All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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I've got Bill Arkin and he writes for Newsweek and he's also the author of the book American Coup about the revolution within the form of the George W. Bush years here.
This is, I think, the most important article he's ever written, and that's really saying something here, I think, exclusive at newsweek.com, exclusive inside the military's top secret plans if coronavirus cripples the government.
Welcome back to the show, Bill.
How are you?
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
So con plan this and con plan that, and the military is really getting ready for the worst case scenario here.
You want to just take us through it where you want to start?
Well, I want to start by first saying that the military is like the rest of America, and that is to say that they are just as worried for themselves and their families as are the rest of America.
And it's a it's a it's it's a really important point to to make, of course.
And also, I get the sense speaking to people in the military that they're not necessarily dying to, I know that's the wrong word, engage in operations or missions on American soil.
It's not it's not what military people are trained to do.
It's not what they are prepared for.
And especially right now in the American military, when it's fighting wars overseas that we don't even pay attention to.
I think there's a lot of people who feel like it's not the first resort, the military, not even the National Guard, which in some ways is a force that's to be distinguished from the active duty military because of its state status.
But again, the National Guard's use as a law enforcement force or as a force to enforce the law, it's it's not a it's definitely not a the first choice and it shouldn't be the first choice.
So having said that, having said that, people who I speak to in the military themselves are skeptical of the use of the military and feel like the federal government is itself not even necessarily the first resort, that the states and local communities really have much more to do here in dealing with coronavirus.
They are directed to and and responsible for looking at the defense of the United States and the continuity of the U.S. government.
And there are many plans written, some well-known and some highly secret, that lay out not just the continuity of the presidency and the continuity of the government, but also everything that ranges from dealing with civil disturbances in America and the outbreak of violence all the way through to the imposition of martial law.
Yeah.
All right.
So I guess let's start with the National Guard there, as you mentioned, and their role and how the law describes their role as assistance to civilian law enforcement on the state level and the power of the president to nationalize them for whichever purposes.
And actually, really, maybe we should start with the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act.
So we know in normal times what the law is supposed to be about how these things are decided.
OK, well, first, let's just make it clear that there is something called the National Guard.
It's in many ways has a dual status.
First, in its state status, it works for the governors and is constituted as what is called the militia in the constitution of our country.
And there are 450,000 or so National Guardsmen and women around the country, all assigned to states and state units.
That National Guard can also be federalized as a part of the reserves of the active duty military.
And that requires orders that either come for individual units, say, for instance, when they are sent to Iraq or Afghanistan to fight, or in the case of, say, a post 9-11 reaction when National Guardsmen were activated to serve at airports and train stations and the like.
So there is a National Guard and then there is the military and the military.
When I say the military, I mean the federal military, the U.S. armed forces, which is a separate force from the National Guard.
And that force, the federal armed forces, are restricted from engaging in law enforcement on American soil.
And that's an important distinction.
They're not necessarily restricted from engaging on law enforcement, either in enforcing their own laws internally, nor are they restricted from engaging in law enforcement overseas.
But in a long series of traditions and controversies that have gone back to pre-Civil War era, the use of military forces as a posse comitatus, that is a force called out by the sheriff in order to enforce the law, has been restricted.
Now, there are three exceptions to this restriction, posse comitatus.
One of them is if the military is used in accordance with the law, which is to say that Congress has said specifically that the military can operate on domestic soil in the conduct of enforcing the law.
And the number one exception that Congress has ruled on is the drug war.
So the U.S. military is involved in the drug war and in the interdiction of drugs, including inside the United States.
And that is a lawful mission of the U.S. military that does not violate posse comitatus.
The second has to do with weapons of mass destruction, either reacting to a weapons of mass destruction, a terrorist attack inside the United States or other extraordinary missions associated with WMD.
But they're fairly narrowly written.
The third is what's called the Insurrection Act.
And though it's got this unfortunate name that makes it sound as if the United States is going to be engaged in an insurrection, the truth of the matter is that the Insurrection Act is more of a catch all that was used as much in dealing with, say, for instance, the calling out of the military for law enforcement in 1992 in response to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles or post-Katrina when the governor of Louisiana declined to federalize her National Guard forces.
And the question of whether or not active duty forces in New Orleans could enforce the law stymied the Bush administration.
So the Insurrection Act essentially is a law that today says that the military can be used to enforce the law when the local authorities are either unable or unwilling to do so.
So why unwilling?
