20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

Something similar appears to have happened on January 6. Here too the FBI had informants among those arrested at the Capitol, including one, Thomas Caldwell, who was allegedly a leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group accused of being the principal organizer of the attack.[66]

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1. Chris Hayes, “9/11: The Roots of Paranoia,” The Nation, December 25, 2006, https://www.thenation.com/article/politi...-paranoia/. ↑
   
2. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), 171. ↑
   
3. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), xi-xii. ↑
   
4. Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 199-200: n. 63. ↑
   
5. Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Study of Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). ↑
   
6. Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” Administration and Society, April 17, 2015, 23. ↑
   
7. Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State,” 277. ↑
   
8. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5. ↑
   
9. Schmitt, Political Theology, 6. ↑
   
10. Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State.” ↑
    
11. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 183-184. ↑
    
12. Scott, The American Deep State, 121. ↑
    
13. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 47. ↑
    
14. Stephen Kinzer, “From Mind Control to Murder? How a Deadly Fall Revealed the CIA’s Darkest Secrets,” The Guardian, September 6, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019...st-secrets. ↑
    
15. Tamsin Shaw, “The Bitter Secret of ‘Wormwood,’” The New York Review of Books, January 18, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/18...-wormwood/. ↑
    
16. John M. Crewdson, “Hunt Says CIA Had Assassin Unit,” The New York Times, December 26, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/12/26/archi...small.html. ↑
    
17. Good, “American Exception” 201-202. ↑
    
18. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 23. ↑
    
19. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 186-187. ↑
    
20. Scott, The Road to 9/11, Chapters 13 and 14. ↑
    
21. Scott, The American Deep State, 40. ↑
    
22. Other notable examples evincing elements of these perspectives include Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, https://books.google.com/books?id=I0kEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false; George Kennan, “The Long Telegram” (Moscow, 1946), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/coldwar/docum...kennan.htm; “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” (Washington, D.C., April 14, 1950), https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ns...sc68-1.htm; “FY 94-99 Defense Planning Guidance (Draft)” (Washington, D.C., 1992), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb...ytedit.pdf; Thomas Donnelly, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century”; Anonymous, “The Longer Telegram: Toward A New American China Strategy,” Atlantic Council Strategy Papers (Washington, D.C., 2021), https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-conte...rategy.pdf. ↑
    
23. See Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, etc…. ↑
    
24. We borrow this term from our friend Daniel Ellsberg. ↑
    
25. Scott, The American Deep State, 9. ↑
    
26. Evan Thomas, Newsweek, December 30, 2001, https://www.newsweek.com/day-changed-america-148319. I argue in The Road to 9/11 that Cheney may have entered the PEOC twice, the second time after making an important COG phone call to Bush (Scott, The Road to 9/11, 200-03, 221-22). ↑
    
27. For Mineta’s allegations and the Commission’s handling of them, see Scott, The Road to 9/11, 199-206. ↑
    
28. Enough is known about the training of the alleged Arab hijackers to assert that they never approached the level of competence needed to fly a jet airliner into a specific building. ↑
    
29. In the case of 9/11, I suspect there also may have been a third dark force with a third and far more lethal goal, to bring the Twin Towers, in a yet another piggy-backed plot, to the ground for insurance purposes. In this essay I will not discuss the possible third plot. ↑
    
30. For an overview of COG involvement in previous structural deep events, see Scott, The American Deep State, 109-20. ↑
    
31. In 1994, Tim Weiner reported in The New York Times that what he called “The Doomsday Project” – the search for “ways to keep the Government running after a sustained nuclear attack on Washington” – had “less than six months to live.” [See Tim Weiner, “Pentagon Book For Doomsday Is to Be Closed,” The New York Times, April 18, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/18/us/pe...losed.html.] Weiner’s language was technically correct, but also very misleading. In fact, COG planning now simply continued with a new target: terrorism. On the basis of Weiner’s article, the first two books to discuss COG planning, by James Bamford and James Mann, both reported that COG planning had been abandoned. Tim Shorrock in 2008 repeated that “the COG program was abandoned during the Clinton administration,” and Shirley Anne Warshaw in 2009 wrote that “the Clinton administration … shut down the super-secret Project.” But on this specific point, all these otherwise excellent and well-informed authors were wrong. ↑
    
32. Excerpt from August 19, 1961, memorandum to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy from
    Presidential Assistant Frederick G. Dutton, http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/27864. ↑
    
