Excerpt from:
America’s Unchecked
Security State
Part I: The Toxic
Legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s Illegal Powers
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 2, April 29, 2013 .
By Peter Dale Scott
“Dear Bess…. Hoover
- President Harry S Truman, 1947
"The other night, we picked up a situation where this
senator was seen drunk, in a hit-and-run accident, and some good-looking broad
was with him. We got the information, reported it in a memorandum, and by noon the next day, the senator was
aware that we had the information, and we never had trouble with him on
appropriations since."
-- FBI Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach1
“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some
things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. Democracy
flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets
and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”
--Katherine Graham,
publisher of the Washington Post, during a speech at CIA
headquarters, 1988.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." 2
--Lord Acton in an April 1887 letter to the Anglican Bishop of London
J.
Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and Our Doomsday Mania
Peter Dale Scott:
Both scholars and ordinary Americans now look back with
relief on McCarthyism and “the anticommunist hysteria of the early 1950s,” [3] in
the belief that we have outgrown such paranoia and disregard for law and human
rights. But the personal excesses of McCarthy were surface manifestations of
deeper illegal institutional procedures, mostly initiated by J. Edgar Hoover
that never really ended, and indeed have since proliferated…
I believe that some deep events - such as 9/11, Watergate
and the JFK Assassination - are structural: they are not just a part of recent
American history, but have significantly shaped it.
A factor…is the important and increasingly deleterious
impact on the American history of what I have called structural deep events:
events like the JFK Assassination, the Watergate break-in, and 9/11, which
repeatedly involved law-breaking or violence, are mysterious to begin with, are
embedded in ongoing cover processes, have had consequences that enlarge the
scope of cover government (placing it further beyond legal authority), and are
subsequently covered up by systematic falsification in media and internal
government records…
….The JFK Assassination and (I believe) 9/11 involved
complex machinations both inside and outside government, plots perhaps
involving both the state and deep forces outside it…
As I studied the JFK assassination, I quickly recognized
that Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, through his involvement with
local prostitution (and allegedly drugs), had special relationships with
organized crime in Chicago, Dallas, and Cuba, with wealthy oilmen and other
members of the Dallas overworld (some of them friends of J. Edgar Hoover), and
most significantly with the Dallas police.63 All these relationships were
“deep” in the sense that they were suppressed or downplayed by the Warren
Commission in its report….
The Warren Report was systematic in its suppressions, in
order to marginalize both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby as forces external to
the American political system. For example, the Warren Commission reported
their belief “that the evidence does not establish a significant link between
Ruby and organized crime.”64 They chose to suppress many credible reports
that Ruby could secure Dallas police protection for high-level gambling and
narcotics transactions; and they also chose not to transmit the discovery by one
of their junior staff attorneys “that one of Ruby’s suspicious phone contacts,
the convicted Teamster organizer Barney Baker, had phoned Dave Yaras [one of
the Chicago nob’s most notorious assassins] the night before the
assassination.”65
Ruby’s relationships were not just local but international.
Ruby, in a vain attempt to be interviewed by Earl Warren in Washington rather
than Dallas, dropped the name of a mutual lawyer acquaintance, Alfred McLane;
the name was so sensitive that the Warren Hearings in four instances never once
spelled his last name correctly. Yet Warren New
York
….Anyone who even questions the governmental account of 9/11
earns the title “conspiracy theorist.” In the wake of 9/11 the U.S. Government
website has, since 2005, supported various versions of a "Conspiracy
Theories and Misinformation" page, which still seeks to debunk “9/11
conspiracy theories;” and for a while attempted, unsuccessfully, to prove that
“conspiracy theories” about Dallas
…Since 1963 both the FBI and the CIA
have taken steps to counter the efforts of critics to challenge the official
story on Dallas
….For example, when Drew Pearson reported [correctly] that
the FBI had interviewed Oswald [just] before the assassination, yet failed to
warn the Secret Service about him, the FBI tried to silence the columnist…. The
FBI even resorted to “dirty tricks” to suppress dissent over its conclusions.
