Original subtitles

♪♪

-The true story of 9/11

was a total, absolute collapse of authority.

-I turn. "Mr. Vice President, sir,

we got a bogey eight miles out, low and fast,

inbound to the White House."

He goes, "Don, do we have an asset

that can take a shot at him?

Do I have anything over Washington, D.C.,

we can engage him with?"

The Secret Service and I are going,

"Seven... six... five..."

He goes, "Don, I'll authorize an over-the-horizon shot.

If you got a radar-guided missile over Baltimore

and you can lock onto him, shoot him."

As I sit in the secure facility deep under the White House,

there are people outside pushing civilians to the south

or clearing civilians to the north,

and they're going to take a body blow

right here in front of them.

-Everybody out.

♪♪

-For over 70 years, our leaders have told us one thing

under the bright lights.

-The protection of the lives and property of Americans

is the responsibility of all public officials.

-I care, we're trying.

-And it is my first duty as president

to protect the American people.

-We have it so well under control.

-But America's shadow government has spent trillions of dollars

on secret plans that serve one premise...

When the [bleep] really hits the fan, we're on our own.

-I have nothing, nothing.

-For decades, the government has invested trillions of dollars

in a secret plan to save itself.

[ Buzzer ]

While the rest of us die.

♪♪

♪♪

[ Explosion ]

Fears of nuclear Annihilation fueled the creation of a system

to ensure the continuity of government

even during a nuclear war.

It's known as C.O.G.

-The Continuity of Government system, from bunkers

and airborne command posts

to tractor-trailers hidden around the country,

have been developed over decades.

-This massive secret project

funneled unbelievable amounts of money away

from the public good and towards the survival of the wealthy,

the elite, and the powerful of the United States.

-Through the Cold War no one had ever tested

whether it would actually work in an emergency.

We'd written down all of the plans on paper.

We tested them all in exercises.

But when an actual crisis happened,

would any of it actually work?

- Made. - Yes, made. Get ready.

- Cake. - Yes, cake. Get ready.

- Cane. - Yes...

-President George W. Bush is visiting an elementary school

in Florida, a routine public appearance

to promote literacy,

where he reads a book called "The Pet Goat"

to a room of first graders.

The White House Chief of Staff whispers in the President's ear,

"America is under attack."

Bush takes a moment to gather his thoughts

and continues with the reading.

For months during the summer of 2001,

warnings of a terror attack

had been pouring into the White House.

[ Gunfire ]

-We began to receive lots of intelligence indications

that there was going to be a major terrorist strike

by Al-Qaeda, by bin Laden's organization,

against the United States.

CIA said the attack would be overseas,

but they couldn't rule out that the attack

would be in the United States.

The Bush Administration

did very little in response to that intelligence,

despite the CIA director telling him repeatedly,

despite my warnings.

The Bush Administration didn't go to a war footing,

didn't try to find Al-Qaeda people in the United States,

didn't try to preempt the attack

by going after bin Laden in Afghanistan.

They didn't really believe the warnings, I think.

-Underestimating the threat of an Al-Qaeda attack,

America is caught off guard on 9/11,

setting off a disastrous chain of events.

-In the seconds after the attack on the World Trade Center,

the Bush Administration went into

an absolute tailspin of confusion

and anarchy.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

There were moments in this country

where no one had any idea who was in control,

no one had any idea who had executive power,

who was calling the shots.

[ Sirens wailing ]

-The American people were completely in the dark.

Much of our national security apparatus

and our political system was in the dark.

That information void expanded across

most of the federal government

and definitely across the population.

♪♪

-As the National Coordinator for Security,

Richard Clarke is also in charge

of the Continuity of Government program.

-For the first time in the history

of the Continuity of Government system, we activated it.

-It's to ensure the security of the principals...

The separation and the security of the president,

the vice president, and the speaker of the house.

That no matter what happened,

one of them would be available to step into the Oval Office.

-With no destination in mind,

President Bush is rushed onto Air Force One

and launched into the sky.

The number-one priority of the pilot...

To get the plane as high as possible

and as far away from anyone else as he could.

-At that point, Washington was a combat zone.

We were literally still waiting for the combat aircraft

from the Air Force to get up and to protect us

in the White House.

The Secret Service director and I and the Vice President

all urged the President not to come back.

-Throughout the Cold War, the plan had been to evacuate

top government officials out to mountain bunkers

in Raven Rock, Pennsylvania, and Mount Weather, Virginia.

