The War Conspiracy

 JFK 9-11, and the Deep Politics of War (2013)

The Road to 9-11 Wealth Empire and the Future of America (2007)

Drugs, Oil and War (2003)

Crime and Cover-Up (1977)

The Iran-Contra Connection (1987)

Oswald, Mexico and Deep Politics (2013)
The American War Machine (2010)

      Peter Dale Scott’s work is scholarly and exhaustive; and I do emphasize exhaustive. It is also somewhat circular, not because the author does not follow every lead to the hilt, nor because he fails to consider every possible angle—for he diligently pursues each—bringing every fertile connection to light—but because the singularity of the leads he generates can tend to overwhelm the human mind. For the available facts or leads represent an even more final, invisible, more stubbornly embedded conspiracy; one which might be defined by Mr. Scott as that single Deep Event which is the very typos of rational purpose buried within irrational assemblage. Perhaps this explains why conventional American journalists are so fond of writing about ‘conspiracy theorists’ in a dismissively jocular vein, as if anything but actual conspiracy were ever possible. This prejudice for so-called facts—rather than the reasoning behind them—ought to give us pause. About imagined conspiracies we claim to know the folk-wisdom states, but about ourselves—alas, we freely acknowledge that we know nothing! (An admission implicitly conceded by those historians who study recent American history.) This contradiction summarizes and eulogizes the political culture of our day, one of smiley icons gone awry and police who murder the citizens they are supposed to protect. Meanwhile the weighty load of yet other hidden events are steadily presented to us as ‘accidents’, or mere happenstance. It is odd indeed how credulous most people have become, but perhaps not unpredictable, if one does makes allowance for conspiracies. And one of the oddest twists in the story is the very normalization of this liberal naiveté. Only one real headline seems to have been generated since 1963, one that reads every day the same: ‘Things Just Keep Happening to Throw us off Course: We Don’t Understand How or Why’ This is the mental dope than generates the dumbed-down recruit to the military and the despairing student who receives no real education at our expensive Universities. This is the mental torpor that empties the ballot-booth from boredom and lack of choice. This is the harried and narrow-minded businessman, and the political parties who refuse all reasonable compromise. Yet no one seems to inquire into the larger context except a rare contrarian like Mr. Scott. This stubborn persistence makes Mr. Scott’s life-work not only admirable, but an inspiring example of intellectual heroism.

     

       Only when a man as indefatigable as this author appears on the dismal scene—a man willing to leave no stone unturned—a scholar willing to remove even the mountain under the stone—only then do we realize the contrived gravity of our ignorance. Then we come to see that not only do we live encircled by conspiracies, but that our entire notion of the conspiratorial is inadequate to describe our historical situation, one in which the chief actors, in careful tandem, do not whisper in dark alleyways—but rather recognize each other seamlessly—either in their own bureaucracies, or in private, political and privileged settings, and speaking with a similarly privileged discourse, right down to the exchange of pleasantries. (Thus the dark-plans and actors instinctively find one another, for they can well afford the usual enactments of cordiality.) At least this seems to be the idea. At another time they may couch their acts and words in precise legalisms, such as those probably used by Vice President Cheney on September 11, 2001 when he is thought to have secretly set in motion the plan for GOG, or Continuity of Government, during a phone call to President Bush, a plan that he himself had designed, one which in which the Constitution of the United States is suspended to insure that the government of the United States, and not the people, survive whatever disaster is to be imposed upon them. (Naturally all this is performed without their knowledge or consent). For when you don’t bother to tell the citizenry that their Constitution has been suspended, you can work your will slowly, and over time, and perhaps achieve your dark purpose, at least to the extent to which you know what your dark purpose is, which I doubt they do, since evil is always banal and never knows a clear purpose. But such a thriller scenario must be a kick indeed for those who participate in it, for in this trite play small men finally have the pleasure of turning the table on their betters, the founding-fathers, and are thus enabled to feel the grandeur of their own pettiness as they wreck a design which they could never have created.

     

     The reason Americans take the trouble to mock conspiracies is precisely because they are so immersed in them through their institutions that they no longer see them, for they have entered into that Deep State, both psychological and political, that Mr. Scott so well describes in these books. Doubtless this gives those actors very restful sleep—even as the inexorable gears turn, wheels that belong, apparently, to no one, and which thus need no special dispensation. For yet another name for conspiracy in America is simply: business as usual. Business men are rarely unable to find one another, and even more rarely unable to find a common interest. One of the clearest of these interests being, for example, the manufacture of armaments.

