Peter Dale Scott and His Contribution to Understanding American Politics and the Human Condition By Judyth Vary Baker Anti-conspiracy writers have long sneered at the many critics who have stepped forth exhibiting concern over the findings of the Warren Commission and other U.S. government-sponsored investigations regarding tragic assassinations and the resultant decline of American civilization into the twenty-first century due to war, corruption, lies to the public, and sheer, unregulated greed. A common complaint of Official Version defenders had been that their critics lacked the mental moxie needed to qualify as such. But astride both centuries stands the Colossus of American political analysis – Peter Dale Scott – spanning the gap between socio- political myth and reality, guiding the safe passage of truth to port in these troubling times. From his own website: Biography Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott.. He is married to Ronna Kabatznick;; and he has three children,Cassie,, Mika, and John Scott,, by a previous marriage to Maylie Marshall. His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in(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 (1994, 1995, 2006), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008). 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), published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars. In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award. A new book of poems, Mosaic Orpheus,, will appear in Spring 2009 from McGill-Queen's University Press. 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." …This website is dedicated to helping to promote an informed public opinion that is both local and international. I particularly want to thank those who have sent me supportive or informative emails from 37 countries: Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, Singapore, China, Japan, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Canada (plus 3 more from visitors in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nepal). Special thanks to the visiting professor in Singapore, who said that he was forwarding this URL to his friends in China. I wish also to thank friends who have forwarded useful material, such as the important Irish Times story on bin Laden, the US, and oil, that first reached me via Indonesia from Qatar. I do believe that international public opinion, when it becomes powerful enough, will become the most effective restraint to the excesses and follies of particular governments.. From Spartacus, we can obtain the following quotations from Scott’s writings, showing both his depth of logic and the consistency of his thought: (1) Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) At the first meeting of the newly constituted Warren Commission, Allen Dulles handed out copies of a book to help define the ideological parameters he proposed for the Commission's forthcoming work. American assassinations were different from European ones, he told the Commission. European assassinations were the work of conspiracies, whereas American assassins acted alone. Someone was alert enough to remind Dulles of the Lincoln assassination, when Lincoln and two members of his cabinet were shot simultaneously in different parts of Washington. But Dulles was not stopped for a second: years of dissembling in the name of "intelligence" were not to fail him in this challenge. He simply retorted that the killers in the Lincoln case were so completely under the control of one man (John Wilkes Booth), that the three killings were virtually the work of one man. Dulles's logic here (or, as I prefer to call it, his paralogy) was not idiosyncratic, it was institutional. As we have seen, J. Edgar Hoover had already, by November 25, committed his own reputation and the Bureau to the conclusion that Oswald had done it, and acted alone. Chief Justice Warren knew this, yet said atat the same meeting, "We can start with the premise that we can rely upon the reports of the various agencies that have been engaged in the investigation." John J. McCloy spoke for the extra-governmental establishment when he added that it was of paramount importance to "show the world that America is not a banana republic, where a government can be changed by conspiracy." (2) Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) FBI documents released in 1979 show other instances in which key information was either altered before it reached the Warren Commission, or else withheld altogether. For example, judging from Warren Commission records, the FBI covered up Jack Ruby's connections to organized crime. The Commission did not receive an important interview with Luis Kutner, a Chicago lawyer who had just told the press (correctly) about Ruby's connections to Chicago mobsters Lennie Patrick and Dave Yaras. All the FBI transmitted was a meaningless follow-up interview in which Kutner merely said he had no additional information. Apparently the FBI also failed to transmit a teletype revealing that Yaras, a national hit man for the Chicago syndicate who had grown up with Ruby, and who had been telephoned by one of Ruby's Teamster contacts on the eve of the assassination, was about to attend a " hoodlum meeting" of top East and West Coast syndicate representatives, including some from the "family" of the former Havana crime lord Santos Trafficante. (3) Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) Such an explanation is less plausible for the FBI's interference with leads that appeared to be guiding its agents to the actual assassins of the President - a case, seemingly, of obstruction of justice, or worse. How else should one assess the response of FBI headquarters to a report from Miami that Joseph Adams Milteer, a white racist with Klan connections, had in early November 1963 correctly warned that a plot to kill the President "from an office building with a high-powered rifle" was already "in the working"? These words are taken from a tape-recording of a discussion between Milteer and his friend, Miami police informant Bill Somersett. Miami police provided copies of this tape to both the Secret Service and the FBI on November 10, 1963, two weeks before the assassination, and this led to the cancellation of a planned motorcade for the President in Miami on November 18.20 Although an extremist, Milteer was no loner. Southern racists were well organized in 1963, in response to federal orders for desegregation; and Milteer was an organizer for two racist parties, the National States Rights party and the Constitution party. In addition he had attended an April 1963 meeting in New Orleans of the Congress of Freedom, Inc., which had been monitored by an informant for the Miami police. A Miami detective's report of the Congress included the statement that "there was indicated the overthrow of the present government of the United States," including "the setting up of a criminal activity to assassinate particular persons." The report added that "membership within the Congress of Freedom, Inc., contain high ranking members of the armed forces that secretly belong to the organization." In other words, the deep politics of racist intrigue had become intermingled, in the Congress as elsewhere, with the resentment within the armed forces against their civilian commander. Perhaps the most important example in 1963 was that of General Edwin Walker, whom Oswald was accused of stalking and shooting at. Forced to retire in 1962 for disseminating right-wing propaganda in the armed forces, Walker was subsequently arrested at the "Ole Miss" anti-desegregation riots. Nor was the FBI itself exempt from racist intrigue: Milteer, on tape, reported detailed plans for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Hoover's FBI, by the end of 1963, had also targeted for (in their words) "neutralizing ... as an effective Negro leader." Four days after the assassination Somerset! reported that Milteer had been "jubilant" about it: "Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding you when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered rifle." Milteer also was adamant that he had not been "guessing" in his original prediction.