White House Revises Secret Post-disaster Protocol

Another sinister Bush power grab. This one is secret:

The Bush administration is writing a new plan to maintain governmental control in the wake of an apocalyptic terrorist attack or overwhelming natural disaster, moving such doomsday planning for the first time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to officials inside the White House.

[...]The policy replaces a Clinton-era "continuity in government" post-disaster plan. The old plan is classified, but security specialists and administration officials said the new policy centralizes control of such planning in the White House and puts a greater emphasis on terrorism spurring the catastrophe.

A Scenario for Coupe d'etat:

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.

You can't trust this president:

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.

We need to be suspicious:

Sharon Bradford Franklin , the senior counsel at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan think-tank that promotes constitutional safeguards, said the policy's definition "is so broad that it raises serious concerns about when and how this might be used to authorize unchecked executive action."