20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

dramatic weakening of U.S. state secrecy.[17]

Jeffrey Epstein, another victim of the “deep state”? [Source: nydailynews.com]
All of this is to suggest that there may be state actors with the ability to take supralegal executive action with covert sanction from the state. Such mechanisms may be intertwined with Doomsday/COG networks, thus they may benefit from the overriding authority and utmost secrecy therein.
Doomsday/COG: A Key to the Mystery of 9/11?
Regarding 9/11, this line of inquiry has some relevance in light of a number of factors. First, there is the fact that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were both members of an ultra-secret committee drafting COG provisions in the 1980s under Reagan. Cheney at the time was a congressman, and Rumsfeld was a pharmaceutical executive.[18]
Donald Rumsfeld, left, and Dick Cheney, right, with President Gerald Ford. Who could have predicted at the time the trouble these two devious minds would go on to cause? [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]
Although it was reported in The New York Times that “the Doomsday Project” had been shut down in the post-Soviet Clinton years, planning and exercises continued in the 1990s with terrorism replacing nuclear war as the basis. Cheney and Rumsfeld were again part of these COG operations, working as part of a collection of right-wing hawks that one Pentagon official described as “a secret government in waiting.”[19]
There is also the still-secret use of COG elements on 9/11 following the activation of COG measures on the day of the attacks. In The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott extensively detailed what is known about the still largely obscured role of COG on 9/11, especially as regards the strange actions of Dick Cheney.[20]
Additionally, in the aftermath of 9/11 and up to the present, unspecified emergency provisions have been reauthorized by a U.S. Congress that is not allowed to know the full details of what is being reauthorized. When a member of the Homeland Security Committee, Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), requested to see Bush administration annexes to COG emergency provisions, he was twice denied.[21]
Peter DeFazio [Source: wikipedia.org]
Given the foregoing, one cannot rule out the possibility that some sort of overriding prerogative powers were exercised through COG/Doomsday channels in such a way as to influence events before, during, and/or following 9/11.

Perhaps such could help explain those episodes, detailed in Part 2 of this series, in which various legitimate state actors were stymied just as they were close to exposing or interfering with the unfolding 9/11 conspiracy. If indeed COG/Doomsday networks are vested with the responsibility of safeguarding the state from existential threats up to and including nuclear war, the requisite prerogatives could well mean that such entities are ultimately sovereign in the Schmittian sense and thus not subject to legal circumscription or public oversight.
A logical corollary is that such entities would necessarily have to determine when a situation does or does not represent a threat to core national security imperatives or interests. Democratically elected officials like Congress or the President may or may not have had decisive input in defining the scope and authority of such entities. Furthermore, these opaque networks may have considerable independence in defining those core national security imperatives or interests in the first place.
Beginning with The War and Peace Studies Project in World War II, various U.S. elites in and out of government have advocated essentially for U.S. hegemony over the global capitalist system and/or the unrestrained use of state power to defeat threats to U.S. hegemony.[22] Most notably, these included the threats ostensibly posed by the “global communist conspiracy.” In practice, however, we see the repeated pattern of the U.S. often acting against non-communist, even democratic governments—especially those countries guilty of “resource nationalism,” i.e., countries guilty of attempting to utilize their respective resource wealth in ways that benefit their own citizenry.[23]
If deep political elements do prevail within the COG/Doomsday networks vested with overriding prerogative powers and control of state secrecy, such a constellation of powers could have been utilized to facilitate the events of September 11, 2001, and/or to influence the events’ impacts.
One grim possibility could be that COG/Doomsday provisions were established by Cheney and Rumsfeld (or like-minded actors) in such a way as to allow COG-affiliated networks to carry out covert operations without presidential authorization. In such a scenario, people like CIA Director George Tenet and CIA officer Richard Blee and others could have functioned as fail-safe actors, holding key positions that granted them controlling authority over the most sensitive elements related to al-Qaeda.

• George Tenet [Source: wikipedia.org]
  
• Richard Blee in his high school yearbook. [Source: historycommons.org]
  

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda could be funded and managed covertly by highly secretive elements within or above the intelligence services of other countries, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in this case. Figures like Tenet and Blee would not have needed to know precisely why they were protecting certain figures or operations from exposure. However, given that Blee’s protection coincided with his famous warning about impending “spectacular” attacks, it is harder to conceive of him as totally unwitting.

Another similar COG/Doomsday explanation could explain the U.S. response to 9/11 and the subsequent cover-ups of crucial aspects of the event. In such a scenario, networks affiliated with the neoconservatives could have set the stage for 9/11 without any formal sanction from overriding COG entities.
Then on the day of the attacks, provisions could have been enacted which granted the administration overriding control of COG/Doomsday networks and their attendant prerogative powers. Such may include the secret authority to manage information and conduct governance in accordance with what the administration deems necessary for security in the face of an existential threat.
The very activation of COG measures on September 11, 2001, indicates that the attacks were deemed to be an emergency of that magnitude. If complicit administration figures subsequently activated COG/Doomsday measures during the attacks, such may have allowed them to exercise various prerogative powers—ostensibly to respond to the crisis, but perhaps in practice to use the full emergency powers of the state to prevent exposure of key incriminating acts and actors.

Given state secrecy, the hashing out of such possibilities cannot rise above the status of elaborated hypothesis. That said, when one accepts the well-documented historical facts of widespread state lawlessness and high levels of state secrecy, there is no basis for the a priori rejection of hypotheses which raise the possibility of clandestine state complicity in violent events of great politico-economic significance such as 9/11.
Reflexive denunciations of explanations which posit covert state criminality likely reflect a number of social forces. Such would include, perhaps: (1) the hegemony of deep political forces over the “common sense” that prevails at liberal institutions like the media and academia; (2) the common human tendency of suppressing traumatic experiences; (3) the similar but less intense human responses which reflexively seek to minimize cognitive dissonance and maintain individuals’ core worldviews; and (4) the unknown extent to which deep political forces have actively manipulated culture to obscure top-down governance of a nominally democratic political order.
Collectively, these and other dynamics have short-circuited the ability of a democratic polity to hold the ruling elite accountable. The general stupefaction of mainstream discourse on these matters has accelerated since 9/11. Prevailing conventional taboos about “conspiracy theories” are nonsensical and yet routinely invoked. We are told that “conspiracy theories” about 9/11 are unacceptable even as the state’s theory of 9/11 is that it was the result of a conspiracy.
Protesters like these are stigmatized and ignored. [Source: wsj.com]
Symptomatic of this enforced myopia was the mainstream response to the grand Russiagate conspiracy theory, a spectacle which to date has failed to produce any convictions for conspiracy or treason. In this case, the critics of the Russiagate conspiracy theory were actually themselves denounced as “conspiracy theorists.” Thus, among other things, Russiagate provided further support for the claim that the mainstream usage of the term “conspiracy theory” is simply a way to stigmatize and dismiss critics of official pronouncements.
Rachel Maddow, a l