33. Matthew L. Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife: The Eisenhower Administration’s Continuity-of-Government Plans and the Legacy of ‘Constitutional Dictatorship,’” Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, Spring 2010, 7-8. ↑
    
34. Executive Order 11490, October 28, 1969; Executive Order 11921, “Emergency Preparedness Functions,” June 11, 1976, Federal Register, vol. 41, no. 116 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office (GPO), June 15, 1976, pp. 294-300, quoted in Diana Reynolds, “FEMA and the NSC: The Rise of the National Security State,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, 53, 1990, 33. ↑
    
35. Howard Ruff, How to Prosper during the Coming Bad Years (New York: Warner Books, 1979), 150. ↑
    
36. Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, Trilateral Commission Report, 113. ↑
    
37. The Carter administration should perhaps be remembered as the Trilateral Administration: The Trilaterals in it included President Carter and Vice President Mondale, National Security Adviser Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, and Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal (Jay Peterzell, “The Trilateral Commission and the Carter Administration,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 12, No. 51 December 17, 1977,, 2097-2104). ↑
    
38. After Carter’s defeat in 1980, Huntington continued to serve as a member of FEMA’s Advisory Board. Brzezinski rejoined him in government as a senior consultant to the George H.W. Bush administration. ↑
    
39. Charles Perrow, “Using Organizations: The Case of FEMA,” Items, Social Science Research Council, June 11, 2006, https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-kat...e-of-fema/. ↑
    
40. Ibid. ↑
    
41. Perrow, “Using Organizations.” ↑
    
42. When North had to send emergency instructions for arms delivery to the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, instructions that directly contravened the embargo prohibiting such sales, he used the Flashboard network to avoid alerting the Ambassador and other unwitting personnel. The records of the President’s Special Review Board (Tower Board) set up under Reagan to review Iran-Contra, are stored at the Reagan Library. In Box 93199 is a folder, “Flashboard SRB 1178.” I hope some younger scholar will FOIA for this folder and analyze it. ↑
    
43. Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987. In October 1984 Jack Anderson also reported that FEMA’s plans would “suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, effectively eliminate private property, abolish free enterprise, and generally clamp Americans in a totalitarian vise.” ↑
    
44. The New York Times, July 14, 1987. ↑
    
45. “For the first time in history… contingency plans for the continuity of government had been implemented” (9/11 Commission Report, 326, cf. 38). Many have found this crucial but underreported fact hard to believe. The first two print reviews of The Road to 9/11, both favorable and intelligently written, both reported that I speculated that COG had been imposed on 9/11. ↑
    
46. Barton Gellman and Susan Schmidt, “Shadow Government Is at Work in Secret,” The Washington Post, March 1, 2002, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/p...eacf46bfd/. ↑
    
47. Shirley Anne Warshaw, The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney (Stanford, CA: Stanford Politics and Policy, 2009), 164-65. ↑
    
48. Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin, “Congress Not Advised of Shadow Government,” The Washington Post, March 2, 2002; cf. “‘Shadow Government’ News To Congress.” CBS News, March 2, 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/201109050804...2530.shtml: “Key congressional leaders say they didn’t know President Bush had established a ‘shadow government,’ moving dozens of senior civilian managers to secret underground locations outside Washington to ensure that the federal government could survive a devastating terrorist attack on the nation’s capital, The Washington Post says in its Saturday editions. Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) told the Post he had not been informed by the White House about the role, location or even the existence of the shadow government that the administration began to deploy the morning of the Sept. 11 hijackings.” ↑
    
49. In the early stages of COG planning, provisions were made for the post-nuclear survival of Congress at GREENBRIER, an underground redoubt under a West Virginia hotel constructed in 1959-62. It was dropped from COG planning in the 1980s and is now a tourist site. ↑
    
50. Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 133–35. Yoo has denied this, assuring me that on 9/11 he had no contact with either Cheney or Addington. I believe Gellman. ↑
    
51. Attorney General Ashcroft, in Chicago that morning, had been told by Rice with Cheney in the PEOC on his return to join his deputy, Larry Thompson, and his assistant, David Ayres, who had already been sent out of Washington to a classified COG site. Because of traffic conditions, Ashcroft was ultimately redirected that afternoon to the FBI Crisis Management Center. See John Ashcroft, Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (New York: Center Street, 2006). Yoo’s eventual boss at the OLC, Jay Bybee, had not yet been appointed. Bybee’s position, as assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, required Senate confirmation. His name had been submitted to the Senate on September 4, 2011, one week before 9/11. ↑
    
