WP: Govt drill 6/19 employees going to bunkers in MD and Va

[Digit]

BACK TO THE BUNKER

By William M. Arkin
Sunday, June 4, 2006; Page B01

On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups -- to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/02/AR2006060201410.html

[havocmom]

1. Now that sorta worries me.

Nothing like a little exercise to confuse officials in the event of an actual emergency. Just ask Cheney about it and how well it screwed things up for NORAD and FAA on 9-11

[soothsayer]

2. Please, God, let mother earth seal them up in there!

They'll be in all our bunkers then. Mount Weather and all that. I thought they also run and hide in the woods, now, in the Shenandoah forest, too.

[Selatius]

3. If somebody nuked Washington, I wouldn't obey this shadow gov't

It is likely the reason Washington got wiped off the map was because it did something that caused a backlash in the form of a nuke.

In such a situation, I advocate a convention be called to amend certain portions of the Constitution and re-establish a new government through new elections that will, hopefully, lead to a government more responsive to the will of people and less able to act against the interests of the people for the sake of corporate barons and war profiteers.

[TomInTib]

4. Just watch 'em wreck a couple of buses.

I'm sorry, but it just struck me as being funny.

Wine will do that s*^t.

[DianaForRussFeingold]

5. Are there going to be any corporate Leaders?

It sounds like the the Twilight Zone! Maybe they are goung to create something like the Green Zone,in Iraq. How about the Christian Coalition,If they are invited,I am scared!:scared: