The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 9 | Issue 47 | Number 2 | Article ID 3650 | Nov 26, 2011

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The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11　　ドゥームズデイ・プロジェクト（ペンタゴン）と深層の事件：ケネディ暗殺、ウオーターゲイト、イラン・コントラ、9.11 *Japanese translation available

Peter Dale Scott

The Doomsday Project and DeepEvents: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra,and 9/11 Japanese translation isa v a i l a b l e(http://peacephilosophy.blogspot.com/2011/12/blog-post_28.html) [WithAkira Doujimaru's introduction forJapanese readers to Scott ' sdoomsday conception]; Chineset r a n s l a t i o n i s a v a i l a b l e(http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4c809bec0100otk4.html); Frencht r a n s l a t i o n i s a v a i l a b l e(http://www.voltairenet.org/Le-Projet-Jugement-dernier-et-les,172310);German translation is available(http://www.larsschall.com/2014/01/08/das-doomsday-projekt-und-tiefenereignisse-jfk-watergate-iran-contra-und-911/); Italian translationi s a v a i l a b l e(http://www.vocidallastrada.com/2012/01/il-progetto-giorno-del-giudizio-e -g l i .h tml#more) ; Spanisht r a n s l a t i o n i s a v a i l a b l e(http://www.voltairenet.org/El-Proyecto-Juicio-Final-y-los); Portugueset r a n s l a t i o n i s a v a i l a b l e(http://guilhermescalzilli.blogspot.co

m/2012/01/o-projeto-juizo-final-e-os-eventos.html).

Peter Dale Scott

I know the capacity that is there to maketyranny total in America, and we must see to itthat this agency [the National Security Agency]and all agencies that possess this technologyoperate within the law and under propersupervision, so that we never cross over thatabyss. That is the abyss from which there is noreturn."

-- Senator Frank Church (1975)

I would like to discuss four major and badlyunderstood events – the John F. Kennedyassassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and9/11. I will analyze these deep events as part ofa deeper political process linking them, aprocess that has helped build up repressivepower in Amer ica a t the expense o fdemocracy.

In recent years I have been talking about adark force behind these events -- a force which,for want of a better term, I have clumsily calleda “deep state,” operating both within andoutside the public state. Today for the first timeI want to identify part of that dark force, a partwhich has operated for five decades or more atthe edge of the public state. This part of thedark force has a name not invented by me: theDoomsday Project, the Pentagon’s name for theemergency planning “to keep the White House

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and Pentagon running during and after anuclear war or some other major crisis.”1

My point is a simple and important one: toshow that the Doomsday Project of the 1980s,and the earlier emergency planning thatdeveloped into it, have played a role in thebackground of all the deep events I shalldiscuss.

More significantly, it has been a factor behindall three of the disturbing events that nowthreaten American democracy. The first ofthese three is what has been called theconversion of our economy into a plutonomy –with the increasing separation of America intotwo classes, into the haves and the have-nots,the one percent and the 99 percent. The secondis America’s increasing militarization, andabove all its inclination, which has becomemore and more routine and predictable, towage or provoke wars in remote regions of theglobe. It is clear that the operations of thisAmerican war machine have served the onepercent.2

The third – my subject today -- is the importantand increasingly deleterious impact onAmerican history of structural deep events:mysterious events, like the JFK assassination,the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violatethe American social structure, have a majorimpact on American society, repeatedly involvelaw-breaking or violence, and in many casesproceed from an unknown dark force.

There are any number of analyses of America’scurrent breakdown in terms of income andwealth disparity, also in terms of America’sincreasing militarization and belligerency.What I shall do today is I think new: to arguethat both the income disparity – or what hasbeen cal led our plutonomy - - and thebelligerency have been fostered significantly bydeep events.

We must understand that the income disparityof America’s current economy was not the

result of market forces working independentlyof political intervention. In large part it wasgenerated by a systematic and deliberateongoing political process dating from theanxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and1970s that control of the country was slippingaway from them.

This was the time when future Supreme CourtJustice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memorandum,warned that survival of the free enterprisesystem depended on “careful long-rangeplanning and implementation” of a well-financed response to threats from the left.3 Thiswarning was answered by a sustained right-wing offensive, coordinated by think tanks andfunded lavishly by a small group of familyfoundations.4 We should recall that all this wasin response to serious riots in Newark, Detroit,and elsewhere, and that increasing calls for arevolution were coming from the left (in Europeas well as America). I will focus today on theright’s response to that challenge, and on therole of deep events in enhancing theirresponse.

What was important about the Powellmemorandum was less the document itself thanthe fact that it was commissioned by the UnitedStates Chamber of Commerce, one of the mostinfluential and least discussed lobbying groupsin America. And the memorandum was only oneof many signs of that developing class war inthe 1970s, a larger process working both insideand outside government (including what IrvingK r i s t o l c a l l e d a n “ i n t e l l e c t u a lcounterrevolution”), which led directly to theso-called “Reagan Revolution.”5

It is clear that this larger process has beencarried on for almost five decades, pumpingbillions of right-wing dollars into the Americanpolitical process. What I wish to show today isthat deep events have also been integral to thisright-wing effort, from the John F. Kennedyassassination in 1963 to 9/11. 9/11 resulted inthe implementation of “Continuity of

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Government” (COG) plans (which in the OliverNorth Iran Contra Hearings of 1987 werecalled plans for “the suspension of the U.S.constitution”). These COG plans, building onearlier COG planning, had been carefullydeveloped since 1982 in the so-calledDoomsday Project, by a secret group appointedby Reagan. The group was composed of bothpublic and private figures, including DonaldRumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Oliver North testifying in the Iran ContraHearings

I shall try to show today that in this respect9/11 was only the culmination of a sequence ofdeep events reaching back to the Kennedyassassination if not earlier, and that the germsof the Doomsday Project can be detectedbehind all of them.

More specifically, I shall try to demonstrateabout these deep events that

1) prior bureaucratic misbehaviorby the CIA and similar agencieshelped to make both the Kennedyassassination and 9/11 happen;

2) the consequences of each deepevent included an increase in top-down repressive power for these

same agencies, at the expense ofpersuasive democratic power;6

3) there are symptomatic overlapsin per sonne l be tween theperpetrators of each of these deepevents and the next;

4) one sees in each event theinvolvement of elements of theinternational drug traff ic –suggesting that our currentplutonomy is also to some degree anarconomy;

5) in the background of each event(and playing an increasinglyimportant role) one sees theDoomsday Project -- the alternativeemergency planning structure withits own communications network,operating as a shadow networkoutside of regular governmentchannels.

