Query Why More Are 'Involved' In Solving Dallas Than 911 - Here & Most Political Forums

[Malcolm Pryce]

I didn't intend to suggest for one second that it really was just a 'rogue cabal with some rifles', merely that the nay-sayer could easily rationalise it away as such.

[Dawn Meredith]

Late at night so I can't do justice to the (very good) initial query, but I recall being deeply annoyed when reading a concluding page in one of the Doug Horne INSIDE THE AARB volumes - Horne brings in some typical 9/11 truther bashing and notes for the reader how (paraphrasing) 'most legitimate JFK researchers do not believe that 9/11 was an inside job, or that the towers were felled through controlled demolition'. And I sat there and ran through all the various key JFK researchers I could think of who had written books or who were well-respected, and big surprise, most of them - contrary to Horne's assertion - were outspoken believers in a 9/11 conspiracy.

As others have suggested, there is some distance to the JFK assassination, whereas 9/11 is still an ongoing event and many of the perps, their front companies and handlers are still making their presence known in the daily paper up to today.

Another point is that there have not been the number of investigations that there have been in the JFK assassination. After the WC I mean. Investigations that did not achieve the result we needed but fleshed it out more. Gaeton Fonzi's book for example, as a result of his time on HSCA. Then all the records released via ARRB. Resulting in many more books, increasing knowledge.
I have not read Horne and am disgusted that he wrote that.

Dawn

[Jim Hargrove]

Oh, geez, I'm going to make people I respect hate me now, and I haven't studied 9/11 much at all, but....

It just seems to me that if you see giant, fuel-laden airliners crash into tall buildings, and then you decide the buildings fell down for a different reason, it's time to take up yoga or some sort of mental relaxation. A high school buddy of mine now lives right across the Hudson in New Jersey very near lower Manhattan, and he watched the whole thing from his yard, and he feels the same way I do. Not that the USG is too good to do something like that, or worse, because it clearly isn't, but I just haven't seen much EVIDENCE to condemn it on this particular crime. OTOH, John Armstrong told me he watched film of one of the ancillary buildings collapse that looked suspicious to him, but I haven't seen it.

Sorry. I'll go away.

[Lauren Johnson]

Oh, geez, I'm going to make people I respect hate me now, and I haven't studied 9/11 much at all, but....

It just seems to me that if you see giant, fuel-laden airliners crash into tall buildings, and then you decide the buildings fell down for a different reason, it's time to take up yoga or some sort of mental relaxation. A high school buddy of mine now lives right across the Hudson in New Jersey very near lower Manhattan, and he watched the whole thing from his yard, and he feels the same way I do. Not that the USG is too good to do something like that, or worse, because it clearly isn't, but I just haven't seen much EVIDENCE to condemn it on this particular crime. OTOH, John Armstrong told me he watched film of one of the ancillary buildings collapse that looked suspicious to him, but I haven't seen it.

Sorry. I'll go away.

Actually, Jim, don't go away. This thread was about why people spend so much time on JFK while largely ignoring 9/11. I would rather more people comment here on this topic. This whole thread has been very eye opening for me.

[Peter Lemkin]

9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension

by Peter Dale Scott

Scholar and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott compares the events of September 11, the JFK assassination and the Oklahoma City bombing. He exposes the existence and continuity of a "deep state" behind the facade.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | LOS ANGELES (UNITED STATES) | 27 APRIL 2013

