Volume 9 | Issue 47 | Number 2 | Article ID 3650 | Nov 26, 2011 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran- Contra, and 9/11 ドゥームズデイ・プロジェクト（ペンタゴン）と 深層の事件：ケネディ暗殺、ウオーターゲイト、イラン・コント ラ、9.11 *Japanese translation available Peter Dale Scott The Doomsday Project and Deep In recent years I have been talking about a Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, dark force behind these events -- a force which, for want of a better term, I have clumsily called and 9/11 Japanese translation is a “deep state,” operating both within and available [With Akira Doujimaru's outside the public state. Today for the first time introduction for Japanese readers to I want to identify part of that dark force, a part Scott's doomsday conception];which has operated for five decades or more at Chinese translation isavailable ; the edge of the public state. This part of the French translation isavailable ; dark force has a name not invented by me: the Doomsday Project, the Pentagon’s name for the German translation isavailable ; emergency planning “to keep the White House Italian translation isavailable ; and Pentagon running during and after a Spanish translation isavailable ; nuclear war or some other major crisis.”1 Portuguese translation isavailable . My point is a simple and important one: to Peter Dale Scott show that the Doomsday Project of the 1980s, and the earlier emergency planning that I know the capacity that is there to make developed into it, have played a role in the tyranny total in America, and we must see to it background of all the deep events I shall that this agency [the National Security Agency] discuss. and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper More significantly, it has been a factor behind supervision, so that we never cross over that all three of the disturbing events that now abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no threaten American democracy. The first of return." these three is what has been called the conversion of our economy into a plutonomy – -- Senator Frank Church (1975) with the increasing separation of America into two classes, into the haves and the have-nots, I would like to discuss four major and badly the one percent and the 99 percent. The second understood events – the John F. Kennedy is America’s increasing militarization, and assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and above all its inclination, which has become 9/11. I will analyze these deep events as part of more and more routine and predictable, to a deeper political process linking them, a wage or provoke wars in remote regions of the process that has helped build up repressive globe. It is clear that the operations of this power in America at the expense ofAmerican war machine have served the one democracy. percent.2 1 9 | 47 | 2 APJ | JF The third – my subject today -- is the important What was important about the Powell and increasingly deleterious impact onmemorandum was less the document itself than American history of structural deep events: the fact that it was commissioned by the United mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, States Chamber of Commerce, one of the most the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate influential and least discussed lobbying groups the American social structure, have a major in America. And the memorandum was only one impact on American society, repeatedly involve of many signs of that developing class war in law-breaking or violence, and in many cases the 1970s, a larger process working both inside proceed from an unknown dark force. and outside government (including what Irving Kristol called an “intellectual There are any number of analyses of America’s counterrevolution”), which led directly to the current breakdown in terms of income and so-called “Reagan Revolution.”5 wealth disparity, also in terms of America’s increasing militarization and belligerency. It is clear that this larger process has been What I shall do today is I think new: to argue carried on for almost five decades, pumping that both the income disparity – or what has billions of right-wing dollars into the American been called our plutonomy -- and thepolitical process. What I wish to show today is belligerency have been fostered significantly by that deep events have also been integral to this deep events. right-wing effort, from the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 to 9/11. 9/11 resulted in We must understand that the income disparity the implementation of “Continuity of of America’s current economy was not the Government” (COG) plans (which in the Oliver result of market forces working independently North Iran Contra Hearings of 1987 were of political intervention. In large part it was called plans for “the suspension of the U.S. generated by a systematic and deliberate constitution”). These COG plans, building on ongoing political process dating from the earlier COG planning, had been carefully anxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and developed since 1982 in the so-called 1970s that control of the country was slipping Doomsday Project, by a secret group appointed away from them. by Reagan. The group was composed of both public and private figures, including Donald This was the time when future Supreme Court Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Justice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memorandum, warned that survival of the free enterprise system depended on “careful long-range planning and implementation” of a well- financed response to threats from the left.3 This warning was answered by a sustained right- wing offensive, coordinated by think tanks and funded lavishly by a small group of family foundations.4 We should recall that all this was in response to serious riots in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere, and that increasing calls for a revolution were coming from the left (in Europe as well as America). I will focus today on the right’s response to that challenge, and on the role of deep events in enhancing their response. Oliver North testifying in the Iran Contra 2 9 | 47 | 2 APJ | JF Hearings Contributing to both the JFK Assassination and 9/11 I shall try to show today that in this respect Both the JFK assassination and 9/11 were 9/11 was only the culmination of a sequence of facilitated by the way the CIA and FBI deep events reaching back to the Kennedy manipulated their files about alleged assassination if not earlier, and that the germs perpetrators of each event (Lee Harvey Oswald of the Doomsday Project can be detected in the case of what I shall call JFK, and the behind all of them. alleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of this More specifically, I shall try to demonstrate facilitation was the decision on October 9, 1963 about these deep events that of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald from the FBI watch list for surveillance. 1) prior bureaucratic misbehavior This was shortly after Oswald’s arrest in New by the CIA and similar agencies Orleans in August and his reported travel to helped to make both the Kennedy Mexico in September. Obviously these assassination and 9/11 happen; developments should normally have made Oswald a candidate for increased surveillance.7 2) the consequences of each deep event included an increase in top- This misbehavior is paradigmatic of the down repressive power for these behavior of other agencies, especially the CIA, same agencies, at the expense of in both JFK and 9/11. Indeed Gheesling’s persuasive democratic power;6 behavior fits very neatly with the CIA’s culpable withholding from the FBI, in the same 3) there are symptomatic overlaps month of October, information that Oswald had in personnel between the allegedly met in Mexico City with a suspected perpetrators of each of these deep KGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov.8 This also helped events and the next; ensure that Oswald would not be placed under surveillance. Indeed, former FBI Director 4) one sees in each event the Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained involvement of elements of the that the CIA’s withholding of information was international drug traffic – the major reason why Oswald was not put suggesting that our current under surveillance on November 22, 1963.9 plutonomy is also to some degree a narconomy; A more ominous provocation in 1963 was that of Army Intelligence, one unit of which in 5) in the background of each event Dallas did not simply withhold information (and playing an increasingly about Lee Harvey Oswald, but manufactured important role) one sees the false intelligence that seemed designed to Doomsday Project -- the alternative provoke retaliation against Cuba. I call such emergency planning structure with provocations phase-one stories, efforts to its own communications network, operating as a shadow network portray Oswald as a Communist conspirator (as outside of regular government opposed to the later phase-two stories, also channels. false, portraying him as a disgruntled loner). A conspicuous example of such phase-one stories is a cable from the Fourth Army Command in Bureaucratic Misbehavior as a Factor Texas, reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman 3 9 | 47 | 2 APJ | JF who was also in an Army Intelligence Reserve necessary.”16 This was six months after unit: Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in October 1962, had given explicit (albeit highly Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence qualified) assurances to Khrushchev, that the Section, Dallas Police Department, notified United States would not invade Cuba.17 This did th 112 INTC [Intelligence] Group, thisnot stop the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the Headquarters, that information obtained from JCS Directorate of Plans and Policy) from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in producing a menu of “fabricated provocations 1959 and is a card-carrying member ofto justify military intervention.”18 (One 10 Communist Party.” proposed example of “fabricated provocations” envisioned “using MIG type aircraft flown by This cable was sent on November 22 directly to US pilots to … attack surface shipping or to the U.S.