Bureaucratic Misbehavior as a FactorContributing to both the JFK Assassinationand 9/11

Both the JFK assassination and 9/11 werefacilitated by the way the CIA and FBImanipulated their f i les about allegedperpetrators of each event (Lee Harvey Oswaldin the case of what I shall call JFK, and thealleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawafal-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of thisfacilitation was the decision on October 9, 1963of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to removeOswald from the FBI watch list for surveillance.This was shortly after Oswald’s arrest in NewOrleans in August and his reported travel toMexico in September. Obviously thesedevelopments should normally have madeOswald a candidate for increased surveillance.7

This misbehavior is paradigmatic of thebehavior of other agencies, especially the CIA,

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in both JFK and 9/11. Indeed Gheesling’sbehavior fits very neatly with the CIA’sculpable withholding from the FBI, in the samemonth of October, information that Oswald hadallegedly met in Mexico City with a suspectedKGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov.8 This also helpedensure that Oswald would not be placed undersurveillance. Indeed, former FBI DirectorClarence Kelley in his memoir later complainedthat the CIA’s withholding of information wasthe major reason why Oswald was not putunder surveillance on November 22, 1963.9

A more ominous provocation in 1963 was thatof Army Intelligence, one unit of which inDallas did not simply withhold informationabout Lee Harvey Oswald, but manufacturedfalse intelligence that seemed designed toprovoke retaliation against Cuba. I call suchprovocations phase-one stories, efforts toportray Oswald as a Communist conspirator (asopposed to the later phase-two stories, alsofalse, portraying him as a disgruntled loner). Aconspicuous example of such phase-one storiesis a cable from the Fourth Army Command inTexas, reporting a tip from a Dallas policemanwho was also in an Army Intelligence Reserveunit:

Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, IntelligenceSection, Dallas Police Department, notified112 t h INTC [Intell igence] Group, thisHeadquarters, that information obtained fromOswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in1959 and is a card-carrying member ofCommunist Party.”10

This cable was sent on November 22 directly tothe U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill inFlorida, the base poised for a possibleretaliatory attack against Cuba.11

The cable was not an isolated aberration. It wassupported by other false phase-one stories fromDallas about Oswald’s alleged rifle, andspecifically by concatenated false translationsof Marina Oswald’s testimony, to suggest that

Oswald’s rifle in Dallas was one he had ownedin Russia.12

These last false reports, apparently unrelated,can also be traced to officer Don Stringfellow’s488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.13 Theinterpreter who first supplied the falsetranslation of Marina’s words, Ilya Mamantov,was selected by a Dallas oilman, Jack Crichton,and Deputy Dallas Police Chief GeorgeLumpkin.14 Crichton and Lumpkin were also theChief and the Deputy Chief of the 488th ArmyIntelligence Reserve unit.15 Crichton was alsoan extreme right-winger in the community ofDallas oilmen: he was a trustee of the H.L.Hunt Foundation, and a member of theAmerican Friends of the Katanga FreedomFighters, a group organized to opposeKennedy’s policies in the Congo.

We have to keep in mind that some of the JointChiefs were furious that the 1962 Missile Crisishad not led to an invasion of Cuba, and that,under new JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor, theJoint Chiefs, in May 1963, still believed “thatUS mi l i tary in tervent ion in Cuba i snecessary.”16 This was six months afterKennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis inOctober 1962, had given explicit (albeit highlyqualified) assurances to Khrushchev, that theUnited States would not invade Cuba.17 This didnot stop the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (theJCS Directorate of Plans and Policy) fromproducing a menu of “fabricated provocationsto justify military intervention.”18 (Oneproposed example of “fabricated provocations”envisioned “using MIG type aircraft flown byUS pilots to … attack surface shipping or toattack US military.”)19

The deceptions about Oswald coming fromDallas were immediately post-assassination;thus they do not by themselves establish thatthe assassination itself was a provocation-deception plot. They do however reveal enoughabout the anti-Castro mindset of the 488th ArmyIntelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm

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that it was remarkably similar to that of the J-5the preceding May – the mindset that produceda menu of “fabricated provocations” to attackCuba. (According to Crichton there were“about a hundred men in [the 488th Reserveunit] and about forty or fifty of them were fromthe Dallas Police Department.”)20

It can hardly be accidental that we see thisbureaucratic misbehavior from the FBI, CIA,and military, the three agencies with whichKennedy had had serious disagreements in histruncated presidency.21 Later in this paper Ishall link Dallas oilman Jack Crichton to the1963 emergency planning that became theDoomsday Project.

Analogous Bureaucratic Misbehavior in theCase of 9/11

Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000-2001, againflagrantly withheld crucial evidence from theFBI: evidence that, if shared, would have ledthe FBI to surveil two of the alleged hijackers,Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. Thissustained withholding of evidence provoked anFBI agent to predict accurately in August,2001, that “someday someone will die.”22 After9/11 another FBI agent said of the CIA: “They[CIA] didn’t want the bureau meddling in theirbusiness—that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI.... And that’s why September 11 happened. Thatis why it happened. . . . They have blood ontheir hands. They have three thousand deathson their hands”23 The CIA’s withholding ofrelevant evidence before 9/11 (which it wasrequired by its own rules to supply) wasmatched in this case by the NSA.24

Without these withholdings, in other words,neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11could have developed in the manner in whichthey did. As I wrote in American War Machine,it would appear that

Oswald (and later al-Mihdhar) had at someprior point been selected as

designated subjects for an operation. Thiswould not init ia l ly have been for thecommission of a crime against the Americanpolity: on the contrary, steps were probablytaken to prepare Oswald in connection with anoperation against Cuba and al-Mihdhar [Isuspect] for an operation against al-Qaeda. Butas [exploitable] legends began to accumulateabout both figures, it became possible for somewitting people to subvert the sanctionedoperation into a plan for murder that wouldlater be covered up. At this point Oswald (andby analogy al-Mihdhar) was no longer just adesignated subject but also now a designatedculprit.25

Kevin Fenton, in his exhaustive bookDisconnecting the Dots, has since reached thesame conclusion with respect to 9/11: “that, bythe summer o f 2001, the purpose o fwithholding the information had become toallow the attacks to go forward.”26 He has alsoidentified the person chiefly responsible for themisbehavior: CIA officer Richard Blee, Chief ofthe CIA’s Bin Laden Unit. Blee, while Clintonwas still president, had been one of a factioninside CIA pressing for a more belligerent CIAinvolvement in Afghanistan, in conjunction withthe Afghan Northern Alliance.27 This thenhappened immediately after 9/11, and Bleehimself was promoted, to become the newChief of Station in Kabul.28

How CIA and NSA Withholding of Evidencein 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 WarMachine, pp. 200-02. But Tonkin Gulf is similarto the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, in thatmanipulation of evidence helped lead America –in this case very swiftly – into war.