[FONT=Segoe UI][COLOR=#3A3A3A]Introduction: Structural Deep Events and the Strategy of Tension in ItalyFrom an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as "events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force." [1]Piazza Fontana bombingBologna bombingThe examples in Italy, well known to Italians, include the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, the Piazza della Loggia bombing of 1974, and the Bologna railway bombing of 1980. These bombings, in which over one hundred civilians were killed and many more wounded, were attributed at the time to marginal left-wing elements of society. However, thanks chiefly to a series of investigations and judicial proceedings, it is now clearly established that the bombings were the work of right-wing elements in collusion with Italian military intelligence, as part of an on-going "strategy of tension" to discredit the Italian left, encourage support for a corrupt status quo, and perhaps move beyond democracy altogether. [2] As one of the conspirators, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, later stated, "The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency." [3]Vinciguerra also revealed that he and others had also been members of a paramilitary "stay-behind" network originally organized at the end of World War II by the CIA and NATO as "Operation Gladio."In 1984, questioned by judges about the 1980 Bologna station bombing, Vinciguerra said: "With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages...[it] lies within the state itself...There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army...A secret organisation, a super-organisation with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them...A super-organisation which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on Nato's behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces. [4]Gladio connections to sustained false-flag violence, again involving NATO and the CIA, were subsequently revealed in other countries, notably Belgium and Turkey. [5]The original purpose of Gladio was to consolidate resistance in the event of a Soviet takeover. But many of the senior Italians involved in the bombings implicated the CIA and NATO in them as well:General Vito Miceli, the Italian head of military intelligence, after his arrest in 1974 on a charge of conspiring to overthrow the government, testified "that the incriminated organization, … was formed under a secret agreement with the United States and within the framework of NATO." Former Italian defense minister Paulo Taviani told Magistrate Casson during a 1990 investigation "that during his time in office (1955-58), the Italian secret services were bossed and financed by the boys in Via Veneto'i.e. the CIA agents in the U.S. Embassy in the heart of Rome." In 2000 "an Italian secret service general [Giandelio Maletti] said . . . that the CIA gave its tacit approval to a series of bombings in Italy in the 1970s to sow instability and keep communists from taking power. . . . The CIA wanted, through the birth of an extreme nationalism and the contribution of the far right, particularly Ordine Nuovo, to stop (Italy) sliding to the left,' he said." [6]Daniele Ganser, in his important bookNato's Secret Armies, has endorsed a Spanish report that in 1990 NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner (a German politician and diplomat) secretly confirmed that NATO's headquarters, SHAPE, was indeed responsible:The Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), directing organ of NATO's military apparatus, coordinated the actions of Gladio, according to the revelations of Gladio Secretary-General Manfred Wörner during a reunion with the NATO ambassadors of the 16 allied nations. [7]Extrapolating from such testimony, Ola Tunander has compared the strategy of tension in Italy, with its false-flag bombing attacks, to "what the Turkish military elite might describe as the correction of the course of democracy by the deep state' [a Turkish term]." [8]Strategy of TensionBut I believe it would be too simplistic an analysis to blame the Italian strategy of tension exclusively on Vinciguerra's "super-organisation which… took up the task [of false-flag bombings], on Nato's behalf." There appear to have been other directing forces besides NATO and those elements Vinciguerra was aware of through Italian military intelligence (the SID, later SISMI). It is important to recall that the Italian trials of those convicted for the 1980 Bologna bombing implicated not only Vinciguerra, SISMI, and Gladio, but also elements of the Italian mafia (the Banda della Magliana) and the Italian Masonic Lodge Propaganda-Due (P-2), with links to criminal bankers and the Vatican. [9]In short, if we suggest that something like the Turkish deep state was involved in the Italian strategy of tension, this does not suggest a solution to the Italian mystery, so much as a zone, or interlocking network, for further research.Has a Strategy of Tension Been Exercised in America?Gladio connections to sustained false-flag violence, again involving NATO and the CIA, were subsequently established in other countries, notably Belgium and Turkey. [10] I wish to propose that America, as well as Europe, has also suffered from a similar series of false-flag structural deep events, including bombings, that have, in conformity with the same strategy of tension, systematically moved America into its current condition, a state of emergency.Nato headquartersAmong the false flag structural deep events I wish to consider today areThe John F. Kennedy assassination of 1963, or 11/22, which led to the CIA's Operation Chaos against the anti-Vietnam War movement. (11/22 was clearly a deep event: many documents in the area of Lee Harvey Oswald's relations to CIA operations are still being withheld, despite statutory and court orders to release them. [11]The Robert Kennedy assassination of 1968, followed immediately by emergency legislation which led to state-sponsored violence at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention.The 1993 first World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which led to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.9/11 and the subsequent false flag anthrax attacks of 2001, which led to the imposition of Continuity of Government (COG) measures, the Patriot Act, and the proclamation, on September 14, 2001, of a State of Emergency which remains in effect. (In September 2012 it was once again renewed for another year). [12]These structural deep events have had a common and cumulative result: the erosion of public or constitutional power, and its progressive replacement by unconstrained repressive force. I have argued elsewhere that1) as in Italy, all of these events were blamed on marginal left-wing elements, but in fact involved elements inside America's covert intelligence agencies, along with their shadowy underworld connections.2) some of these structural deep events bore a relationship to the ongoing secret planning - known in the Pentagon as the Doomsday Project - for Continuity of Government (or COG) in an emergency, which entailed its own secret communications network, and arrangements for what (in the Oliver North Hearings) was called "suspension of the American Constitution."3) in every case, the official response to the deep event was a set of new repressive measures, usually in the form of legislation.4) cumulatively, these events suggest the on-going presence in America of what I have called a "dark force" or "deep state," analogous to what Vinciguerra described in Italy as a "secret force…occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the [successive] outrages." [13]The Oklahoma City Bombing (4/19) and 9/11Recently I viewed for a film, "A Noble Lie," about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. [14] This gave me a chance, for the first time, to test these hypotheses against the case of Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, or what I shall call 4/19. More than I could have anticipated, 4/19 fit into and strengthened this analysis.Oklahoma City BombingThe film "A Noble Lie," itself points to some striking similarities between the events of 1995 and of 2001. The most obvious is the alleged destruction of a steel-reinforced building by external forces (a truck bomb in the case of the Murrah Building in 1995, flying debris in the case of Building Seven in 2001). Experts in both cases have asserted that the buildings in fact could only have been brought down by cutting charges placed directly against the sustaining columns inside the building. Here for example is a report to Congress from General Benton K. Partin, a retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General and expert on non-nuclear weapons devices:When I first saw the pictures of the truck-bomb's asymmetrical damage to the Federal Building, my immediate reaction was that the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementing demolition charges at some of the reinforcing concrete column bases…. For a simplistic blast truck-bomb, of the size and composition reported, to be able to reach out on the order of 60 feet and collapse a reinforced column base the size of column A-7 is beyond credulity. [15]There is now a broad and growing consensus among architects, engineers, and other experts, that the three buildings which collapsed on 9/11 in the World Trade Center were also most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges. [16]Another important similarity was the legal consequence of most of these events: the response to Oklahoma City was the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, while the response to 9/11 was the first implementation of COG and the passage (after a false flag anthrax attack) of the Patriot Act. "A Noble Lie" focuses on the domestic consequences of the Antiterrorism Act, and indeed it did, like the Patriot Act after it, provide for significant restrictions on the right of habeas corpus as the courts had interpreted it. In other words, both acts provided pretexts for implementation of the proposals for warrantless detention that had been a central focus of COG planning in the 1980s with Oliver North. This fit into a larger ongoing pattern of the progressive restriction of our constitutional rights by unrestrained coercive power a pattern that I will trace back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.But there were important foreign consequences of the 1996 Antiterrorism Act as well, in particular Section 328, which amended the Foreign Assistance Act to bolsterassistance in the form of arms and ammunition to certain specific countries, for the purpose of fighting terrorism. [17] This in turn led in 1997 to the creation of secret "Eyes Only" liaison agreement between the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) and Saudi Arabia, followed by a subsequent CIA agreement in 1999 with Uzbekistan (i.e. two of the most secretive and repressive regimes in the world today). [18]I have argued that these secret liaison agreements - with Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan - may have provided the cover for secret CIA withholding of information before 9/11 about the designated 9/11 culprits al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. [19] Thus, if my analysis of the CIA's withholding in 2000-2001 is accurate, then 4/19 in 1995 did not just exhibit similarities to 9/11: it was a significant part of the build-up which allowed this withholding to occur, and also 9/11 itself.Increases in Repressive Power After Deep EventsThat 4/19 in 1995 had repressive legal consequences links it both to 9/11 in 2001 and also to 11/22 in 1963, after which the Warren Commission used the JFK assassination to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result ofthe Warren Commission's controversial recommendations that the Secret Service's domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA. [20]In the ensuing Vietnam War this involvement of the CIA in domestic surveillance led to the CIA's Operation Chaos, an investigation of the antiwar movement in which the CIA, despite its Charter's restrictions on domestic spying,amassed thousands of files on Americans, indexed hundreds of thousands of Americans into its computer records, and disseminated thousands of reports about Americans to the FBI and other government offices. Some of the information concerned the domestic activity of those Americans. [21]The pattern of increased repression would repeat itself four years later in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, in response to which two US Army brigades were (until 1971) stationed on permanent standby in the United States, as part of Operation GARDEN PLOT to deal with domestic unrest. [22]The pattern was repeated again withthe assassination of Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hours between Bobby's shooting and his death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001) that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service in the name of protecting presidential candidates. [23]This was not a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency. [24] The change also contributed to the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them equipped the so-called "Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups." [25]Other Similarities between Dallas in 1963 and Oklahoma City in 1995The repressive consequences after 11/22 in 1963, and after 4/19 in 1995, are linked to other shared features between the two events. Almost immediately after 11/22 there were reports from both inside and outside government, suggesting that Oswald had killed the president as part of an international Communist conspiracy.In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, I called these "Phase-One" reports, part ofa two-fold process. Phase One put forward the phantom of an international plot, linking Oswald to the USSR, to Cuba, or to both countries together. This phantom was used to invoke the danger of a possible nuclear confrontation, which induced Chief Justice Earl Warren and other political notables to accept Phase Two, the equally false (but less dangerous) hypothesis that Oswald killed the President all by himself. …. [T]he Phase-One story… was first promoted and then defused by the CIA. Michael Beschloss has revealed that, at 9:20 AM on the morning of November 23, CIA Director John McCone briefed the new President. In Beschloss' words: "The CIA had information on foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an international conspiracy." [26]To this day both Phase-One and Phase-Two stories have dominated the treatment of 11/22 in the governing media, to the virtual exclusion of non-establishment analyses treating 11/22 as a deep event.Many have forgotten that there was a Phase One-Phase Two process with respect to 4/19 as well. Both immediately and thereafter there were a number of reports linking McVeigh and Nichols to Iraqis and other Middle Easterners, including Ramzi Yousef, the fugitive bomber in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (which also used an ammonium nitrate (ANFO) bomb in a Ryder rental truck.) [27] Both Clinton and his Counterterrorism Coordinator, Richard Clarke, have confirmed that some of these stories were discussed at a meeting of the Counterterrorism Security Group on the day of 4/19. [28] Both men also claim to have dismissed them in favor of a low-grade Phase Two local conspiracy led by the two designated culprits: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. But reports of Middle Eastern involvement, sometimes attributed to sources inside government, continued to appear in the governing media, including CBS, NBC, and the New York Times. [29]First World Trade Center bombing of 1993Meanwhile, signs of a local Iraqi conspiracy were industriously pursued by an Oklahoma City NBC reporter, Jayna Davis, and collected in her book The Third Terrorist. Her Phase-One evidence was centered on an all-points-bulletin initial search, quickly suppressed, for an unnamed John Doe #2. Her research was subsequently endorsed in a Congressional Report by Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. [30]Moreover Richard Clarke has written that the Oklahoma City bombing was followed by a spate of new internal Presidential Decision Directives or PDDs (in addition to the Antiterrorism Act), which were drafted by himself. One of these addressed a security problem in response to the Oklahoma City bombing, and another conferred new counterterrorism powers on himself, including his new title as National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism. Two (PDD 62 and especially PDD 67) dealt with what he calls a more "robust system of command and control" for "our Continuity of Government program," which in his words "had been allowed to fall apart when the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack had gone away." [31]These words recall Tim Weiner's report of April 1994 in the New York Times that in the post-Soviet Clinton era, "the Doomsday Project, as it was known" was scheduled to be scaled way back, because "the nuclear tensions" of the Soviet era had faded away. [32] In other words Clinton had planned to scale back the Doomsday Project (which was governed by a secret extra-governmental committee including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, then both not in government); but Richard Clarke used Oklahoma City to save the Doomsday Project, make it more robust and place it under his own control.According to author Andrew Cockburn, a new target was found:Although the exercises continued, still budgeted at over $200 million a year in the Clinton era, the vanished Soviets were now replaced by terrorists. . . . There were other changes, too. In earlier times the specialists selected to run the "shadow government" had been drawn from across