The hope was that everyone could be evacuated

in the first 15 minutes after an attack.

Over the course of that morning, though,

none of that happened.

-Most of the top people in the President's line of succession

are unable to get to the bunkers or never contacted.

Others are uncooperative. Vice President Dick Cheney

refuses to evacuate the White House.

-At about 9:30 in the morning on 9/11,

Vice President Cheney was bundled up by Secret Service

and moved to a basement next to the White House Situation Room.

I think, within an hour or so,

they moved him through a long tunnel and blast doors

to a Presidential Emergency Operation Center

beneath the East Wing of the White House.

-Speaker Dennis Hastert is rushed from the Capitol Building

to Andrews Air Force Base, wheels squealing

as his motorcade rushes off the Capitol grounds.

-The Speaker of the House was rushed onto that helicopter

and whisked out of the city.

So we had a constitutional survivor,

someone in the constitutional chain of command

who was outside of the city.

-Across the Potomac River,

a third plane crashes into the Pentagon.

-There is a lot of confusion here at the Pentagon.

It appears that something hit the Pentagon

on the outside of the fifth corridor.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

-All units, I said, all units...

-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,

the key link to the nation's military,

stands up from his desk and goes out to the crash site.

♪♪

-When he heard the plane hit his building,

hit the Pentagon, his natural instinct was to go to the scene.

It was his building. His people were hurt.

So he left the command post,

in a natural instinct of a leader,

wanted to be part of the rescue.

♪♪

Now, that was dramatic. It was emotional.

He should have stayed in the command post.

He ordered his deputy secretary to fly out

in a helicopter, fly out of the target zone.

And, so, for a while neither the Secretary of Defense

nor the Deputy Secretary of Defense was available.

-This is an extensive military command and control system,

and to watch it break down at an instant

because one person was so overcome by human emotion...

He just took a multibillion-dollar program

and broke it.

[ Sirens wailing ]

-Every federal agency is ordered

to activate an alternative headquarters

outside of Washington,

but things don't go according to plan.

-It was impossible to get out of Washington.

As soon as the attack started occurring,

everyone was trying to leave Washington.

All the roads were blocked. All the bridges were blocked.

The cell phones weren't working because they were overloaded.

And we had no helicopters to get the other departments' teams

out of town.

-Clarke remains in the situation room

in the basement of the West Wing of the White House.

It's the nerve center of presidential crisis management.

With Air Force One flying at 45,000 feet

for extra security, communication becomes difficult.

-And they don't even really know where to go.

They don't know really what to do.

They don't know whether more attacks are coming.

The Pentagon is a smoldering mess,

and that's what the President is facing

as he's flying in Air Force One.

-Under attack from an unknown enemy,

America's defenses default to their Cold War footing.

The Pentagon escalates the country's nuclear readiness

by going to defense condition 3.

-Once Continuity of Government is declared, the nuclear forces

and the strategic forces go to DEFCON 3.

And, so, it's a really big deal,

and by declaring an alert of this sort, a lot of things

happen that the Russians detect.

Airplanes going into the skies,

submarines going on sorties,

missiles being put on higher levels of alert.

And the Kremlin calls to speak to the President to inquire

as to what's going on.

And because the communications are spotty,

the decision is made in the White House

that Condoleezza Rice...

She's a Russian and Soviet specialist...

Will speak to Putin instead.

-Because of the breakdown in communication,

a critical conversation between world leaders during

a moment of crisis doesn't take place.

-George W. Bush, in a strange turn of events,

sort of became an observer to the tragedy

and the spectacle, leaving Vice President Dick Cheney

to basically take over the authority of the presidency

and start to handle this burgeoning newborn war

that America was finding itself in.

So it was a total, absolute collapse of authority.

-In a way, Dick Cheney had trained his entire adult life

for the morning of 9/11.

He had been Defense Secretary

and a White House Chief of Staff.

Now Cheney,

in the bunker underneath the White House,

takes charge of the US government's response

to the attacks.

With no formal role in the chain of command,

the Vice President began to issue orders

and spur the military into action.

-You have to appreciate the magnitude of the decision

that he was entrusted with, and that is a decision

I wouldn't wish on anyone.

-With the chain of command in disarray

life-and-death decisions

at the core of Continuity of Government

are about to be tested for the first time.