Historians such as Fredrik Logevall haveagreed with the assessment of formerundersecretary of state George Ball that the US

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destroyer mission in the Tonkin Gulf, whichresulted in the Tonkin Gulf incidents, “wasprimarily for provocation.”29 The planning forthis provocative mission came from the J-5 ofthe Joint Chiefs of Staff, the same unit that in1963 had reported concerning Cuba that, “theengineering of a series of provocations tojustify military intervention is feasible.”30

The NSA and CIA suppression of the truth onAugust 4 was in the context of an existing high-level (but controversial) determination toattack North Vietnam. In this respect theTonkin Gulf incident is remarkably similar tothe suppression of the truth by CIA and NSAleading up to 9/11, when there was again ahigh-level (but controversial) determination togo to war.

Increases in Repressive Power After DeepEvents

All of the deep events discussed above havecontributed to the cumulative increase ofWashington’s repressive powers. It is clear forexample that the Warren Commission used theJFK assassination to increase CIA surveillanceof Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, thiswas the result of

the Warren Commission’s controversialrecommendations that the Secret Service’sdomestic surveillance responsibilities beincreased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically,the Warren Report concluded both that Oswaldacted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that theSecret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinatemore closely the surveillance of organizedg r o u p s ( W R 4 6 3 ) . I n p a r t i c u l a r , i trecommended that the Secret Service acquire acomputerized data bank compatible with thatalready developed by the CIA.31

This pattern would repeat itself four years laterwith the assassination of

Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hoursbetween Bobby’s shooting and his

death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute—drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin GulfResolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001)— that still further augmented the secretpowers given to the Secret Service in the nameof protecting presidential candidates.32

This was not a trivial or benign change: fromthis swiftly considered act, passed underJohnson, flowed some of the worst excesses ofthe Nixon presidency.33

The change also contributed to the chaos andviolence at the Chicago Democratic Conventionof 1968. Army intelligence surveillance agents,seconded to the Secret Service, were presentboth inside and outside the convention hall.Some of them equipped the so-called “Legion ofJustice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squadturned loose on local anti-war groups.”34

In this way the extra secret powers conferredafter the RFK assassination contributed to thedisastrous turmoil in Chicago that effectivelydestroyed the o ld Democrat ic Partyrepresenting the labor unions: The threeDemocratic presidents elected since then haveall been significantly more conservative.

Turning to Watergate and Iran-Contra, both ofthese events were on one level setbacks to therepressive powers exercised by Richard Nixonand the Reagan White House, not expansions ofthem. On the surface level this is true: bothevents resulted in legislative reforms thatwould appear to contradict my thesis ofexpanding repression.

We need to distinguish here, however, betweenthe two years of the Watergate crisis, and theinitial Watergate break-in. The Watergate crisissaw a president forced into resignation by anumber of forces, involving both liberals andconservatives. But the key figures in the initialWatergate break-in itself – Hunt, McCord, G.Gordon Liddy, and their Cuban allies -- were allfar to the right of Nixon and Kissinger. And theend result of their machinations was not

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finalized until the so-called HalloweenMassacre in 1975, when Kissinger was oustedas National Security Adviser and Vice-PresidentNelson Rockefeller was notified he would bedropped from the 1976 Republican ticket. Thismajor shake-up was engineered by two otherright-wingers: Donald Rumsfeld and DickCheney in the Gerald Ford White House.35

That day in 1975 saw the permanent defeat ofthe so-called Rockefeller or liberal factionwithin the Republican Party. It was replaced bythe conservative Goldwater-Casey faction thatwould soon capture the nomination and thepresidency for Ronald Reagan.36 This little-noticed palace coup, along with other relatedintrigues in the mid-1970s, helped achieve theconversion of America from a welfare capitalisteconomy, with gradual reductions in incomeand wealth disparity, into a financializedplutonomy where these trends were reversed.37

Again in Iran-Contra we see a deeperaccumulation of repressive power under thesurface of liberal reforms. At the time not onlythe press but even academics like myselfcelebrated the termination of aid to theNicaraguan Contras, and the victory there ofthe Contadora peace process. Not generallynoticed at the time was the fact that, whileOliver North was removed from his role in theDoomsday Project, that project’s plans forsurveillance, detention, and the militarizationof the United States continued to grow after hisdeparture.38

Also not noticed was the fact that the USCongress, while curtailing aid to one smalldrug- f inanced CIA proxy army, wassimultaneously increasing US support to amuch larger coalition of drug-financed proxyarmies in Afghanistan.39 While Iran-Contraexposed the $32 million which Saudi Arabia, atthe urging of CIA Director William Casey, hadsupplied to the Contras, not a word waswhispered about the $500 million or more thatthe Saudis, again at the urging of Casey, had

supplied in the same period to the Afghanmujahedin.40 In this sense the drama of Iran-Contra in Congress can be thought of as amisdirection play, directing public attentionaway from America’s much more intensiveengagement in Afghanistan – a covert policythat has since evolved into America’s longestwar.

We should expand our consciousness of Iran-Contra to think of it as Iran-Afghan-Contra. Andif we do, we must acknowledge that in thiscomplex and misunderstood deep event the CIAin Afghanistan exercised again the paramilitarycapacity that Stansfield Turner had tried toterminate when he was CIA Director underJimmy Carter. This was a victory in short forthe faction of men like Richard Blee, theprotector of al-Mihdhar as well as the advocatein 2000 for enhanced CIA paramilitary activityin Afghanistan.41

Personnel Over laps Between theSuccessive Deep Events

I will never forget the New York Times front-page story on June 18, 1972, the day after theWatergate break-in. There were photographs ofthe Watergate burglars, including one of FrankSturgis alias Fiorini, whom I had alreadywritten about two years earlier in myunpublished book manuscript, “The DallasConspiracy” about the JFK assassination.