Well, because the military was used during the civil rights era to enforce desegregation, which was something that sometimes local and state authority didn't want to do.
So unwilling became a part of the language of the Insurrection Act.
So it is the case that President Trump, in response to a request from a governor, could invoke the Insurrection Act and could order the military to assist local authorities in the enforcement of the law.
That is not martial law.
That is the invoking of the Insurrection Act, the use of the military in assisting duly constituted civil authorities in enforcing the law, either because they're not able to or because they are unwilling to enforce the law.
And it's somewhat limited and it's also confusing because the way the Insurrection Act is written, it says enforcing federal law.
And again, that goes back to issues of taxation and issues of civil rights that were the laws that U.S. military forces were often engaged in in enforcing.
And so it's not necessarily applicable to the coronavirus crisis that we're currently facing.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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What exactly is martial law then as distinct from these other things?
Martial law, I think, as defined both in the in the statutes and in military doctrine would be that where a military commander, either locally or in a state or in theory in the country, states that civil authority is no longer valid because of either a breakdown in civil authority or because of a level of violence that has overwhelmed civil authority.
So that military, the military is in charge and that the military is in charge, as they always say, until civil authority can be restored.
This can either be done as a result of the declaration by the president of the United States or it can be done on a local level if a state requests assistance from the from the federal government or if a situation in a state or a local area demands that the military intervene in this case, then really it is the it is that the military is in charge and it will stay in charge until it is able to stabilize the situation and then turn over control back to the civil government.
There's never been really a case of martial law in modern American history and the cases of the imposition of martial law that took place in the eighteen hundreds, you know, were were cases in which those who imposed martial law were were later either found guilty of crimes or really were hounded out of polite society and American history books.
So martial laws, it's a popular term that we throw around.
I would I would think that even in something as broadly dangerous as the coronavirus, that and in that it's going to affect police and National Guard as much as it's going to affect normal citizens, that we will not be seeing necessarily the imposition of martial law.
What we will be seeing is a lot more military people on the streets working hand in hand with other first responders in order to stabilize the situation, especially where military skills can be applied.
So let's think about that, because military skills are not necessarily in an area of enforcing the law.
Military skills really are are what are looked at to free up state assets to be able to enforce the law.
So when even the military has its contingency plans to go into a state, let's say, in response to coronavirus, it's more to provide backup to for medical care, logistics, transport, engineering, so that the National Guard can enforce the law.
And and so it supplants parts of the National Guard to allow more people in the National Guard to engage in law enforcement.
That's how they see it right now.
That's how they see it right now.
Now, whether that will be actually how it unfolds, that's another question.
But so that really means that the military would like the National Guard to take the responsibility and like the governors to take the responsibility.
Now, that doesn't mean that they don't have contingency plans, whether if that's not possible, but that's how they see it as of right now.
OK, so I want to go back to what you were saying at the beginning there.
And and as you've been kind of implying throughout here that the military is very reluctant to take on this authority.
They really don't want it.
And you believe them when they tell you that they would only do this until they can restore civilian rule and then they'd step right back out of the way again.
Their sacred oath is to the Constitution.
And some of them mean that and believe that.
I hear you.
And I think that that all sounds right to me.
But I'm reminded of a statement by former four star General Tommy Franks a few years back that if we were to suffer another major 9-11 sized terrorist attack, that America would probably move permanently to a military form of government.
And a lot of people kind of shouted him down and said that that was really hyperbolic and he shouldn't have said that.
But I wonder really about the gray area there between no, no, no, no, no.
We don't want this authority and geez, we might just have to hold on to it.
Well, I think that the bigger gray area these days, Scott, is coronavirus.
So the entire paradigm of emergency response, which was created after 9-11, essentially assumed that there would be a localized emergency and that assistance would come from the outside in order to stabilize wherever there was a terrorist attack or even a hurricane or some other disaster.
The problem with coronavirus and this I've heard now from numerous people inside the Pentagon is that there really is no outside anymore.
So the entire paradigm of post 9-11 national response has to be sort of thrown out the window if indeed we're going to be looking at hundreds of thousands of cases of people who come down with virus and communities that are going to be sequestered and even quarantined.
So someone is going to have to enforce those restrictions if they get worse than what we see them today.
And given the projections that we're hearing and given also how much we've seen change in the last two weeks, it's not unreasonable to imagine that the military will have to play a greater role.
Now, whether that will lead to the kind of takeover that you describe or Tommy Frank stupidly referred to, that's another question.
But I think we're in a place right now where we can debate what is the proper role of the military.