the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans alike. But now, down in the bunkers, Rumsfeld [and Cheney] found [themselves] in politically congenial company, the players' roster being filled almost exclusively with Republican hawks. "It was one way for these people to stay in touch. They'd meet, do the exercise, but also sit around and castigate the Clinton administration in the most extreme way," a former Pentagon official with direct knowledge of the phenomenon told me. "You could say this was a secret government-in-waiting." [33]Of course the fact that 4/19 was followedby a strengthening of COG does not of itself corroborate my thesis that COG planning has been a significant factor in the planningand execution of America's structural deep events [34] However there were other recurring features in the picture I have presented of America's structural deep events, and we do find these in the Oklahoma City story.Of these the most prominent is the importance in the official story of designated culprits who were very possibly government informants or double agents. [35] Perhaps the best documented recent example is the US Government's use and protection of the senior al-Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed as a double agent inside al Qaeda; this protection allowed him to train some of the participants of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and later help organize the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing in Kenya. [36]In my 2008 book The War Conspiracy I discussed the possibility that both Lee Harvey Oswald and some of the Arabs designated in 9/11 (Ali Mohamed, al-Hazmi, al-Mihdhar) may in fact have been double agents working with a US Government agency, such as the FBI or Army Intelligence. [37] Others have suggested that at the very least Oswald was an FBI informant; and Lawrence Wright wrote inThe New Yorker that, in withholding the names of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar from the FBI, "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it." [38]In this context I noted with great interest the contention in "A Noble Lie" that Timothy McVeigh, the prime designated culprit in 4/19, may also have been an informant or double agent working for the U.S. Army. [39] Of course this contention remains unproven, but the film provides some corroborative evidence.The Oklahoma City Bombing and Operation PATCONWhat is certain is that McVeigh, like Oswald, al-Hazmi, and al-Mihdhar, was in a milieu of known informants and or double agents, who were part of an important secret operation. In the case of Oswald and the two Saudis, this suggests reasons for the U.S. Government's on-going suppression of important facts about them, both before the crimes they are alleged to have committed, and ever since to the present day. [40]In 2005 John M. Berger, an excellent researcher, discovered that in the 1990s the FBI, in a major counterintelligence operation, codenamed PATCON for "Patriot-conspiracy," had been investigating McVeigh's milieu of armed right-wingers or what Berger calleda wildly diverse collection of racist, ultra-libertarian, right-wing and/or pro-gun activists and extremists who, over the years, have found common cause in their suspicion and fear of the federal government. The undercover agents met some of the most infamous names in the movement, but their work never led to a single arrest. When McVeigh walked through the middle of the investigation in 1993, he went unnoticed. [41]PATCON was particularly focused on a former asset of Oliver North's illegal network to supply arms to the Nicaragua Contras: Tom Posey and his paramilitary group Civilian Material Assistance (CMA). In the 1980s, according to Paul de Armond, CMA had begun as "as an adjunct to the Alabama Ku Klux Klan." [42] Enrolled in the Contra supply effort by first the Defense Intelligence Agency and then Oliver North, CMA's "volunteer" work in patrolling the Arizona border against incoming aliens persuaded then-Congressman John McCain to serve on its board. [43] But in PATCON's eyes in the Post-Reagan era, "Posey was a notorious black market arms dealer, suspected of having contraband sources on more than one U.S. military base." [44]In both JFK and 9/11 it seems clear to me that the subsequent cover-ups derive from the fact that the respective plots were skillfully designed to piggy-back on authorized covert operations, in such a way as to ensure a subsequent cover-up. Berger's important essay in Foreign Policyon PATCON does not suggest a connection between McVeigh's plot and the FBI operation. However he notes deep in the essay that Dennis Mahon, an associate of McVeigh and another important target of PATCON,would go on to be a well-known figure in white supremacist circles and was convicted in February for the 2004 mail bombing of a state diversity official in Arizona. After his arrest in 2009, Mahon told his cellmate that he was "the number three anonymous person in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation."In other words, Mahon identified himself as John Doe #2.Berger, on his own Website Intelwire, has written that "Mahon has spoken of knowing McVeigh in the past," and has concluded that, "Based on those comments and other information, it is at least plausible that Mahon was involved in the [Oklahoma City] bombing. [45] Berger's "other evidence" is the testimony of ATF informant Carol Howe, transmitted first by Jayna Davis and then by Congressman Rohrabacher, that before 4/19 "Mahon talked about targeting federal buildings for bombings. …[and] took three trips [with McVeigh's contact Andre Strassmeir] to Oklahoma City." [46]Mahon has been characterized as a self-aggrandizing loose talker. However, it seems safe to say that we better understand the context of Oklahoma City after considering the new evidence relating to PATCON, a secret FBI operation from 1991 to 1993 then known only to insiders.Was Oklahoma City "a Sting Gone Wrong"?Although PATCON itself was officially terminated in 1993, we learn from its files that there were in fact a number of ongoing informants at Elohim City, Oklahoma very likely including not only Howe but also Strassmeir. [47] The Government's lack of response to the reports they received of an intended bombing strengthens the hypothesis, voiced in the film "A Noble Lie," that the 4/19 plot was initially intended as a sting, the lethal result of which represented "a sting gone wrong."If so, this would increase the similarity between 4/19 and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. According to the official account, this was also a conspiracy penetrated by the FBI, also involving an ANFO bomb on a Ryder rental truck that was also later identified by its vehicle identification number (VIN) on a metal fragment. [48] In the 1993 bombing theNew York Times later reported from tapes of interviews of the FBI's informant with his FBI handler:Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said. [49]This Times story of the 2003 WTC bombing clearly describes a conspiracy that had been effectively penetrated by the FBI, which nonetheless, for whatever reason, reached its lethal conclusion. One such case of a penetrated operation "gone wrong" in 1993 might be attributed to confusion, bureaucratic incompetence, or the problems of determining when sufficient evidence had been gathered to justify arrests. A repeated catastrophe two years later raises the question whether the lethal outcome was not intended.Together with the example of inaction on the CIA's prior knowledge of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, the three mass murders strengthen the claim to the International Criminal Court of Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the Honorary President of Italy's Supreme Court: that 9/11 was "a repeat of the CIA's 'strategy of tension' carried out in Italy" from the 1960s to the 1980s. [50] I appreciate that it will be difficult as well as painful for most Americans to contemplate that America's own history, like that of Italy a half century ago, could have been systemically manipulated and destabilized by unknown forces. But the more research I do, the more I am convinced that something like Judge Imposimato's verdict must be considered.Moreover, if the Italian analogy is applicable to the United States, then the judgment that "9/11 was "a repeat of the CIA's 'strategy of tension' carried out in Italy" raises a larger question about all the structural deep events we have considered, especially the bombings of 1993 and 1995. Were these all part of a single sustained strategy of tension? It is too early to tell. But at the very least the WTC bombings of 1993 and 2001 show suggestive signs of common origins - both outside government (the plotters Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the informant Ali Mohammed) and possibly inside (as indicated by the overlapping, ongoing cover-ups of both). [51]In contrast, all of the structural deep events I have been discussing are predictably treated by the governing media as the work of marginal outsiders - by a "lone nut" like Oswald, or a "lone wolf" like Timothy McVeigh. The commonalities between these events I have presented suggest a different analysis: that insiders including intelligence officials and other government officers, as well as outsiders, including government agents and double agents, must be held responsible for repeatedly designing plots that, because of their interface with sanctioned intelligence operations, will not be revealed by government.My own analysis identifies these insiders as part of an on-going milieu, admittedly amorphous and unstructured, linking the secret networks in government to other powerful forces in our society, For want of a better phrase, I have labeled this milieu, reluctantly, as the "deep state." [52] But as I remarked earlier with respect to Italy, the term "deep state" is not offered as a solution to these unsolved crimes, but as a focus for further research.An Alternative Analysis of Deep Events: State Crimes Against DemocracyLet me contrast my own analysis with those of two others. The first is the notion of a "secret government" put forward in an important PBS program in 1987 by Bill Moyers. [53] It rightly points to the dangerous rise of covert agencies, and above all the CIA, inside government since the National Security Act of 1947. And it analyzes the crimes of Iran-Contra in particular as an example of secret government escaping from the jurisdiction of the law and other restraints of the Constitution and public state.In the words of the Moyers showThe Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government.In other words, the show was pointing to the "Enterprise" used by North and his allies inside and outside the Executive Office Building to implement Iran-Contra and other policies that violated law and/or the directives of Congress. As I have shown elsewhere, North, implementing these policies, availed himself of the emergency antiterrorist network, codenamed Flashboard, that had been put together, at immense cost, by the Doomsday Project. [54] In so doing, he was "piggy-backing:" using the authorized secret network for an illicit, criminal program, outside of the network's designated purpose.Such an analysis could be screened on PBS in 1987 because one part of the U.S. government at that time was at war with another - a war which set Casey at odds not only with Congress but even with senior officers in his own agency the CIA. [55] One can locate Moyers' show as part of a series of insider leaks and governing media exposés of Oliver North's off-the-books "Enterprise," which North (and behind him CIA director Casey) had used to violate official policies and laws. [56] In short Moyers' challenge to Casey's and North's "warriors" suited the aims of the traditional CIA (and their usual backers, the "traders" on Wall Street). [57]Thus we should not be surprised that it had nothing to say about the role of North's superior, Vice-President Bush, or about the stake of corporate interests in promoting CIA covert operations around the world (such as the much larger 1980s CIA operation in Afghanistan). Above all, it had not a word about North's Doomsday Project planning to "suspend the U.S. Constitution," even though this did surface for an instant in the Iran-Contra Hearings. [58] By its silence about the Doomsday Project, the show failed to address the ongoing planning which, I believe, allowed for the fruition of COG plans in 9/11 and the Patriot Act. To sum up, the Moyers attack on the secret government was largely confined to what was already in the public record. It did not venture into deep politics.More recently the concept of State Crimes Against Democracy, or SCADs, has been proposed by Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, and endorsed by some of my friends in the 9/11 Truth community, including Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff. By SCADs, Prof. deHaven-Smith means "concerted actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty." [59]One great advantage of the SCAD hypothesis is that, unlike my own work, it has been discussed in academic journals, thus breaking a kind of sound barrier. But I have problems with the term "State Crimes." On the one hand I would claim that the State, or some segments of the state, is often the victim of deep events, as in 4/19. On the other I see the State as primarily a guarantor of democracy, not simply an enemy of it.I agree that some government insiders play an important role in these events, indeed, I have documented some of these in the preceding pages. But I find it misleading to pin the blame for the crime on the State alone. After all, if a bank insider opens the door to a group of bank robbers, what ensues (even if you choose to call it an "inside job") is unmistakably a robbery ofthe bank, not by it.SCAD analysis is far more useful and sophisticated than I can present it here, and I expect to continue to learn from those who pursue it. But it is not deep political analysis. DeHaven-Smith's list of SCADs includes "the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia," two relevant policy decisions (rather than events) that we know came from the Oval Office; although covert at the time, and very arguably illegal, they were when exposed not at all mysterious and thus essentially not very deep.By positing SCADs as a struggle between the State on the one hand and democracy on the other, I believe this analysis oversimplifies both concepts, and underestimates (as Moyers did not) the internal contradictions within each. Democracy is after all a form of the state in which the people's freedom and power is constitutionally guaranteed by the state (or what I call the public state). And at least one of deHaven-Smith's SCADs - the JFK assassination - might more logically be considered a crime against the state, rather than by it.Phillips and Hoff seem to recognize this difficulty: they drop the JFK assassination from their own list of SCADs. [60] But this artificially segregates the JFK assassination from other deep events, such as the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, which I believe are parts of a common syndrome.In short I believe in the crucial importance of a distinction that SCAD analysis does not make - between the public state that is ostensibly dedicated to fostering the welfare, rights and upward power of the people, and that residue of unofficial powers inside and outside government, or what I have awkwardly called the deep state, that for a half century has been progressively eroding that upward or persuasive power, and replacing it with unrestricted, unconstitutional power (or violence) of its own.My final objection to SCAD analysis is practical. If the state is the author of these crimes, then the work of critics must be to mobilize public opinion against the state. This fits the libertarian politics of those who (like Alex Jones and other lovers of the Second Amendment) profoundly distrust the public US state in its entirety, and not just its covert agencies. Prof. DeHaven-Smith's own analysis implicates not just covert intelligence agencies of the US Government but the government as a whole, and perhaps particularly the courts. (In support of this indictment, he is able to point to the Supreme Court's unusual action, in 2000, of itself electing George W. Bush as president, by a vote of five to four.)But a strategy of attacking the state as a whole seems to me an example of defeatist politics. Here again we can be enlightened by the Italian strategy of tension, which is a tale of indiscriminate terror with a happier ending. The terror bombings ended after Bologna in 1980, thanks to a series of vigorous and courageous investigations by first journalists, then parliamentary commissions, and finally the courts (not least the court of Judge Imposimato himself, which investigated the murder of Italian premier Aldo Moro and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II). The victory of truth over violence did not come easily: journalists, parliamentarians, and at least one judge were themselves killed. And it was clearly a victory against one part of the state, which was achieved through the countervailing forces of other parts.The Italian example proves that the forces behind a strategy of tension are not invincible. They also suggest that, if the dark forces of the deep state are to be defeated, this will take the combined resources, not just of the people, but of those elements in government that can, eventually, be aroused in search of the truth.If this essay contributes to this purpose, it will be because others take up the line of inquiry I have indicated. I myself do not claim to understand the inner truth about these structural deep events. But I hope I have successfully indicated some of the directions which future investigations should pursue.

