Secret Rule of USA -- COG -- Congress SUSPENDED

Ultimately the most important thing that happend that day [11.sep.2001] -- more important even than the decision to invade Afghanistan -- was to institute Continuity of Government [COG].

Continuity of Government is a very misleading phrase. If, as alledged it involved the suspension of the constitution, then, I think, it better be called CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT.

it is not just that there is a kind of deep infrastructure [deep state] but time after time after time is has involved that grey area where CIA operations interface with narcotics.

Peter Dale Scott, 11.Aug 2008

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Tue., August 12, 2008: August 11, 2008- 9/11 and Continuity of Government ShowIn the First Hour with Peter Dale Scott and in the Second Hour with John Judge

Peter Dale Scott, author of The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America (2007) and a revised updated version of The War Conspiracy, now entitled-The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (August 2008). He has also written Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (2003), and edited with David Ray Griffin 9/11 and American Empire (2006)

His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (from JFKLancer, 1995), and Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003)

His chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994). In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.

An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).

His poetry has dealt with both his experience and his research, the latter of which has centered on U.S. covert operations, their impact on democracy at home and abroad, and their relations to the John F. Kennedy assassination and the global drug traffic. The poet-critic Robert Hass has written (Agni, 31/32, p. 335) that "Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time."

He was featured in Guerrilla News Networks short documentary The War Conspiracy and their more ambitious documentary Aftermath- Unanswered Questions from 9/11.

Peter Dale Scott's website is www.peterdalescott.net.

A major point in his book- The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America was the structural shift in government that took place on 9/11 when Continuity of Government was implemented by Cheney, who in conjunction with Rumsfeld had been working on plans for it for decades.

In 9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics, Peter wrote:

9/11, the Public, and Internet Politics

This raises the question whether the public, about to vote in the 2008 election, can exercise the constitutional restraints that Congress and the media have failed to supply. The answer, I submit, lies in what I would call Internet Politics, the mobilization of nationwide pressures on candidates in the next election through internet coordination.

There is I believe a latent majority of Americans who could agree to ask all candidates to

a) review and revise the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to unequivocally restore habeas corpus, within the limitations of the U.S. Constitution, Article One, Section 9;

b) unequivocally outlaw torture;

c) review and restrict the provisions for warrantless electronic surveillance in the Protect America Act of 2007.

d) vote for The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (H.R. 3835), which addresses these and other issues. This bill was introduced by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul on October 15, 2007, and is supported by both the Republican American Freedom Agenda, and the Democratic American Freedom Campaign.82

Those in the 911 Truth Movement could ask candidates to take two further steps

d) insist on the right of the Homeland Security Committees in Congress to review the COG appendices to National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD)-51;

e) support a law to force all government agencies to collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009.83

But social thought is socially fashioned. For it to be effective it must be mobilized, and become more than a chorus of bloggers croaking from our backwater lilypads in the blogomarsh. Clearly it would take a strenuous concerted effort to create or persuade a movement, such as MoveOn, to take on all these issues.

Is it possible that some organization can be persuaded to accept this challenge, and take the first steps in mobilizing such a force?

I urged Peter to make his case and push his action plan. (He also agreed to walk his talk and speak at the 9/11 Truth Film Festival at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland on September 11, 2008).

Time went by very quickly, and we had to digress somewhat, because of the recent significant events that have taken place in South Ossetia (See Chossudovsky's article- War in the Caucasus: Towards a Broader Russia-US Military Confrontation? which follow a pattern of provocation so well outlined in Peter Dale Scott's Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History.

Peter drew on his vast historical knowledge to give context to the meaning and significance of the changes taking place in our time, and how we have a new power, opportunity to challenge the situation.

John Judge was also a founder of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA)and featured in GNN's Aftermath speaking on Continuity of Government. He is also a co-founder of 911 CitizensWatch, a grassroots watchdog group demanding transparency and a thorough investigation of 9/11 and the Committee for High School Options and Information on Careers,Education and Self-Improvement (CHOICES),a group countering military recruitment in the schools and providing civilian alternatives.

John is active with the Washington Peace Center and has been an activist opposing war, racism and militarism since the 1960s. John is an independent researcher and lecturer on political assassinations, covert operations, hidden history, and the rise of fascism in America.

In addition to his website- judgeforyourself.us, his writings and insights can be found on www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/.

John gave a more detailed look specifically at the history of Continuity of Government, which is really a misnomer as it should be called "End of Government," as it replaces elected officials to serve the public with military tyrannies who seem to only try to enrich and extend their powers through force and fear.

He also gave a glimpse from his perch in Washington DC, where he witnessed how Congress was prevented from exercising its oversight mandate, and noted that in studying "Continuity of Government" and creating plans- Congress was deemed "expendable."

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The Deep State and 9/11

The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle’s plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools.1 Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who was subsequently murdered in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB).2

Similar attacks in Turkey have given rise to the notion there of an extra-legal "deep state" – a combination of forces, ranging from former members of the CIA-organized Gladio organization, to "a vast matrix of security and intelligence officials, ultranationalist members of the Turkish underworld and renegade former members of the [Kurdish separatist] PKK."3 The deep state, financed in part by Turkey’s substantial heroin traffic, has been accused of killing thousands of civilians, in incidents such as the lethal bomb attack in November 2005 on a bookshop in Semdinli. This attack, initially attributed to the Kurdish separatist PKK, turned out to have been committed by members of Turkey's paramilitary police intelligence service, together with a former PKK member turned informer.4 On April 23, 2008, the former Interior Minister Mehmet Agar was ordered to stand trial for his role in this dirty war during the 1990s.5

In my book The Road to 9/11, I have argued that there has existed, at least since World War Two if not earlier, an analogous American deep state, also combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld.6 I also pointed to recent decades of collaboration between the U.S. deep state and al-Qaeda, a terrorist underworld whose drug-trafficking activities have been played down in the 9/11 Commission Report and the mainstream U.S. media.7

Still to be explained is the suppressed anomalous fact that al-Qaeda’s top trainer on airplane hijackings, Ali Mohamed, was simultaneously a double-agent reporting to the FBI, and almost certainly still maintained a connection to the CIA which had used him as an agent and helped bring him to this country in the 1980s.8 It is not disputed that Ali Mohamed organized the Embassy bombing in Kenya; and that he did so after the RCMP, who had detained him in Vancouver in the presence of another known terrorist, released Mohamed on instructions from the FBI.9

From this historic background of collaboration, I would offer a hypothesis for further investigation: that the American deep state is somehow implicated with al-Qaeda in the atrocity of 9/11; and that this helps explain the conspicuous involvement of the CIA and other U.S. agencies in the ensuing cover-up.

Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American who was formerly an FBI translator, has publicly linked both al-Qaeda and American officials to the Turkish heroin trafficking that underlies the Turkish deep state. Although she has been prevented from speaking directly by an extraordinary court order,10 her allegations have been summarized by Daniel Ellsberg:

Al Qaeda, she's been saying to congress, according to these interviews, is financed 95% by drug money - drug traffic to which the US government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours - such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan - all the 'Stans - in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed in Turkey, and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe's heroin, by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo - Albanian Muslims in Kosovo - basically the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which we backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century….Sibel says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.11

In 2005 Sibel Edmonds’ charges were partly aired in Vanity Fair. There it was revealed that she had had access to FBI wiretaps of conversations among members of the American-Turkish Council (ATC), about bribing elected US officials, and about "what sounded like references to large-scale drug shipments and other crimes."12

9/11: Not a Coup d’Etat, but One of a Series of American Deep Events

In 2003 Italian journalist Maurizio Blondet published a book entitled 11 settembre: colpo di stato (September 11th: A Coup d’Etat, [Milan, Effedieffe, 2002]).13 Over the years the view of 9/11 as a "coup d’état" has been endorsed by a number of observers, including Gore Vidal.14 In May 2008 a Google search for "coup d’état + 9/11" yielded 297,000 hits. One of the most recent hits, from Ed Encho, has suggested that the heart of the coup may have been the introduction on 9/11, without debate or even notice, of so-called "Continuity of Government" (COG) orders – secret orders still unknown but with constitutional implications.15 Unquestionably, as the 9/11 Commission Report states, COG, the fruit of two decades of secret Cheney-Rumsfeld collaboration, was implemented on 9/11.16 As we shall see, it is not clear just what this implied, either then or today. But journalists have claimed that earlier versions of COG plans involved suspension of the constitution.17

However to call 9/11 a coup d’état exaggerates the difference between the current weakened condition of the public state, and the prior state of affairs that has been building for years, indeed for decades, towards just such a dénouement. For half a century the constitution and laws of the open or public state have been first evaded, then eroded, then increasingly challenged and subverted, by the forces of the deep state. I wish to suggest that this erosion has been achieved in part through a series of important deep events in post-war American history – events aspects of which (it is clear from the outset) will be ignored or suppressed in the mainstream media.

Recent history has seen a number of such events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that are so inexplicable by the public notions of American politics that most Americans tend not even to think of them. Instead most accept the official surface explanations for them, even if they suspect these are not true. Or if others say they believe that "Oswald acted alone," they may do so in the same comforting but irrational state of mind that believes God will reward the righteous and punish the wicked.

Thus on the one hand we must see that America has reached a condition where traditional civil rights are flagrantly restricted as never before – as when former Attorney General Gonzalez told a shocked congressional committee that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution."18 At the same time, we must see that 9/11, as an unexplained or deep event nudging us away from constitutional normalcy and into an unnecessary permanent state of war, is not unprecedented. It is one of a series of similar unexplained events, all of which have had similar results, reaching back to the second Tonkin Gulf incident, the Kennedy assassination, even the misremembered outset of the Korean War.

