THE NEWS EMERGED early this month: Fearful of more terrorist attacks, the White House is maintaining a permanent "shadow government" of about 100 executive-branch honchos in two heavily fortified underground bunkers on the East Coast. (How James Bond is that?) In theory, the shadow government will run the country if nuke-wielding terrorists destroy the White House, the Pentagon, and other federal command centers.

After the Washington Post broke the story March 1 – and the rest of the mainstream press pounced on it – the Bush administration quickly acknowledged the existence of the emergency alt-government. But key details remain top secret. Not surprisingly, the White House and the Pentagon aren't saying who exactly staffs it (question number one: who's got the nuclear trigger duties?), although one Defense Department press flack sardonically told us he was a member.

Last week the Philadelphia City Paper, an alternative weekly, ran a widely circulated story arguing convincingly that one of the shadow bunkers is located in the mountains near Waynesboro, Penn.

For conspiracy theorists, though, this is all old news. After all, they've been talking about the existence of a secret government – the Illuminati, the Freemasons, aliens, a cabal of spooks – for years.

With that in mind, we gave a call to Michael Ruppert, the guy behind the newsletter From the Wilderness, a must-read periodical for the paranoid set. Ruppert, you should know, is an ex-Los Angeles Police Department narcotics cop who believes the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks and "allowed them to occur."

According to Ruppert, the shadow administration consists of far more than a mere 100 people in two installations. Like many conspiracists, Ruppert believes the Federal Emergency Management Agency – not the Pentagon – is responsible for carrying out the president's secret plans. "There are various stages for the implementation of shadow government, the most extreme of which involves the division of the country into nine separate regions, each with a regional director from FEMA," he told us. "This would really turn the country into baronies, with FEMA only reporting to the White House."

The bunkers, Ruppert argues, are located all over the country. "There are nine of them." In fact, Ruppert told us California may be home to two shadow-government installations, one near China Lake and another closer to San Francisco, in the East Bay town of Livermore. (Anybody seen anything X-Files-ish out there?)

For a more credible take on the shadow gov, we called Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency operative who's now a senior fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "We had this back in the Reagan administration," Madsen said. "It was called 'continuity of government,' and I've seen those plans."

In Madsen's opinion, the Bush secret administration is probably staffed by fairly lightweight players, mostly high-level bureaucrats and low-level appointees, with veep Dick Cheney sitting at the top of a pyramid of more than a 100 people. He also thinks the shadow gov may be using more than two facilities. "There's all kinds of sites out there."

After spending 30 years reporting on soldiers and spies, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh probably has more contacts in the spook world than any other civilian. So we figured the crusty old Pulitzer winner might know something about this stuff.

"I couldn't care less about the shadow government," Hersh said via phone from Washington, D.C. "Let's hope there are hundreds of thousands of members of the shadow government – that would mean they're not in D.C." (A.C. Thompson)

BART's disastrous planning

It was 6:40 p.m., the gates at the Powell Street BART station were closed, and TV camera dudes were collecting footage of miserable-looking commuters in the process of not commuting while a lot of cops and firefighters milled about. Nothing like the now-proverbial "suspicious white powder" to fuck up your night.

Going to the East Bay? You need to go to Embarcadero Station, a BART cop told me.

What about Civic Center? It's about a million blocks closer.

You gotta go to Embarcadero. All the other stations are closed.

At Embarcadero the station agent informed me that station was closed as well. That left the Transbay Terminal and an epic ride over the bridge via AC Transit.

When I got to the Transbay, near-pandemonium had set in. There were literally thousands of people queued up – think: opening day for any of the Star Wars movies – and no buses in sight. Eventually I quit waiting for Godot and piled into a cab with three Berkeley-bound worker bees. By a little after 9 p.m., I had made it home.

Suffice it to say that BART and AC Transit's disaster-preparedness skills weren't particularly impressive.

BART spokesperson Mike Healy insists the subway system isn't slacking. "We've actually been working on responding to a potential terrorist attack since 1995, since the attacks on the Tokyo subway," Healy said. "The problem was that it would've taken AC Transit a long time to round up buses to put into service for transbay commuting. In this case, because we didn't know how long the system would be out, we decided to hold off on calling AC Transit for the buses." (Thompson)

Meanwhile, business is booming

Although most of the economy is still in the shitter, there are actually a few bright spots out there in the business world. Take Nukepills.com, a flourishing little e-commerce play that's seen a hundredfold increase in sales in the past six months.

Based in Charlotte, N.C. ("about eight miles from the McGuire nuclear power station," company owner Troy Eason said), Nukepills.com retails radiation-fighting potassium iodide tablets.

Basically, potassium iodide restricts the thyroid gland's intake of radioactivity, (possibly) reducing the chance that you'll come down with fallout-induced thyroid cancer if terrorists steer some Boeings into the reactors at Diablo Canyon or detonate a suitcase nuke in your backyard.

Given all the atomic anxiety out there, Nukepills hasn't had to do much marketing. "Business is fantastic," Eason said. "Anytime there's a news story about terrorists, nukes, the Nuclear Posture Review, the shadow government, or anything of the sort, our sales go up."