In February 1964, when Mark Lane New York
….The CIA also took
steps, not just to refute critics of the Warren Commission, but to discredit
them. In 1967, for example, the CIA sent out
to its stations a guidance memo, entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren
Report,” which advised its officers to, among many other things, “point
out…that the critics are…politically interested…financially interested…hasty
and inaccurate in their research;”73
* relationships with organized crime in Chicago, Dallas, and
Cuba, with wealthy oilmen and other members of the Dallas overworld (some of
them friends of J. Edgar Hoover), and most significantly with the Dallas
police.63 All these relationships were “deep” in the sense that they were
suppressed or downplayed by the Warren Commission in its report….
…The Warren Report was systematic in its suppressions, in
order to marginalize both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby as forces external to
the American political system. For example, the Warren Commission reported
their belief “that the evidence does not establish a significant link between
Ruby and organized crime.”64 They chose to suppress many credible reports
that Ruby could secure Dallas police protection for high-level gambling and
narcotics transactions; and they also chose not to transmit the discovery by
one of their junior staff attorneys “that one of Ruby’s suspicious phone
contacts, the convicted Teamster organizer Barney Baker, had phoned Dave Yaras
[one of the Chicago nob’s most notorious assassins] the night before the
assassination.”65
Ruby’s relationships were not just local but international.
Ruby, in a vain attempt to be interviewed by Earl Warren in Washington rather
than Dallas, dropped the name of a mutual lawyer acquaintance, Alfred McLane;
the name was so sensitive that the Warren Hearings in four instances never once
spelled his last name correctly. Yet Warren New
York
….McLane was general counsel for an oil company, Rimrock
Tidelands, whose representative in New York, Santo Sorge, was listed in Congressional
Hearings as “one of the most important [Sicilian] mafia leaders… probably
[with] liaison duties between highest ranking Mafiosi in the United States and
Italy.”66 Mafia representatives are expert in government corruption, which
may explain why Sorge’s paper company was able to obtain oil leases in Tunisia,
leases then farmed out to legitimate development companies and ultimately to
the oil majors.67
The Role of Covert
Agencies in Combating Deep Political Research
….To my knowledge none of the hard facts in the preceding
paragraphs is disputed. Nevertheless, these relationships are usually
suppressed (perhaps because of their importance to the deep forces in our
society). They were avoided altogether by the Warren Commission, and later
perversely distorted by its successor, the House Select Committee on
Assassinations (which portrayed Ruby as a mobster, rather than as a connection
between the mob and the Dallas
….The evidence suggests that Hoover’s careful cultivation of
the media, together with the information he had gathered on journalists and
above all Congressmen, made him, more than any other individual, responsible
for the manipulability of the U.S. media. This is well illustrated by Hoover
Ellen Rometsch
…In the same summer of 1963 the British press was obsessed
with the Christine Keeler sex scandal, a complex story of a prostitution ring
where one of a call girl’s johns had been Secretary of War John Profumo, and
another a suspected Soviet spy. The scandal led inexorably to the resignation
of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in October 1963.
…On June 10, the president had spoken at American
University
All of these potential changes were of concern to Hoover
Dealing with the Keeler scandal in Britain Hoover New York Britain
But the pressures continued. On October 26, a story by Clark
Mollenhoff reported that Rometsch had been expelled from the country, after
“attending parties with congressional leaders and some prominent New
Frontiersmen from the executive branch of government.”
Clark Mollenhoff …was one of Edgar’s “friendly” reporters.
His article added that Senator John Williams…”had obtained an account” of
Rometsch’s activity. It would later emerge that the Senator had come into
possession of documents from the FBI, a leak that only Edgar could have
approved.117
The article added that Williams intended to present his
information to the Senate body already investigating the host of the Rometsch
parties, former Senate aide Bobby Baker.
Now the Kennedy brothers were facing a crisis not just in
the press but in Congress. Bobby dealt with it by going as a supplicant to
Hoover, the man who (in the words of Taylor Branch), “more than any other
person, had the power to determine whether the Rometsch affair stayed as quiet
as [Inga] Arvad [an early JFK mistress, who allegedly had also slept with Adolf
Hitler] or became as noisy as the Profumo scandal in England.”[118] Burton
Hersh agrees: “Only he, Hoover Hoover
The Bobby Baker inquiry continued without reference to
Rometsch, and the U.S. England
As a result of Hoover
But the relationship of the Kennedys to Hoover was now far
more subordinate than before. Bobby promptly issued four wiretaps on Martin
Luther King that Hoover Hoover
The whole episode illustrated dramatically how the U.S. CIA ’s Wurlitzer, but Hoover
….On another level, it illustrates the importance of the
organized sex business and organized crime in reinforcing the influence of deep
powers over public politicians, not just in the case of the Kennedys, but also
in the Koreagate sex scandal of 1976, and allegedly in Watergate as well.122…..