The simulated "surprise" of the Bush administration to the 9/11 attack is indeed analogous to the simulated "surprise" of the Truman administration to the outbreak of war in Korea on June 25, 1950. The historian Bruce Cumings, in a volume of 957 pages, has recalled the curious behavior in previous weeks of high levels in Washington:

The CIA predicts, on June 14, a capability for invasion [of South Korea] at any time. No one disputes that. Five days later, it predicts an impending invasion. . . . Now, Corson … says that the June 14 report leaked out to "informed circles," and thus "it was feared that administration critics in Congress might publicly raise the issue. In consequence, a White House decision of sorts was made to brief Congress that all was well in Korea." . . . Would it not be the expectation that Congress would be told that all was not well in Korea? That is, unless a surprised and outraged Congress is one’s goal.19

In his exhaustive analysis of the war’s origins, Cumings sees this U.S. deception by high level officials as a response to manipulated events, which in turn were the response to the threat of an imminent expulsion of the Chinese Nationalist KMT from Taiwan, together with a peaceful reunification of Korea. The details are complex, but of relevance to 9/11, not least because of the involvement of the opium-financed KMT:

By late June, [U.S. Secretary of State Dean] Acheson and Truman were the only high officials still balking at a defense of the ROC [the "Republic of China," the KMT Chinese Nationalist remnant on Taiwan]….Sir John Pratt, an Englishman with four decades of experience in the China consular service and the Far Eastern Office, wrote the following in 1951: "The Peking Government planned to liberate Formosa on July 15 and, in the middle of June, news reached the State Department that the Syngman Rhee government in South Korea was disintegrating. The politicians on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel were preparing a plan to throw Syngman Rhee out of office and set up a unified government for all Korea."….Thus the only way out, for Chiang [Kai-shek, the KMT leader], was for Rhee to attack the North, which ultimately made Acheson yield and defend Nationalist China [on Taiwan].20

Meanwhile, in South Korea,

an Australian embassy representative sent in daily reports in late June, saying that "patrols were going in from the South to the North, endeavouring to attract the North back in pursuit. Plimsoll warned that this could lead to war and it was clear that there was some degree of American involvement as well." [According to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam,] "The evidence was sufficiently strong for the Australian Prime Minister to authorize a cable to Washington urging that no encouragement be given to the South Korean government."21

Cumings also notes the warning in late April from an American diplomat, Robert Strong, that "desperate measures may be attempted by [the Chinese] Nationalist Government to involve [U.S.] in [a] shooting war as [a] means of saving its own skin."22 In chapters too complex to summarize here, he chronicles the intrigues of a number of Chiang’s backers, including the China Lobby in Washington, General Claire Chennault and his then nearly defunct airline CAT (later Air America), former OSS chief General William Donovan, and in Japan General MacArthur and his intelligence chief Charles Willoughby. He notes the visit of two of Chiang’s generals to Seoul, one of them on a U.S. military plane from MacArthur’s headquarters. And he concludes that "Chiang may have found …on the Korean peninsula, the provocation of a war that saved his regime [on Taiwan] for two more decades:"

Anyone who has read this text closely to this point, and does not believe that Willoughby, Chiang, [Chiang’s emissary to Seoul, General] Wu Tieh Cheng, Yi Pōm-sōk, [Syngman] Rhee, Kim Sōk-won, Tiger Kim, and their ilk were capable of a conspiracy to provoke a war, cannot be convinced by any evidence.

He adds that anti-conspiratorialist Americans "are prey to what might be called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism" -- a charge that may be revived, if it can ever be shown that 9/11 also was "a conspiracy to provoke a war."23

9/11, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK Assassination

In 1964 Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, in response to Secretary of Defense McNamara’s assurances that there was "unequivocal proof" of a second "unprovoked attack" on U.S. destroyers. Today we know not only that there was no such second attack, but that the combined harassments of CIA-controlled PT boats and US destroyers in North Vietnamese waters were so provocative as to invite one. George Ball, who at the time was an Undersecretary of State, later commented in a 1977 BBC radio interview that

Many of the people who were associated with the war were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing. The sending of a destroyer up the Tonkin Gulf was primarily for provocation. ... There was a feeling that if the destroyer got into some trouble, that it would provide the provocation we needed.24

The Tonkin Gulf deep event presents a number of similarities to the Korean deep event in 1950. Tonkin Gulf also can be analyzed into three different phases: the deception of Congress by high level officials, preceded by provocative intrigues in Asia, and reinforced by deceptive manipulation of reports inside the NSA. (All three phases can also be discerned in the provocative maneuvers in 1968 of the U.S.S. Pueblo, in an incident or deep event that did not lead, as some clearly wished, to a military response against North Korea.)25

We now know from a recently declassified in-house NSA history that on August 4, 1964, NSA possessed 122 pieces of SIGINT (signals intelligence) which taken together indicated clearly that there was no second North Vietnamese attack on August 4: "Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August." But of these 122 pieces, the White House was supplied with only fifteen – "only SIGINT that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers."26

Meanwhile, over at CIA, "By the afternoon of Aug. 4, the CIA’s expert analyst on North Vietnam … had concluded that probably no one had fired on the U.S. ships. He included a paragraph to that effect in the item he wrote for the Current Intelligence Bulletin, which would be wired to the White House and other key agencies and appear in print the next morning. And then something unique happened. The Director of the Office of Current Intelligence, a very senior officer …, descended into the bowels of the agency to order the paragraph deleted. He explained: `We’re not going to tell LBJ that now. He has already decided to bomb North Vietnam’"27

The parallel events in NSA and CIA illustrate how a shared bureaucratic mindset, or propensity for military escalation, can generate synergistic responses in diverse milieus, without there having necessarily been any conspiratorial collusion between the two agencies.

Of more than passing interest is the fact that the CIA in the 1960s still had senior officers who believed that sooner or later a showdown with the Chinese Communists was inevitable, and had renewed General Chennault’s old proposal for a large-scale landing by Chiang on the Chinese mainland.28 This seems to explain a series of manipulative escalatory moves in Laos, shortly before the Tonkin Gulf incidents, with a similar momentum towards expanding the U.S. war beyond South Vietnam. In 1963-64 one notes again, as in 1950, the intriguing of local KMT elements, in this case forces directly involved in the opium traffic.29

As for 9/11, the paradox between surface tranquility and alarming warnings is as evident as it was in 1950. Even the 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that in the summer of 2001 "the system was blinking red" for an al-Qaeda attack. Its record amply refutes Condoleezza Rice’s claim in May 2002 that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would … try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."30 Yet in the midst of this crisis the CIA in August 2001 was flagrantly withholding crucial evidence from the FBI that, if shared, would have assisted the FBI in its current efforts to locate one of the alleged hijackers, Khaled al-Mihdar. This withholding provoked an FBI agent to predict at that time, accurately, that "someday someone will die."31

As I describe in the forthcoming expanded reissue of my book The War Conspiracy, this culpable withholding of crucial evidence from the FBI by the CIA closely parallels the CIA’s withholding from the FBI of important information about Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1963. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this withholding was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.32 Without these withholdings, in other words,

neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have unfolded in the manner in which they did.

And without understanding the details, we can safely conclude that operations of the CIA – the deep state -- were somehow implicated, whether innocently or conspiratorially, in the background of both the JFK assassination and 9/11. With respect to the CIA’s withholding of information from the FBI about Oswald, even a former CIA officer, Jane Roman, has agreed that this indicates "some sort of [CIA] operational interest in Oswald’s file."33 Lawrence Wright, commenting in The New Yorker about the CIA’s analogous withholding of information about al-Mihdar, has reached the similar conclusion that "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it."34

In short, from this perspective, 9/11 is not wholly without precedent in U.S. history. It should be seen not as a unique departure from orderly constitutional government – a coup d’état – but as yet another unexplained deep event of the sort that has continued to erode the American constitutional system of open politics and civil liberties.

9/11: Not Just Another Deep Event, But a Constitutional Deep Event

It is however a deep event of a new and unprecedented order. Deep events related to political control of this country are far more frequent than most of us like to recognize. Since the conspicuous assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s – all deep events -- at least six politicians have also died in single-plane crashes. Although many of these crashes were probably accidental, it is striking that only one Republican has died in this fashion, as opposed to five Democrats.35 Official accounts of the deaths of three of these Democrats – Senator Paul Wellstone, and Congressmen Hale Boggs and Nick Begich, have been challenged, as has the very suspicious "accidental" death in a 1970 single-plane crash of UAW labor leader Walter Reuther.36

Of these deep events, some – notably the JFK assassination -- stand out as having had structural impact on American political society. America’s three major wars since World War Two – Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq – have all been preceded by deep events that have cumulatively contributed to America’s current war-based economy. Looked at in this way, 9/11 falls into a sequence in which it is preceded by the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident and by the intrigues and lies in June 1950 concerning Korea.

But of all these deep events, 9/11 can be seen as the first to have had not only structural but constitutional implications. For with the introduction of COG before 10:00 AM on September 11, 2001, the status of the U.S. constitution in American society has changed, in ways that still prevail. What COG means in practice is still largely unknown to us. It is clear though that in abridging habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, the innovations after COG and 9/11 made the U.S. constitutional situation more like the situation in Britain, where written statutes are explicitly restricted supplemented by an undefined royal prerogative: a collection of powers belonging to the Sovereign which have no statutory basis.37

Abuse of the British royal prerogative was one of the explicit grievances which ultimately led to the American Revolution. Then as now it was linked to imperial arrangements for standing armies to wage war. It could be said that in America today, the powers needed for imposing U.S. global dominance in the world have again come to restrict the scope of the constitutional public state.

