Continuity of Government: Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution?

Brooks was responding to a story by Alfonzo Chardy in the Miami Herald. about Oliver North’s involvement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in planning for “Continuity of Government” (COG). According to Chardy, the plans envisaged “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.”

Reagan had installed at FEMA a counterinsurgency team that he had already assembled as governor of California. The team was headed by Army Col. Louis Giuffrida, who had attracted Reagan’s attention by a paper he had written while at the US Army War College, advocating the forcible warrantless detention of millions of black Americans in concentration camps.“ Reagan first installed Giuffrida as head of the California National Guard, and called on him “to design Operation Cable Splicer. … martial law plans to legitimize the arrest and detention of anti-Vietnam war activists and other political dissidents.” These plans were refined with the assistance of British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, who had used massive detention and deportations to deal with the 1950s Communist insurgency in what is now Malaysia.'

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