Peter Dale Scott

] ] &notes=Scholar%20and%20former%20diplomat%20Peter%20Dale%20Scott%20compares%20the%20events%20of%20September%2011,%20the%20JFK%20assassination%20and%20the%20Oklahoma%20City%20bombing.%20He%20exposes%20the%20existence%20and%20continuity%20of%20a%20%22deep%20state%22%20behind%20the%20facade.] ]


[1] Peter Dale Scott, "The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 21, 2011, .[2] Daniele Ganser, Nato's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Routledge, 2005); Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991).[3] Vincenzo Vinciguerra, in "Strage di Piazza Fontana spunta un agente USA," La Repubblica, February 11, 1998 .[4] "Secret agents, freemasons, fascists . . . and a top-level campaign of political 'destabilisation,'" The Guardian, December 5, 1990 ; quoted in Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 7.[5] Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, 125-47, 224-44.[6] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 181. Cf. Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, 6.[7] Ganser, Nato's Secret Armies, 26; citing El Pais, November 26, 1990.[8] Tunander, "The War on Terror," 164.[9] Cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 30: "In February 1989 Italian Special Prosecutor Domenico Sica asserted that responsibility for at least some of the terror bombings during the past decade lay also with the Mafiathat is, what I am referring to as the global drug connection."[10] Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, 125-47, 224-44.[11] Scott Shane, "C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery," New York Times, October 16, 2009. For my analysis of deep similarities between 11/22 and 9/11, see Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy:JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: The Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 341-96.[12] See White House, "Message from the President Regarding the Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks," September 11, 2012 .[13] For my ambivalent use of the term "deep state," see Scott, American War Machine, 20-23.[14] For an introduction to the film, see "A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995 with James Lane and Chris Emery," Alex Jones Channel, December 16, 2011, .[15] General Benton K. Partin, letter to members of Congress, May 17, 1995; in David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror(Los Angeles: Feral House, 1998) . Another explosives expert, Samuel Cohen, wrote to a Congressman that "It would have been absolutely impossible and against the laws of nature for a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil… no matter how much was used… to bring the building down" (ibid.). Anders Breivik's ammonium nitrate car bomb in front of the Norwegian Prime Minister's office would seem to corroborate Partin and Cohen: Breivik's bomb shattered windows but caused no structural damage whatever to the building.[16] "9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out," a film prepared by AE911Truth, PBS, September 16, 2012 . Cf. Bill Christison (a former senior official of the CIA), "Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11," Dissident Voice, August 14, 2006 . www.dissidentvoice.org: The WTC buildings "were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings."[17] Charles Doyle, "Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996: A Summary," Federation of American Scientists, June 3, 1996 . In a December 2000 memo, Richard Clarke confirmed that this assistance was being supplied "through the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center (CTC) and State's Anti-Terrorism Program (ATA)"[18] Scott, "Launching the U.S. Terror War," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus ; citing Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day (New York: Ballantine Books, c2011), 396.[19] Scott, "Launching the U.S. Terror War." This withholding of information is a significant parallel with the CIA's withholding of significant information about Lee Harvey Oswald from the FBI in 1963, in the weeks just before the 11/22 JFK assassination.[20] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280; quoted in Scott, "Doomsday Project."[21] Church Committee, Report, Book III - Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 682.[22] Nate Jones, "Document Friday: Garden Plot:' The Army's Emergency Plan to Restore "Law and Order" to America." National Security Archive, August 11, 2011 .[23] Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House, 1976), 443-46; quoted in Scott, "Doomsday Project."[24] Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there was a great increase in their number. The Washington Star later explained that "the big build-up in [Army] information gathering…did not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King" (Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted inFederal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728); quoted in Scott, "Doomsday Project."[25] George O'Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278-79, also Scott, "Doomsday Project."[26] Peter Dale Scott, "Overview: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico," History Matters ; citing Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 22. "Phase-One" stories, followed by "Phase-Two" media rebuttals, have continued ever since, most recently in 2012 with the publication by former CIA officer Brian Latell of an informant's claim that Castro had prior knowledge of what would happen in Dallas (Brian Latell, Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine[New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012]).[27] Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2002 ; "Take AIM: Jayna Davis on OKC Third Terrorist," AIM.org . Cf. Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, "The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There A Foreign Connection?" Report, December 26, 2006 .[28] Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 97-99.[29] Jim Naureckas , "The Oklahoma City Bombing: The Jihad That Wasn't," Extra! (Fair), July/August 1995 .[30] Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing(Nashville TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004); Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman's Report, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation.[31] Clarke, Against All Enemies, 167.[32] Tim Weiner, "Pentagon Book for Doomsday Is to Be Closed," New York Times, April 17, 1994: quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 186.[33] Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy(New York: Scribner, 2007), 88; quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 187.[34] Scott, "The Doomsday Project and Deep Events."[35] Over and over the daily news provides instances of new deep events that involve informants. As I write, the headlines report widespread Muslim violence throughout the world, in response to a despicable anti-Muslim film one of whose promoters admitted to be a deliberate provocation (Sheila Musaji, "The Tragic Consequences of Extremism," The American Muslim, September 14, 2012, ). I was not surprised to read later that one of the men responsible for the film, Nakoula Nakoula, was also a federal informant ("Producer Of Anti-Islam Film Was Fed Snitch," The Smoking Gun, September 14, 2012 ). As I wrote on my Facebook page, "I don't think anyone should leap to sweeping conclusions from this revelation that one of the film's makers, Nakoula Nakoula, was a government informant. But this fact so complicates the background of this allegedly "amateurish" film that I feel justified in my original assumption: that we might be facing here another deep event (as defined in my book American War Machine)."[36] Scott, Road to 9/11, 151-60.[37] Scott, War Conspiracy, 355-56, 357-63 ("The Role of Double Agents"); Cf. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 247-53, 257-60.[38] See Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: PocketBooks, 1994), ch.29, n4; Harrison E. Livingstone, The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy (Bloomington, IN: Trafford, 2006),131 (Oswald); Lawrence Wright, "The Agent," New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf. Wright,Looming Tower, 339-44 (al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar).[39] This is in line with other features he exhibited in conformity with those I had previously pointed to in the designated culprit stereotype. One is the absurd ease and speed with which he was soon arrested for driving without license plates. In 2008 I compared Oswald with the alleged 9/11 hijackers under the heading "Instant Identification of the Culprits" (Scott, War Conspiracy, 347-49). David Hammer, who was on Death Row with McVeigh, has written that McVeigh confided to him at length how in fact he was a federal undercover agent in a sting operation targeting right-wing extremists. See David Paul Hammer, Deadly Secrets: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (B.oomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010).[40] Jefferson Morley and Michael Scott, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2008) [11/22]; Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2011) [9/11].[41] J.M. Berger, "Patriot Games: How the FBI spent a decade hunting white supremacists and missed Timothy McVeigh," Foreign Policy, April 18, 2012 .[42] "First organized by Tom Posey as part of his Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) organization, the CMA operated as a shadow wing of the Reagan administrations illegal Contra network. Posey and the CMA began as an adjunct to the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. They were first active in smuggling weapons to Central America with the assistance of a Defense Intelligence Agency operation called "Yellow Fruit" and later absorbed into Oliver North's Contra re-supply operation. Posey was later indicted for violations of the Neutrality Act for his gunrunning activities. North and Reagan administration officials intervened in the trial and the charges were dismissed under the curious grounds that the Neutrality Act only applied during peacetime and the Contra operation was the equivalent of a formal state of war" (Paul de Armond, "Racist Origins of Border Militias").[43] "John McCain has worked with white racists before," Daily Kos, October 12, 2008 . I have not been able to determine whether this is the Tom Posey whom David Koch named to be Treasurer of his Citizens for a Sound Economy. Cf. "Tom-Posey, KKK, Koch Brothers, CSE," .[44] Berger, "Patriot Games."[45] John Berger, "Witness Mahon Claimed He Was Third Man in Oklahoma City Bombing," Intelwire, January 10, 2012 .[46] John Berger, "Witness Mahon Claimed He Was Third Man in Oklahoma City Bombing," Intelwire, January 10, 2012http://news.intelwire.com/2012/01/w....[47] For Strassmeir as an intelligence agent, see e.g. Investigative Report prepared for Oklahoma Representative Charles Key, in Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, Final Report, 460-62; David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Venice City, CA: Feral House, 1998), 121-47.[48] Athan G. Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide (Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 1999), 94.[49] Ralph Blumenthal, "Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast," New York Times, October 28, 1993 .[50] "Top Italian Judge Refers 9/11 to International Criminal Court," Aangirfan, September 11, 2012 .[51] Scott, Road to 9/11, 151-61. Both before and after 1993, and again before and after 2001, a key role in the cover-up was played by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. See Scott, Road to 9/11, 152, 155-59; Peter Lance, Triple Cross (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006), 219-23, 274-79, 298-301, 317-18, 358-64, etc.[52] Scott, American War Machine, 20-23.[53] Bill Moyers, The Secret Government, PBS 1987 .[C