52. Gellman, Angler, 191. ↑
    
53. The provisions of Executive Order 12656 of Nov. 18, 1988, appear at 53 FR 47491, 3 CFR, 1988 Comp., p. 585, https://www.archives.gov/federal-registe...12656.html. The Washington Post (March 1, 2002) later claimed, falsely, that Executive Order 12656 dealt only with “a nuclear attack.” Earlier there was a similar misrepresentation in the New York Times (November 18, 1991). ↑
    
54. Notice on the Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks, The White House, September 09, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room...t-attacks/. We can expect similar action this month to renew EO 13224, the authority under which he is withholding reserves of the Afghan Government from the Taliban. ↑
    
55.  One Congressman explained to a constituent that the provisions of the National Emergencies Act have now been rendered inoperative by COG. If true, this would seem to justify Chardy’s description of COG as a suspension of the Constitution. ↑
    
56. Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Continuity Directive 1, link. NSPD-51 also nullified PDD 67, Richard Clarke’s COG directive of a decade earlier; and it referred to new “classified Continuity Annexes” which shall “be protected from unauthorized disclosure.” ↑
    
57. Scott, The American Deep State, 40. ↑
    
58. Natalie Andrews, “Congressional Leaders Evacuated to DC’s Fort McNair,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2021, at 3:46 p.m. ET, https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/biden-t...tGvXOlg6Ov. ↑
    
59. Mark Preston, “Senate ‘Meets’ at Fort McNair: Hundreds Participate in Disaster Drill,” Roll Call, January 20, 2004, https://www.rollcall.com/2004/01/20/sena...rt-mcnair/. ↑
    
60. Carol Leonnig and ‎Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year (New York: Penguin Press, 2021), 181. On July 15, 2021, one week before the book’s release, an advance story read: “The top Democrat and Republican, as well as fellow leaders Chuck Schumer and Kevin McCarthy, were transported from the Capitol to Fort McNair, an Army post in southwest Washington, during the chaos, the book says” (Oma Seddiq, “Pence refused to leave the Capitol during the January 6 riot despite Secret Service agents urging him to evacuate, saying, ‘I’m not getting in the car’: book,” Yahoo!Money, July 15, 2021, https://money.yahoo.com/mike-pence-refus...25651.html). But this exact passage does not occur in the book; it is only implied. ↑
    
61. Leonnig and Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It, 466-67; cf. Woodward and Costa, Peril, 244. ↑
    
62. Victoria Bekiempis, Guardian, December 31, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020...mp-loyalty. ↑
    
63. Rebecca Shabad, “D.C. National Guard chief: Pentagon took 3 hours to greenlight troops during Capitol assault,” NBC News, March 3, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congres...t-n1259434. ↑
    
64. Neil MacFarquhar, “Defendant in Plot to Kidnap Michigan Governor Is Sentenced to Six Years,” New York Times, August 25, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/us/gr...higan.html. ↑
    
65. Ken Bensinger, “Watching the Watchmen,” BuzzFeed News, July 20, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ken...-informant. ↑
    
66. “Man charged in Capitol riot worked for FBI, lawyer says,” AP, February 9, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man...s-n1257121: “Thomas Caldwell, who authorities believe holds a leadership role in the extremist group, worked as a section chief for the FBI from 2009 to 2010 after retiring from the Navy, his lawyer, Thomas Plofchan, wrote in a motion urging the judge to release him from jail while he awaits trial. The defense said Caldwell, who has denied being part of the Oath Keepers, has held a top-secret security clearance since 1979, which required multiple special background investigations, according to Plofchan. Caldwell also ran a consulting firm that did classified work for the U.S. government, the lawyer said.” ↑
    
67. “639 people have been charged in the Capitol insurrection so far. This searchable table shows them all,” Insider, August 30, 2021, https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capit...mes-2021-1. ↑
    
68. Jaclyn Diaz and Rachel Treisman, “Members Of Right-Wing Militias, Extremist Groups Are Latest Charged In Capitol Siege,” NPR, January 19, 2021, https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrectio...capitol-si: “People allegedly affiliated with organizations such as The Three Percenters, The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Texas Freedom Force, and other self-described Nazis and white supremacists were among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building, according to federal investigators.” ↑
    
69. Leonnig and Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It, 481; cf. 473. ↑
    
70. Jen Judson and Aaron Mehta, “Army secretary McCarthy could be asked to stay in Biden administration,” Defense News, December 9, 2020, https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/12...istration/. In fact, McCarthy resigned on January 20. ↑
    
71. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 280; citing Warren Report, 25-26, 463. ↑
    
72. 9/11 Report, 555n9: “The 9/11 crisis tested the U.S. government’s plans and capabilities to ensure the continuity of constitutional government and the continuity of government operations. We did not investigate this topic, except as needed to understand the activities and communications of key officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice Chair, and senior staff were briefed on the general nature and implementation of these continuity plans.” In other words, the 9/11 Commission itself was NOT briefed. ↑
    
73. I discuss this utilization of Structural Deep Events as part of a strategy of tension in Peter Dale Scott, “Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, September 22, 2012, https://apjjf.org/2012/10/39/Peter-Dale-...ticle.html. If my prediction holds true, then January 6 should be seen as having contributed to a prolongation of this strategy of tension. ↑
    

Thomas Caldwell at Capitol riots. [Source: newsweek.com]
And here too the delay in response allowed multiple crimes to be committed, and subsequent arrests to be made. By August 30, 639 people had been charged in the Capitol insurrection.[67] Among them are several members of at least four of the right-wing militia groups that are now a clear domestic threat to the security of this country.[68] Some of those arrested have already agreed to turn state’s evidence, and testify for the prosecution.
On January 6, according to Leonnig and Rucker, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, Trump’s post-election replacement for Mark Esper, was pushing for a vigorous law enforcement response by 2:45 p.m. They attribute the delay in the arrival of Guard units from Maryland and Virginia to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who “hadn’t gotten around to” authorizing their call up “until more than two and a half hours after the Capitol was breached.”[69] It may be relevant that, among the leaders in Trump’s Pentagon, McCarthy had been singled out by Defense News in December as a long-time defense official who would probably be kept on by Biden.[70]
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy [Source: washingtonpost.com]
In Conclusion …
It is far too early to state with confidence what really happened on January 6. But I feel confident in calling it a Structural Deep Event, one in which COG was involved, and about which we can expect lies in high places.
As I said at the outset, 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.
It would appear that, on January 6, insurrectionary militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys plotted to use violence to forestall the confirmation of Biden as President. This plot was itself blocked (in other cases, one might have said, “trumped”) by a more institutional plan to use this very violence against the insurrectionists.
Proud Boys. [Source: ft.com]
Time may someday confirm if members of the Secret Service used COG powers to augment the first plot, and if Ryan McCarthy delayed the arrival of the National Guard as part of the institutional response.
Or, if previous SDEs like the JFK assassination and 9/11 are a precedent, we may still be debating these issues decades from now.
Here is a more confident prediction. As I wrote in Deep Politics, the Warren Commission Report combined a finding that a disgruntled lone assassin killed John Kennedy with non sequitur recommendations that the Secret Service, together with the FBI and CIA, should increase and coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups.[71]
In like fashion, the 9/11 Commission Report, after confirming that COG was implemented on 9/11 (Report, 326, cf. 38), and also that “We did not investigate this topic” (Report, 555n9),[72] concluded with a recommendation that planning for “continuity of operations” should be increased (Report, 398).[73]
Relying on these precedents and absent a major political change, I predict that the House select committee investigating January 6 will recommend that the surveillance of Americans be increased, perhaps with greater NSA/CIA/FBI coordination.
But this would be exactly wrong.
Reps. Bennie Thompson (right) and Liz Cheney, joined by fellow committee members, speak to the media after a July 27 hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. [Source: npr.org]
This country is not suffering from a deficit of secret surveillance powers. It is suffering from a surfeit of secret powers, most of them never constitutionally authorized—powers that successively contribute to more and more deep events that are then used to justify their own further proliferation.
Just as foolish U.S. operations in Central Asia led to the formation of, first, al-Qaeda and, then, ISIS, so successive molestations of this country by its shadow government have led to the rise of outlandish and malevolent right-wing militias.

• Militia group in Michigan. [Source: metrotimes.com]
  
• Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri of al-Qaeda. Both groups grew in response to misguided U.S. government policies.[Source: hindustantimes.com]
  

This country must move in the opposite direction. I can think of no better first step than to end the State of Emergency proclaimed in 2001, as a first step in dismantling the apparatus of fear and domination that has so distorted this country.
In my books I have called upon Congress to do this. But Congress will not take this action until the American people, aware at last of what has been going on, force them to do so.