      Because these facts are hidden in the open, a certain challenge is presented to the mind. Neither I, nor any reader, will be likely to find more evidence for them than Mr. Scott has already uncovered. Nor do I think, will anyone else but the author will be able to confirm the veracity or importance of so many linkages between persons and organizations of interest. Mr. Scott’s massive study thus stands alone, and in some sense this must be true of the man himself. Were he able to provide us with a simple and declarative truth and a facile explanation he surely would have done so. But having excavated as deep as any citizen can, he is often left, it appears to me, with only thin strands of smoke rising into the night. But such trails are often more valuable than the clear propaganda which is supposed to explain them, for one can almost always hear the hollow sound of something unnatural, of something that protests too much, as Mr. Scott so often demonstrates. 

       In short, I do believe that Mr. Scott is on to something serious that every American ought to take very seriously, namely: that while they have been sleepily accepting whatever the State and the Media has wanted them to believe for the last half-century, a Deep State, in both the psychological and political senses of the term, has utterly swallowed the Constitutional one, degrading the democratic will of the citizenry to a theatre-prop. Even so, Mr. Scott is not the first person to note that the world is run by idiots for idiots, by special interests in the name of democracy, as well as by ‘leaders’ who are actually the basest of ‘followers’. The question of the hour is: how will we respond to this situation, with the self-indulgent laziness of the satiate, or the outrage of our nation’s founders?

     How do we reply, for example, to the precision of a chart Mr. Scott has printed on page 168 of The War Conspiracy, a chart which clearly proves that diplomatic peace overtures of willing third-parties, including Rumania, Poland and Canada, were repeatedly rejected by the United States out-of-hand in the period of the Vietnam War between 1966 and 1968? No conclusion can be drawn from that chart but that the United States did not want to conclude any sort of peace with Vietnam, even at the expense of losing American lives. To our giants of purposeful war the lives of soldiers stupid enough to offer their lives for their country are expendable, and there are no moral qualms. In this instance the economic interests behind the War in Vietnam are made crystal clear.

      I wish it were possible for a mere mortal to hold all the details that Mr. Scott has uncovered clearly in his mind and to make the necessary deductions---but the interlocking wheels are so sordid and so subtle, and the implications so ethically revolting, than one has little trouble understanding why simpler, less disturbing versions of history are such an easy-sell. For what most ethical humans, unlike the CIA, above all desire from tragedies, is the assuagement of grief and an end to pain. (Yet oddly enough to be in this craven position toward power is cooperate in destroying one’s own power, a syndrome we have often witnessed.)  But the last chapter of The War Conspiracy entitled: JFK 9-11 and War: Recurring Patterns the author does not grant us any assuagement; rather he challenges us to face the real truth of these two linked events. It is also made very clear that similar methods of obfuscation stand behind the anomalies within both events. All that I can do here is ask that others read this chapter, for in it logical inference is rigorously employed to reconstruct the suppressed history of the last half-century, a history whose finger points in the opposite direction from the accepted falsehoods. One instance involves stock purchases made before November 22, 1963, another a pre-existing paper-trail, another the role of double-agents Oswald and Ali Mohammed, wars followed by an increase in Heroin and Opium production, as well as the usual game of internal foils between the CIA and the FBI. A final solution may not have yet emerged, but any sensible citizen will prick up their ears.

       Alas, I am unable to keep all these bizarre though perfectly credible scenarios in my mind in a manner which helps me to see an over-arching logic in the affairs of men. Neither is this incidental to the matter of what those scenarios establish; and this may dispose me to less reliable hunches, even if these derive from still more elaborate suppression of the truth. All that I can conclude—is that when I lack all the pieces of a broken mirror—I can nonetheless attempt to see myself in a single chard. From that point forward any evidence which is suppressed, altered or destroyed can only reinforce the fundamental intuition that the truth lies elsewhere. At that point one may be willing to concede that flying saucers are real so long as one is asserting that something is indubitably real; for the alternative is a permanent dream-state, one of half-truth, apparently the preferred ideal of the CIA on all questions whatsoever. Yet there must be something encoded in human-nature that seeks the truth, as opposed to dwelling in twilight. How else can the child be born, the writer write, or the musician compose? However hard our secret agencies work to make truth into fiction, yet they still seem to fail. But why, we must ask, do we make so little effort to understand their (the CIA’s) peculiar system of thought, one in which truth and fiction are always so subtly intertwined? For if they ever entirely succeeded, wouldn’t we all be singing joyous hymns to the Fuehrer, or else enter into obedient but catatonic sleep? Therefore I don’t see, as they do, a genuine alternative to the truth. Are we waiting to behold the bow of justice in the sky, the seal of God’s grace? I cannot understand so much psychological strain dedicated only to proving nothing. When one is enclosed in a dream-state, isn’t it only a matter of time before the mask crumbles? If we know this, then why do we hesitate?