[Peter Lemkin]

The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11
by Peter Dale Scott
Presentation made by the author at the November 2011 COPA meeting in Dallas
The Asian-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 47 No 2
21 November 2011
Original video presentation available here




Table Of Contents
Bureaucratic Misbehavior as a Factor Contributing
to both the JFK Assassination and 9/11
Analogous Bureaucratic Misbehavior in the Case of 9/11
How CIA and NSA Withholding of Evidence in the Second
Tonkin Gulf Incident, Contributed to War with North Vietnam
Increases in Repressive Power After Deep Events
Personnel Overlaps Between the Successive Deep Events
A Common Denominator for Structural Deep Events:
Project Doomsday and COG
Notes


I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
Senator Frank Church (1975)


I would like to discuss four major and badly understood events the John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. I will analyze these deep events as part of a deeper political process linking them, a process that has helped build up repressive power in America at the expense of democracy.


In recent years I have been talking about a dark force behind these events a force which, for want of a better term, I have clumsily called a "deep state," operating both within and outside the public state. Today for the first time I want to identify part of that dark force, a part which has operated for five decades or more at the edge of the public state. This part of the dark force has a name not invented by me: the Doomsday Project, the Pentagon's name for the emergency planning "to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major crisis."[1]


My point is a simple and important one: to show that the Doomsday Project of the 1980s, and the earlier emergency planning that developed into it, have played a role in the background of all the deep events I shall discuss.


More significantly, it has been a factor behind all three of the disturbing events that now threaten American democracy. The first of these three is what has been called the conversion of our economy into a plutonomy with the increasing separation of America into two classes, into the haves and the have-nots, the one percent and the 99 percent. The second is America's increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, which has become more and more routine and predictable, to wage or provoke wars in remote regions of the globe. It is clear that the operations of this American war machine have served the one percent.[2]


The third my subject today is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history of structural deep events: mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.


There are any number of analyses of America's current breakdown in terms of income and wealth disparity, also in terms of America's increasing militarization and belligerency. What I shall do today is I think new: to argue that both the income disparity or what has been called our plutonomy and the belligerency have been fostered significantly by deep events.


We must understand that the income disparity of America's current economy was not the result of market forces working independently of political intervention. In large part it was generated by a systematic and deliberate ongoing political process dating from the anxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and 1970s that control of the country was slipping away from them.


This was the time when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memorandum, warned that survival of the free enterprise system depended on "careful long-range planning and implementation" of a well-financed response to threats from the left.[3] This warning was answered by a sustained right-wing offensive, coordinated by think tanks and funded lavishly by a small group of family foundations.[4] We should recall that all this was in response to serious riots in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere, and that increasing calls for a revolution were coming from the left (in Europe as well as America). I will focus today on the right's response to that challenge, and on the role of deep events in enhancing their response.


What was important about the Powell memorandum was less the document itself than the fact that it was commissioned by the United States Chamber of Commerce, one of the most influential and least discussed lobbying groups in America. And the memorandum was only one of many signs of that developing class war in the 1970s, a larger process working both inside and outside government (including what Irving Kristol called an "intellectual counterrevolution"), which led directly to the so-called "Reagan Revolution."[5]


It is clear that this larger process has been carried on for almost five decades, pumping billions of right-wing dollars into the American political process. What I wish to show today is that deep events have also been integral to this right-wing effort, from the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 to 9/11. 9/11 resulted in the implementation of "Continuity of Government" (COG) plans (which in the Oliver North Iran Contra Hearings of 1987 were called plans for "the suspension of the U.S. constitution"). These COG plans, building on earlier COG planning, had been carefully developed since 1982 in the so-called Doomsday Project, by a secret group appointed by Reagan. The group was composed of both public and private figures, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.


I shall try to show today that in this respect 9/11 was only the culmination of a sequence of deep events reaching back to the Kennedy assassination if not earlier, and that the germs of the Doomsday Project can be detected behind all of them.


More specifically, I shall try to demonstrate about these deep events that
1. prior bureaucratic misbehavior by the CIA and similar agencies helped to make both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 happen;
2. the consequences of each deep event included an increase in top-down repressive power for these same agencies, at the expense of persuasive democratic power;[6]
3. there are symptomatic overlaps in personnel between the perpetrators of each of these deep events and the next;
4. one sees in each event the involvement of elements of the international drug traffic suggesting that our current plutonomy is also to some degree a narconomy;
5. in the background of each event (and playing an increasingly important role) one sees the Doomsday Project the alternative emergency planning structure with its own communications network, operating as a shadow network outside of regular government channels.


Bureaucratic Misbehavior as a Factor Contributing
to both the JFK Assassination and 9/11


Both the JFK assassination and 9/11 were facilitated by the way the CIA and FBI manipulated their files about alleged perpetrators of each event (Lee Harvey Oswald in the case of what I shall call JFK, and the alleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of this facilitation was the decision on October 9, 1963 of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald from the FBI watch list for surveillance. This was shortly after Oswald's arrest in New Orleans in August and his reported travel to Mexico in September. Obviously these developments should normally have made Oswald a candidate for increased surveillance.[7]


This misbehavior is paradigmatic of the behavior of other agencies, especially the CIA, in both JFK and 9/11. Indeed Gheesling's behavior fits very neatly with the CIA's culpable withholding from the FBI, in the same month of October, information that Oswald had allegedly met in Mexico City with a suspected KGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov.[8] This also helped ensure that Oswald would not be placed under surveillance. Indeed, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that the CIA's withholding of information was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.[9]


A more ominous provocation in 1963 was that of Army Intelligence, one unit of which in Dallas did not simply withhold information about Lee Harvey Oswald, but manufactured false intelligence that seemed designed to provoke retaliation against Cuba. I call such provocations phase-one stories, efforts to portray Oswald as a Communist conspirator (as opposed to the later phase-two stories, also false, portraying him as a disgruntled loner). A conspicuous example of such phase-one stories is a cable from the Fourth Army Command in Texas, reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman who was also in an Army Intelligence Reserve unit:
Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, notified 112th INTC [Intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of Communist Party."[10]
This cable was sent on November 22 directly to the U. S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba.[11]


The cable was not an isolated aberration. It was supported by other false phase-one stories from Dallas about Oswald's alleged rifle, and specifically by concatenated false translations of Marina Oswald's testimony, to suggest that Oswald's rifle in Dallas was one he had owned in Russia.[12]


These last false reports, apparently unrelated, can also be traced to officer Don Stringfellow's 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.[13] The interpreter who first supplied the false translation of Marina's words, Ilya Mamantov, was selected by a Dallas oilman, Jack Crichton, and Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin.[14] Crichton and Lumpkin were also the Chief and the Deputy Chief of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.[15] Crichton was also an extreme right-winger in the community of Dallas oilmen: he was a trustee of the H. L. Hunt Foundation, and a member of the American Friends of the Katanga Freedom Fighters, a group organized to oppose Kennedy's policies in the Congo.