♪♪

♪♪

-Two planes have just slammed into the World Trade Center.

A third has hit the Pentagon.

A fourth hijacked plane

heading straight toward the heart of the capital

is still in the air over Western Pennsylvania.

-It occurred to me that more attacks might be coming.

We evacuated the White House complex.

-Everybody out. Everybody out.

-We sent the Vice President into the bomb shelter

in the East Wing.

-The decisions in the bunker that morning

cut to the heart of the questions

and the moral calculus of the Continuity of Government,

the idea that some lives are worth more than others,

that there are people in the government

who, because of their position, because of their authority,

are worth protecting over other Americans.

♪♪

-We knew that there were at least two more aircraft aloft.

We believed that the White House was a target

for an incoming aircraft.

-One in particular, United Airlines Flight 93,

appears to be headed back towards Washington.

-Deep underground in the heavily fortified

Presidential Emergency Operations Center, it's chaos.

[ Phones ringing ]

-I reached down and I picked up a receiver.

The gentleman on the other end goes, "Major,

we have another hijacked aircraft

16 miles south of Pittsburgh,

inbound Washington, D.C."

-Lieutenant Colonel Robert Darling

was a Marine Corps helicopter pilot

assigned to the White House military office.

On September 11th,

he was supporting the Vice President

and the National Security Advisor.

-I was like, "Whoa, you're gonna have to hold on."

I turn to my right, and who's standing right next to me

but Vice President Cheney.

-Cheney tries but fails to reach Donald Rumsfeld.

The Secretary of Defense

remains at the chaotic scene outside the Pentagon,

keeping him out of the chain of command

at another critical moment.

-The Pentagon asks for an unimaginable authority.

Can we shoot down a commercial airliner

full of Americans over American soil?

-Without hesitation, Vice President Cheney said,

"Shoot that aircraft down."

-Two F-16s are scrambled with orders

to intercept Flight 93,

but the fighter jets are unarmed.

At the time, having armed fighters

standing by to defend the capital from a domestic threat

wasn't part of the national defense strategy.

♪♪

So their only option is to try

and bring down the airliner with 44 people on board

by ramming the plane out of the sky.

One of the pilots plans to crash the plane into the cockpit.

The other plans to target the tail.

But this scene never happened.

Flight 93 had crashed before the jets even took off.

- "Aircraft down, aircraft down."

[ Sirens wailing ]

"68 miles south of Pittsburgh. No survivors."

All eyes on the Vice President.

He was staring at those three speaker boxes.

He turned around. He walked right over to me.

He goes, "Major, we just shot that plane down.

I really need to talk to the President."

-In the chaos, it's only after Cheney gives the order

to shoot down Flight 93

that he informs the President of his decision.

And for much of the morning, the officials inside the bunker

didn't know whether they were responsible for bringing down

a passenger jet.

Only later would it become known

that it was the passengers storming the cockpit

who caused the plane to crash.

A half-hour later, another, this time unidentified, plane

is picked up on radar.

-I turn. "Mr. Vice President, sir,

we got a bogey eight miles out, low and fast,

inbound to the White House."

This time, Donald Rumsfeld,

the Secretary of Defense, was back in the building.

He goes, "Don, we got a bogey seven miles out.

Do we have an asset that can take a shot at him?

Anything over Washington, D.C., we can engage him with?"

-Meanwhile, in the unreinforced situation room above,

Clarke and his team make a fateful decision of their own.

-At one point, I realized that we might not survive.

And so I asked most of the people there to leave.

They refused.

I asked them then to write their name

and Social Security number, date of birth on a piece of paper,

and we e-mailed that list out of the White House.

In case the building was hit,

the people who had to rescue us

or find the remains would know how many people to look for.

♪♪

-Down in the bunker, time is running out.

-The Secret Service and I are going,

"Seven... six... five..."

-Cheney has the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,

on the line who tells the Vice President

he's got other fighter jets screaming toward the capital.

-He goes, "Don, I'll authorize an over-the-horizon shot.

No visual confirmation required.

If you got a radar-guided missile over Baltimore

and you can lock onto him, shoot him.

Shoot him. Shoot him."

As I sit in the secure facility deep under the White House,

there are people outside pushing civilians to the south

or clearing civilians to the north,

and they're going to take a body blow

right here in front of them.

When all of a sudden, all the satellite radios blared to life,

"That's not a bogey."

That's a medevac helicopter heading to the Pentagon

to save lives talking on the wrong frequency.