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Frank Sturgis

Sturgis was no nonentity: a former contractemployee of the CIA, he was also wellconnected to the mob-linked former casinoowners in Havana.42 My early writings on theKennedy case focused on the connectionsbetween Frank Sturgis and an anti-CastroCuban training camp near New Orleans inwhich Oswald had shown an interest; also inSturgis’ involvement in false “phase-one”stories portraying Oswald as part of aCommunist Cuban conspiracy.43

In spreading these “phase-one” stories in 1963,Sturgis was joined by a number of Cubans whowere part of the CIA-supported army in CentralAmerica of Manuel Artime. Artime’s base inCosta Rica was closed down in 1965, allegedlybecause o f i t s invo lvement in drugtrafficking.44 In the 1980s some of these Cubanexiles later became involved in drug-financedsupport activities for the Contras.45

The polit ical mentor of Artime’s MRRmovement was future Watergate plotter

Howard Hunt; and Artime in 1972 would payfor the bail of the Cuban Watergate burglars.The drug money-launderer Ramón MiliánRodríguez has claimed to have delivered$200,000 in cash from Artime to pay off someof the Cuban Watergate burglars; later, insupport of the Contras, he managed two CostaRican seafood companies, Frigorificos andOcean Hunter, that laundered drug money.46

It is alleged that Hunt and McCord had bothbeen involved with Artime’s invasion plans in1963.47 It was I believe no accident that theorganization of Hunt’s protégé Artime becameenmired in drug trafficking. Hunt, I haveargued elsewhere, had been handling a U.S.drug connection since his 1950 post in MexicoCity 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 ofthe nation’s emergency planning network thatwould later figure so prominently in thebackground of Iran-Contra and 9/11. McCordwas a member of a small Air Force Reserve unitin Washington attached to the Office ofEmergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned “todraw up lists of radicals and to developcontingency plans for censorship of the newsmedia and U.S. mail in time of war.”49 His unitwas part of the Wartime Information SecurityProgram (WISP), which had responsibility foractivating “contingency plans for imposingcensorship on the press, the mails and alltelecommunications (including governmentcommunications) [and] preventive detention ofcivilian ‘security risks,’ who would be placed inmilitary ‘camps.’”50 In other words, these werethe plans that became known in the 1980s asthe Doomsday Project, the Continuity ofGovernment planning on which Dick Cheneyand Donald Rumsfeld worked together fortwenty years before 9/11.

A Common Denominator for StructuralDeep Events: Project Doomsday and COG

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McCord’s participation in an emergencyp l a n n i n g s y s t e m d e a l i n g w i t htelecommunications suggests a commondenominator in the backgrounds of almost allthe deep events we are considering. OliverNorth, the Reagan-Bush OEP point man onIran-Contra planning, was also involved in suchplanning; and he had access to the nation’s topsecret Doomsday communications network.North’s network, known as Flashboard, "excluded other bureaucrats with opposingviewpoints…[and] had its own specialworldwide antiterrorist computer network, …by which members could communicateexclusively with each other and theircollaborators abroad." 5 1

Flashboard was used by North and hissuperiors for extremely sensitive operationswhich had to be concealed from other dubiousor hostile parts of the Washington bureaucracy.These operations included the illegal shipmentsof arms to Iran, but also other activities, somestill not known, perhaps even against OlofPalme’s Sweden.52 Flashboard, America’semergency network in the 1980s, was the namein 1984-86 of the full-fledged Continuity ofGovernment (COG) emergency network whichwas secretly planned for twenty years, at a costof billions, by a team including Cheney andRumsfeld. On 9/11 the same network wasactivated anew by the two men who hadplanned it for so many years.53

But this Doomsday planning can be traced backto 1963, when Jack Crichton, head of the 488th

Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, waspart of it in his capacity as chief of intelligencefor Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out ofan underground Emergency Operating Center.As Russ Baker reports, “Because it wasintended for ‘continuity of government’operations during an attack, [the Center] wasful ly equipped with communicat ionsequipment.”54 A speech given at the dedicationof the Center in 1961 supplies further details:

This Emergency Operating Center [in Dallas] ispart of the National Plan to link Federal, Stateand loca l government agenc ies in acommunications network from which rescueoperations can be directed in time of local orNational emergency. It is a vital part of theNational, State, and local Operational SurvivalPlan.55

Crichton, in other words, was also part of whatbecame known in the 1980s as the DoomsdayProject, 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, butnow to plan for the effective suspension of theAmerican constitution in the face of anyemergency.56 This change in 1988 allowed COGto be implemented in 2001. By this time theDoomsday Project had developed into what theWashington Post called “a shadow governmentthat evolved based on long-standing ‘continuityof operations plans.’”57

It is clear that the Office of EmergencyPreparedness (OEP, known from 1961-1968 asthe Office of Emergency Planning) supplies acommon denominator for key personnel invirtually all of the structural events discussedhere. This is a long way from establishing thatthe OEP itself (in addition to the individualsdiscussed here) was involved in generating anyof these events. But I believe that the

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alternative communications network housedfirst in the OEP (later part of Project 908)played a significant role in at least three ofthem: the JFK assassination, Iran-Contra, and9/11.

This is easiest to show in the case of 9/11,where it is conceded that the Continuity ofGovernment (COG) plans of the DoomsdayProject were implemented by Cheney on 9/11,apparently before the last of the four hijackedplanes had crashed.58 The 9/11 Commissioncould not locate records of the key decisionstaken by Cheney on that day, suggesting thatthey may have taken place on the “securephone “ in the tunnel leading to thepresidential bunker – with such a highclassification that the 9/11 Commission wasnever supplied the phone records.59 Presumablythis was a COG phone.