We have to keep in mind that some of the Joint Chiefs were furious that the 1962 Missile Crisis had not led to an invasion of Cuba, and that, under new JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor, the Joint Chiefs, in May 1963, still believed "that US military intervention in Cuba is necessary."[16] This was six months after Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in October 1962, had given explicit (albeit highly qualified) assurances to Khrushchev, that the United States would not invade Cuba.[17] This did not stop the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the JCS Directorate of Plans and Policy) from producing a menu of "fabricated provocations to justify military intervention."[18] (One proposed example of "fabricated provocations" envisioned "using MIG type aircraft flown by US pilots to … attack surface shipping or to attack US military.")[19]


The deceptions about Oswald coming from Dallas were immediately post-assassination; thus they do not by themselves establish that the assassination itself was a provocation-deception plot. They do however reveal enough about the anti-Castro mindset of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably similar to that of the J-5 the preceding May the mindset that produced a menu of "fabricated provocations" to attack Cuba. (According to Crichton there were "about a hundred men in [the 488th Reserve unit] and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.")[20]


It can hardly be accidental that we see this bureaucratic misbehavior from the FBI, CIA, and military, the three agencies with which Kennedy had had serious disagreements in his truncated presidency.[21] Later in this paper I shall link Dallas oilman Jack Crichton to the 1963 emergency planning that became the Doomsday Project.


Analogous Bureaucratic Misbehavior in the Case of 9/11


Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000-2001, again flagrantly withheld crucial evidence from the FBI: evidence that, if shared, would have led the FBI to surveil two of the alleged hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. This sustained withholding of evidence provoked an FBI agent to predict accurately in August, 2001, that "someday someone will die."[22] After 9/11 another FBI agent said of the CIA: "They [CIA] didn't want the bureau meddling in their business that's why they didn't tell the FBI.... And that's why September 11 happened. That is why it happened. . . . They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands"[23] The CIA's withholding of relevant evidence before 9/11 (which it was required by its own rules to supply) was matched in this case by the NSA.[24]


Without these withholdings, in other words, neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have developed in the manner in which they did. As I wrote in American War Machine, it would appear that
Oswald (and later al-Mihdhar) had at some prior point been selected as designated subjects for an operation. This would not initially have been for the commission of a crime against the American polity: on the contrary, steps were probably taken to prepare Oswald in connection with an operation against Cuba and al-Mihdhar [I suspect] for an operation against al-Qaeda. But as [exploitable] legends began to accumulate about both figures, it became possible for some witting people to subvert the sanctioned operation into a plan for murder that would later be covered up. At this point Oswald (and by analogy al-Mihdhar) was no longer just a designated subject but also now a designated culprit.[25]
Kevin Fenton, in his exhaustive book Disconnecting the Dots, has since reached the same conclusion with respect to 9/11: "that, by the summer of 2001, the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward."[26] He has also identified the person chiefly responsible for the misbehavior: CIA officer Richard Blee, Chief of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit. Blee, while Clinton was still president, had been one of a faction inside CIA pressing for a more belligerent CIA involvement in Afghanistan, in conjunction with the Afghan Northern Alliance.[27] This then happened immediately after 9/11, and Blee himself was promoted, to become the new Chief of Station in Kabul.[28]


How CIA and NSA Withholding of Evidence in the Second
Tonkin Gulf Incident, Contributed to War with North Vietnam


I will spare you the details of this withholding, which can be found in my American War Machine, pp. 200-02. But Tonkin Gulf is similar to the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, in that manipulation of evidence helped lead America in this case very swiftly into war.


Historians such as Fredrik Logevall have agreed with the assessment of former undersecretary of state George Ball that the US destroyer mission in the Tonkin Gulf, which resulted in the Tonkin Gulf incidents, "was primarily for provocation."[29] The planning for this provocative mission came from the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the same unit that in 1963 had reported concerning Cuba that, "the engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible."[30]


The NSA and CIA suppression of the truth on August 4 was in the context of an existing high-level (but controversial) determination to attack North Vietnam. In this respect the Tonkin Gulf incident is remarkably similar to the suppression of the truth by CIA and NSA leading up to 9/11, when there was again a high-level (but controversial) determination to go to war.


Increases in Repressive Power After Deep Events


All of the deep events discussed above have contributed to the cumulative increase of Washington's repressive powers. It is clear for example that the Warren Commission used the JFK assassination to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result of
the Warren Commission's controversial recommendations that the Secret Service's domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA.[31]
This pattern would repeat itself four years later with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hours between Bobby's shooting and his death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001) that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service in the name of protecting presidential candidates.[32]


This was not a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency.[33]


The change also contributed to the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them equipped the so-called "Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups."[34]


In this way the extra secret powers conferred after the RFK assassination contributed to the disastrous turmoil in Chicago that effectively destroyed the old Democratic Party representing the labor unions: The three Democratic presidents elected since then have all been significantly more conservative.


Turning to Watergate and Iran-Contra, both of these events were on one level setbacks to the repressive powers exercised by Richard Nixon and the Reagan White House, not expansions of them. On the surface level this is true: both events resulted in legislative reforms that would appear to contradict my thesis of expanding repression.


We need to distinguish here, however, between the two years of the Watergate crisis, and the initial Watergate break-in. The Watergate crisis saw a president forced into resignation by a number of forces, involving both liberals and conservatives. But the key figures in the initial Watergate break-in itself Hunt, McCord, G. Gordon Liddy, and their Cuban allies were all far to the right of Nixon and Kissinger. And the end result of their machinations was not finalized until the so-called Halloween Massacre in 1975, when Kissinger was ousted as National Security Adviser and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was notified he would be dropped from the 1976 Republican ticket. This major shake-up was engineered by two other right-wingers: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the Gerald Ford White House.[35]


That day in 1975 saw the permanent defeat of the so-called Rockefeller or liberal faction within the Republican Party. It was replaced by the conservative Goldwater-Casey faction that would soon capture the nomination and the presidency for Ronald Reagan.[36] This little-noticed palace coup, along with other related intrigues in the mid-1970s, helped achieve the conversion of America from a welfare capitalist economy, with gradual reductions in income and wealth disparity, into a financialized plutonomy where these trends were reversed.[37]


Again in Iran-Contra we see a deeper accumulation of repressive power under the surface of liberal reforms. At the time not only the press but even academics like myself celebrated the termination of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, and the victory there of the Contadora peace process. Not generally noticed at the time was the fact that, while Oliver North was removed from his role in the Doomsday Project, that project's plans for surveillance, detention, and the militarization of the United States continued to grow after his departure.[38]


Also not noticed was the fact that the US Congress, while curtailing aid to one small drug-financed CIA proxy army, was simultaneously increasing US support to a much larger coalition of drug-financed proxy armies in Afghanistan.[39] While Iran-Contra exposed the $32 million which Saudi Arabia, at the urging of CIA Director William Casey, had supplied to the Contras, not a word was whispered about the $500 million or more that the Saudis, again at the urging of Casey, had supplied in the same period to the Afghan mujahedin.[40] In this sense the drama of Iran-Contra in Congress can be thought of as a misdirection play, directing public attention away from America's much more intensive engagement in Afghanistan a covert policy that has since evolved into America's longest war.


We should expand our consciousness of Iran-Contra to think of it as Iran-Afghan-Contra. And if we do, we must acknowledge that in this complex and misunderstood deep event the CIA in Afghanistan exercised again the paramilitary capacity that Stansfield Turner had tried to terminate when he was CIA Director under Jimmy Carter. This was a victory in short for the faction of men like Richard Blee, the protector of al-Mihdhar as well as the advocate in 2000 for enhanced CIA paramilitary activity in Afghanistan.[41]


Personnel Overlaps Between the Successive Deep Events


I will never forget the New York Times front-page story on June 18, 1972, the day after the Watergate break-in. There were photographs of the Watergate burglars, including one of Frank Sturgis alias Fiorini, whom I had already written about two years earlier in my unpublished book manuscript, "The Dallas Conspiracy" about the JFK assassination.


Sturgis was no nonentity: a former contract employee of the CIA, he was also well connected to the mob-linked former casino owners in Havana.[42] My early writings on the Kennedy case focused on the connections between Frank Sturgis and an anti-Castro Cuban training camp near New Orleans in which Oswald had shown an interest; also in Sturgis' involvement in false "phase-one" stories portraying Oswald as part of a Communist Cuban conspiracy.[43]


In spreading these "phase-one" stories in 1963, Sturgis was joined by a number of Cubans who were part of the CIA-supported army in Central America of Manuel Artime. Artime's base in Costa Rica was closed down in 1965, allegedly because of its involvement in drug trafficking.[44] In the 1980s some of these Cuban exiles later became involved in drug-financed support activities for the Contras.[45]


The political mentor of Artime's MRR movement was future Watergate plotter Howard Hunt; and Artime in 1972 would pay for the bail of the Cuban Watergate burglars. The drug money-launderer Ramón Milián Rodríguez has claimed to have delivered $200,000 in cash from Artime to pay off some of the Cuban Watergate burglars; later, in support of the Contras, he managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.[46]


It is alleged that Hunt and McCord had both been involved with Artime's invasion plans in 1963.[47] It was I believe no accident that the organization of Hunt's protégé Artime became enmired in drug trafficking. Hunt, I have argued elsewhere, had been handling a U.S. drug connection since his 1950 post in Mexico City as OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) chief.[48]


But McCord not only had a past in the anti-Castro activities of 1963, he was also part of the nation's emergency planning network that would later figure so prominently in the background of Iran-Contra and 9/11. McCord was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned "to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war."[49] His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating "contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian security risks,' who would be placed in military camps.'"[50] In other words, these were the plans that became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, the Continuity of Government planning on which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked together for twenty years before 9/11.