And we can also ponder whether or not the military is prepared to undertake these responsibilities rather than sort of just speculate as to what might happen.
And I say that because I've talked to quite a few military people over the last couple of weeks as I've been doing my reporting for Newsweek.
And really what I found is a lot of curiosity on the part of military commanders and planners to better understand how they can play an important role in helping out with coronavirus while avoiding so many of the controversies associated with use of military forces to enforce the law, which they are reluctant to do.
Yeah, so now we have here these various plans and we all know that they have a plan for everything, including invading Canada if they have to and this kind of thing.
But these plans include what happens if coronavirus wipes out the West Wing?
What happens if coronavirus means that they have to, if things get so bad, they have to essentially evacuate all important people out of Washington, D.C. and all these different kinds of things.
And you have this quote in here, like you say, it was said in a bit of morbid humor that Americans had better learn who General Terrence J.
O'Shaughnessy is.
And that's a quote from a senior officer said that to you.
Well, I think that this is the real problem we face right now is that we don't know whether or not Washington is itself going to be immune from the coronavirus or what the impact of coronavirus in Washington, D.C. will be.
Here's what we do know, however, about the kind of preparations and plans that they make.
First, there are all sorts of plans, many of them highly secret, about continuity of government and continuity of the presidency.
And that could entail everything from the type of things we saw post 9-11, where Dick Cheney went to the bunker and has separated himself from George Bush just in case there was another terrorist attack.
And really quite perplexing.
I don't see that the government has taken many of those actions yet, which just seems ridiculous to me.
But in other words, you're saying that Mike Pence ought to be at Mount Weather right now.
Well, maybe not at Mount Weather or maybe not even separated out.
But I would like to have some assurance from the government that they are at least anticipating that such a scenario is credible and they want to provide assurances to the American public that no matter what, constitutional rule in America will continue.
So their sluggishness in not doing that is signaling to me and signaling, I think, to the public when they start to ask the questions that, in fact, they don't take constitutional rule that seriously.
And in fact, they're willing to take risks with constitutional rule.
So what are their plans?
Their plans are what they call devolving succession.
So there's succession to the presidency and succession to leadership and government agencies.
And they're all laid out in a variety of laws derived from the Constitution and executive orders that say, here's the successor, actually named individuals going down from the top of the federal government all the way to the secretary of education, the 16th in line to become the president were there to be a need to succeed to the presidency.
Devolvement is the creation of a second line of unelected and unappointed officials who create a shadow government, if you will, that would take over responsibility for the functioning of government were the successor line interrupted.
Now, I guess on some level, I don't have a problem that there is such a contingency plan, but it seems to me that with the coronavirus, we are flirting with the possibility that devolvement will happen long before succession will ever happen.
Not so much because there will be some big nuclear explosion in Washington that will kill everyone, but more that the normal workings of government will surely be interrupted as time goes by.
And the idea that we can just so quickly devolve the workings of governmental decision making to people who are not just the second string, but unknown to the American public, and that those leaders will then be able to provide any comfort to the American public that the government is lawfully constituted and doing its job is ridiculous.
So it's incumbent upon the government to say, we are instituting our continuity plans, and we're going to do it in a transparent way so that we can make it clear to the American public that under the worst of circumstances, in fact, we are preserving the constitution and the laws of this nation in providing leadership.
But I think that there is a doggedness on the part of the Trump administration and on the part of the continuity folks who I think are really lost in their own world of secrecy, not to do that.
And so I'm much more concerned that some unknown government official will devolve power and become an illegitimate leader than I am of the military taking over the country in martial law.
I'm much more concerned that Washington is not adequately prepared, nor is it doing what needs to be done in order to reassure the American public that it knows what it's doing and that it's doing it lawfully.
And now this second string, from what little I do know of the continuity of government plans and exercises and so forth, in, say, the 1990s, it was mostly made up of prominent former government officials.
For example, then former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had served under Ford, would often play the president in the war games and was, I think, on the list.
So I wonder if this second string, they are all people we never heard of, or they're all people that we've seen in positions of high authority in, say, the Clinton years or the Bush years or the Obama years or something.
In the continuity plans, as they're currently written, the devolved officials are actually government people, whether they be political appointees or career government people, who would be those who would immediately devolve.
We're not talking about a nuclear war here, where all of a sudden prominent Americans are going to be pulled out of retirement in order to be a government until a government can be constituted.