END EXCERPT
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH NOTES:
The Asia-Pacific
Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 2, April 29, 2013 .
By Peter Dale Scott
“Dear Bess…. Hoover
- President Harry S Truman, 1947
"The other night, we picked up a situation where this
senator was seen drunk, in a hit-and-run accident, and some good-looking broad
was with him. We got the information, reported it in a memorandum, and by noon the next day, the senator was
aware that we had the information, and we never had trouble with him on
appropriations since."
-- FBI Assistant Director Cartha
DeLoach1
“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some
things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. Democracy
flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and
when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”
--Katherine
Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, during a speech at CIA
headquarters, 1988.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." 2
--Lord Acton in an April 1887 letter to the Anglican Bishop of London
J.
Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and Our Doomsday Mania
Both scholars and ordinary Americans now look back with
relief on McCarthyism and “the anticommunist hysteria of the early 1950s,” [3] in
the belief that we have outgrown such paranoia and disregard for law and human
rights. But the personal excesses of McCarthy were surface manifestations of
deeper illegal institutional procedures, mostly initiated by J. Edgar Hoover,
that never really ended, and indeed have since proliferated.
This has been especially true since the implementation of
Continuity of Government (COG ) measures on
9/11, measures that for two decades had been refined in the Pentagon’s
“Doomsday Project,” by an extra-governmental (and arguably unconstitutional)
secret committee including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.4 As Patrick
Thronson has observed in a law journal article, “continuity-of-government
procedures…confer powers on the President—such as the unilateral suspension of
habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional
order.”5 Yet some of these measures were then hastily made law in the USA
PATRIOT act of 2001, in support of the so-called “War on Terror.”6
In the 9/11 Commission Report we read (p. 394)
that “Congress responded, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the Patriot
Act.” But the Patriot Act, which Congress (nudged by false-flag anthrax
attacks) passed without time to read it, did not begin as
a response to 9/11. Like the infamous Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964,
with which it deserves to be compared, it had been prepared well before the
event to which it “responded,” in this case slowly and patiently over decades,
starting in the 1950s. In other words, it was the product of an almost
continuous level of secret emergency planning, going back to J. Edgar Hoover,
that I shall show to have underlain both 9/11 and Iran-Contra, and perhaps even
Watergate.
As Len Colodny and Tom Schachtman have noted, among the most
striking features of the PATRIOT Act was its resurrection of the
long-discredited Huston Plan of 1970. The new bill permitted the FBI, CIA ,
and other agencies to engage in activities that had so horrified Attorney
General John Mitchell that he convinced Nixon to rescind the plan four days
after it was promulgated. Mitchell considered unconstitutional the Huston
Plan’s provisions for warrantless wiretapping, opening of mail, “black-bag”
burglaries by U.S.
Attorney General John Mitchell authorized some illicit
measures; but also, at Hoover
And the “threat” which the Huston Plan had addressed (in the
same year as the shootings of students at Kent State and Jackson State) was an
internal one: the danger that anti-war and other popular movements might force
a lasting foreign policy change on Nixon and his successors: a change
preventing America from waging future aggressive wars. (At one stage the Huston
Plan envisaged the creation of camps in Western states for the detention of
anti-war protesters.)