The extent to which presidential power is limited by congressional statute has been and will be continuously and extensively debated. It is clear however that the George W. Bush administration has revived the extreme or monarchical view expressed, for the first time in American political history, by former president Richard Nixon: that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."38

Jack Goldsmith, a former Assistant Attorney General in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, has reported that, inside the White House, Cheney’s legal advisor David Addington frequently argued that "the Constitution empowers the President to exercise prerogative powers to do what is necessary in an emergency to save the country."39 Goldsmith concluded that "The presidency in the age of terrorism – the Terror Presidency – suffers from many of the vices of [Nixon’s] Imperial Presidency."40

Cheney, supported by Addington, made clear in his Iran-Contra Minority Report of 1987 his belief that "the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law." Cheney supported this claim by pointing to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson, without using the word "prerogative," justified by "the laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of serving our country when in danger."41 But the Cheney-Addington defense of an on-going prerogative in an on-going war on terror has far more in common with 17th-century British monarchical legal theory, than with Jefferson’s single resort to such action, after a lifetime of attacking the notion of prerogative power.42

As part of the case for an unrestrained or monarchical view of executive power, we have seen the contention that the President may disregard or marginalize treaty obligations prohibiting torture. Before COG was declared on September 11, 2001, a network of laws, developed through checks and balances by all three branches of federal government, prohibited torture. "It was not to last."43

In keeping with Cheney’s COG planning in the 1980s, the Bush administration has made similar inroads on habeas corpus, a right conferred by Magna Carta, reaffirmed by the English parliament in a statute of 1679, and mentioned in the U.S. constitution. Nevertheless, in defining the constitutional crisis we now face, it is important to see that it is not an unprecedented and anomalous event, but rooted in developments over decades.

9/11, Deep Events, and the Global Dominance Mindset in American Society

The continuity of past deep events is part of the problem facing those who wish to understand and correct what underlies them. For the mainstream U.S. media (as we now clearly see them) have become so implicated in past protective lies about Korea, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK assassination that they, as well as the government, have now a demonstrated interest in preventing the truth about any of these events from coming out.44

This means that the current threat to constitutional rights does not derive from the deep state alone. As I have written elsewhere, the problem is a global dominance mindset that prevails not only inside the Washington Beltway but also in the mainstream media and even in the universities, one which has come to accept recent inroads on constitutional liberties, and stigmatizes, or at least responds with silence to, those who are alarmed by them.45 Just as acceptance of bureaucratic groupthink is a necessary condition for advancement within the state, so acceptance of this mindset’s notions of decorum has increasingly become a condition for participation in mainstream public life.

In saying this, I mean something more narrow than the pervasive "business-defined consensus" which Gabriel Kolko once asserted was "a central reality," underlying how "a ruling class makes its policies operate."46 I would agree that, at least since the Reagan era, the mindset I am describing has become more and more clearly identified with the mentality of an overworld determined to protect its privileges and even enlarge them at the expense of the rest of society.

But the mindset I mean is narrower in focus – originally concerned with defending and now increasingly concerned with enlarging America’s dominance in the world, in an era of finite and increasingly scarcer resources. And it is also, increasingly, less a consensus than an arena of serious division and debate.

It is clear that the mindset is not monolithic. There have been recurring notable dissents within it, such as when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed in the New York Times that the Bush administration, in defiance of the FISA Act, was engaged in warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone calls inside the United States.47 But on other issues, notably the Iraq War, the Times has conspicuously failed to play the judicious critical role that it did with respect to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In general, as Kristina Borjesson reports in her devastating book, "Investigative reporting is dwindling…because it is expensive, attracts lawsuits, and can be hostile to the corporate interests and/or government connections of a news division’s parent company."48 And as to critical thinking about 9/11, as before about the Kennedy assassination, the Post has predictably gone out of its way to depict the 9/11 truth movement as a "cacophonous and free-range…bunch of conspiracists."49

According to a survey of Lexis Nexis, the New York Times did not report Attorney General Gonzalez’ newsworthy claim that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." (The Washington Post reported it, without comment, in a story of 197 words.)50 And on the question of torture even a liberal Harvard University professor, Michael Ignatieff, has argued in a University Press book from an even-handed starting point – "A democracy is committed to both the security of the majority and the rights of the individual" -- to an alarming defense of "coercive questioning."51

In this state of affairs, I shall argue, the Internet provides an opportunity for opposition, of potentially immense political importance.

Deep Events as Intrigues within the Global Dominance Consensus

Many critics of American foreign policy on the left tend to stress its substantial coherence over time, from the War-Peace Studies for post-war planning of the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1940s, to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson’s plans in the 1950s for a "permanent war economy," to Clinton’s declaration to the United Nations in 1993 that the U.S. will act "multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary."52

This view of America’s policies has persuaded some, notably Alexander Cockburn, to lament the displacement of coherent Marxist analysis by the "fundamental idiocy" and "foolishness" of "9/11 conspiracism."53 But it is quite possible to acknowledge both that there are ongoing continuities in American policy and also important, hidden, and recurring internal divisions, which have given rise to America’s structural deep events. These events have always involved friction between Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations, on the one hand, and the increasingly powerful oil- and military-dominated economic centers of the Midwest and the Texas Sunbelt on the other.

At the time that General MacArthur, drawing on his Midwest and Texas support, threatened to challenge Truman and the State Department, the opposition was seen as one between the traditional Europe-Firsters of the Northeast and new-wealth Asia-Firsters. In the 1952 election, the foreign policy debate was between Democratic "containment" and Republican "rollback." Bruce Cumings, following Franz Schurmann, wrote later of the split, even within the CIA, between "Wall Street internationalism" on the one hand and "cowboy-style expansionism" on the other.54

Many have followed Michael Klare in defining the conflict as one, even within the Council on Foreign Relations, between "traders" and warrior "Prussians."55 Since the rise to eminence of the so-called "Vulcans" – notably Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, backed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the struggle has frequently been described as a struggle between the multilateralists of the status quo and the unilateralists seeking indisputable American hegemony.56

Underlying every one of the deep events I have mentioned, and others such as the U-2 incident, can be seen this contest between traderly (multilateralist) and warriorly (unilateralist) approaches to the maintenance of U.S. global dominance. For decades the warriorly faction was clearly a minority; but it was also an activist and well-funded minority, in marked contrast to the relatively passive and disorganized traderly majority. Hence the warriorly preference for war, thanks to ample funding from the military-industrial complex and also to a series of deep events, was able time after time to prevail.

The 1970s can be seen as a turning-point, when a minority CFR faction, led by Paul Nitze, united with corporate executives from the military-industrial complex like David Packard and pro-Zionist future neocons like Richard Perle to forge a succession of militant political coalitions, such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). Cheney and Rumsfeld, then in the Ford White House, participated in this onslaught on the multilateral foreign policy of Henry Kissinger.57 In the late 1990s Cheney and Rumsfeld, even while secretly refining the COG provisions put into force on 9/11, also participated openly in the successor organization to the CPD, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

From his office interfacing between CIA and the U.S. Air Force, Col. L. Fletcher Prouty deduced that there was a single Secret Team, within the CIA but not confined to it, responsible for not only the Tonkin Gulf incidents (timed to enable already planned military action against North Vietnam) but other deep events, such as the U-2 incident of 1960 (which in Prouty’s opinion was planned and timed to frustrate the projected summit conference between Eisenhower and Khrushchev) and even the assassination of President Kennedy (after which the Secret Team "moved to take over the whole direction of the war and to dominate the activity of the United States of America").58

In language applicable to both Korea in 1950 and Tonkin Gulf in 1964, Prouty argued that CIA actions followed a pattern of actions which "went completely out of control in Southeast Asia:"

The clandestine operator… prepares the stage by launching a very minor and very secret, provocative attack of a kind that is bound to bring open reprisal. These secret attacks, which may have been made by third parties or by stateless mercenaries whose materials were supplied secretly by the CIA, will undoubtedly create reaction which in turn is observed in the United States…. It is not a new game. [but] it was raised to a high state of art under Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy against North Vietnam, to set the pattern for the Gulf of Tonkin attacks.59

I mention Prouty’s thesis here in order to record my partial dissent from it. In my view his notion of a "team" localizes what I call the global dominance mindset too narrowly in a restricted group who are not only like-minded but in conspiratorial communication over a long term. He exhibits the kind of conspiratorialist mentality once criticized by G. William Domhoff:

We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world …. [Conspiracy theories] encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world.60

My own position is still that which I articulated years ago in response to Domhoff:

I have always believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to `a few bad people,’ but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed.61

Quoting what I had written, Michael Parenti added, "In sum, national security state conspiracies [or what I would call deep events] are components of our political structure, not deviations from it."62

The outcome of the deep events I have mentioned so far has been chiefly a series of victories for the warriors.63 But there have been other structural deep events, notably Watergate in 1972-74 and Iran-Contra in 1986-87, which can be interpreted, if not as victories for the traders, at least as temporary setbacks for the warriors. In The Road to 9/11 I have tried to show that Cheney and Rumsfeld, while in the Ford White House, bitterly resented the setback represented by the post-Watergate reforms, and immediately set in motion a series of moves to reverse them. I argue there that the climax of these moves was the imposition after 9/11 of their long-planned provisions for COG, formulated under their supervision since the early 1980s.

Thus since World War Two the warriorly position, initially that of a marginal but conspiratorial minority, has moved since the Reagan and Bush presidencies into a more and more central position. This is well symbolized by the rise in influence since 1981 of the Council for National Policy, originally funded by Texas oil billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and explicitly designed to offset the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations.64 Comparing the 1950s with the present decade, it is striking how much the status of the State Department has declined vis-à-vis the Pentagon. With the accelerated militarization of the U.S. economy, the question arises whether a more traderly foreign policy can ever again prevail.

And since 9/11, especially with the institution of unknown COG procedures, some have talked of the overall subversion of democracy, by a new Imperial Presidency in the Bush White House.65

9/11, the Threat to Constitutional Rights, and Congress

A skeptic might observe that there is still a Congress, with constitutional powers to review and restrict what the executive does. And it is true that a joint congressional committee, in 2002, did investigate CIA and FBI activities before and after 9/11.66 The powers of Congress have been weakened, however. A crucial section of this report, dealing precisely with the CIA’s and Saudi government’s relationship to the alleged hijacker al-Mihdar, was classified and withheld by the administration. When some of the explosive information was leaked to Newsweek, the committee members and staff (rather than the Saudi government) became the focus of a criminal leak investigation by the FBI.67 The chairman, Senator Bob Graham

thought the leak investigation was an obvious effort by the administration to intimidate Congress. And if that was the intention, it worked. Members of the joint committee and their staffs were frightened into silence about the investigation.68

It would appear that the election of Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress has done little to change this state of affairs. Warrantless electronic surveillance (which the President has referred to as a COG provision)69 was endorsed by the new 110th Congress in the Protect America Act of 2007, an act which restricted FISA Court supervision as the President had wished. This same 110th Congress failed to undo the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which (as Robert Parry wrote in the Baltimore Chronicle) "effectively eliminated habeas corpus for non-citizens, including legal resident aliens."70

Just as alarmingly, Congress has shown little or no desire to challenge, or even question, the over-arching assumptions of the war on terror. We are still in a proclaimed national emergency that was first proclaimed by President Bush on September 14, 2001.71 As the Washington Times wrote on September 18, 2001, "Simply by proclaiming a national emergency on Friday, President Bush activated some 500 dormant legal provisions, including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law." The Washington Times was referring to presidential Proclamation 7463 of September 14, 2001, "Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks." The state of emergency that was subsequently declared on September 23, 2001, by Executive Order 13224, was again formally extended by the president on September 20, 2007.72

COG, NSPD-51, and the Challenge to Congressional Checks and Balances

The constitutional implications of this state of emergency were aggravated by the President’s "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive" (NSPD)-51, of May 9, 2007, which decreed (without even a press release) that

When the president determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the president can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an "enduring constitutional government."73

The Directive, without explicitly saying so, appeared to override the post-Watergate statutory provisions for congressional regulation enacted in 1977 by the National Emergencies Act.74

Among major newspapers, only the Washington Post reported NSPD-51 at all, noting that the "directive formalizes a shift of authority away from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House."75 It added that

After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly to 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."

However the Post failed to note that these continuity of operations (COG) plans, which reportedly involve suspension of the Constitution and possibly Congress, were secret -- the fruit of secret planning over two decades by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, even during periods of time when neither of the two men held a government position.76

After urging from constituents, including many members of the 911truth movement, Congressman Peter deFazio did attempt to see the Continuity of Government (COG) plans in the classified Appendices of NSPD-51. Both he, and eventually the entire House Committee on Homeland Security, were denied the opportunity to see these appendices, on the grounds that the Committee did not possess the requisite clearances. This should have been a line in the sand for Congress to assert its constitutional rights and duties. As I have reported elsewhere,

The story, ignored by the mainstream press, involved more than the usual tussle between the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government. What was at stake was a contest between Congress's constitutional powers of oversight, and a set of policy plans that could be used to suspend or modify the constitution.77

But it appears that the current Congress will do nothing to support Congressman deFazio’s efforts at congressional oversight of COG.

Congress and the On-Going Cover-Up of 9/11

Furthermore, the 110th Congress took no action to ensure that all government agencies will collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009.78 A law to ensure this is badly needed.

The FBI has been declassifying documents cooperatively with respect to this commitment, and recently the CIA has begun to cooperate as well.79 But some federal agencies, notably the FAA and Pentagon, are not collaborating with the 9/11 Commission’s commitment at all. It may take a law to get them to do so. Both the FAA and the Pentagon declined to release important records to the 9/11 Commission, despite its statutory powers, until required to do so by judicial subpoena.80 But the law which created the 9/11 Commission in 2002 made no legal determination for the future of its records.81

This is a matter of concern, because 9/11 has clearly initiated a major readjustment of our traditional constitutional balances and civil rights. I submit that a vigorous defense of the constitutional traditions of this country requires vigorous pressure for the release of the 9/11 Commission’s records, so that we can begin to resolve the mysteries of how this constitutional crisis arose.

In short, we are living in an on-going state of emergency whose exact limits are unknown, on the basis of a controversial deep event – 9/11 -- that is still largely a mystery. Without endorsing the notion that a coup d’état has occurred, I would categorically assert that a radically hegemonic mindset, located primarily in Vice-President Cheney’s office, is currently using 9/11, the war on terror, and secret COG rules to assert prerogative limitations on the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution, without any significant challenge from a compliant Congress and media.

9/11, the Public, and Internet Politics

This raises the question whether the public, about to vote in the 2008 election, can exercise the constitutional restraints that Congress and the media have failed to supply. The answer, I submit, lies in what I would call Internet Politics, the mobilization of nationwide pressures on candidates in the next election through internet coordination.

There is I believe a latent majority of Americans who could agree to ask all candidates to

a) review and revise the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to unequivocally restore habeas corpus, within the limitations of the U.S. Constitution, Article One, Section 9;

b) unequivocally outlaw torture;

c) review and restrict the provisions for warrantless electronic surveillance in the Protect America Act of 2007.

d) vote for The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (H.R. 3835), which addresses these and other issues. This bill was introduced by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul on October 15, 2007, and is supported by both the Republican American Freedom Agenda, and the Democratic American Freedom Campaign.82

Those in the 911truth movement could ask candidates to take two further steps

d) insist on the right of the Homeland Security Committees in Congress to review the COG appendices to National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD)-51;

e) support a law to force all government agencies to collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009.83

But social thought is socially fashioned. For it to be effective it must be mobilized, and become more than a chorus of bloggers croaking from our backwater lilypads in the blogomarsh. Clearly it would take a strenuous concerted effort to create or persuade a movement, such as MoveOn, to take on all these issues.

Is it possible that some organization can be persuaded to accept this challenge, and take the first steps in mobilizing such a force?

NOTES

1 In the single month of March 1962, the OAS set off an average of 120 bombs per day ("The Generals' Putsch," http://countrystudies.us/algeria/34.htm).

2 BBC News, November 24, 2006: "Alexander Litvinenko wrote a book in which he alleged Federal Security Service (FSB) agents in Russia coordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in the country that killed more than 300 people."

3 Gareth Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War," Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008,
http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2374142.

4 Nicholas Birch, Irish Times, November 26, 2005,

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2005/1126/1908792893FR26TURKEY.html.
Former Turkish president and prime minister Suleyman Demirel later commented on this incident that "It is fundamental principle that there is one state. In our country there are two….There is one deep state and one other state ….The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one." (Jon Gorvett, "Turkey’s `Deep State’ Surfaces in Former President’s Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006, http://www.washington-report.org/archives/Jan_Feb_2006/0601037.html ).

5 Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War." A Google search on June 7, 2008, for "Semdinli + PKK" in major world English-language publications yielded 157 results. Of these just two were from the United States. Of these one (Washington Times, December 6, 2005) did not mention the deep state’s involvement in the incident at all. The other (Newsweek, November 28, 2005) defined the deep state without mentioning its underworld involvement. A similar search for "deep state" revealed the same paucity of coverage in the U.S. media.

6 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 4-7, 14-17, etc.

7 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 121-22, 124-27, 163-69.

8 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 139-42, 150-60, etc.; Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI –and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006).

9 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 153; citing Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001. It is no accident that the mainstream U.S. press have been silent, not just concerning this important fact, but also about the two books recording it: Peter Lance’s Triple Cross and my own The Road to 9/11. Triple Cross finally got mentioned by name in the New York Times, but only because its publisher, Judith Regan, was dismissed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (New York Times, December 19, 2006).

10 On October 18, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege in order to prevent disclosure of the nature of Edmonds' work on the grounds that it would endanger national security.

11 Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06,
http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2006/10/ellsberg-hastert-got-suitcases-of-al.html.

12 Vanity Fair, September 2005. According to the ATC web site, "As one of the leading business associations in the United States, the American-Turkish Council (ATC) is dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse membership includes Fortune 500, U.S. and Turkish companies, multinationals, nonprofit organizations, and individuals with an interest in U.S.-Turkish relations." It is thus comparable to the American Security Council, whose activities in 1963 are discussed in Scott, Deep Politics, e.g. 292.

Edmonds has been partially corroborated by Huseyin Baybasin, another Turkish heroin kingpin now in jail in Holland, in his book Trial by Fire: "I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England." But as he adds: "I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part." Baybasin claimed he was assisted by Turkish officers working for NATO in Belgium ("The Susurluk Legacy," By Adrian Gatton, Druglink Magazine, Nov/Dec 2006, http://adriangatton.com/archive/1990_01_01_archive.html).

13 Also in 2003 former government consultant Chalmers Johnson declared, in an interview, that what happened in Florida after the 2000 election was a "coup d’état" (Critical Asian Studies, 35, no. 2 [2003], 303). In the same year Bill Moyers, a veteran of the Johnson White House, wrote of the G.W. Bush to realign government as "the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime" (Text of speech to the Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future, June 4, 2003, Washington, DC,
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0610-11.htm).

14 Interview with Alex Jones, November 2, 2006, http://jonesreport.com/articles/021106_vidal.html.

15 Ed Encho, "9/11: Cover For a Coup D'Etat?" OpEdNews, May 27, 2008,

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=7521.

16 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, Road to 9/11, 228-29.

17 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats, and the FBI: The Covert War against the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 184; Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.

18 Robert Parry, "Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus," Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007, http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/011907Parry.shtml.

19 Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II, 611, 613; quoting William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial, 1977), 315–21; whole passage quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 61. Cumings quotes further from Dean Rusk’s testimony to Congress on June 20: ‘‘We see no present indication that the people across the border have any intention of fighting a major war for that purpose’’ (taking over South Korea). He notes that General Ridgway later said he "was shocked" by Dean Rusk’s reassuring testimony.

20 Cumings, Origins, II, 600-01. My selective quotations cannot do justice to the complexity of Cumings’ book, which presents three different possible explanations for the outbreak of the war. Cumings depicts a contest for the future of the peninsula -- and also Taiwan -- in which local leaders on both sides were looking for support from their respective megapowers.