       Our first national purpose must be to free ourselves of an obsession, the idea that our security is necessarily and unalterably opposed by those who wish only for exactly the same security we desire. We cannot achieve security by fostering secret agencies to randomly impose their own designs against the larger purposes of the people, and against other nations. In fact, such agencies are bound to disrupt any level of democracy, and to ruin themselves just as surely as they ruin our credibility. In the end, you cannot have both perfect security and possess democracy; nor can you impose full spectrum dominance without creating at least some measure of full spectrum resentment. Unless, of course, that is exactly your intention; to throw things just enough out of balance so that you deliberately create the wars which enrich private parties and further empower the State. We have allowed our secret agencies to pass judgment on history itself, and given them the means to work their will. The CIA is now a national sacrilege. The very premise of its mission, which was originally to protect our Republic from military attack, has resulted in the destruction of our Republic as a community of free-citizens. President Kennedy wanted to break the CIA, in his own words “into a thousand pieces”, and had he lived he would surely have done just that. This is one of the reasons, perhaps the chief one, for his murder. No nation can live secure from its own faults, its own hubris, or its own people. To walk down that fantastical path is to inherit the wind. Even ancient Athens knew that while their potential enemies were many, their safest recourse was to be able to repel any attack by and for themselves, for all else was compromise that could lead to their internal destruction. This is the sort of practical defense that best suits a democracy, one in which the people’s freedom is itself their greatest defense. We must rid ourselves of the dangerous obsession that simultaneous perfect security and the perfect exercise of our will to power is possible. The two cannot live together within the same house, for one will dominate the other. Let us seek new forms of national being, not those of domination and control, but those based in comity, interdependence and transparence.

       After reading Mr. Scott’s books two further questions present themselves. Can we restrain our secret agencies, rein them in or abolish them? Could the third-estate and a new fifth-estate join forces to overthrow the current dominance of the first, third and second estates, (in their new incarnations of excessive governance, excessive wealth and ironclad secrecy) and thereby initiate the peaceful rejuvenation of American society?

      Will the American people reclaim constitutional government, or will or will they continue to trade a modicum of personal comfort for the arbitrary will of an isolated and well-provisioned elite and an Executive that increasingly resembles a Torquemada? Do the American people have the resolve to retain their freedoms on their own terms, or will they passively permit others, as they have recently demonstrated, to settle those terms in their name? 

  

      The evidence exists that nations, just like individuals, can pass through states of collective madness. Sometimes the madness is curable and brief, at other times it comes unexpectedly, often from the imagined stresses of an overwrought imagination. The United States has not lost its way suddenly, but it has lost its way at dramatic variance with its own recent past. It was at the height of its prestige when it deliberately created organizations that betray the simple necessities of national security, and empower them in ways unforeseen by the men who authored the Declaration and the Constitution. We can justly call these institutions paranoid by reason of the fact that their creation was directed toward an enemy which turned-out to be fanciful—that is ‘the specter of international Communism'. We need to consider the plain truth of our historical error—and let it end there. There is no need to compound our fault. We must rid ourselves of the unhealthy obsession that State Secrecy both creates and fosters.

      Few people recall that between the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the year of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a scant eleven years passed. It is a small amount of time considering the monumental nature of an undertaking that resulted in the creation of a new nation from the backlash of an unpopular tax. Yet it is now fifty-two years since the assassination of a very popular President led to a cascade of changes in American life—reversals would be a more accurate term—years when all sorts of ‘threats’, some real, some manufactured, still others entirely illusory, have whittled-away our liberties step by ominous step. Mr. Scott’s vision may contain elements that are hard to bear, even soul-crushing, but we cannot run from his mirror. The choice is ours to make. Shall we remain compliant, or do we have the courage to alter our course, to raise an active banner, even to rebel, if rebellion is all that is left to us? Or shall we become the mere pawns or observers of a system of governance completely unlike that which our forefathers fashioned?

       In 1938, in a period of great dangers, T.S. Eliot did not hesitate to demand more of western civilization rather than less: “Has our society” he then wrote, “assembled anything more prominent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies, and a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?” With Eliot, we can still hope that civilization is more than compound interest.

      Let us soberly reflect that our Declaration of Independence summarizes the American belief in something more than money: namely the right to be governed by governments chosen and directed by the people, free from the manacles of any force that would enslave them: our founding fathers plainly state this in the Declaration of Independence:

 “Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

      This natural right is ours to exercise whenever we choose.             

                                 Will Morgan, August 9, 2015