Two of the provisions that Mitchell found unconstitutional –
warrantless surveillance and preventive detention – can be found not just in
the Patriot Act of 2001, the COG provisions
of the 1980s, and the Huston Plan of 1970, but still further back: in the
review of emergency detention plans ordered by LBJ after the March 1967 March
on the Pentagon,8 and in the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950
(eventually overturned).9Ultimately the plans derive from secret powers that
Hoover illegally arrogated to himself, despite explicit prohibitions from
different Attorneys General.10
At this point one can narrate two different histories of
these secret or deep powers. On the public level, the emergency detention
provisions of the McCarran Act were never used; and they were repealed in 1971,
as Hoover
Attorney General John Mitchell approved FBI Director
Hoover’s recommendation that the FBI continue investigating individuals “who
pose a threat to the internal security of the country” for inclusion in an
“administrative” index for anticipated future detention.11
In other words, the only practical consequence of the
Congressional repeal was that Hoover
Also on a deeper level, the planning for detention
continued, almost without a break, until it was finally put into effect on
9/11. In like fashion other illicit powers, initiated by Hoover CIA Director William Casey
and Oliver North. On the public level, again, thanks largely to the
congressional investigations of Watergate and Iran-Contra, these proliferations
were checked. But I hope to show that, while both Nixon and North were ousted,
the plans for illegality they encouraged continued, almost continuously, on a
deeper level.
This essay demonstrates that these deep powers are illegal,
unchecked, and for the most part unwarranted. Some of them may indeed be
needed, because America Boston
J. Edgar Hoover
They have not been designed to meet real threats today, but
are the result of past unchecked bureaucratic proliferation since the 1950s,
mostly after the real Soviet threat to U.S. security had passed.13 They
were refined with sustained energy by COG
planners in the 1980s, when the “Soviet threat” had become a phantom
resurrected only in the propaganda mills of William Casey’s CIA .
The key to the renewed planning was the specter of
Soviet-inspired terrorism. The notion that the Soviet Union was behind global
terrorism was forced on CIA professional
analysts in 1981 by CIA Director Casey,
citing a single book, Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, that is now almost universally
discredited.14 Yet the hysterical CIA
estimates at that time of the Soviet threat soon became permanently embodied in
the hysterical provisions of the Doomsday Project, especially after their implementation
in 2001. I shall argue shortly that these unchecked measures, far from being a
response to 9/11 and al Qaeda, actually contributed (perhaps blindly), to the
events that now are used to justify them.
And when we compare the fifties to what is happening now, we
must recognize that America today is caught up in a new hysteria, or collective
insanity, that is far more over-reaching and dangerous to personal liberty than
the hysteria of either Joe McCarthy or William Casey. Warrantless surveillance
and detention, in particular, exist today on a scale that would have been
inconceivable then. And, as before, on a scale vastly beyond both the law and
what is actually needed for our security.
As in the case of McCarthyism, the people are not the
original sources of this hysteria, but receptacles and responders to a hysteria
generated by their leaders. There were many reasons for this hysteria in the
Cold War, some of them not at all irrational. But central to the origin of Hoover
Lord Acton wrote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely."[15] Even in the absence of absolute
power, we can still say that “Power tends to intoxicate, and unchecked power
intoxicates irrevocably." Since World War Two we have seen the conspicuous
examples of Truman’s Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and later senior CIA
officer Frank Wisner: both these men went insane, had to be removed from
office, and subsequently committed suicide. Less dramatic were the cases of
McCarthy and President Nixon: neither man was ever certified insane, but both
lost power rapidly when they succumbed to the follies of their manic or
paranoid power overreaches.16
I will argue that the same model of manic or paranoid
self-destruction applies, less conspicuously, to other figures, less important
in public history than in this present narrative of unchecked power: men such
as Assistant FBI Director “Crazy” Bill Sullivan, CIA
counterintelligence chief James Angleton, Oliver North, and most recently
Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.17 All three men abused their
assigned powers irrationally, to such an extent that their excesses resulted in
their being driven from office.18 (An important, instructive, but more
debatable example is that of Hoover himself. Hoover
It is a tribute to the long-term sanity and homeostasis of
the American political system that all these men – the central figures in this
essay – lost clout to a greater or lesser degree after this inevitable
autointoxication from unchecked power. Unfortunately the process I am