We're talking about a slowly moving virus that might affect enough members of Congress, enough senior leaders within the government, so that we may face a situation where even Congress may not be able to meet, may not be able to establish a quorum, where government agencies might not be able to receive legitimate orders from on high.
So we're not really talking about the former picture of what continuity looked like.
We're really talking today about the devolving into faceless and nameless government functionaries who would take over America.
To me, that is not an unrealistic picture, and it's also one that is alarming, because it kind of shows how the continuity of government system has created a bit of contempt for the Constitution and for our laws.
So we have this very system, which is created in order to preserve the Constitution, being so good at its own contingency planning, that in fact, it has undermined the Constitution by trying to conceive of every possible contingency in order to continue to operate.
Mm-hmm.
So some faceless guy says, well, I'm the president now.
He's got to get Air Force General O'Shaughnessy to go along with that, or he ain't nothing, right?
Well, I guess on some level, the devolvement of actual rules, so whether that be by the president or the vice president or other successors to the presidency under the Constitution, would indeed need to get buy-in not just from the military, but from the rest of the government.
Right.
And the governors, right, of the 50 states?
Yes.
I mean, so the very process by which you're devolving continuity, if you will, has got to be one that's credible.
It's got to be one that people recognize as legitimate.
Otherwise, you then have all of a sudden a conflict within America as to who is in charge.
And so that's why it should be a transparent system, so that when, in fact, the succession occurs or continuity is implemented or devolvement takes place, that everybody understands why this has happened.
So that's why it all taking place in secret is so ridiculous, because it's just flirting with disaster as if it were to be implemented.
Okay.
So now can you take us through and explain a little bit about what Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac are here?
Well, so there are secret plans for continuity of government.
Those are sort of the basic plans of moving government agencies to their alternate locations, like Mount Weather or like Raven Rock in Pennsylvania.
And there are other bunkers and other alternate facilities, which every agency of government has set up in order to fulfill its continuity requirements.
That's the open system kind of at the secret level, if you will.
Then there are these like above top secret plans which are dealing with how to protect the president, how to deal with a nuclear blackmail or nuclear incident in Washington, how to deal with like the worst case scenario of even foreign troops on American soil.
And I have been tracking these plans and this world for more than three decades and only recently came aware of the fact that there were three separate plans, Octagon, Zodiac and Freejack that were newly created, that is during the Obama years, that essentially are three separate plans for how the above top secret world would respond to different contingencies.
Now, what those specific contingencies are, I can't tell you.
I don't know.
I know that there's a fourth plan called Atlas.
And from what I've been able to find out and piece together, that has to do with evacuating the non-national security agencies from Washington.
But as to what Zodiac and Freejack and Octagon are, like what procedures they would follow in order to evacuate the president, in order to implement continuity, in order to open up alternate sites, in order to enforce the law, in order to communicate the existence of new government, that I really don't know.
And at this point, given that we are not talking about something that we're hiding from the Russians, given that we're not talking about terrorists as a threat to the United States, that we're talking about reassuring the American public during coronavirus that the government knows what it's doing and is taking into consideration all of the contingencies possible, it seems incumbent that the government tell us a little bit more about what these plans are so that we can understand when they might be implemented.
Is it fair to say that that's why some of these sources talk to you for this piece, because they agree with you that we really need to know this stuff, as top secret as it all is?
I think, again, as I said at the beginning of this interview, Scott, that I feel like the military are citizens, and they're citizens first, particularly in this case of coronavirus, where it's affecting everyone.
We already see cases of coronavirus on military bases.
We already see military forces that are restricted to base, domestic travel that's been restricted, military people who are stranded overseas, either in military exercises or other missions or other orders, where they got stuck in the coronavirus stop of travel.
Like everyone else in American society, they and their families are vulnerable.
More than ever before in my 30 plus years of covering this subject, I get a sense that the military is as nervous as the rest of America is about what the future holds.
As much as anyone else, then, therefore, they want to have two things.
One, they want to have safety for their families.
Two, they want to have confidence in government that it knows what it's doing.
Right now, I'm afraid that they have neither.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, everybody, that is William M. Arkin.
He wrote the book, American Coup, How a Terrified Government is Destroying the Constitution.
Oh, here he's in a race with me right now with his next book coming out, Ending Perpetual War.
He's writing here at Newsweek, exclusive inside the military's top secret plans, if coronavirus cripples the government and we're leaving this story in the top section up at antiwar.com for you guys to find easily as well, too.
Thank you so much for your time, Bill.
Thanks for having me on today, Scott.