21 Cumings, Origins, II, 547; citing Gavin McCormack, Cold War/Hot War (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1983), 97; E. Gough Whitlam, A Pacific Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), 57-58.

22 Cumings, Origins, II, 527.

23 Cumings, Origins, II, 600, 601. Yi Pōm-sōk was a pro-Chiang advocate in Seoul of attacking North Korea. Kim Sōk-won was a Korean commander who had previously attacked North Korea. Tiger Kim was a Korean veteran of the Japanese army close to Rhee, and a war criminal.

24 James Bamford, Body of Secrets (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 301. William Bundy has taken issue with this judgment, arguing that escalating the war north "didn’t fit in with our plans at all" (Robert McNamara, "The Tonkin Gulf Resolution," in Andrew Jon Rotter, Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991], 83). But Ball was correct in reporting that bombing fit in with some people’s plans.

25 Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 178-215.

26 Robert J. Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964," Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf.

27 Ray McGovern, "CIA, Iran & the Gulf of Tonkin," ConsortiumNews, January 12, 2008, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/011108a.html.

28 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 132, cf. 67; citing Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 318, 314.

29 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 88, 93-103.

30 "National Security Advisor Holds Press Briefing," White House Website, May 16, 2002,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020516-13.html.
We now know that on 9/11 there were a number of war games and exercises, including an exercise at the National Reconnaissance Office near Dulles Airport, testing responses "if a plane were to strike a building." (Scott, Road to 9/11, 215-16; Evening Standard [London], August 22, 2002; Boston Globe, September 11, 2002,
http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/wire_stories/0903_plane_exercise.htm ).

31 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352-54 (FBI agent). After 9/11 another FBI agent was even more bitter: "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" (James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies [New York: Doubleday, 2004], 224).

32 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268; quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.

33 Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 387-88.

34 Lawrence Wright, "The Agent," New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 388-89.

35 Republican Senators Heinz and Tower also died in plane crashes, but after collisions between two aircraft. Conservative Democrat Larry McDonald died when the civilian airliner KAL 007 was shot down by Soviet interceptors in September 1983.

36 Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 201, 206: "In the years before the fatal crash there had been assassination attempts against Walter and Victor [Reuther]. (Victor believes the attempt against him was intended as a message to Walter.) In each of these instances, state and federal law-enforcement agencies showed themselves at best lackadaisical in their investigative efforts, suggesting the possibility of official collusion or at least tolerance for the criminal deeds. … Third, like the suspicious near-crash that occurred the previous year, the fatal crash also involved a faulty altimeter in a small plane. It is a remarkable coincidence that Reuther would have been in two planes with the exact same malfunctioning in that brief time frame....In a follow-up interview with us, Victor further noted: `Animosity from government had been present for some time [before the fatal crash]. It was not only Walter's stand on Vietnam and Cambodia that angered Nixon, but also I had exposed some CIA elements inside labor, and this was also associated with Walter .... There is a fine line between the mob and the CIA There is a lot of crossover. Throughout the entire history of labor relations there is a sordid history of industry in league with Hoover and the mafia .. . . You need to check into right-wing corporate groups and their links to the national security system.’ Checking into such things is no easy task. The FBI still refuses to turn over nearly 200 pages of documents regarding Reuther's death, including the copious correspondence between field offices and Hoover. And many of the released documents-some of them forty years old-are totally inked out. It is hard to fathom what national security concern is involved or why the FBI and CIA still keep so many secrets about Walter Reuther's life and death."

37 See discussion in Jack N. Rakove, "Taking the Prerogative out of the Presidency: An Originalist Perspective," Presidential Studies Quarterly 37.1, 85–100; Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New York: Rodale, 2007), 153-58

38 Interview with David Frost, aired May 11, 1977; in Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 159; Robert D. Sloane, "The Scope of Executive Power in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction," Boston University Law Review 88:341,
http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr/documents/SLOANE.pdf, 346.

39 Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (New York : W.W. Norton, 2007), 82.

40 Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 183

41 Minority Report, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100th Congress. 1st Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No. 100-216, p. 465.

42 Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 174.

43 Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 72; cf. Sloane, "The Scope of Executive Power," 347.

44 Cf. the investigative journalist and media critic Philip Weiss, "When Black Becomes White," in Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 186: "The mainstream media’s response [to theories of the Kennedy assassination] has been a dull one – to solemnly and stoically report the government’s assertions, over and over."

45 Scott, War Conspiracy, 10, 383, 395.

46 Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1969), xii-xiii.

47 James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. "Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls", New York Times, December 21, 2005.

48 Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw, 13. Even former George W. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has referred to the media in his book as "complicit enablers" of Bush administration war propaganda (Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception [New York: Public Affairs, 2008], 70, 125).

49 Washington Post, September 8, 2006. Cf. BBC, "Paranoia paradise," April 4, 2002,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1909378.stm. \
The common tactic of such essays is to focus on absurdly eccentric beliefs, and try to pass them off as representative of all those criticizing received anti-conspiratorial opinion.

50 Washington Post, January 23, 2007. However on May 4, 2008, the Post discussed the remark in a favorable review of former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards’ book Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost -- And How It Can Find Its Way Back.

51 Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.

52 E.g. Paul L. Atwood, "War and Empire Are and Always Have Been the American Way of Life," Global Policy Forum, February 2006,
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2006/022006history.htm.

53 Alexander Cockburn, "The Age of Irrationality: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the American Left," CounterPunch, November 28, 2006,
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html.

54 Cumings, Origins, II, 123; cf. 13-14; Herbert Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An

Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Random House, 1974).

55 Michael Klare, Beyond the "Vietnam Syndrome" (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981).

56 E.g. Robert Wright, "All Quiet on the Western Front," Slate, October 11, 2001,

http://www.slate.com/id/117170/ .

57 Scott, Road to 9/11, 57-61, etc. Cf. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).

58 L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (1997), http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/.

59 Prouty, The Secret Team (1997), Chapter II.

60 G. William Domhoff, in Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 125-26.

61 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 11.

62 Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996),

63 This has been doubted in the case of the JFK assassination, notably by Chomsky. For my latest contribution to this old argument, see Scott, War Conspiracy (2008).

64 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 14; Michael Standaert, Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006), 112-14.

65 Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (New York: Little Brown, 2007), 51. Strangely, Savage does not mention COG by name, but he refers to the decade of COG planning in the 1980s as evidence for his case that a "cabal of zealots" has been planning for "the return of the imperial presidency" ever since Cheney and Rumsfeld lost their posts in the Ford Administration.

66 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

67 See "The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002.

68 Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 54-55.

69 "Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed `every 45 days’ as part of planning to assess threats to `the continuity of our government’"
(Christopher Ketcham, "The Last Round-Up," Radaronline, May 15, 2008,
http://circleof13.blogspot.com/2008/05/last-roundup.html).

Cf. President’s Radio Address, December 15, 2005,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051217.html :
"The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland."

70 Parry, "Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus," Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007.

71 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 228-29.

72 White House Notice of September 20, 2007,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070920-9.html.

73 Jerome Corsi, "Bush makes power grab," WorldNetDaily, May 23, 2007, \
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55824.

74Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, "National Emergency Powers," updated August 30, 2007, pp. 10ss,
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/98-505.pdf.

75 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

76 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing James Mann, "The Armageddon Plan," Atlantic Monthly (March 2004), http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200403/mann; James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 138–45; James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 70-74. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown", Counterpunch, March 31, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/scott03312008.html.

77 Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown", Counterpunch, March 31, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/scott03312008.html.

78 Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.

79 The National Archives started a pilot project for the declassification of Commission records. According to their interim report, dated June 22, 2007, they have made progress with the Commission’s internal files. However the following excerpt shows that of other agencies, only the FBI was cooperating in 2007:

FBI Decisions:

Declassified: 98 documents (241 pages)

Declassified, but needs referral elsewhere: 31 documents (132 pages)

Sanitized: 100 documents (400 pages)

Sanitized and needs referral elsewhere: 170 documents (1,067 pages)

Withheld in full: 4 documents (15 pages)

The CIA, the agency with the second highest number of pages in this pilot, has indicated that they have "made no decision regarding how and when it will apply any resources to this request."

Other than FBI, we have received no official response from the other referral agencies ("Update on the Declassification of the Records of the 9/11 Commission," June 22, 2007, http://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb/meetings/06-22-07-tilley.pdf.)

The CIA subsequently resolved to review relevant records.

80 John Farmer, " ‘United 93’: The Real Picture," Washington Post, April 30, 2006. Cf. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 87: "The staff front office suggested that the NORAD situation bordered on willful concealment."

81 Public Law 107-306, Nov. 27, 2002, Title VI, Section 610.

82 Amerrican Freedom Agenda, http://www.americanfreedomagenda.org; American Freedom Campaign,
http://www.americanfreedomcampaign.org.

83 Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.


Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He is the author of the forthcoming book (reissued and much enlarged) The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. It can be pre-ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press at http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store. Scott’s website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.




===========================

NSPD-51 and the Potential for a Coup d'Etat by National Emergency

William H. White

Can you think of anyone better than George W. Bush with whom to entrust the dictatorial powers hinted at in NSPD-51? Or perhaps you are unwilling to trust anyone with such powers, even Bush. That is not an option in NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE 51 (NSPD-51), signed by Bush and released without comment by the White House on May 9, 2007. To quote from NSPD-51: “This policy establishes ‘National Essential Functions,’ prescribes continuity requirements for all executive departments and agencies, and provides guidance for State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector organizations in order to ensure a comprehensive and integrated national continuity program that will enhance the credibility of our national security posture and enable a more rapid and effective response to and recovery from a national emergency.” What one would expect, but for some of its few details.

