Clues from the past - History of Bush's War Cabinet

[Westgate]

I have just started reading - 'Rise of The Vulcans' - 'The History of Bush's War Cabinet' by James Mann. When browsing the book in my local Borders bookstore, before purchase, it fell open at chapter nine - 'In the Midst of Armageddon'

As I read the beginning of the chapter, I suddenly thought that here was a clue from the past, that is almost certainly current in today's 'Shrubland'. I have long wondered exactly how 911 could have been planned by the perps. Just how many people would actually have to know the whole plan? With skilled compartmentalisation, of which both military and politicians are extremely adept, probably not that many in terms of key players. So maybe it was a case of 'who you know' rather than 'what you know'. The key surely lies in the ability to network with a small cadre who are each well placed to camouflage their true intentions from those outside the loop. But then, a great level of trust must be forged, perhaps soundly based on experience of working closely with one another. But if the top planning perps are from diverse professional backgrounds, how could they liaise and gain experience as top team players? Here is the beginning of Chapter Nine...........

'At least once a year during the 1980s, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was still working diligently on Capitol Hill, and Rumsfeld remained a hard-driving business executive in Chicago. Yet for three or four days at a time, no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Rumsfeld's office locate him. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number, through which they might relay messages in case of emergencies.

After leaving their day jobs, Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man, joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officers and a single member of Ronald Reagan's cabinet, separately slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a discarded military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear made it's way to the same location.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were principle figures in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan administration. Under it, the administration furtively carried out detailed planning exercises to establish a new American 'president' and his staff, outside and beyond the specifications of the US Constitution, in order to keep the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Over the years a few details about the existence of this Reagan-era effort have come to light, but not the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld.

This clandestine program of the 1980s served as the hidden backdrop to the operations of the second Bush administration in the hours, days and months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. When Vice President Cheney urged President Bush to stay out of Washington that day, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to get out of town and when other federal officials were later sent to work outside the capital to ensure the "continuity of government" in case of further attacks, these actions had their roots in the Reagan administration's classified program. When Cheney himself began to move from Washington to one or another "undisclosed locations" after September 11, he never acknowledged that he had also regularly gone of to undisclosed locations in the 1980s.'..............................

IMHO - these years enabled the coming together of a team well versed in their abilities to govern in the event of a nuclear war or any other sort of dramatic catastrophe. The relationships formed and rehearsed between the military, government, and federal officials, would have made the perfect cover for an 'inside team' planning 911 during the 1990's.

I wonder if this is a clue as to how it all started?