♪♪

-Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Rudy Giuliani

has his own plans to ensure survival.

In 1999, he built a $13 million bomb-proof shelter

nicknamed Rudy's Bunker, but there's one problem.

His Emergency Operations Center

was built in the World Trade Center itself,

a location that terrorists had already bombed once before

back in 1993.

So in the opening minutes of the attack,

New York found itself without its Emergency Operation Center,

leaving Mayor Giuliani

and other officials to wander the streets

attempting to find a place to set up a command post.

♪♪

-To create a bunker that cost millions

or tens of millions of dollars that's centrally located

in what we now know is an incredibly vulnerable place,

but failing to provide radios that worked to firefighters,

I think, is a perfect illustration

of how broken our system was.

If we had prioritized money and resources in the right way,

more firefighters would have lived.

-Paul Rieckhoff was on the front lines that morning,

deployed to the rescue efforts at Ground Zero.

-I was in the National Guard in New York.

I started the morning sleeping in late

with a dental appointment, and I ended the evening

in camouflage standing on a pile in the wreckage of Ground Zero

digging up bodies.

The magnitude of a gaping chest wound

in New York City was unfathomable.

And even now, when I reflect on it,

I think my mind probably censors a bit of the enormity of it.

-It turns out America was totally unprepared

for the threat it faced on the morning of 9/11.

None of the plans that we had developed

during the Cold War would work.

The FAA and the military found themselves with radars

only facing out.

The fighter planes that were scrambled into the sky

thought that they were trying to repel Soviet bombers

and flew first out to the Atlantic

before realizing that the threat was already behind them.

Across the country,

the military trained for the Cold War found itself

outclassed by 19 hijackers with box cutters

aboard commercial airliners.

-The truly demoralizing truth

is that the massive Continuity of Government project,

which redistributed incredible amounts of wealth

away from social projects like education

and health care and infrastructure

and the betterment of the lives of American citizens,

is it created this hulking rusting infrastructure

that never actually worked at any moment.

It was completely incompetent and unnecessary.

-But 9/11 wasn't the only fail.

Just days later, the US government found itself

under attack again, this time from an enemy within.

-The big fear through the fall of 2001

was when was the next shoe going to drop?

When was the second wave of attacks?

-This nation stands with the good people of New York City

and New Jersey and Connecticut,

as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.

-In the weeks after the worst terrorist attack on US soil,

a shadowy figure drops an anonymous letter

addressed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

♪♪

-Senator Tom Daschle received a pile of mail,

constituent mail.

One of the interns

starts opening up the mail.

And the one she selected

was postmarked from a fourth grade school in New Jersey.

So she picked that one up, wanted to open it up,

and found it was taped shut.

So she took a pair of scissors

and carefully sliced up the side,

and gray-white powder fell out.

She also noticed it drifted up into the air.

♪♪

-After 9/11, FBI agent Scott Decker

was transferred to the counterterrorism branch

and now was assigned to investigate

the rapidly unfolding anthrax attacks.

-If it's a positive, they'll turn bright red.

If it's a related bacteria, another Bacillus,

sometimes they'll turn pink.

We get false positives.

But when the Capitol Police test this

and test it again and again, they keep getting bright red.

So they're pretty sure it's not a false positive this time.

-The government's top biological defense lab confirms

the white substance is anthrax.

Anthrax is a highly infectious and deadly disease

caused by inhaling or touching a bacteria.

Letters were mailed to another senator and major news outlets.

-In just a week's time,

we have had four confirmed cases of anthrax.

-The letters sent to NBC and the "New York Post"

were the same... "Death to America.

Death to Israel. Allah is great."

-As soon as a wave of letters began to arrive

across the country with weaponized anthrax

and people began to sicken and die,

everyone believed this was the next wave,

this was Al-Qaeda's second act.

It came at a time when the nation's psyche

was already fragile, and now,

across the country, people were dying of a new attack.

-Meanwhile, in D.C., the fallout from the anthrax attack

continues to grow.

-The Capitol Police cars were contaminated with anthrax,

their bomb dogs were contaminated with anthrax.

The stuff that had been mailed to Senator Daschle

was so concentrated, so dried, and such a fine powder,

it spread all over Capitol Hill very quickly.

-The attacks raise a frightening possibility

ignored during the Cold War.