Under NSPD-51, only limited ‘National Essential Functions’ of government will continue, which may or may not include Congress and the courts. NSPD-51 assures us: “Enduring Constitutional Government means a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches...” This “matter of comity,” which usually refers to the informal and voluntary recognition of jurisdiction among courts, is troublesomely ambiguous in this context. Is Bush claiming that he, rather than the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court, determines which functions the three branches of the federal government shall continue to perform? Does the president decide for himself, as he "coordinates," which laws and court orders to faithfully execute?

NSPD-51 claims that it "provides guidance” to state and local governments, when in fact it does the opposite because it revoked the then existing Presidential Decision Directive 67 of October 21, 1998 ("Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations"), including “all Annexes thereto.” And replaced them with NSPD-51, along with: “Annex A and the classified Continuity Annexes, attached hereto.” But then the rabbit disappears as NSPD-51 soldiers on: “This directive and the information contained herein shall be protected from unauthorized disclosure, provided that, except for Annex A, the Annexes attached to this directive are classified and shall be accorded appropriate handling, consistent with applicable Executive Orders.” In other words, all the details are secret and even the non secret “Annex A” remains undisclosed by the White House.

Having revoked on May 9, 2007 the nation’s then existing emergency plan for continued national governance without explanation, Bush’s NSPD-51 calls for: “The Plan shall be submitted to the President for approval not later than 90 days after the date of this directive.” One assumes, during this lapse in emergency plans, no emergency was expected, or at least presented less risk than leaving that old Clinton plan in place. Since the national media, except one story each in the Washington Post and Boston Globe, have ignored NSPD-51, Bush has not bothered to explain any of this.

Especially if such explanations might raise questions about the decision to revoke the existing plan before finishing work on the new plan, which some might conclude serves only to rush the review of one of the most complex and sensitive plans in government in an attempt to slip something by the rest of us. Whatever the motive, abruptly revoking the existing plan, while mandating a new plan within 90 days, exhibits the same reckless, delusional optimism that characterizes much of Bush's planning record. Clearly Bush is confident he can do far better than Clinton, whose administration labored for years on that old plan. Much of the old plan may even be in the new plan, who knows?

Among those who do not know are members of the House Committee on Homeland Security. The Bush administration has repeatedly denied the committee access to NSPD-51, about which Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio (D) complained in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. What we do know is those 90 days passed without a new plan approval being announced. Perhaps no plan gives the president exactly the maximum power and minimum accountability desired; or, perhaps the plan's approval is secret as well. Apparently, the "matter of comity"among the three branches of government, referred to in NSPD-51, does not include allowing NSPD-51 to be read by members of Congress, which the Congress, in a continuing pattern of acquiesce, has not challenged.

This almost entirely secret directive can be invoked when the president decides “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” occurred. Bush alone will decide when he must assume this burden, though surely only upon prayerful contemplation during the time saved not having to consult Congress. In addition, because of a change to the Insurrection Act of 1807, enacted as part of the 439-page 2007 Defense Authorization Bill signed into law in October 2006, Bush need no longer obtain a governor’s consent to take control of a state’s national guard units. This same bill overturns the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which limited the use of US military forces within the United States for law enforcement. In addition, Bush issued an executive order on July 17, 2007 authorizing the government to seize the assets of anyone "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq" under provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Could this include critics of the Iraq war, whom Bush has repeatedly accused of undermining the war effort?

When might Bush invoke NSPD-51? My own guess would be Spring ‘08, after Bush is "forced" to attack Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons, and Iran then fails to cooperate, attacking US ships in the Gulf and Mediterranean instead of accepting our offers of assistance. Even if Iran denied Bush his basic objective by refusing to be goaded into reacting beyond its own borders, the resulting global economic chaos and spontaneous popular reactions beyond Iran could compel Bush to invoke NSPD-51, quite apart from whatever our new enemy might undertake. On the other hand, under NSPD-51 any provocation of Bush could lead to him creating a pretext for declaring a national emergency. For example,Ralph Nader quotes Massachusetts Rep. John W. Olver (D), who has a PhD from MIT, when presented with the votes of 13 Town Meetings [real Town Meetings, not the media events staged for candidate performances] in Olver's congressional district calling for impeachment of Cheney and Bush, Olver responded that he opposed any impeachment move against Bush because "the current autocratic executive [Bush] would attack Iran from the air, declare a national emergency, institute marshal law, and call off the 2008 elections were the Democrats to initiate impeachment."

Should Bush declare a national emergency and begin exercising the many powers available to him in law, as well as the ever expanding powers he claims by fiat, our nation would cross into a world increasingly difficult to predict, largely beyond our national experience, except perhaps for our revolution and civil war, subject to ad hoc, unchecked decision making, with genuine rule of law no longer an available guide. It would likely become increasingly difficult, in the absence of reliable information, to understand and deal with the originating crisis, however real or contrived. And to distinguish it from the difficulties arising from the declaration of a national emergency itself. However, this sort of thing has sadly occurred in many other countries, with much the same result likely here: a self-sustaining crisis, in which the chief rationales for continuing the national emergency are the effects of the national emergency themselves, compounded by errors in governance and crimes by those who seized power, sustained by their fear for what would happen to them should they give it up. The longer term prospect would likely include national decline and insurrection, with an even more unpredictable array of international consequences starting with a widening war.

In the short term, one can imagine Congress, demonstrating its usual wisdom and courage, expressing concern about the clearly large, though secret, number of American citizens "detained," surprise at the scope of firearm and asset seizures, discomfort with the pace of executions under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and outrage at being locked out of its capital offices due to a classified biological threat of undetermined duration, thus preventing Congress from voting to set benchmarks for Iran and to demand our readmission to NATO. But Congress would likely find some comfort in the "delay" of the 2008 elections, given Bush's decision to allow all incumbents, including those temporarily detained, to remain in office, which many in Congress would praise for its "unifying bipartisan comity," and await the president's determination when it is safe for Congress and the Supreme Court to actually meet again. Just as many in corporate American would appreciate the need to "defer" collecting capital gains and corporate taxes in the interests of helping the economy in a time of national crisis. Besides, how could anyone resist the perfectly Orwellian logic of declaring a dictatorship to insure "Constitutional Continuity" for the “homeland,” while setting aside the actual Constitution of the United States?

Whatever unknowable future a declaration of national emergency might bring, clearly many are going to be profoundly unhappy with such a turn of events. And that may be why Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is already building detention centers around the nation to “support the rapid development of new programs” that could accommodate those incompatible with Constitutional Continuity, the dead-enders who actually protest or resist, plus the usual suspects who might think to object.

But how would all those potential incompatibles, certainly tens of thousands and likely far more, find their way to an appropriate detention center? After all, the Bush administration has managed to prosecute only a handful of businesses for hiring illegal aliens who number in the millions. Its clearly a matter of priorities. So, despite such distractions as hurricane Katrina, the Justice Department has been conducting mass arrest exercises code named Operation Falcon, whereby thousands of law enforcement officers from federal, state, county and local agencies arrested some 10,000 individuals within seven days, working from lists provided by the U.S. Marshall’s Service, all coordinated to commence across the country simultaneously. Since practice makes perfect, three mass arrest exercises have been conduced: Two national (Falcon I April 4-10, 2005 arresting 10,340; Falcon II April 17-23, 2006 arresting 9,037); and one “eastern half of the country” (Falcon III October 22-28, 2006 arresting 10,733).

What can not be found among these data is mention of any legitimate law enforcement purpose served by these mass arrests. While some arrested were serious criminals, most were of the unanswered warrantee and support payment delinquent sort, soon released. The important element here appears to be getting operational experience and, perhaps most critically, habituating state and local police agencies to conducting mass arrests from lists provided by the federal government. In the eastern regional Falcon III alone, 103 state agencies, 430 county sheriff's offices/departments and 482 police departments did just that according to the U.S. Marshals Service web site. At the current pace, perhaps Falcon IV, for the western half of the U.S., will be the last drill and then the real thing: Operation Falcon V.

So its likely, when Bush addresses his fellow citizens after declaring the national emergency, many of his critics will be listening most attentively to detention camp loud speakers. As for how detainees will be treated, one can assume every effort will be made to maintain our current standards for indefinite detention without trial and torture assisted interrogation, where little slip-ups under the press of numbers and emergency conditions are likely to be of little consequence.What is certain, should coup d'etat by national emergency take place, is it will be denied even as it unfolds, and this is likely to be followed by assurances it will be temporary, lasting "not one day more than it needs to," followed by accusations the resistors are responsible for prolonging the state of emergency, and finally appeals to turn in others if you want your own relatives released soon from detention or your property/assets returned; all lies to sustain a long planned, permanent state of national emergency.

What is likely to be important in most corporate media is demonstrating our determination to carry on by shopping as well as selecting the proper anthem for our new world order. I'm hoping for something stirring along the lines of "Deutschland Uber Alles," except with a touch of Texas twang as in "Dallas Uber Alles," in an arrangement using fewer trombones plus a weeping steel guitar. However, since this is such an important decision, our new anthem, with its companion national prayer and corporate logo, should be selected by ‘We the people of the United States’ from among three finalists chosen by our First Lady, in our first-ever national referendum, proving yet again our commitment to democracy and putting all those new voting machines to use in November '08 after all.

Or you might send this and/or additional such materials to others, including your congressional delegation as well as the press, to warn about the danger Bush’s NSPD-51 presents, and demand steps be taken to prevent it. Since the courts are hopelessly slow given the immediate danger, Congress must do its duty. And we must do our duty and demand Congress end its reluctance to stand up to Bush's repeated, escalating, bullying contempt: if its unnecessary, it should be easy; if its not easy, it is all the more necessary.