It is not clear whether the “secure phone” inthe White House tunnel belonged to the SecretService or (as one might expect) was part ofthe secure network of the White HouseCommunications Agency (WHCA). If the latter,we’d have a striking link between 9/11 and theJFK assassination. The WHCA boasts on itsWeb site that the agency was “a key player indocumenting the assassination of PresidentKennedy.”60 However it is not clear for whomthis documentation was conducted, for theWHCA logs and transcripts were in factwithheld from the Warren Commission.61

The Secret Service had installed a WHCAportable radio in the lead car of thepresidential motorcade.62 This in turn was incontact by police radio with the pilot car aheadof it, carrying DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin ofthe 488 t h Army Intel l igence Reserveunit.63 Records of the WHCA communicationsfrom the motorcade never reached the WarrenCommission, the House Committee onAssassinations, or the Assassination RecordsReview Board.64 Thus we cannot tell if theywould explain some of the anomalies on the two

channels of the Dallas Police Department. Theymight for example have thrown light upon theunsourced call on the Dallas Police

tapes for a suspect who had exactly the falseheight and weight recorded for Oswald in hisFBI and CIA files.65

Today in 2011 we are still living under theState of Emergency proclaimed after 9/11 byPresident Bush. At least some COG provisionsare still in effect, and were even augmented byBush through Presidential Directive 51 of May2007. Commenting on PD-51, the WashingtonPost reported at that time,

After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about100 senior civilian managers [includingCheney] to rotate secretly to [COG] locationsoutside of Washington for weeks or months at atime to ensure the nation’s survival, a shadowgovernment that evolved based on long-standing “continuity of operations plans.”66

Presumably this “shadow government” finalizedsuch long-standing COG projects aswarrantless surveillance, in part through thePatriot Act, whose controversial provisionswere already being implemented by Cheneyand others well before the Bill reachedCongress on October 12.67 Other COG projectsimplemented included the militarization ofdomestic surveillance under NORTHCOM, andthe Department of Homeland Security’s ProjectEndgame—a ten-year plan to expand detentioncamps at a cost of $400 million in fiscal year2007 alone.68

I have, therefore, a recommendation for theOccupy movement, rightfully incensed as it iswith the plutonomic excesses of Wall Streetover the last three decades. It is to call for anend to the state of emergency, which has beenin force since 2001, under which since 2008 aU.S. Army Brigade Combat Team has beenstationed permanently in the United States, inpart to be ready “to help with civil unrest andcrowd control.”69

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Democracy-lovers must work to prevent thepolitical crisis now developing in America frombeing resolved by military intervention.

Let me say in conclusion that for a half centuryAmerican politics have been constrained anddeformed by the unresolved matter of theKennedy assassination. According to a memo ofNovember 25 1963, from Assistant AttorneyGeneral Nicholas Katzenbach, it was importantthen to persuade the public that “Oswald wasthe assassin,” and that “he did not haveconfederates.”70 Obviously this priority becameeven more important after these questionablepropositions were endorsed by the WarrenReport, the U.S. establishment, and themainstream press. It has remained anembarrassing priority ever since for allsucceeding administrations, including thepresent one. There is for example an official inObama’s State Department (Todd Leventhal),whose official job, until recently, includeddefense of the lone nut theory against so-called“conspiracy theorists”71

If Oswald was not a lone assassin, then itshould not surprise us that there is continuitybetween those who falsified reports aboutOswald in 1963, and those who distortedAmerican politics in subsequent deep eventsbeginning with Watergate. Since the deepevent of 1963 the legitimacy of America’spolitical system has become vested in a lie -- alie which subsequent deep events have helpedto protect.72

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomatand English Professor at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oila n d W a r(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742525228/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), The Road to 9/11(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520258711/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), and The War Conspiracy:

JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0980121361/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). His most recent book isAmerican War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIAGlobal Drug Connection and the Road toA f g h a n i s t a n(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742555941/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). His website, which containsa w e a l t h o f h i s w r i t i n g s , i s h e r ehttp://www.peterdalescott.net/q.html

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, 'TheDoomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK,Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,' The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 47 No 2, November21, 2011.

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Notes

1 Tim Weiner, “The Pentagon’s Secret Stash,”Mother Jones Magazine Mar-Apr 1992, 26.

2 J.A. Myerson “War Is a Force That Pays the 1Percent: Occupying American Foreign Policy,”Truthout , November 14 , 2001 , l ink(http://www.truth-out.org/war-force-pays-1-perce n t - o c c u p y i n g - a m e r i c a n - f o r e i g n -policy/1321286925). Cf. Peter Dale Scott, TheRoad to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2007), 6, etc.

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 asquoted in Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles ofRage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a BriefHistory,” 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 anFBI 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 PoliticsII, 80, 129n; HSCA Critics Conference of 17S e p t e m b e r 1 9 7 7 , 1 8 1 , l i n k(http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?mode=searchResult&absPageId=326672). Stringfellow worked under JackRevill in the Vice Squad of the DPD SpecialServices Bureau. As such he reported regularlyto the FBI on such close Jack Ruby associatesas James Herbert Dolan, a “known hoodlumand strong-arm man” on the FBI’s Top Criminallist for Dallas (Robert M. Barrett, FBI Report ofFebruary 2, 1963, NARA#124-90038-10026, 12[Stringfellow]; cf. NARA#124-10212-10012, 4[hoodlum], NARA#124-10195-10305, 9 [TopCriminal]). Cf. 14 WH 601-02 Ruby and Dolan].Robert Barrett, who received Stringfellow’sreports to the FBI, had Ruby’s friend Dolanunder close surveillance; he also took part inOswald’s arrest at the Texas Theater, andclaimed to have seen DPD Officer Westbrookwith Oswald’s wallet at the site of the Tippitkilling [Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee HarveyOswald 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, DeepPolitics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n;Scott, War Conspiracy, 382).

12 Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH383. (Marina’s actual words, beforemistranslation, were quite innocuous: “I cannotdescribe it [the gun] because a rifle to me likeall rifles” (Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23WH 383; discussion in Scott, Deep Politics,168-72).

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13 Stringfellow himself was the source of oneother piece of false intelligence on November22: that Oswald had confessed to the murdersof both the president and Officer Tippit (DallasFBI File DL 89-43-2381C; Paul L. Hoch, “TheFinal Investigation? The HSCA and ArmyIntelligence,” The Third Decade, 1, 5 [July1985], 3),

14 9 WH 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; RussBaker, 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 ActionRelated to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 tothe Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA#202-10002-10018, 12. Cf. pp. 15-16: “TheUnited States should intervene militarily inCuba and could (a) engineer provocativeincidents ostensibly perpetrated by the Castroregime to serve as the cause of invasion…”

17 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 568; JamesA. Nathan, The Cuban missile crisis revisited,283; Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy ofSecrecy, 9.

[18 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of ActionRelated to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 tothe Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA#202-10002-10018, 12.

