20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

U.S. elites’ Orwellian subversion of democratic sense-making through such means is not incomprehensible. Americans have lived through vast amounts of official deception for which the responsible parties have not been held accountable. Since few Americans at this point would be persuaded by loud assertions of the state’s integrity and rectitude, there is a logic to the use of weaponized speech to discredit, a priori, any explanations that raise the specter of high criminality.
I am not in a position to state authoritatively whether or not exceptionalist Doomsday/COG elements played a role in bringing about the terror spectacle of September 11, 2001. Regardless, American democracy could not but benefit from an American glasnost—a great opening up of that which the state has concealed from the U.S. public since the country began to pursue global hegemony after World War II.
Presently, the U.S. has just experienced a demoralizing defeat in America’s longest war, the war in Afghanistan for which 9/11 provided the initial pretext. Short of launching an apocalyptic nuclear war, there would seem to be no way to reverse the decline of U.S. global dominance. The U.S. is going the way of all empires.
Protesters against U.S. war in Afghanistan in Karachi in September 2001 predict U.S. demise. [Source: foreignaffairs.com]
Though the 9/11 wars should be recognized as reckless gambits to prevent this outcome, they likely hastened it. Now in 2021, having failed to use America’s considerable power to confront looming crises of climate change and staggering inequality, perhaps it is time for U.S. elites to abandon the covert empire—the empire that denies its imperial status by creating myths and cover stories to obscure its strategies and tactics.[24]
For some observers, Obama seemed to offer a chance to wind down the empire after the disastrous Bush years. Instead, he largely consolidated and extended the hegemony of the imperial-minded deep state over U.S. society. Astoundingly, the U.S. under Obama managed to revive the pre-9/11 practice of using al-Qaeda as U.S. proxies in Libya and Syria—a fact whose suppression stands as a monument to the efficacy of the propaganda model that prevails in the U.S.
Obama institutionalized the War on Terror and forever wars. [Source: chicagotribune.com]
But events beyond the control of U.S. elites are coming to the fore. At this late hour, international cooperation and justice-minded reforms offer the best chance to avert catastrophic outcomes that will not leave the powerful unscathed. U.S. elites risk becoming victims of their own totalizing governance: In assessing present day American society, it is clear that the Enlightenment—the presumptuous control of humanity’s fate by way of reason—has been diverted from delivering on its promises.
If at present we are dominated by top-down, anti-Enlightenment forces, perhaps the truth can yet set us free. Necessary first steps would include ending the post-9/11 states of emergency—perhaps in conjunction with the revelation of crucial state secrets which have been hidden for antidemocratic, imperialist reasons. In such a way, we might initiate an era of truth and reconciliation in the U.S. In turn, such a cataclysm might serve as a catalyst for the international cooperation that is necessary if humanity is to respond to our mounting civilizational crises.
– Peter Dale Scott –
In The American Deep State I wrote about America’s structural deep events (SDEs), in which “from time to time dark forces intervene to redirect American policies, such as … 9/11, which launched the global terror war.”[25] I also suggested that there were common features linking America’s structural deep events, above all their involvement with the so-called “shadow government” or “Doomsday Network” set up in the 1950s to provide “continuity of government” (COG) in the event of a devastating nuclear attack.
Another feature of these structural deep events is that, while they are attributed to very marginal elements—such as a disgruntled ex-Marine, or 19 angry Arabs—sooner or later key figures in power, in the course of a cover-up, are caught lying about what actually happened.
In the case of 9/11, Vice President Cheney provided two incompatible accounts of when he arrived at the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), where crucial decisions were made in the half-hour between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m., including the decision to implement COG. Cheney himself told NBC five days later that he arrived to make decisions at the PEOC shortly before the Pentagon was attacked (at 9:37 a.m.).
Photo released by the White House of Vice President Dick Cheney watching the news of the attacks on the World Trade Center in his office on September 11, 2001, before being led to the underground White House bunker. [Source: history.com]
But in December, after disturbing allegations about Cheney’s activities in the PEOC were made by eyewitness Norman Mineta, Cheney gave a later arrival time to Evan Thomas of Newsweek: “Shortly before 10 a.m., the Cheneys were led into the PEOC conference room. [T]hey looked up at the TV screens. It was 9:58 a.m.”[26]
Cheney in the President’s Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) beneath the White House on the morning of 9/11. [Source: history.com]
How did the 9/11 Commission resolve this conflict? By accepting the second time as if unquestioned, and simply ignoring the earlier, much more corroborated story. And how did it deal with Norman Mineta’s very disturbing testimony? By simply ignoring it as well.[27]
Norman Mineta [Source: wikipedia.org]
I can now be slightly more specific about those dark forces, in two respects. To begin with, in all of America’s SDEs to date, an initial, more marginal plot for a deep event was then piggy-backed on and exploited, for a different goal by a more institutional plot.
In the case of 9/11, there was indeed a plot of al-Qaeda Arabs to capture U.S. passenger planes, perhaps to fly them suicidally, but also imprecisely, into the areas of New York and Washington.[28] This plot was detected and exploited by an American dark force, using the Arabs as designated culprits in a piggy-backed plot with a much more ambitious target: to fly planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.[29]
I can also be more specific than before about this second dark force. In earlier books I have written about how, in each of America’s SDEs, a major role has been played by the COG apparatus, also known as the “Doomsday Network”—i.e., the communications network developed over decades at considerable expense to provide the skeleton for governing authority after a decapitating nuclear attack. More specifically, America’s SDEs have involved those individuals charged with secret COG planning for America’s secret Doomsday Network, as well as the COG/Doomsday Network itself.[30]
It is now quite clear to me, as it was not before but should have been, that those planning for the Doomsday Network were also in charge of operating it, if it was ever used. I will argue in this essay that two men known to have planned the Doomsday Network in the 1980s and 1990s were also part of the dark force which caused 9/11 to happen, and then officially implemented the COG plan which had already been used on that day.
The two men were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both part of a secret committee appointed by Reagan to plan for, in effect, a post-constitutional replacement of constitutional authority. Notably, neither man was a part of the U.S. Government while serving in this COG-planning capacity. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Rumsfeld was CEO of G.D. Searle, a Big Pharma corporation. Cheney, initially a congressman, became CEO in the ’90s of Halliburton, the giant oilfield service corporation.[31]
Rumsfeld, center, in the Oval Office with President Ronald Reagan, left, and Secretary of State George Shultz on November 3, 1983. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Evidence that COG planners were also potential operators was discovered by accident, in May of 1961, by Kennedy’s White House assistant Fred Dutton. In that month he wrote a memo to his superiors of a startling discovery: “the existence of classified letters from President Eisenhower to ten private citizens throughout the country giving them authority over various parts of the economy and total society in the event of a declaration of a national emergency…”[32]
Fred Dutton [Source: wikipedia.org]
This was in response to the vulnerability revealed by the USSR’s successful launch of Sputnik, after which Ike’s cabinet commissioned, in the event of a nuclear attack, new “executive agencies” to provide “the means by which a fragmented federal government could begin to exercise authority over a devastated nation.” [33]