The Spectacle of the False-Flag THE SPECTACLE OF THE FALSE-FLAG: PARAPOLITICS FROM JFK TO WATERGATE Eric Wilson THE SPECTACLE OF THE FALSE-FLAG: PARAPOLITICS from JFK to WATERGATE Eric Wilson, Monash University 2015 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the author, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way, alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2015 by Thought | Crimes an imprint of punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-0988234055 ISBN-10: 098823405X and the full book is available for download via our Open Monograph Press website (a Public Knowledge Project) at: www.thoughtcrimespress.org a project of the Critical Criminology Working Group, publishers of the Open Access Journal: Radical Criminology: journal.radicalcriminology.org Contact: Jeff Shantz (Editor), Dept. of Criminology, KPU 12666 72 Ave. Surrey, BC V3W 2M8 [ + design & open format publishing: pj lilley ] I dedicate this book to my Mother, who watched over me as I slept through the spectacle in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and who was there to celebrate my birthday with me during the spectacle at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972 Contents Editor©s Preface ................................................................. i “On Parapolitics and a New Criminology” Jeff Shantz Foreword ........................................................................v “The New Politology of Eric Wilson” Guido Giacomo Preparata Acknowledgements ......................................................xvii Introduction ¼...............................................................1 1 | Parapolitics and Spectacular Power...........................7 Spectacular Power, Criminal Sovereignty, and Parapolitics, 11 Yankees and Cowboys, 20 2 | False Flag I: JFK / Dallas ¼.................................... 31 The Deep Event and Philosophical Denial, 29 ‘The Wilderness of Mirrors’: The Usual Suspects, 53 The Joint Chiefs of Staff A/ General Lymon L. Lemnitzer, 54 B/ General Edward G. Lansdale, 58 The Central Intelligence Agency, 62 A. Senior level Officers, 62 B. Middle level Officers, 63 C. Low Level Officers, 63 Cosa Nostra (a.k.a. ‘The Wise Guys’), 64 Anti-Castro Cubans, 68 Lee Harvey Oswald, 81 (I) Tracy Barnes, 91 (II) David Atlee Phillips /Maurice Bishop, 93 I | THE SPECTACLE OF THE FALSE-FLAG Addendum to Phillips: On the ‘Lords of Misrule’, 99 Oswald in Mexico City, 105 Addendum, Philo-Communists twisting the night away , 116 Oswald-as-Nomad , 124 The Cover-Up/Phase II, 127 3 | False Flag II: LBJ & the Gulf of Tonkin ................. 153 4 | False Flag III: Nixon/Watergate ¼.......................... 175 ‘This is a comedy of errors (=doubles)’, 178 Nixon/Watergate as integrated spectacle, 184 Bob Woodward: The Moorer-Radford Affair, 189 Deep Throat/W. Mark Felt, 193 Parapolitical Symmetries: JFK/Dallas and Nixon/Watergate, 200 ‘The whole Bay of Pigs thing…’, 207 5 | The Spectacle of Conspiracy ¼................................ 225 ‘Twice as big as you can imagine…’: 9/11, 221 The Situation of the Mass Media, 241 The Unknown Quantity (of a private criminality): LIBRA, 242 The Ultra-Idiocy of Naïve Realism: JFK, 254 Colonel X, Part One, 276 Colonel X, Part Two, 277 ‘What’s the dope on the Watergate?’: All the President’s Men, 278 6 | Conclusion ¼.............................................................. 301 Bibliography ¼.....................................¼............................ 305 About the Author ........................................................¼..... 319 Editor's Preface “On Parapolitics and a New Criminology” riminology is a strange discipline. For an area of C study focused overwhelmingly, obsessively even, on state activity, criminology has perhaps as much as any social science, outside of psychology, completely and utterly undertheorized the state. The character of the state is largely misunderstood or only slightly under­ stood within criminology (even as the criminology of figures like Pierre­Joseph Proudhon and Nicos Poulantzas, who wrote much on law and the state, re­ main mostly unread by criminologists). Too often the state is simply taken for granted without real critical analysis. It is accepted straightforwardly, unproblemati­ cally, as the legitimate social authority, the social arbitra­ tor. Where critical approaches to the state are pursued there has been a tendency toward instrumentality or uni­ formity in discussing and explaining state activities. That is, the state is typically portrayed as a rather direct expression of the repressive needs of capital