19 “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (CaseII),” NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. I seenothing in this document indicating that thePresident should be notified that these“fabricated provocations” were false. On thecon t ra ry , t he document ca l l ed f o r“compartmentation of participants” to insurethat 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. Oneof these, DPD Detective John Adamcik, was amember of the party which retrieved a blanketsaid to have contained Oswald’s rifle; andwhich the Warren Commission used to linkOswald to the famous Mannlicher Carcano.Adamcik was later present at Mamantov’sinterview of Marina about the rifle, andcorroborated Mamantov’s account of it to theWarren Commission. There is reason to believethat Mamantov’s translation of Marina’stestimony was inaccurate (Scott, Deep Politics,268-70, 276).

2 1 See James Doug lass , JFK and theUnspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,2008).

22 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; LawrenceWright, 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 IntelligenceAgencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004, 224.For a fuller account of the CIA’s withholdingbefore 9/11, see Kevin Fenton, Disconnectingthe Dots; Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski,“Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA’s 9/11 Story,”S a l o n , O c t o b e r 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 , l i n k(http://www.salon.com/2011/10/14/insiders_voice_doubts_cia_911/).

24 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 7-12, 142-47,etc.

25 Scott, American War Machine, 203.

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26 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.Quite independently, Richard Clarke, theformer White House Counterterrorism Chief on9/11, has charged that "There was a high-leveldecision in the CIA ordering people not toshare information" (Rory O’Connor and RayNowosielski, “Insiders Voice Doubts aboutCIA’s 9/11 Story,” Salon, October 14, 2011).

27 Coll, 467-69.

28 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 107-08.

29 James Bamford, Body of Secrets, 201. Cf.Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The LostChance for Peace and the Escalation of War inVietnam (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1999), 200, citing John Prados, TheHidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago:Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 51.

30 “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (CaseII),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, May 1, 1963, JCS 2304/189, NARA# 2 0 2 - 1 0 0 0 2 - 1 0 0 1 8 , l i n k(http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=48338).

31 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Deathof JFK, 280.

3 2 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 tothe Secret Service, and at this time there was agreat increase in their number. The

Washington Star later explained that “the bigbuild-up in [Army] information gathering…didnot come until after the shooting of the Rev.Martin Luther King” (Washington Star,December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal DataBanks Hearings, p. 1728).

34 George O’Toole, The Private Sector (NewYork: 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.

38 Peter Dale Scott, “Northwards withoutNorth,” Social Justice (Summer 1989). Revisedas "North, Iran-Contra, and the DoomsdayProject: The Original Congressional Cover Upof Continuity-of-Government Planning,"(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3491) Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21,2011.

39 Scott, Road to 9/11, 132.

40 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and JaneHunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 13(Contras); Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 93-102(mujahedin).

41 Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 457-59, 534-36,

42 According to testimony from CIA DeputyDirector Vernon Walters, only “Hunt andMcCord had ever been CIA full-time employees.The others [including Sturgis] were contract

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employees for a short duration or a longerduration” (Watergate Hearings, 3427). Cf.Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-ContraConnection, 45 (casino owners).

4 3 Peter Dale Scott , “From Dal las toWatergate,” Ramparts, December 1973;reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, andRussell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas andBeyond, 356, 363.

44 Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 20.

45 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall,Cocaine Politics, 25-32, etc.

46 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair,Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (London: Verso, 1998), 308-09; Martha Honey,Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the1980s (Gainesville, FL: University Press ofFlorida, 1994), 368 (Frigorificos).

47 Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The StrangeCareer of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking,1974), 96-97.

48 Scott, American War Machine, 51-54. Hunthelped put together what became the drug-linked World Anti-Communist League. Artime’sCosta Rica base was on land whose ownerswere part of the local WACL chapter (Scott andMarshall, Cocaine Politics, 87, 220).

49 Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’sMen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23

50 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York:Random House, 1984), 16, citing Department ofDefense Directive 5230.7, June 25, 1965,amended May 21, 1971.

5 1 P e t e r D a l e S c o t t(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3491),"North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project:The Original Congressional Cover Up ofContinuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21,2011. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "NorthwardsWithout North: Bush, Counterterrorism, andthe Continuation of Secret Power." SocialJustice (San Francisco), XVI, 2 (Summer 1989),1-30; Peter Dale Scott, "The Terrorism TaskForce." Covert Action Information Bulletin, 33(Winter 1990), 12-15.

52 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall,Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA inCentral America (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1998), 140-41, 242 (Iran, etc.);Ola Tunander, The secret war against Sweden:US and British submarine deception in the1980s, 309 (Sweden).

53 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.

54 Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.

55 “Statement by Col. John W. Mayo, Chairmanof City-County Civil Defense and DisasterCommission at the Dedicat ion of theEmergency Operating Center at Fair Park,”M a y 2 4 , 1 9 6 1 , l i n k(http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/fallout/dallaseoc.html).

S i x l i n e a r i n c h e s o f C i v i l D e f e n s eAdministrative Files are preserved in the DallasMunicipal Archives; a Finding Guide isv i e w a b l e o n l i n e h e r e(http://www.ci.dallas.tx.us/cso/archives/FindingGuides/08001.html.). I hope an interestedresearcher may wish to consult them.

56 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.

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57 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

58 9/11 Report, 38, 326, 555n9; Peter DaleScott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, andthe Future of America, 224.

59 Scott, Road to 9/11, 226-30. A footnote in the9/11 Report (555n9) says:

“The 9/11 crisis tested the U.S. government’splans and capabilities to ensure the continuityof constitutional government and the continuityof government operations. We did notinvestigate this topic, except as needed tounderstand the activities and communicationsof key officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice Chair,and senior staff were briefed on the generalnature and implementation of these continuityplans.”

The other footnotes confirm that no informationfrom COG files was used to document the 9/11report. At a minimum these files might resolvethe mystery of the missing phone call whichsimultaneously authorized COG, and (inconsequence) determined that Bush shouldcontinue to stay out of Washington. I suspectthat they might tell us a great deal more.

60 “White House Communications Agency,”Signal Corps Regimental History, link(http://signal150.army.mil/white_house_communications_agency.html).

61 The Warren Commission staff knew of theWHCA presence in Dallas from the SecretService (17 WH 598, 619, 630, etc.).

62 Statement of Secret Service official WinstonLawson, 17 WH 630 (WHCA radio).

63 Pamela McElwain-Brown, “The PresidentialLincoln Continental SS-100-X,” Dealey Plaza

E c h o , V o l u m e 3 , I s s u e 2 , 2 3 , l i n k(http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=16241&relPageId=27) (police radio); Scott, Deep Politics and theDeath of JFK, 272-75 (Lumpkin).