A Common Denominator for Structural Deep Events:
Project Doomsday and COG


McCord's participation in an emergency planning system dealing with telecommunications suggests a common denominator in the backgrounds of almost all the deep events we are considering. Oliver North, the Reagan-Bush OEP point man on Iran-Contra planning, was also involved in such planning; and he had access to the nation's top secret Doomsday communications network. North's network, known as Flashboard, "excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints … [and] had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, … by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad."[51]


Flashboard was used by North and his superiors for extremely sensitive operations which had to be concealed from other dubious or hostile parts of the Washington bureaucracy. These operations included the illegal shipments of arms to Iran, but also other activities, some still not known, perhaps even against Olof Palme's Sweden.[52] Flashboard, America's emergency network in the 1980s, was the name in 1984-86 of the full-fledged Continuity of Government (COG) emergency network which was secretly planned for twenty years, at a cost of billions, by a team including Cheney and Rumsfeld. On 9/11 the same network was activated anew by the two men who had planned it for so many years.[53]


But this Doomsday planning can be traced back to 1963, when Jack Crichton, head of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was part of it in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, "Because it was intended for continuity of government' operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with communications equipment."[54] A speech given at the dedication of the Center in 1961 supplies further details:
This Emergency Operating Center [in Dallas] is part of the National Plan to link Federal, State and local government agencies in a communications network from which rescue operations can be directed in time of local or National emergency. It is a vital part of the National, State, and local Operational Survival Plan.[55]
Crichton, in other words, was also part of what became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, like James McCord, Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney after him. But in 1988 its aim was significantly enlarged: no longer to prepare for an atomic attack, but now to plan for the effective suspension of the American constitution in the face of any emergency.[56] This change in 1988 allowed COG to be implemented in 2001. By this time the Doomsday Project had developed into what the Washington Post called "a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing continuity of operations plans.'"[57]


It is clear that the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP, known from 1961-1968 as the Office of Emergency Planning) supplies a common denominator for key personnel in virtually all of the structural events discussed here. This is a long way from establishing that the OEP itself (in addition to the individuals discussed here) was involved in generating any of these events. But I believe that the alternative communications network housed first in the OEP (later part of Project 908) played a significant role in at least three of them: the JFK assassination, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.


This is easiest to show in the case of 9/11, where it is conceded that the Continuity of Government (COG) plans of the Doomsday Project were implemented by Cheney on 9/11, apparently before the last of the four hijacked planes had crashed.[58] The 9/11 Commission could not locate records of the key decisions taken by Cheney on that day, suggesting that they may have taken place on the "secure phone " in the tunnel leading to the presidential bunker with such a high classification that the 9/11 Commission was never supplied the phone records.[59] Presumably this was a COG phone.


It is not clear whether the "secure phone" in the White House tunnel belonged to the Secret Service or (as one might expect) was part of the secure network of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). If the latter, we'd have a striking link between 9/11 and the JFK assassination. The WHCA boasts on its Web site that the agency was "a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy."[60] However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, for the WHCA logs and transcripts were in fact withheld from the Warren Commission.[61]


The Secret Service had installed a WHCA portable radio in the lead car of the presidential motorcade.[62] This in turn was in contact by police radio with the pilot car ahead of it, carrying DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.[63] Records of the WHCA communications from the motorcade never reached the Warren Commission, the House Committee on Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board.[64] Thus we cannot tell if they would explain some of the anomalies on the two channels of the Dallas Police Department. They might for example have thrown light upon the unsourced call on the Dallas Police tapes for a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.[65]


Today in 2011 we are still living under the State of Emergency proclaimed after 9/11 by President Bush. At least some COG provisions are still in effect, and were even augmented by Bush through Presidential Directive 51 of May 9, 2007. Commenting on PD-51, the Washington Post reported at that time,
After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers [including Cheney] to rotate secretly to [COG] locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nation's survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plans."[66]
Presumably this "shadow government" finalized such long-standing COG projects as warrantless surveillance, in part through the Patriot Act, whose controversial provisions were already being implemented by Cheney and others well before the Bill reached Congress on October 12.[67] Other COG projects implemented included the militarization of domestic surveillance under NORTHCOM, and the Department of Homeland Security's Project Endgame a ten-year plan to expand detention camps at a cost of $400 million in fiscal year 2007 alone.[68]


I have, therefore, a recommendation for the Occupy movement, rightfully incensed as it is with the plutonomic excesses of Wall Street over the last three decades. It is to call for an end to the state of emergency, which has been in force since 2001, under which since 2008 a U. S. Army Brigade Combat Team has been stationed permanently in the United States, in part to be ready "to help with civil unrest and crowd control."[69]


Democracy-lovers must work to prevent the political crisis now developing in America from being resolved by military intervention.


Let me say in conclusion that for a half century American politics have been constrained and deformed by the unresolved matter of the Kennedy assassination. According to a memo of November 25 1963, from Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, it was important then to persuade the public that "Oswald was the assassin," and that "he did not have confederates."[70] Obviously this priority became even more important after these questionable propositions were endorsed by the Warren Report, the U. S. establishment, and the mainstream press. It has remained an embarrassing priority ever since for all succeeding administrations, including the present one. There is for example an official in Obama's State Department (Todd Leventhal), whose official job, until recently, included defense of the lone nut theory against so-called "conspiracy theorists"[71]


If Oswald was not a lone assassin, then it should not surprise us that there is continuity between those who falsified reports about Oswald in 1963, and those who distorted American politics in subsequent deep events beginning with Watergate. Since the deep event of 1963 the legitimacy of America's political system has become vested in a lie a lie which subsequent deep events have helped to protect.[72]





Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here http://www.peterdalescott.net/q.html


Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, 'The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,' The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 47 No 2, November 21, 2011.


Articles on related subjects from The Asia-Pacific Journal
Peter Dale Scott, Norway's Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites
Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents
C. Douglas Lummis, The United States and Terror on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11
Peter Dale Scott, Rape in Libya: America's recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods
Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System
Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?
Herbert P. Bix, The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States