describing is not a wholly self-correcting one. All of these men (except Hoover
What shall we call the new hysteria? I was once tempted to
call it Cheneyism, after the man who with Donald Rumsfeld planned for the
resurrection of these unconstitutional practices for almost twenty years,
before implementing them on the morning of 9/11. But the new hysteria has
outlasted Cheney, and is by now far more institutionalized than the eccentric
vagaries of either McCarthy or even his puppet-master, J. Edgar Hoover. But
even at this deeper structural level, we see a recurring cycle of manic
institutional repressiveness (notably under Richard Nixon) followed by efforts
of saner retrenchment (the post-Watergate reforms of the late 1970s instituted
chiefly by the Senate Church Committee). Since 9/11 the institutional
proliferation of secret, self-defeating repressive powers has become manic
again, much as our economy in the same decade has passed through recurring
periods of manic exuberant bubbles, followed by recession.20
I call our new hysteria the Doomsday Mania, after the
Doomsday Project that was the Pentagon’s name for the 20 years of COG
planning to suspend parts of the U.S. Constitution.21 The Doomsday Project
began under Reagan in 1982 as emergency planning “to keep the White House and
Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major
crisis.”22 Expanded at the end of the Reagan presidency to cover planning
for any emergency, the planning was entrusted to a secret committee
including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, even when both men were no longer in
the U.S. Government.23 Composed mostly of fellow Republicans, even under
Clinton, the committee became what a former Pentagon official described as in
effect “a secret government-in-waiting.”24
From its outset in 1982 to its implantation on 9/11, the
Doomsday Project was indeed apocalyptic, in its baseless determination that America
Taking the long view, we can see that the human rights
granted (or recognized) by the American Constitution were so broad and
unprecedented that they have bred cycles of hysteria almost from their
outset.26 In the elections of 1796 and 1800 Republicans claimed that John
Adams was determined to restore monarchy in the United States, while
Federalists conversely feared that Jefferson and his allies might import into
America the worst features of the French Revolution.27
Elected as president, Adams , fearing
French revolutionary intervention, secured the passage of the Alien and
Sedition Acts. These bestowed on the president ill-defined powers to
criminalize free speech and to detain and deport resident aliens he deemed
dangerous. In short the new era of freedoms under checks and balances had
swiftly bred its opposite: a resort to unchecked presidential powers to
restrain those freedoms.
This dialectic between checked (constitutional or public)
and unchecked (secret or deep) powers has marked American history ever since,
especially in America’s rapid expansion since World War II from a democracy
into a global empire. In seven decades we have seen such well-publicized crises
as the U-2 flap in 1960 which ended plans for an Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit,
Nixon’s conflict with Congress and the courts in the Watergate crisis, and
Reagan’s showdown with Congress in the Iran-Contra crisis. Less noticed were
other contests between checked and unchecked power that were no less momentous
– such as the so-called Halloween massacre of 1975, part of Rumsfeld’s and
Cheney’s successful campaign from the Ford White House to block the efforts of
Senator Church and others to bring the CIA
and FBI under more effective congressional restraints.28
The nation’s divisions in 1796 anticipated our division
today. Madison’s comment on Adams’ behavior is especially pertinent: “Perhaps
it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to
provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.”29 And while most
Americans probably remember the deportation features of Adams’s laws as a
quaint anachronism, a Homeland Security (DHS) publication of 2003, enacting COG
provisions for massive detention in a ten-year Project Endgame, announced that
its Detention and Deportation Program, now the Office and Detention and Removal
(DRO), was established in a 1955 reorganization of the INS
[Immigration and Naturalization Service] to carry out a mission first
articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798…. Legislation since then has
expanded the detention and removal operations…30
The INS detention program
of the 1950s was the result of detention measures in the McCarran-Walter
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which Congress repealed in 1971. As we
shall see, these measures were the embodiment in law of detention and
deportation powers that Hoover had earlier arrogated to himself illegally. But
far greater numbers of Americans were illegally detained after 9/11 than were
ever detained by Hoover.31
Warrantless surveillance, another feature of the new
Doomsday Mania, has as we shall see, a similar history tracing back to Hoover Hoover
The post-9/11 Doomsday mania has also been marked by the
widespread use of torture in interrogations, and also by targeted
assassinations, even against U.S.
