The Continuing Toxic Fallout From 9/11

Here is a great paper by Professor Peter Dale Scott:

I hope in this paper to show that Dick Cheney responded to 9/11 by using devious means to install a small cabal of lawyers – most notoriously John Yoo – who proceeded conspiratorially in the next weeks to exclude their superiors, while secretly authorizing measures ranging from warrantless surveillance and detention to torture.

Some of these were measures which Cheney and Rumsfeld had previously been preparing for almost two decades, as central figures in the secret agency planning for so-called Continuity of Government (COG). It was revealed in the 1980s that these plans aimed at granting a president emergency powers, uncurbed by congressional restraints, to intervene abroad, and also to detain large numbers of those who might protest such actions.

On 9/11, the 9/11 Report confirms, COG was implemented. As we shall see, Cheney promptly ordered the three top figures in the Justice Department out of Washington to a designated COG site buried deep underground.

This allowed Cheney’s cabal to deal instead, starting that same afternoon, with John Yoo in the Justice Department command center. At that time John Yoo, a 34-year-old distinguished chiefly for his repeated defense of Cheney’s eccentric views on presidential authority, had only been in the government for two months.

As a consequence, since 9/11 we have seen warrantless surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, and the militarization of homeland security, on an unprecedented scale that is not just illegal but an erasure of rights specified in the U.S. constitution.

Furthermore, the secrecy and speed of the manner in which our rights were drastically subverted is itself an affront to the ideals of America as an open society: one in which major changes to our political fabric are only made through authorized channels, and after debate.

You can read the rest @
http://www.globalresearch.ca/another-911-intrigue-dick-cheney-john-yoo-and-continuity-in-government-cog-measures-on-911/5545654

The "state of emergency" declared after 9/11 has been renewed every year since then, most recently on August 30, 2016.

If Trump really is going to make a difference, he ought to start by lifting this state of emergency, or at least directing Congress to investigate the rationale for its continuation (which they have failed to do for the past 15+ years).