicable." Because the Bush legal team has pushed a controversial theory that the Constitution gives the president an unwritten power to disobey laws at his own discretion to protect national security, some specialists said that the vagueness of the policy is troubling.

Asked if the White House believes that the National Emergencies Act is a constitutional constraint on executive power and thus would apply, Johndroe repeated only that "Anything developed would be consistent with all applicable laws.""