-The spate of anthrax scares across the country,

particularly to Congress,

you see a situation where anything that wasn't

that large in magnitude,

which wasn't two superpowers flexing their muscles,

went completely unnoticed and unhindered,

which really exposed the impotency of the system

in the first place.

The problem is, for all of the money, time, and effort

spent in creating this system, is that it left America

vulnerable to small attacks, to unpredictable

events on a human level.

-The anthrax attacks also reveal a critical weakness

in Continuity of Government.

-The anthrax attacks made Congress realize

how poorly their own plans for continuity operations

actually were.

They didn't have a fallback location,

and they didn't have a good system to replace members

who might be sick or killed.

Congress realized that they had let their Cold War plans atrophy

and they hadn't replaced them with anything.

There was no backup plan for Congress.

-In a doomsday scenario, sweeping powers

would fall to the Executive Branch,

while a central piece of American democracy

would be left to die.

But during the Cold War, millions of dollars

were spent on a secret plan to make sure that didn't happen.

♪♪

-They were in a small upland valley.

We sit at 2,000 feet surrounded by the Allegheny Mountains.

So when you walk out of the hotel, you encounter

a big broad lawn surrounded by cottages,

and then right after that, you come to the golf clubhouse.

-In 1978, Bob Conte is hired as the official historian

at The Greenbrier, an elite resort

that dates back to 1778.

-When I first moved here, people would tell me about this rumor

that there was a bomb shelter at The Greenbrier.

And why is there a 7,000-foot airport

for a town of 3,800 people?

So I sort of heard these rumors, and to be honest,

I didn't know what to... What to make of them.

-Bankers, industrialists,

and government advisers all hobnob at the resort.

Its guests include dignitaries and presidents.

Then, in 1992, "Washington Post" reporter

Ted Gup comes calling.

-So he walks in, he introduces himself.

He puts a tape recorder on my desk, and son of a gun,

he says, "I'm here to talk about

what's under the West Virginia Wing."

"Oh, it's an old rumor, it goes back

to when they built the West Virginia Wing.

It was during the Cold War. Just a silly rumor.

There's nothing under the West Virginia Wing."

And there's a sort of awkward silence where he's looking at me

because, clearly, he...

He doesn't believe a word I'm saying.

And it was pretty clear to me

that this was going to lead to an article

and disclosure of the bunker.

-On May 31, 1992,

Gup blows the lid off The Greenbrier bunker.

-Actually, what happened, one of the most memorable moments

of, well, my career, maybe my life,

is that Friday morning, the boss calls a meeting,

and I go into his office, and Ted Kleisner,

the president of The Greenbrier, stands up

and says, "Today we are going to acknowledge

a 35-year secret relationship with the federal government

maintaining a bomb shelter here at The Greenbrier."

I could have fallen over at that moment.

-The facility is swiftly shut down as the truth

about Greenbrier is exposed.

Hidden beneath the vast extension

known as the West Virginia Wing

is a massive bomb shelter stocked with supplies

for members of Congress in case of disaster.

-The Greenbrier Congressional bunker

was one of the most closely held secrets of the Cold War.

Built under cover of a resort expansion in the 1950s and '60s,

the bunker was staffed through the Cold War

by a team of secret government workers

working for a front company known as Forsythe Associates.

-I must say, they hid their tracks pretty well.

Everybody who worked here worked for The Greenbrier,

except for these guys.

They were the audiovisual consultants,

but they were sort of mysterious kind of guys, you know.

I mean, when you talked to them, they were sort of normal people.

But it was sort of funny that you had this one operation

where they weren't... they weren't Greenbrier employees.

♪♪

-Three years after its controversial disclosure,

Conte finally gets to see the secret bunker for himself.

♪♪

-I'm peeing in my pants, oh, my God,

I'm actually going to see this bunker, you know.

We walk in. We walk into a cafeteria.

And I'm going, "Wait a minute, stop.

This is... This is the secret bunker?

It looks like a high school cafeteria here, you know."

I just assumed that the bunker

was hundreds of feet underground.

Turns out it was right in front of our nose,

and I'd never really realized.

This door we went through, which I... well, I guess

I never knew what was on the other side of that door...

Leads into the bunker proper.

What was overwhelming to me was how large the bunker was.

We're talking a thousand people here.

We're talking about bunk beds,

we're talking about a dining room,

we're talking about a power plant.

We just kept going on and on and on.

