News Release

* Shadow Government * “Bunker Busters”

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CHRISTOPHER SIMPSON
Professor of communication at American University and author of National Security Directives of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, Simpson is available for limited interviews. He said today: “Senate Majority Leader Daschle knew or certainly should have known that there are contingency plans for a shadow government. But he apparently did not know that the Bush administration had begun actually operating one…. Once the story broke in the news media, the Bush administration began portraying this submerged security apparatus as a relatively innocuous government-in-waiting that would spring into action only after a catastrophic attack on Washington, D.C. — as though it were something like a patriotic insurance policy. That picture is quite misleading. First, every bureaucracy has to remain active if it is to survive at all. In this case, the shadow government is tasked with organizing a significant escalation of ‘war on terrorism’ tactics that the Bush administration plans to carry out during the next federal budget cycle. Second, this incident provides a glimpse into the administration’s bunker mentality. In this case, the entire legislative branch of the U.S. government was seen in the White House as so dangerous in a crisis that it supposedly required the president to create a secret, unelected, emergency government, the key personalities of which are the administration’s own political appointees…. This shadow government is not a ‘security measure.’ It is an attack on the democratic process itself.”

WAYNE MADSEN
Madsen, a former communications security specialist for the National Security Agency, is author of Critical Infrastructure Protection and the Endangerment of Civil Liberties. He said today: “The shadow government installations are located at the Alternate Joint Communications Center, in Raven Rock Mountain near Waynesboro, Penn., and underground on the grounds of the Mount Weather Emergency Assistance Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia…. The Bush-Cheney regime is playing fast and loose with the U.S. Constitution, demonstrating that they are not upholding the oath of office they took on Jan. 20, 2001.”

* “Bunker Busters”

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JACQUELINE CABASSO
Executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, which recently released the report “Nuclear Weapons in a Changed World: The Hidden Dangers of the Rush to War,” Cabasso said today: “Use of new ‘thermobaric’ bunker-busting weapons in Afghanistan illustrates how the ‘war on terrorism’ is being used to test new weapons. It also increases the possibility that the nuclear option may be considered. The Bush administration’s recent Nuclear Posture Review makes the use of nuclear weapons more credible by relocating nuclear weapons within a broad spectrum of warfighting capabilities…. Increasing U.S. casualties in Afghanistan also will increase pressure to ‘save American lives’ — the rationale used by the U.S. to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167