In a sense drone killings today are not secret, but the
Obama administration consistently lies about the program, leading Glen
Greenwald to comment, “People who exercise power inevitably abuse it when they
can wield it in secret. They inevitably lie about what they do when they can
act in the dark.”[32] The NSA meanwhile is engaged in a domestic
data-mining program that is so extensive former NSA insiders fear it could help
“create an Orwellian state.”33
Americans are left with a vague sense that their country has
changed, but are mostly (as in the era of McCarthyism) either too caught up in
the Doomsday Mania to recognize its paranoia, or else frozen in a state of
semi-traumatized denial (much like the “good Germans” of the 1930s).34 The
minority who oppose the present mania mostly feel either powerless, or
uncertain as to what first step must be taken to end it.35
Meanwhile we are living under a government that in certain
respects is increasingly lawless and out of control. It is true that the
government is facing new challenges of a type never experienced before, and
that some emergency measures are justifiable in this crisis. But clearly the
breakdown of legal restraints is counterproductive in the badly named “War on
Terror.” To give just one example, the number of jihadist warriors in the world
has increased, as Tim Weiner notes, after “the images from Abu Ghraib became a
recruiting poster across the world.”36 This example of counterproductive
unchecked illegality is not just an anecdote, but only one example of how the
so-called “War on Terror” has done more to generate and perpetuate terror than
to contain it.37
Weiner believes that the Doomsday Mania has in some respects
abated since the first G.W. Bush administration, because the FBI under Obama
has now adopted a 460-page set of guidelines calling for “rigorous obedience to
constitutional principles and guarantees.”38 But David Shipler,
another Times reporter, has dismissed recent headlines about the
breaking of “lethal terrorist plots”, saying that they were in fact
“dramas…facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed
as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide
vest and rudimentary training.”[39]
Meanwhile there are no comparable moves towards curbing the
NSA’s controversial data-mining of Americans, or the most illegal and
counterproductive programs of all – the Special Forces killer squads and drone
attacks, which in August 2012 killed a respected moderate Yemeni cleric, along
with the al Qaeda representatives with whom he was negotiating.40
|
The
National Security Agency, America’s largest intelligence agency, is also
one of its least supervised.
|
Even within government, there are increasing numbers of
people who recognize that the secret powers of other agencies also need to be
similarly brought back under legal control. But many congressional attempts to
address the problem of state illegality can be considered to have actually
aggravated it, by regularizing illegal practices in a statute. A prominent
example was the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012, which
authorized the President, at his urging, to detain U.S.
What is needed instead is a redirection of the U.S.
Government away from mania and illegality, such as that which ended the
McCarthy era. But to so deal with the remaining illegalities of the Doomsday
Mania, it will be helpful to understand their illegal origins in steps taken by
J. Edgar Hoover, at first against explicit orders from his superiors, the
Attorneys General. Though there is never any single cure to widespread social
problems, it is high time, I believe, for a first step towards normalcy to be
taken: to end the source of illegal powers, namely, the state of emergency
proclaimed after 9/11. And to take that step I agree with Madison
Hooverism as the Source and the Model for Deep
State
It is clear that human rights today are under attack, along
with the constitution itself; yet there is no consensus on how to respond.
Some, ranging from the Tea Party on the right to anarchists on the left,
believe that the enemy is the state itself. Another group, which once included
myself, have pointed to a slightly different and more vulnerable primary enemy
-- not the state but what I have often referred to as the deep state, defined
as all those powers not constitutionally or legally established that are
driving the exercise of state power. One purpose of this essay is to define the
American deep state more precisely, as the aggregate of informal and illegal
powers assembled first by J. Edgar Hoover, and later augmented with the similar
powers accumulated by the CIA and other
covert agencies.
Having spent several years studying the historic origins of
the American deep state, I would now like to propose a third, more limited
target for activist reformers: not the powers of the deep state in themselves,
but the abuse of these powers to override of the rule of law -- for the goal of
American global dominance (including efforts to control the world’s
petroresources).
I hope in this essay to distinguish between three markedly
distinct uses and abuses of the deep state:
Hooverism: the use of the assembled powers of the deep state
for conservative purposes, to preserve the status quo by neutralizing
other forces threatening it from within;
McCarthyism: the use of the assembled powers of the deep
state for radical purposes, to modify the status quo and effect
political change; Doomsday Mania: the wildly expanded use of the assembled
powers of the deep state (as envisaged under the Doomsday Project),
to suspend the status quo, and to liberate these powers for global
dominance.
McCarthyism was a brief episode of collective mania in
American history, which ended as McCarthy himself became more and more a loose
cannon out of control, demonstrably erratic in his behavior if not psychotic.