I guess what I didn't realize

was that they were to continue to be

the Legislative Branch of the federal government.

It wasn't just a matter of a place for them to sleep and eat

so that they could stay alive.

They were moving down the whole institution of Congress.

And this is part of this larger

Continuity of Government program.

-One of the most uncomfortable surprises inside the bunker

was a large weapons cache that had been meant

to be used by security guards to keep out ordinary Americans

who might try to show up at the Congressional bunker.

The weapons cache was a physical manifestation

of the difficult moral calculus

that lies at the heart of these continuity plans,

that the government officials are worth protecting

over the lives of ordinary Americans.

-In the event of a nuclear war, members of Congress

would seal themselves inside the bunker with their staff,

while their spouses and children would be locked outside.

♪♪

-To me, the tragedy of continuity of government

is one that's a story that's not really well-known.

-The big secret... who gets saved often has nothing to do

with making sure the government survives.

-They had to send a special US Customs Service jet

to Bonaire to fly her back to Washington,

even though the airspace of America was closed.

♪♪

-The truth of America's secret doomsday plans

is often stranger than fiction,

but occasionally, the creators of Hollywood movies

and TV dramas stumble on a bit of reality.

-When Aaron Sorkin was writing and researching the show

that ultimately became "The West Wing,"

he met with George Stephanopoulos,

then a top Clinton Administration official,

who showed him, during a conversation over drinks,

something that looked like a bus pass

in Stephanopoulos' wallet.

-What's the card?

-Tells you where to go in the event of a nuclear attack.

-Sorkin turned that card into an episode

involving Deputy White House Chief of Staff

Josh Lyman getting an emergency evacuation card

and worrying that his colleagues didn't.

-Sure.

A-A-And my staff goes with me, or do they have separate...

♪♪

Oh, God. Sorry, you know what? I just got it.

Sorry. Okay. Sure.

Just gonna... I'll stick this right here,

right next to my... My video club membership,

and there's no reason, I guess, why my staff

ever has to know anything about it.

So there it is.

- "The West Wing" episode pulls back the curtain

on a secret Armageddon VIP list

unknown even to many Washington insiders.

♪♪

-Then, on the set, White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers

pulled Sorkin aside and said,

"You know, those cards don't exist."

Dee Dee Myers had made it all the way to the White House,

all the way to becoming White House Press Secretary,

worked with George Stephanopoulos for years,

and she never understood that she wasn't going to be included

if there was a nuclear war.

That George Stephanopoulos would be evacuated

and she would be left behind.

-The evacuation cards are a combo

of a driver's license and a Yahoo! map

that helped get personnel out of the capital

and to the relocation facilities as quickly as possible.

[ Sirens wailing ]

-Some officials are only given cards with driving instructions,

to find their own way to the bunkers,

if and when they can, in an emergency.

The most elite versions,

though, come with evacuation instructions

for how helicopters will locate these key officials

and whisk them away, wherever they are, 24 hours a day.

There was nothing more exclusive in government service

than a golden ticket on one of the evacuation helicopters.

-But it's not just VIPs who will be saved first.

-The government's doomsday plans, though,

have always encompassed more than people.

One of the things that the planners

began to realize as they figured out

what was worth saving in America was that it was important

to preserve America's history, as well.

And so you saw, in the Cold War, plans to evacuate

the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution,

the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address,

even works of art in the National Gallery,

ranked, ordered so that curators would know

which pieces to grab first in an emergency.

-The government's doomsday planners

took on the responsibility

of deciding what parts of history

needed to survive the apocalypse

in order to preserve the idea of America.

-They start making these very technocratic decisions

about what should be saved, including the American people.

I mean, you start looking at the plans

for saving George Washington's uniform,

and you start realizing how much time

and manpower and resources have gone into saving these things.

Meanwhile, American families could be dying

by the millions around the country.

[ Explosion ]

-9/11 put some of the realities of Continuity of Government

into stark relief.

-To me, the tragedy of Continuity of Government

is one that's a story that's not really well-known,

which is how much effort, energy, and American tax dollars

went into protecting the adult children of Dick Cheney.

Cheney had two daughters,

one of whom was an official in the State Department,

and the other was a private citizen.

And she was scuba diving in Bonaire.

The amount of effort that was required

to move Cheney's other daughter back to the United States,

where they had to send a special US Customs Service jet

to Bonaire to fly her back to Washington,

even though the airspace of America was closed,

that those parts of Continuity of Government

that really do represent the imperial presidency,

that really do represent

nothing that has to do with the command of the government

or the constitutional leadership of America,

that is what I really think needs more attention.

