'Kill Switch And Detentions' - Bush Era FOIA Docs Reveal Gov't Plans For Apocalyptic Events

“Kill Switch And Detentions” — Bush-Era FOIA Docs Reveal Government Plans For Apocalyptic Events

Tyler Durden

Previously classified files obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice reveal that the 2004 George W. Bush administration conducted a holistic review of the president’s emergency powers, with the goal of modernizing a set of secret plans for continuity-of-government in a nuclear war.

The George W. Bush Presidential Library turned over 500 out of 6,000 pages of the documents, known as “presidential emergency action documents” (PEADs), which “shed troub­ling new light on the powers that modern pres­id­ents claim they possess in moments of crisis,” according to the Brennan Center, which obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

PEADs were created during the Cold War, when the chance of a Soviet nuclear strike was at its peak. Early drafts reportedly rested on broad interpretations of executive powers. 

According to official reports from the 1960s, various PEADs authorized the president to enact measures such as suspending habeas corpus, to detain “dangerous persons” within the country, to censor news media, and to prevent international travel.

In light if 9/11, one Bush administration official viewed updating the PEADs an “urgent and compel­ling secur­ity effort, espe­cially in light of ongo­ing threats.”

While the Brennan Center was unable to obtain more recent PEADs, the documents show “some of the most disturbing aspects of early-Cold War emergency action documents” were maintained at least throughout 2008.

At least one of the docu­ments under review was designed to imple­ment the emer­gency author­it­ies contained in Section 706 of the Commu­nic­a­tions Act. During World War II, Congress gran­ted the pres­id­ent author­ity to shut down or seize control of “any facil­ity or station for wire commu­nic­a­tion” upon proclam­a­tion “that there exists a state or threat of war involving the United States.”

This fright­en­ingly expans­ive language was, at the time, hemmed in by Amer­ic­ans’ limited use of tele­phone calls and tele­grams. Today, however, a pres­id­ent will­ing to test the limits of his or her author­ity might inter­pret “wire commu­nic­a­tions” to encom­pass the inter­net — and there­fore claim a “kill switch” over vast swaths of elec­tronic commu­nic­a­tion.

And indeed, Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials repeatedly high­lighted the stat­ute’s flex­ib­il­ity: it was “very broad,” as one offi­cial in the National Secur­ity Coun­cil scribbled, and it exten­ded “broader than common carri­ers in FCC [Federal Commu­nic­a­tions Commis­sion] juris[diction].”

More...