Hooverism, in contrast, endured until shortly before Hoover’s death. For
Hoover, who became a virtual dictator within his own fiefdom of the FBI, was at
the same time externally constrained in his exercise of power. This was due
largely to Truman’s antipathy to Hoover CIA and OPC ,
blocking the strenuous efforts of Hoover
I consider the Doomsday Mania, as defined here, to be the
major constitutional danger we face today to the American way of life. More
than McCarthy ever did, it threatens traditional American politics, and indeed
the constitution itself. I hope to show in this essay that its gross expansion
of the random aggregation of deep powers assembled by Hoover, implemented in
the panic and confusion immediately following 9/11 (and the subsequent
mysterious anthrax attacks, another unsolved crime), has resulted in America
now living under what Dana Priest has called “two governments: the one its
citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a
parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade
into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own.”42
When I began this essay, it was to show that the domestic
roots of the Doomsday Mania, including warrantless surveillance, warrantless
detention (two major provisions of the Continuity of Government provisions)
along with the enabling compliance of a suppressive governing media, all had
their origins in measures taken on his own initiative by J. Edgar Hoover. I
once identified Hooverism with McCarthyism,.43 But I have come to see that
the self-defeating excesses of McCarthyism quickly ended, whereas Hoover
Ellen Schrecker rightly reports that, “had observers known
in the 1950s what they learned in the 1970s… ‘McCarthyism’ would probably be
called 'Hooverism.’44 For the FBI was the bureaucratic heart of the
McCarthy era.”45 She documents what is now widely known, that Hoover,
through cutouts, was feeding McCarthy the information enabling him to grab
public attention through televised hearings. “By the middle of 1953, however,
Hoover had begun to worry that the senator’s growing recklessness might somehow
compromise the Bureau and so he cut off the flow.”46 Soon afterwards
McCarthy was discredited – even more so as his alcoholism and other
self-destructive traits became more obvious -- and he ceased to be a major
influence in American politics.
The falling-out illustrated the fundamental difference
between the two men’s uses of secret information. Hoover’s strategy was for
most of his life to acquire it to maintain influence and control over others.
McCarthy’s, in contrast, was to use it to expose and destroy others. But this
was not the only or even the most important difference between the two men. I
hope to show that Hoover’s overriding policy in using secret information was to
maintain the status quo, in particular to prevent either left- or right-wing
radicals from effecting fundamental change. By using secret information against
other individuals and agencies more powerful than himself, McCarthy’s ambition
(far more than Hoover
The literature about Hoover
On the other hand are those who point to Hoover’s role in
amassing a system of secret powers that is now far more effective in
controlling the public state, than the public state is in controlling its own
secret agencies. This aggregation of a second layer of power independent, and
often subversive of the formal institutions of state, has consolidated the
influence in America of what I have called a “deep state;” and its control over
other parts of government has intensified the characteristics of America as a
“dual state.”
My essay will have much to say about Hoover
I shall illustrate what I mean by describing Hoover’s
little-known use of organized crime to defeat a growing and murderous Klan
insurrection in the 1960s, a potential race war that threatened to annihilate
all of the peacefully achieved results of the civil rights movement in that
era. In this instance, as opposed to his unconscionable COINTEL program for
“neutralizing” Martin Luther King, 49 Hoover
It is difficult to extrapolate or draw conclusions from
emergency situations. Specifically I do not believe one can use Hoover’s
illegalities to justify the present erosion of human liberties in the misnamed
and miswaged “war on terror.” It is important to distinguish between Hoover
What is to be done? In concrete terms, the first steps are
very simple. Congress must exercise its statutory responsibility to review the
state of emergency that has been in existence since September 2011, with a view
to its termination. And it must also review all of the secret Continuity of Government
(COG ) measures that have been implemented
since 9/11, including warrantless surveillance and massive emergency
detentions, in order to see which of these should also be terminated.
Our decayed political process is not close to achieving
either of these goals. Most Americans are not even aware that we are in a state
of emergency. The purpose of this essay is to help achieve the needed change in
consciousness, by showing how secret changes, achieved illegally by Hoover
And to begin with, I must challenge the prevailing mentality
in the governing media, which dismisses this essay’s ensuing study of deep
events as “conspiracy theory.” I shall begin with one of the examples of how
the bureaucratic agendas of shadow bureaucracies have helped lead (probably
unintentionally) to al Qaeda terror. This example is unfortunately far from
unique.