-But instead, more attention will be put on creating

an even safer space for the president

to ride out threats from enemies abroad

and perceived enemies right here at home.

[ Rhythmic clapping ]

-Peaceful protest! Peaceful protest!

-May 29, 2020.

As protests erupt in Washington, D.C.,

after the death of George Floyd,

demonstrators close in on the White House gates.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

[ Explosions ]

The Secret Service decides to rush President Trump

down into the White House bunker.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

♪♪

-The great irony of Donald Trump

being rushed into the bunker under the White House

is that he wasn't being protected

against some sort of foreign threat

or imminent nuclear apocalypse.

It was the anger of the American people themselves.

-Later, Trump denies he was hiding in a bunker.

-I went down during the day,

and I was there for a tiny, little, short period of time,

and it was much more for an inspection.

-It was a story that was quickly contradicted,

even by the President's own Attorney General.

-Things were so bad that the Secret Service

recommended the President go down to the bunker.

We can't have that in our country.

♪♪

-As Trump takes to Twitter, tensions escalate

at the gates of the White House.

It's not only the President who is taken to the bunker.

The First Lady and their son, Barron, are also rushed there.

The bunker itself is part of a new secret development

that begins after 9/11.

-On 9/11, the bunker didn't function

very well at all.

Among other problems,

it turned out that you couldn't listen to both the TV

and watch a video conference at the same time.

So, through the morning, Vice President Cheney

had to turn down the cable news

in order to listen to government officials

and turn down the government officials in order to listen

to cable news.

-That Presidential Emergency Operation Center itself

was a rather stark facility.

There was a conference room

and there were a number of support rooms

and there were places of residence

for just one or two people.

-Engine 101 getting cracked open there at a Pentagon,

is that correct?

-The terror attacks prompt National Security officials

to call for a more advanced bunker.

During the Obama Administration,

a conspicuous construction project

begins on the North Lawn of the White House.

-They decided to rebuild the Presidential

Emergency Operations Center, so they built a big bunker

underneath the White House Situation Room.

-The project is shrouded in secrecy.

The public is told the construction

is to replace existing White House infrastructure

and put up a fence.

The new bunker includes a main conference room

and several support rooms

with food and a self-contained air supply.

It's sealed off to prevent radiation from seeping in,

and there are underground tunnels

heading out of the White House entirely.

-And that is able to accommodate the president

and the vice president and the cabinet

in a more comfortable way.

-When Trump arrived at the White House in 2017,

he and a few select officials were given a tour

of the facility, part of an ongoing expansion.

It was clear that the White House bunker

needed upgrading, but after 9/11, investment

in the national security state soars to new levels.

In the D.C. area alone, 33 new building

complexes for top-secret intelligence work

are either under construction or have already been built.

♪♪

-The truth of the matter is the Pentagon will continue

to get the money that it gets and civil needs

will continue to be begging for money

because the Pentagon gets the priority on all spending,

and we won't change our system, but part of why we won't change

our system is this kind of secrecy

and hiddenness associated with believing that the military

is more important than it really is.

And that... that

is a product of the world of Continuity of Government.

-You have to consider that this project

is a complete redistribution of tax dollars

in order to create this redundant government

that is completely beyond the reach

of representative government, beyond the reach of elections,

beyond the reach of the Constitution.

A shadow government that is ready to take over

at a moment's notice,

and it becomes this situation where representative government

is just sort of done away with.

[ Camera shutters clicking ]

-One of the most troubling aspects of these plans

is the realization that almost all of them imagine

suspending the American democracy as we know it.

That the secret government plans for an emergency

involve suspending civil liberties,

declaring martial law, and even, we believe,

suspending the very idea of a three-branch

check-and-balance government,

doing away, effectively, with the Legislative Branch

and the Judicial Branch until an emergency is over.

-You had an entire American city essentially wiped off the map

while an American government stood by and watched.

-We see America's prejudices manifest.

-Go, go!

-We have been busy fighting outside

and we failed to guard our own back door.

-We've met the enemy and the enemy is us.

-It's a traditional fascist spiral.

As soon as they protest that you've attacked them,

you use that as evidence that they're dangerous.

-Your government is here to protect you.

Why should you worry?

♪♪