Peter Dale Scott
In this two-part analysis, former diplomat and scholar Peter Dale Scott
deciphers the successive stages, since the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, of the United States’ inexorable slide into the situation that
President Eisenhower had feared and cautioned his compatriots against.
Since 26 October 2001 and the introduction of the Patriot Act, a secret
structure - the "Deep State" - has been governing the United States
behind the trappings of democracy.
"I know the capacity that is there to make
tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the
National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology
operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never
cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." - Senator Frank Church (1975)
I would like to discuss four major and badly understood events – the
John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. I will
analyze these deep events as part of a deeper political process linking
them, a process that has helped build up repressive power in America at
the expense of democracy.
In recent years I have been talking about a dark force behind these
events — a force which, for want of a better term, I have clumsily
called a “deep state,” operating both within and outside the public
state. Today for the first time I want to identify part of that dark
force, a part which has operated for five decades or more at the edge of
the public state. This part of the dark force has a name not invented
by me: the Doomsday Project, the Pentagon’s name for the emergency
planning “to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a
nuclear war or some other major crisis.” [1]
My point is a simple and important one: to show that the Doomsday
Project of the 1980s, and the earlier emergency planning that developed
into it, have played a role in the background of all the deep events I
shall discuss.
More significantly, it has been a factor behind all three of the
disturbing events that now threaten American democracy. The first of
these three is what has been called the conversion of our economy into a
plutonomy – with the increasing separation of America into two classes,
into the haves and the have-nots, the one percent and the 99 percent.
The second is America’s increasing militarization, and above all its
inclination, which has become more and more routine and predictable, to
wage or provoke wars in remote regions of the globe. It is clear that
the operations of this American war machine have served the one
percent. [2]
The third — my subject today — is the important and increasingly
deleterious impact on American history of structural deep events:
mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in,
or 9/11, which violate the American social structure, have a major
impact on American society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence,
and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.
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