64 In the 1990s the WHCA supplied statementsto the ARRB concerning communicationsbetween Dallas and Washington on November22 (NARA #172-10001-10002 to NARA#172-10000-10008). The AssassinationRecords Review Board also attempted to obtainfrom the WHCA the unedited original tapes ofconversations from Air Force One on the returntrip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Editedand condensed versions of these tapes hadbeen available since the 1970s from the LyndonBaines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.) Theattempt was unsuccessful: “The Review Board’srepeated written and oral inquiries of the WhiteHouse Communications Agency did not bearfruit. The WHCA could not produce any recordsthat illuminated the provenance of the editedtapes.” See Assassinations Records ReviewBoard: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, link(http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/report/chapter-06-part1.pdf). In November2011 AP reported that Gen. Chester Clifton’spersonal copy of the Air Force One recordingswas being put up for sale, with an asking priceof $500,000 (AP, November 15, 2011, link(http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ap-exclusi v e - l o s t - j f k - a s s a s s i n a t i o n - t a p e s -sale-14955442#.TsUtnHGGb-s)).

65 See Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 347-48,385-87.

66 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

67 Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal andPolitical Memoir (New York: ThresholdEditions, 2011), 348: “One of the first effortswe undertook after 9/11 to strengthen the

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country's defenses was securing passage of thePatriot Act, which the president signed into lawon [sic] October 2001.” Cf. “The Patriot Act,which the president signed into law on October2 0 0 1 , ″ l i n k(http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/10/26/the-patriot-act-which-the-president-signed-into-law-on-october-2001/); “Questions and Answersabout Beginning of Domestic Spying Program;l i n k(http://www.emptywheel.net/2009/07/16/questions-and-answers-about-beginning-of-domestic-spying-program/).

68 Scott, Road to 9/11, 236-45; Peter Dale Scott,"Is the State of Emergency Superseding ourConstitution? Continuity of GovernmentPlanning, War and American Society,"(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448)N o v e m b e r 2 8 , 2 0 1 0 ,http:/1/japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448.

69 “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” ArmyT i m e s , S e p t e m b e r 3 0 , 2 0 0 8 , l i n k(http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/). As part of the Army’semergency plan GARDEN PLOT in the 1960s,there were until 1971 two brigades (4,800troops) on permanent standby to quell unrest.

70 “Memorandum for Mr. Moyers” of November25, 1963, FBI 62-109060, Section 18, p. 29, link(http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=756877). Cf.Nicholas Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 2008), 131-36.

71 Leventhal’s official title is (or was) “Chief ofthe Counter-Misinformation Team, U.S.D e p a r t m e n t o f S t a t e ” ( l i n k(http://2002-2009-fpc.state.gov/44434.htm)). In2010 the U.S. State Department “launched anoff icial bid to shoot down conspiracytheories….The "Conspiracy Theories and

Misinformation" page… insists that Lee HarveyOswald killed John F Kennedy alone, and thatthe Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on9/11” Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010,( l i n k(http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/science-and-technology/2010/08/02/white-house-launches-n e w - w e b s i t e - t o - d e b u n k - c o n s p i r a c y -theories-86908-22457938/)). The site still existsh e r e(http://www.america.gov/conspiracy_theories.html?gclid=%20CMCko66n4KECFRMsbwodJ21xKg), (“Conspiracy theories exist in the realm ofmyth, where imaginations run wild, fears trumpfacts, and evidence is ignored.”) The site stillattacks 9/11 theories, but a page on theKennedy assassination has been suspended( l i n k(http://blogs.america.gov/rumors/2009/07/21/lee-harvey-oswald-lone-assassin/comment-page-1/#comment-989)). Cf. Robin Ramsay,“Government vs Conspiracy Theorists: Theofficial war on "sick think,” Fortean Times,A p r i l 2 0 1 0 , l i n k(http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/conspiracycorner/3211/government_vs_conspiracy_theorists.html); “The State Department vs 'SickThink'

The JFK assassination, 9/11, and the Tory MPspiked with LSD,” Fortean Times, July 2010,l i n k(http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/conspiracycorner/3937/the_state_department_vs_sick_think.html); William Kelly, “Todd Leventhal:The Minister of Diz at Dealey Plaza,” CTKA,2 0 1 0 , l i n k(http://www.ctka.net/2010/Levanthal.html).

72 For Nixon’s sensitivity concerning theKennedy assassination, and the way thisinduced him into some of the intrigues knowncollectively as Watergate, see e.g. Scott, Hoch,and Stetler, The Assassinations, 374-78; PeterDale Scott, Crime and Cover-up (SantaBarbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993), 33,

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64-66.

On Peter Dale Scot t ’ s DoomsdayConception

Akira Doujimaru

This is Akira Doujimaru’s introduction forJapanese readers to Scott’s “Doomsday Projectand Deep Events.” In fact it is an introductionthat emerged as a conversation with Scott inthe course of preparing the Japanesetranslation of the original.

"Doomsday, “ or “day of judgment,” is a term inEnglish from medieval expectations of theworld’s end, based on New Testamentreferences to the “days of vengeance,” when allwill be judged after the Second Coming ofChrist. That kind of millenarian eschatology hasalways stirred the popular imagination. Peopleonce applauded the so-called prophecies byNostradamus, and now some are arguing thatthe world will end in 2012 because the ancientcalendar of Maya doesn’t have years after thatyear.

On the other hand, not dealing with suchfantasies, there is “The Coup d’état of 2012”, afictitious scenario written in 1992 at therequest of the then Chairman of the Joint

Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. In this fiction, thearmed forces have replaced the civil power andare running social welfare and medical care,education, transportation, But in real life wesee that the US Congress passed the NationalDefense Appropriations Act (NDAA) inDecember, 2011, and militarization hasapparently been intensified.

Anyway, we can’t help feeling horrified by theterm “the Doomsday Project”, which accordingto the author, Peter Dale Scott, is a term coinedby the Pentagon. The Bible tells us that theworld will be separated into two partseternally: Paradise for a minority of selectedpeople, and Hell for the majority. When wethink of the events occurring in our world todaywhere one percent of the population isincreasing in wealth and 99 percent are losing,the name ‘Doomsday project’ seems to have toomuch reality for us to laugh at.

Peter Dale Scott (1929 - ) is a Canadian bornpoet, a former diplomat and a former Englishprofessor at the University of California,Berkeley. He looks at history from theperspective of ‘deep politics’, examining a widerange of data on certain critical events that arenormally ignored or lied about in officialpublications – a phenomenon which is oftenaccompanied by other classified, or perhapsdestroyed, data. Peter Dale Scott’s ‘deeppolitics’ can help discern certain consistentpatterns underlying all of these deep events.