as a whole. And this, again, is the case only in critical approaches in which the state is interrogated or even problematized at i II | THE SPECTACLE OF THE FALSE-FLAG all, most criminology taking the state, its legitimacy if not its neutrality, for granted. Philosophically inclined criminologists like Bruce Arri­ go have remarked on the underdeveloped nature of crimi­ nological theory in general. So this under­theorization of the state is part of a larger problem in criminology. Arrigo suggests a philosophical turn in criminology that could en­ gage with philosophical works, particularly the critical philosophies of the post­1968 period in social thought. For too much of criminology it is as if the waves of post­68 social theorizing (and associated contemporary develop­ ments) never happened. Thankfully we have trailblazers like Eric Wilson who on the one hand seek to broaden the theoretical and politi­ cal horizons of criminology while on the other giving a more nuanced and deeper reading of the state and the rela­ tions and practices that animate it. Wilson is too percep­ tive, his work too subtle to present a uniform view of the liberal democratic state. Wilson offers a presentation of state operations of power as conflictual, contradictory, competing, confused. His is a robust conception of power that is rarely encountered in criminology. Wilson goes outside the theoretical bounds of what is typically in criminological thought. He makes use of in­ sights from Guy Debord’s works on social spectacle to re­ read literature on deep state practice and its (spectacular) false flag representations. Wilson, following Debord, moves away from notions of static, uniform power. Wilson’s work, in addition to shifting thinking about the liberal democratic state, challenges us to rethink the subject(s) of criminology. This is a step, on one hand, to­ ward rethinking criminology as analysis of states and state criminality. More than that, it challenges us to move be­ EDITOR'S PREFACE | III yond analyses of the simple or naïve view of states. In a sense Wilson’s book in Spectacle(s) of the False Flag(s) is solidly in the tradition of C. Wright Mills works like The Power Elite and White Collar (other of­ ferings that are too little read by criminologists). In Mills’ work the hidden or shadow networks are present­ ed as the fabric of the modern state—always in action behind the screen (or wishful dream) of the formal democratic institutions of government. Mills work makes clear that ruling groups centered in the state often have driven interests—moving and shifting specific al­ liances as interests shift and specific players gain or lose influence. Criminology needs works like this to develop its fo­ cus on state relations, networks of (counter)governance. Criminology has a long way to go to be adequately or ef­ fectively attuned to deep state relations. Whether from critical or uncritical, heterodox or orthodox perspectives, our understandings of the state have, for the most part been too superficial, too shallow. In place of simple in­ strumentality we may speak of instrumentalities, often competing and contradictory if converging at important points. Clandestinity is the health of the state. Yet it is rarely understood or acknowledged as such. A critical criminol­ ogy, let alone a radical one, must offer more insightful, nuanced, informed readings of the complexities of the state as the object of crime par excellence. One can en­ vision future criminological undertakings that apply such parapolitical spectacular analyses to issues of state­ corporate crime, transnational crime, or security studies as only a few examples. In this understanding, criminali­ ty, far from being a distortion of state practice is the IV | THE SPECTACLE OF THE FALSE-FLAG character of state practice (with the state as fragmented and uneven). The current work is an important step along these paths. It offers an example for all of criminology to ap­ proach. It hints at the possibility of a new criminology, a parapolitical criminology that looks beyond the surface of the spectacle that has so hypnotized and distracted main­ stream and orthodox criminology. It is work that carries certain risks. Thus, a final note on conspiracy. Even the threat of being labeled conspiracy theory can dissuade serious researchers from pursuing top­ ics of great importance. This is, of course, partly how power operates to silence or defuse criticism. We know— intuitively—that conspiracies exist, yet we shrink from naming them as such. We need to conceptualize conspira­ cy not as strange, atypical event,