Notes


§
1. Tim Weiner, "The Pentagon's Secret Stash," Mother Jones Magazine Mar-Apr 1992, 26. [link to synopsis]
§
2. J.A. Myerson "War Is a Force That Pays the 1 Percent: Occupying American Foreign Policy," Truthout, November 14, 2001, link. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 6, etc. [See REVIEWS OF THE ROAD TO 9/11 from the author's website]
§
3. Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 29, 98.
§
4. Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 97.
§
5. Scott, Road to 9/11, 21, 51-52; Kristol as quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History," Harper's Magazine, September 2004, 36.
§
6. E.g. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 204-05.
§
7. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 354.
§
8. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 387; Scott, American War Machine, 152.
§
9. Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City, MO: Andrews, McMeel, and Parker, 1987), 268, quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.
§
10. Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; HSCA Critics Conference of 17 September 1977, 181, link. Stringfellow worked under Jack Revill in the Vice Squad of the DPD Special Services Bureau. As such he reported regularly to the FBI on such close Jack Ruby associates as James Herbert Dolan, a "known hoodlum and strong-arm man" on the FBI's Top Criminal list for Dallas (Robert M. Barrett, FBI Report of February 2, 1963, NARA#124-90038-10026, 12 [Stringfellow]; cf. NARA#124-10212-10012, 4 [hoodlum], NARA#124-10195-10305, 9 [Top Criminal]). Cf. 14 WH 601-02 Ruby and Dolan]. Robert Barrett, who received Stringfellow's reports to the FBI, had Ruby's friend Dolan under close surveillance; he also took part in Oswald's arrest at the Texas Theater, and claimed to have seen DPD Officer Westbrook with Oswald's wallet at the site of the Tippit killing [Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit (Milford, MI: Oak Cliff Press, 1998), 287-90]).
§
11. It was sent for information to Washington, which received it three days later (Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; Scott, War Conspiracy, 382).
§
12. Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383. (Marina's actual words, before mistranslation, were quite innocuous: "I cannot describe it [the gun] because a rifle to me like all rifles" (Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383; discussion in Scott, Deep Politics, 168-72).
§
13. Stringfellow himself was the source of one other piece of false intelligence on November 22: that Oswald had confessed to the murders of both the president and Officer Tippit (Dallas FBI File DL 89-43-2381C; Paul L. Hoch, "The Final Investigation? The HSCA and Army Intelligence," The Third Decade, 1, 5 [July 1985], 3),
§
14. 9 WH 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 119-22.
§
15. Rodney P. Carlisle and Dominic J. Monetta, Brandy: Our Man in Acapulco (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1999), 128.
§
16. Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12. Cf. pp. 15-16: "The United States should intervene militarily in Cuba and could (a) engineer provocative incidents ostensibly perpetrated by the Castro regime to serve as the cause of invasion …"
§
17. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 568; James A. Nathan, The Cuban missile crisis revisited, 283; Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 9.
§
18. [Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12.
§
19. "Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. I see nothing in this document indicating that the President should be notified that these "fabricated provocations" were false. On the contrary, the document called for "compartmentation of participants" to insure that the true facts were not leaked ("Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," NARA #202-10002-10018, 19).
§
20. Quoted in Baker, Family of Secrets, 122. One of these, DPD Detective John Adamcik, was a member of the party which retrieved a blanket said to have contained Oswald's rifle; and which the Warren Commission used to link Oswald to the famous Mannlicher Carcano. Adamcik was later present at Mamantov's interview of Marina about the rifle, and corroborated Mamantov's account of it to the Warren Commission. There is reason to believe that Mamantov's translation of Marina's testimony was inaccurate (Scott, Deep Politics, 268-70, 276).
§
21. See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008). [book review]
§
22. 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352-54 (FBI agent).
§
23. James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004, 224. For a fuller account of the CIA's withholding before 9/11, see Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots; Rory O'Connor and Ray Nowosielski, "Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA's 9/11 Story," Salon, October 14, 2011, link.
§
24. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 7-12, 142-47, etc.
§
25. Scott, American War Machine, 203.
§
26. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95. Quite independently, Richard Clarke, the former White House Counterterrorism Chief on 9/11, has charged that "There was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information" (Rory O'Connor and Ray Nowosielski, "Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA's 9/11 Story," Salon, October 14, 2011 link).
§
27. Coll, 467-69.
§
28. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 107-08.
§
29. James Bamford, Body of Secrets, 201. Cf. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200, citing John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 51.
§
30. "Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, JCS 2304/189, NARA #202-10002-10018, link.
§
31. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280. [book summary and a review]
§
32. Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House, 1976), 443-46.
§
33. Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there was a great increase in their number. The Washington Star later explained that "the big build-up in [Army] information gathering … did not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King" (Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728).
§
34. George O'Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278-79.
§
35. Scott, Road to 9/11, 52-53.
§
36. Scott, Road to 9/11, 53-54.
§
37. Scott, Road to 9/11, 50-64. ["Chapter Three, The Pivotal Presidency: Ford, Rumsfeld, and Cheney". The Epigraph at the chapter's beginning reads: "We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob." President Franklin Roosevelt's Radio Address Unveiling Second Half of the New Deal, October 31, 1936]
§
38. Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards without North," Social Justice (Summer 1989). Revised as "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011.
§
39. Scott, Road to 9/11, 132.
§
40. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 13 (Contras) [online book copy]; Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 93-102 (mujahedin).
§
41. Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 457-59, 534-36,
§
42. According to testimony from CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters, only "Hunt and McCord had ever been CIA full-time employees. The others [including Sturgis] were contract employees for a short duration or a longer duration" (Watergate Hearings, 3427). Cf. Marshall, Scott, and Hunter,The Iran-Contra Connection, 45 (casino owners).
§
43. Peter Dale Scott, "From Dallas to Watergate," Ramparts, December 1973; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, 356, 363.
§
44. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 20.
§
45. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 25-32, etc. [book excerpts] [SeeReviews of COCAINE POLITICS from the author's website]
§
46. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press [First Chapter] (London: Verso, 1998), 308-09; Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994), 368 (Frigorificos).
§
47. Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 96-97.
§
48. Scott, American War Machine, 51-54. Hunt helped put together what became the drug-linked World Anti-Communist League. Artime's Costa Rica base was on land whose owners were part of the local WACL chapter (Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 87, 220).
§
49. Woodward and Bernstein, All the President's Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23
§
50. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16, citing Department of Defense Directive 5230.7, June 25, 1965, amended May 21, 1971. [See also: Jim Hougan: Secret Agenda thread on The Education Forum]
§
51. Peter Dale Scott, "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards Without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power." Social Justice (San Francisco), XVI, 2 (Summer 1989), 1-30; Peter Dale Scott, "The Terrorism Task Force." Covert Action Information Bulletin, 33 (Winter 1990), 12-15.
§
52. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 140-41, 242 (Iran, etc.); Ola Tunander, The secret war against Sweden: US and British submarine deception in the 1980s, 309 (Sweden).
§
53. Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87. [In Chapter 11, Parallel Structure and Plans for Continuity of Government, these pages form the section titled: "Cheney, Rumsfeld, and COG Planning in the 1980s". Significant footnote references from this section of pages includes:
"Government Coordination for National Security Emergency Preparedness" - National Security Decision Directive 188 (NSC-NSDD-188), 16 September 1985
Announcement of Establishment of the Emergency Mobilization Preparedness Board, December 29, 1981 (was superceded by NSDD-188)
"The Armageddon Plan," During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new President' in the event that a nuclear attack killed the country's leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of the Bush Administration on and after 9/11, By James Mann, The Atlantic Monthly, March 2004.
"Undernews: The Amazing, Scary History of FEMA," Progressive Review, 11 September 2005
"Reagan aides and the `secret' government," Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, >July 6, 1987
"Poised for A COUP: Bush regime struggles to retain power in an increasingly alienated America," by Rodger Herbst, Washington Free Press, no. 70 (July-August 2004)
"The Mysterious Mountain" by Richard Pollock, The Progressive, March 1976, pages 12-16. Find this article if you can. It and other relevant articles are referenced insidehttp://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/mt_weather.htm andhttp://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/mountweather.htm
Executive Order 12656Assignment of emergency preparedness responsibilities, 18 November 1988 (53 FR 47491, 3 CFR, 1988 Comp., p. 585)]


§
54. Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.
§
55. "Statement by Col. John W. Mayo, Chairman of City-County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission at the Dedication of the Emergency Operating Center at Fair Park," May 24, 1961,link.


Six linear inches of Civil Defense Administrative Files are preserved in the Dallas Municipal Archives; a Finding Guide is viewable online here. I hope an interested researcher may wish to consult them.
§
56. Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.
§
57. Washington Post, May 10, 2007. ["Bush orders contingency plans for attack on U.S."]
§
58. 9/11 Report, 38, 326, 555n9; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, 224.
§
59. Scott, Road to 9/11, 226-30. A footnote in the 9/11 Report (555n9) says:
"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."
The other footnotes confirm that no information from COG files was used to document the 9/11 report. At a minimum these files might resolve the mystery of the missing phone call which simultaneously authorized COG, and (in consequence) determined that Bush should continue to stay out of Washington. I suspect that they might tell us a great deal more.
§
60. "White House Communications Agency," Signal Corps Regimental History, link.
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61. The Warren Commission staff knew of the WHCA presence in Dallas from the Secret Service (17 WH 598, 619, 630, etc.).
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62. Statement of Secret Service official Winston Lawson, 17 WH 630 (WHCA radio).
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63. Pamela McElwain-Brown, "The Presidential Lincoln Continental SS-100-X," Dealey Plaza Echo, Volume 3, Issue 2, 23, link (police radio); Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 272-75 (Lumpkin).
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64. In the 1990s the WHCA supplied statements to the ARRB concerning communications between Dallas and Washington on November 22 (NARA #172-10001-10002 to NARA #172-10000-10008). The Assassination Records Review Board also attempted to obtain from the WHCA the unedited original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the return trip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and condensed versions of these tapes had been available since the 1970s from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.) The attempt was unsuccessful: "The Review Board's repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes." See Assassinations Records Review Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, link. In November 2011 AP reported that Gen. Chester Clifton's personal copy of the Air Force One recordings was being put up for sale, with an asking price of $500,000 (AP, November 15, 2011, link).
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65. See Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 347-48, 385-87.
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66. Washington Post, May 10, 2007. ["Bush orders contingency plans for attack on U.S."]
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67. Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 348: "One of the first efforts we undertook after 9/11 to strengthen the country's defenses was securing passage of the Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on [sic] October 2001." Cf. "The Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on October 2001,″ link; "Questions and Answers about Beginning of Domestic Spying Program; link.
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68. Scott, Road to 9/11, 236-45; Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society," November 28, 2010.
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69. "Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1," Army Times, September 30, 2008, link. As part of the Army's emergency plan GARDEN PLOT in the 1960s, there were until 1971 two brigades (4,800 troops) on permanent standby to quell unrest.
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70. "Memorandum for Mr. Moyers" of November 25, 1963, FBI 62-109060, Section 18, p. 29, link. Cf. Nicholas Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 131-36.
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71. Leventhal's official title is (or was) "Chief of the Counter-Misinformation Team, U.S. Department of State" (link). In 2010 the U.S. State Department "launched an official bid to shoot down conspiracy theories…. The "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation" page … insists that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on 9/11" Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010, (link). The site still exists here, ("Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored.") The site still attacks 9/11 theories, but a page on the Kennedy assassination has been suspended (link). Cf. Robin Ramsay, "Government vs Conspiracy Theorists: The official war on "sick think," Fortean Times, April 2010, link; "The State Department vs 'Sick Think' The JFK assassination, 9/11, and the Tory MP spiked with LSD," Fortean Times, July 2010, link; William Kelly, "Todd Leventhal: The Minister of Diz at Dealey Plaza," CTKA, 2010, link.
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72. For Nixon's sensitivity concerning the Kennedy assassination, and the way this induced him into some of the intrigues known collectively as Watergate, see e.g. Scott, Hoch, and Stetler,The Assassinations, 374-78; Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-up (Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993), 33, 64-66.