NOTE TO THE READER: It is entirely true that each real event cited here has alternative, plausible explanation, and those participating in these events may be entirely unaware of the darker ends to which their work may be put. The essay's many conjectures are exactly that. However, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance not good faith or trust. Nor is the US Constitution based on trust, but rather on checks and balances, in a arrangement designed to avoid the gravest of follies and to contain inevitable mischief, embracing sound assumptions about the weaknesses of human nature rather than its virtuous pretenses. Knowing the Bush administration's record of reckless lawlessness and radical mind set, the possibility of a coup d'etat by national emergency can not be ignored, especially within the context of recent institutional actions that can be reasonably interpreted as being consistent with and preparatory to such an undertaking. These include Bush's relentless assault on and blatant affront to the constitutional limits on executive power, exemplified by the brazenly sly release without comment of NSPD-51, and encouraged by congressional failure to stand up to his flagrant excesses. I believe the risk to our republic is real. And needs to be confronted immediately, with the objective of using existing congressional power and establishing additional safeguards, formal and informal, to prevent it. Better to prevent what some may claim was never going to happen, than to suffer betrayed good faith, with the appalling costs of experiencing and undoing this grave folly Bush appears to be edging toward, as relentlessly as he undertook the invasion of Iraq from the first days of his administration.

Further reading:
Congressional Research Service Report - National Emergency Powers
Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State by Mike Whitney
The Bush Push to Militarize America by Jerome Corsi

=================================

How the CIA Created the Crack Epidemic

September 15, 1996

In the early 1980s, a new drug, crack cocaine, appeared on the streets--at a time when many youth in the inner city were being forced into the underground economy in order to survive. New burdens were being added onto the poor. In a situation of intolerable poverty, unemployment, lousy health care, falling apart schools and crumbling housing, the spread of crack cocaine brought intensified conflicts between street organizations and the painful desperation of people addicted to the pipe. The government launched brutal new invasions by the police--a so-called "war on drugs"-- using the spread of crack as an excuse.

This war on the people has resulted in an epidemic of police brutality and murder, the mass incarceration of Black and Latino youth, and the criminalization of a generation.It was widely believed that the sudden epidemic of crack cocaine into the oppressed communities--like the introduction of heroin in the Vietnam war era--could be traced to the authorities themselves.Now new facts are in, and it is revealed that this is precisely what has been going on.An exposé by reporter Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News reveals that agents working with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sold tons of cocaine in the United States during those years and shipped the profits to the CIA-run army of Nicaraguan Contras. Webb based his work on "recently declassified reports, federal court testimony, undercover tapes, court records here and abroad and hundreds of hours of interviews over the past 12 months." He was assisted by journalists Georg Hodel and Leonore Delgado.Webb's report uncovered the names of the Contra operatives who bought tons of cocaine from the Colombian drug cartels and passed it on to various drug-dealing networks within the U.S. It documents how Contra drug dealers met with a major CIA agent before starting their operation. It reveals how the Salvadoran government air force flew the cocaine into Texas airfields. It details how tons of cheap cocaine flowed like a river into ghetto streets--first in Los Angeles and then beyond. And finally, Webb's report documents the repeated U.S. government efforts to protect these operations.It has been a long struggle to break through the government coverup of this CIA cocaine traffic. During the congressional Iran-Contra hearings in the late 1980s, two people stood up in the audience and shouted "What about the cocaine!?" They were arrested and sentenced to over a year in prison.Long-time readers of our newspaper, the Revolutionary Workerwill remember many articles, especially in 1988 and 1989, exposing the CIA's use of cocaine to finance their secret war in Central America. Our reports were based on the work of many other people--including the Christic Institute, columnist Alexander Cockburn, journalists Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan, filmmaker Barbara Trent (who created the film Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra-Affair), and Professor Peter Dale Scott (author of The Iran Contra Connection--Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era).

Now an important new piece of the puzzle has fallen into place: Gary Webb documents that the CIA's agents did more than participate in the cocaine trade. He reveals in detail the role they played in creating the crack explosion that has caused so much suffering among the people.Here is a U.S. government that publicly preached "Just Say No!" and sent an army of police to attack the people in the name of a "war on drugs." And meanwhile, this same government had for years been at the nerve center of the operations that brought in the drugs!

Many people have suspected all along that the U.S. government was behind the crack explosion. Now here are the facts.In this article, we will pass on some of the information Gary Webb uncovered. And we will place it in the context of information documented by others about the role of the CIA and the Reagan/Bush White House in the cocaine trade.The full series by Gary Webb, called "Dark Alliance," appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on August 18, 19 and 20. It is available on the Internet at http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/.

The Nicaraguan Contras--
a Covert, Self-Financing
CIA Operation

In the U.S. in 1980, cocaine was a drug that only the rich could afford. Gary Webb writes, "One study of actual cocaine prices paid by DEA agents put it at $5,200 an ounce." After high-level decisions in the U.S. government, this changed.

On December 1, 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret National Security Directive (NSD) approving the CIA efforts to secretly organize an army to wage war against Nicaragua.

The brutal pro-U.S. Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, had been overthrown in a 1979 revolution and replaced by the leftist Sandinista government. The U.S. ruling class feared that the Sandinistas would weaken U.S. control over Central America and provide the Soviet Union with a "foothold" in a region the U.S. considered its own "backyard."

In August 1981, Col. Enrique Bermúdez--who'd been Somoza's Washington liaison to the U.S. Pentagon--announced the formation of the Fuerza Democrática Nicaraguense (FDN--in English, the "Nicaraguan Democratic Force"). Webb documents that it was the CIA that pulled together the forces who became the FDN--mostly from remnants of Somoza's hated National Guard. Under the leadership of U.S. and Nicaraguan CIA agents, the FDN waged a brutal "low intensity war" of assassination and sabotage to destabilize Nicaragua. Webb reports that Bermúdez was one of those agents who "received regular CIA paychecks for a decade, payments that stopped shortly before his still-unsolved slaying in Managua in 1991."

Webb documents that Ronald Reagan's secret NSD directive permitted the CIA to spend $19.9 million of direct U.S. money on this project--enough to get the Contras started, but not enough to maintain the ongoing military force. It was not necessary to allocate more money: This covert operation was self-financed, so that its crimes could not be easily traced back to the U.S. government. At the moment Reagan signed his NSD, Contra operatives were already buying and selling massive amounts of cocaine.

Gary Webb's exposé focuses heavily on the career of Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, the Contra operative directly in charge of selling cocaine in Los Angeles. Blandón testified about these operations in detail in March 1996--when he appeared as a star witness in the San Diego drug trial of his own protege "Freeway Rick" Ross. Webb writes that Blandón "who began working for the FDN's drug operation in late 1981, testified that the drug ring sold almost a ton of cocaine in the United States that year--$54 million worth at prevailing wholesale prices. It was not clear how much of the money found its way back to the CIA's army, but Blandón testified that `whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going for the Contra revolution.' "

The Planning Meeting That Started the Cocaine Trade

Danilo Blandón, the son of a wealthy Nicaraguan slumlord, was sent to earn a masters degree in U.S.-style "marketing." At the time of the Sandinista revolution, Blandón was living a life of privilege as Nicaragua's director of wholesale markets--heading a $27 million U.S.-financed program for creating "an American-style agricultural system" in Nicaragua.

Webb reports that, when the Somoza dictatorship collapsed, the Blandón family lost their cattle ranches and their property in sprawling urban slums. Blandón left for the United States where, by 1981, he was involved in the formation of the Contras.

Webb writes that Blandón's involvement with cocaine fundraising started when he was asked to pick up another exile, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero, at the Los Angeles Airport. Blandón testified in the Ross trial that he and Meneses flew to Honduras and met with the CIA's leading Nicaraguan agent, Col. Bermúdez. Afterward, he said they "started raising money for the Contra revolution." In his testimony, Blandón claimed that Bermúdez didn't know that their fundraising project would be cocaine. Webb writes that "the presence of the mysterious Mr. Meneses strongly suggests otherwise."

Webb reports that Meneses was widely known as a major drug trafficker. Extensive police records in the U.S. documented his activities, and in Nicaraguan newspapers he was called "Rey de la Droga" [the Drug King]. And yet, he was quickly welcomed both into the United States and then into the leading circles of the FDN. In July 1979, Meneses entered the U.S. and was soon granted a visa and work permit as a political refugee. Then in 1981, Meneses himself claims, Bermúdez put him in charge of "intelligence and security" for the newly organized FDN forces in California. Meneses bragged "Nobody would join the Contra forces down there without my knowledge and approval."

With the approval of the U.S. government and the blessing of the CIA agent Bermúdez, Meneses settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. From there, he supervised the importation of thousands of kilos of cocaine into California--while his agent Danilo Blandón worked in Los Angeles marketing that cocaine to networks of drug dealers.

Blandón testified, "There is a saying that the ends justify the means, and that's what Mr. Bermúdez told us in Honduras. OK?"

In June 1984, at the height of their drug operation, Meneses was photographed at a meeting with the political boss of the FDN, Adolfo Calero. Calero is a former Coca-Cola bottler and long-time CIA agent, who served as the public face of the Contras, so that the old cutthroats of Somoza's National Guard could keep to the shadows.

All this evidence suggests that, from its earliest stages, the Contra cocaine operation had CIA approval and support.

Evidence that emerged during the 1980s suggests how high up that approval may have gone. Reagan's specialist in covert operations, Col. Oliver North, denied that anyone in the White House knew that Contra leaders were running drugs. But an August 9, 1985 memo written by North to his agent Robert Owens discusses a DC-6 airplane used to supply the Contras and notes that it "is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S." In another memo, North writes, "$14 M[illion] to finance came from drugs." (RW, January 16, 1989)

Meanwhile, in the Senate's Kerry hearings, an Oregon businessman involved in secret arms and drug shipments named Richard Brenneke said that Donald Gregg, the national security aide to then-Vice President George Bush, was the Washington contact for Brenneke's operation. Brenneke says that he flew a drug shipment to Amarillo, Texas in mid-1985 and discussed it with Gregg who answered, "You do what you were assigned to do. Don't question the decision of your betters."

