The following is reproduced with permission of the author from its source at:
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3650
Additional links and annotations provided by David Ratcliffe
Additional links and annotations provided by David Ratcliffe
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
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
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
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
Notes
Copyright © 2011 Peter Dale Scott
Reproduced with permission of the author. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/DoomsdayProject.html |
No comments:
Post a Comment