In this essay, ‘deep politics’ demonstrates aclear continuity in a series of deep events in USpolitical and military issues, from theassassination of President Kennedy on 22November 1963, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in

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1964 that led directly the Vietnam War, and theassassination of Attorney General RobertKennedy on 6 June 1968, to the Watergatescandal that shook America in 1973 and 74, thescandal of Iran-Contra in the final decade of theCold War, and the brutal wars in

Afghanistan from 1970s to now, leading up to9/11 in 2001 and beyond. An apparent patternbegins to emerge as each bead of an incident isconnected with another by a thread of ‘deeppolitics’.

Scott picks out the thread from the data andtheir connections with the greatest coolnessand rigor, without assumptions independent ofthe factual data .The events have continued toevolve since 9/11 to today, the end of 2011.

I can’t help thinking about a tie between these“deep events” and the changing world whichwe see around us today. While the lives of the99% are being threatened in so-called‘depression’, great mega-banks, representingmassive polarization of wealth, are successfullydominating Europe and destroying sovereignstates, with the US credit ranking agenciesacting at their command. They have the IMF astheir headquarters, whose head has beenreplaced by an ‘accidental scandal’, while newwars on Iran and Syria is being prepared.

Japanese nation and society, of course, are nowfeeling the impact of that “deep politics”. I wasstartled a few days ago at the headlines ofsome Japanese papers reporting that PrimeMinister Noda is striving ‘with all my strength’to pass the Tran-Pacific Partnership and raisethe consumption tax and that 82% of Japanesefeel ‘friendly to the US’, more than ever, thanksto US help following the earthquake

Disasters. I could not resist murmuring aparody of a famous Chinese poem,

‘Fallen our country…, Poisoned our mountainsand rivers…,”

Although Scott’s chapter in Mark Selden, ed.,Remaking Asia: Essays on the American Uses ofPower appeared in Japanese nearly forty yearsago, this is the first Japanese translation of hiswriting on deep politics, which I find verystrange. Can his “deep politics” make Japaneseinvestigators hesitate to engage his workbecause they fear the taint of conspiracytheories? Or is it possible that they sniffsomething taboo in th is term that isuntouchable for Japanese? I don’t know, but inany event I will introduce some of his writingsat the bottom of this translation. It isregrettable that Japanese people are unawareof his precious works. I hope this monumentalessay will serve as a trigger for Japanese tofocus their concern on “deep politics”.

But I must say I feel a bit frustrated about afew points. He says nothing in this essay aboutthe ‘US neo-cons’ who raised their headsbetween the Iran-Contra case and 9/11. And,related to that, the role of the ‘Israel (Jewish)lobby’ that emerged powerfully in the 1980sisn’t addressed. In addition, the authormentions nothing about the criminal roles ofthe left media which have attacked movementsfor truth, something they have done continuallyfrom the assassination of JFK to 9/11. I alsodare say that we can’t know whether theseincidents were actually committed by suchalleged criminals as Oswald or al-Hazmi withthe connivance of the CIA and so on, orwhether they were inside jobs by agents inwhich the alleged criminals were falselyaccused. One can have suspicions about bothcases, but we find no clarification of this in theessay.

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Nevertheless, such incompleteness may beinevitable since the author states,

‘I will focus today on the right’s response tothat challenge, and on the role of deep eventsin enhancing their response.’ Moreover, it maybe too difficult even for Peter Dale Scott torefer to all these things in this limited space. Insum, we should look

at each event, considering others around it thatthe author didn’t mention, when we try tounderstand the ‘deep politics’ of the incidentsdescribed in this essay. This may be our bestway to respect to a scholar who has continuedthrough his works to trace carefully the ‘redthread’ hidden under the darkness of modernhistory.

At the end of this essay, Scott makes a preciousrecommendation for the Occupy movement.Living in a world that has been militarizedsince September 2011, in order to prevail it isimportant that the movement demand the endof the current State of Emergency and therelated provisions of the ‘Patriot Act.’

The issues posed by ‘deep events’ have been ofconcern to some part of this movement fromthe beginning. At present the movement seemsto be cracking under heavy suppression andintimidation. But the most valuable current ofthis movement should be reproduced in popularmovements in the US and throughout the worldin coming years. I think it necessary that thesemovements evolve into those which not onlydemand elimination of excessive economicdisparity but also pay attention to thoseresponsible for such disparity. I’ve noticed that88% of the movement asks for re-investigationof 9/11’ and 96% for ‘repeal of the Patriot Act’(as of 10 December 2011). This would

represent a hope for our future that is slightbut solid (if the information from this website isreliable).

Lastly, I have to express the deepest gratitudeto Mr. Haruhiko Sakurai,

who provided the main part of this translationand many references, to Ms.

Satoko Norimatsu who worked hard to assistthe translation and to publish it, and, above all,to Mr. Peter Dale Scott and the Asia-PacificJournal.

(by Akira Doujimaru, in Barcelona)

Luke 21:22: ὅτι ἡμέραι ἐκδικήσεως αὗταί εἰσιντοῦ πλησθῆναι πάντα τὰ γεγραμμένα. (KingJames Version: “For these be the days ofvengeance, that all things which are writtenmay be fulfilled.)“

However, Scott does discuss neocons and theIsraeli lobby in The Road to 9/11, 23-25, 55-60,100-01, etc., and American War Machine,162-65, 172-79, etc.

Scott has, however, frequently criticized left-wing structuralist analyses of American foreignpolicy, for their failure to recognize politicaldivergences inside Washington. See e.g. DeepPolitics and the Death of JFK, 10-11, 34-37; TheWar Conspiracy (2008), 8-15; Peter Dale Scott,“9/11, Canada, left gatekeepers & Zelikow,”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDZR72PPUO0; Peter Dale Scott, “9/11, Deep Events, andthe Curta i lment o f U.S. Freedoms,”

APJ | JF 9 | 47 | 2

21

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17300; etc.

For discussion of what Scott calls “designatedculprits,” see Peter Dale Scott, The WarConspiracy (2008), 347-57, 385-88.

The essay was originally presented as a talkthat was limited to under one hour.

In fact Scott’s essay mentions the State ofEmergency rather than the Patriot Act, but thetwo documents are so closely connected thatthis statement accurately conveys the sense ofScott’s remark.