Blessed with Government-Protected Transportation

In the 1970s, cocaine production was increasing in Latin America and Colombian groups were emerging as major refiners and distributors of the drug. However, cocaine remained extremely expensive in the United States because no one had worked out reliable ways of transporting large amounts of the drug. This was what the Contra operative brought to the drug trade: they hooked up street-level U.S. drug networks directly with the Colombian drug cartels, using transportation networks developed by U.S. intelligence.

In the film Coverup, a long-time CIA specialist in covert war, John Stockwell, says: "You have CIA bases in Costa Rica and Honduras. You have airplanes flying back and forth continuously landing at bases in the United States where they don't have to go through regular customs, with the CIA escorting people in and out."

According to Webb, the Meneses/Blandón wing of the Contra operation also relied on yet another U.S.-sponsored network: the Salvadoran air force planes flying into a U.S. Air Force base in Texas. Webb reports that Meneses had close personal and business ties to a Salvadoran air force commander Marcos Aguada--and Webb adds that Aguada is also known to have been a CIA agent.

During a 1992 court testimony, Enrique Miranda testified that he was an intelligence operative in Somoza's government and that, after the Sandinista revolution, he worked as Meneses' emissary to the cocaine cartel of Bogotá, Colombia. "He [Norwin Meneses] and his brother Luis Enrique had financed the Contra revolution with the benefits of the cocaine they sold," Miranda testified. "This operation, as Norwin told me, was executed with the collaboration of high-ranking Salvadoran military personnel. They met with officials of the Salvadoran air force, who flew [planes] to Colombia and then left for the U.S., bound for an Air Force base in Texas, as he told me." During the 1980s, the Salvadoran military was engaged in counterinsurgency against guerrilla forces and was closely supervised by CIA and U.S. military advisors. Webb writes, "U.S. General Accounting Office records confirm that El Salvador's air force was supplying the CIA's Nicaraguan guerrillas with aircraft and flight support services throughout the mid-1980s."

Bottom Line Arithmetic of the Crack Explosion

Blandón testified that after the 1981 meeting with Bermúdez, Meneses took him back to San Francisco for two days of schooling in the cocaine trade. Then, Blandón said, Meneses gave him two kilograms of cocaine, the names of two customers, and a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

Meneses funneled the cocaine to California from its various entry points. Webb writes, "It arrived in all kinds of containers: false-bottomed shoes, Colombian freighters, cars with hidden compartments, luggage from Miami. Once here, it disappeared into a series of houses and nondescript storefront businesses scattered from Hayward to San Jose, Pacifica to Burlingame, Daly City to Oakland."

"Danilo Blandón is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern California," L.A. County Sheriff's Sgt. Tom Gordon said in a 1986 affidavit. "The monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo, who is a high-ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua."

Webb reveals that Blandón deliberately targeted the Black communities of L.A.with his massive drug import operation--selling "the world's most expensive street drug in some of California's poorest neighborhoods."

According to Webb, Blandón recruited a small-time South-Central drug dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross. Ross sold the cocaine for Blandón in South Central L.A.and Compton, using contacts in various Crips street organizations and later among the Bloods. Ross swore he had no idea where Blandón got the drugs, and only knew that Blandón was "plugged" into powerful forces.

Quickly, within a year, Blandón and Ross had taken over much of drug traffic of Los Angeles. The reason for their success was simple: price. With cheap transportation and government protection--the Contras were able to deliver huge quantities of extremely cheap cocaine. When they started, a kilo of cocaine reportedly cost L.A. drug dealers about $30,000 or $50,000. But the Contra operatives were able to sell at $12,000 and still gather millions in profits for the CIA's covert war.

Webb says Blandón and Ross helped decide which drug organizations grew strong: Drug dealers either bought cocaine from "Freeway Rick" Ross, the frontman for the Contras, or else they went out of business. Ross said, "It was unreal. We were just wiping out everybody." Webb quotes Blandón, from a 1990 DEA tape, saying that he had sold between two and four tons of cocaine in Los Angeles during the 1980s.

A Blizzard
Hits the Ghetto

Not only was this Contra cocaine cheap enough to become a street drug for the first time, it was also cheap enough for the mass production of its recently invented, crystallized, smokeable form--crack. Crack delivers an explosive high--10 times more powerful than snorted powder cocaine.

Webb describes Blandón as "the Johnny Appleseed of crack." By late 1983, his cocaine operation became a massive crack operation. Rick Ross estimates his networks were sometimes distributing $2 million or $3 million worth of crack in one day. In their crack-manufacturing cookhouses, huge vats of bubbling cocaine had to be stirred with canoe paddles.

As everyone knows, the effect of the crack explosion--in oppressed communities, in the schools, and in the projects--has been devastating. Crack is extremely addictive. And thanks to the CIA's protection, it was also extremely cheap.

The legacy of this CIA operation is thousands of crack addicts, often homeless, living and dying in abandoned buildings, driven to desperate acts to feed their pipes. The violent capitalist competition of the drug trade, unleashed by U.S. government agents, has intensified deadly conflicts among the people.

And then, in the ultimate hypocrisy, this same government called for a war on drugs starting in the late 1980s--and sent its armed enforcers into oppressed communities, creating a new level of harassment and brutality. The authorities set legal penalties for possessing and selling crack cocaine many times higher than penalties for comparable amounts of powder cocaine--which has been more popular among the more affluent. As a result of this discrimination, tens of thousands of Black youth are serving hard time for possessing or selling small amounts of crack cocaine. A 1993 study showed that 88.3 percent of those convicted on federal crack offenses were Black. They have seized thousands of young men for imprisonment--for the crime of selling rocks that were introduced into oppressed communities by the CIA itself!

Protection and
Continuing Coverup

Webb reports that U.S. drug agencies investigated Meneses throughout the 1980s: "Agents from four organizations--the DEA, U.S. Customs, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement--have complained that investigations were hampered by the CIA or unnamed `national security' interests."

Webb documents one police attempt to raid Blandón's operation in October 1986--after the Contras had snowed L.A.in cocaine for five years without interference. Agents of the FBI, IRS, LAPD and sheriffs fanned out to a dozen locations. Blandón and several of his agents were arrested. But nothing incriminating was found and no one was ever prosecuted. Webb writes, "Ron Spear, a spokesman for Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, said Blandón somehow knew that he was under police surveillance. Others thought so, too. `The cops always believed that investigation had been compromised by the CIA,' Los Angeles federal public defender Barbara O'Connor said in a recent interview."

Webb documents that since then it also came out that the L.A. County Sheriff's elite narcotics squad, including the secret task force assigned to capture Ross, had been involved in massive corruption, beating suspects, stealing drug money and planting evidence.

After the Contra-Sandinista war ended, the Meneses/Blandón ring went into operations for themselves, and in 1989 the U.S. government started efforts to dismantle their operations--in a way they hoped would avoid producing exposure or political waves. Ross, who knew nothing of the Contra-CIA connection, was busted and sent to jail. When he was released he was busted (in a DEA sting run by Blandón) and faces more prison.

Meanwhile, Meneses moved from San Francisco to a ranch in Costa Rica before Federal prosecutors finally charged him with conspiracy to distribute one kilo of cocaine. Webb reports that after Nicaraguan police arrested Meneses on drug charges in 1991, his judge expressed astonishment that this infamous drug dealer had never been busted in the U.S. During a pretrial hearing Judge Martha Quezada asked: "How do you explain the fact that Norwin Meneses, implicated since 1974 in the trafficking of drugs...has not been detained in the United States, a country in which he has lived, entered and departed many times since 1974?"

"Well, that question needs to be asked to the authorities of the United States," replied Roger Mayorga, then chief of Nicaragua's anti-drug agency.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government worked systematically to suppress any evidence of CIA involvement in the crack explosion. "The Justice Department flipped out to prevent us from getting access to people, records--finding anything out about it," recalled Jack Blum, former chief counsel to the Senate subcommittee that investigated allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking. "It was one of the most frustrating exercises that I can ever recall."

Webb writes that this year, shortly before Blandón took the stand in San Diego as a witness against Ross, "federal prosecutors obtained a court order preventing defense lawyers from delving into his ties to the CIA." Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale argued that Blandón "will admit that he was a large-scale dealer in cocaine, and there is no additional benefit to any defendant to inquire as to the Central Intelligence Agency."

To provide for Blandón's cooperation, he was sprung from prison by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1994 and hired as a "full-time informant" for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Webb writes, "According to his Miami lawyer, Blandón spends most of his time shuttling between San Diego and Managua, trying to recover Nicaraguan properties he left behind in 1979..." With the return to power of a pro-U.S. government in Nicaragua, Blandón stands a good chance of returning to his family's traditional slumlord business--profiting from the desperation of Nicaragua's poor. Several people have alleged that Blandón continues to organize international cocaine smuggling.

Webb writes: "A Freedom of Information Act request filed with the CIA was denied on national security grounds. FOIA requests filed with the DEA were denied on privacy grounds. Requests filed months ago with the FBI, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have produced nothing so far. None of the DEA officials known to have worked with the two men would talk to a reporter. Questions submitted to the DEA's public affairs office in Washington were never answered, despite repeated requests."

When Webb's exposé appeared in the Mercury News, Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale even demanded to know how the press had gotten its picture of Danilo Blandón's face--claiming that the publication of that picture violated a court order.

The fact that this government continues to suppress all kinds of information connected with the CIA-Contra crack operations is itself a confession of guilt.

It seems clear that the information that has now come out--devastating though it already is for the CIA--is still only the tip of the iceberg.

Many questions remain unanswered: Who approved this massive flood of cocaine to the U.S.? And who decided that it would start by specifically targeting the Black communities of Los Angeles? How deeply was the White House itself--Ronald Reagan and his vice president George Bush--involved in these decisions? Who ordered the coverup? And who continues to insist on the coverup today?

"Everybody's talking about crime; tell me who are the criminals."

Peter Tosh