How an FBI Decision Helped Set Up Al Qaeda Terror
In early 1993 a wanted Egyptian terrorist named Essam Hafez
Marzouk, a close ally of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, arrived at Canada Vancouver Airport
If the RCMP had detained Ali Mohamed, who was much bigger
game than the first terrorist, hundreds of lives might have been saved. After
being released, Ali Mohamed went on to Nairobi. There in December 1993 he and
his team photographed the U.S. Embassy, and then delivered the photos to Osama
bin Laden in Khartoum, leading to the Embassy bombing of 1998.51 Ali
Mohamed later told an FBI agent that he also trained al Qaeda terrorists in how
to hijack airplanes using box cutters.52
The RCMP release of Ali Mohamed was unjustified, clearly had
historic consequences, and may have contributed to 9/11. Yet the release was
done for a bureaucratic reason: Ali Mohamed gave the RCMP the phone number of
an FBI agent, John Zent, in the San Francisco FBI office, and told them, “If
they called that number, the agent on the other end of the line would vouch for
him.” As Ali Mohamed had predicted, Zent ordered his release.53
Ali Mohamed was an important double agent, of major interest
to more important U.S. USG
still had not sentenced him in 2006; and he may still not have gone to
jail.54 The story of his release in Vancouver
Mohamed’s release in Vancouver CIA ,
U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg, the murder of Jewish extremist Meir Kahane,
and finally the cover-up of 9/11 perpetrated by the 9/11 Commission and their
witness, 56 U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.
The release of Mohamed was remarkably similar to the later
release of David Headley (alias Daood Sayed Gilani) whom “U.S. Pakistan
The deep event is also an example of deep politics, a mixture
of intrigue and suppression involving not just a part of the U.S. Government,
but also the governing media. Let me say a bit more about the role of media
suppression in the creation and preservation of deep events. To this day
(according to a search of Lexis Nexis) the Vancouver release incident, well
covered in Canada’s leading newspaper The Toronto Globe and
Mail (December 22, 2001), has never been mentioned in any major
American newspaper. Nor is there any surviving mention of it in the best mainstream
book about the FBI and Ali Mohamed, The
Black Banners, by former FBI agent Ali Soufan (a book that was itself
heavily and inexcusably censored by the CIA ,
after being cleared for publication by the FBI).57
The U.S.
For the full story one had to go to the media of Britain Canada Australia Singapore
In 1998, after the Embassy bombings, Mohamed was finally
arrested. In the ensuing trial an FBI Agent, Daniel Coleman, entered a court
affidavit (approved by Patrick Fitzgerald) which summarized the Vancouver
In 1993, MOHAMED advised the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(“RCMP”) that he had provided intelligence and counter-intelligence training in
Afghanistan Vancouver ,
Canada United
States Afghanistan Sudan
Like the American media, this FBI affidavit suppressed the
fact that Mohamed, an admitted ally of Osama bin Laden caught red-handed with
another known terrorist, was released on orders from the FBI.
The whole episode illustrates what has become all too common
in recent American history, the way in which secret bureaucratic policies can
take priority over the public interest, even to the point of leading to mass
murder (since it contributed to the Embassy bombings). It is also an
example of what I mean by the two levels of history in America
The collaboration in deep politics of forces outside the
official or public state – which includes the mass media – has persuaded me
reluctantly to use the concept of the deep state, and expand it to refer, not
just to covert agencies, but also to the media and other controlling forces,
both inside and outside the public state.
My intention is to focus on the second kind of events –
those deep events either not discussed in the governing media or else referred
to dismissively as the figments of “conspiracy theory.”
But first let us consider these deep events in a larger
context. I believe that some deep events – such as 9/11, Watergate, and the JFK
assassination -- are structural: they are not just a part of recent American
history, but have significantly shaped it.
Deep Events and Deep Powers in Recent American History
There have been four interrelated and alarming trends in
recent American history. The first is America U.S.
This can scarcely be separated from the third trend: the
recent increasing separation of America America America
The fourth, a factor underlying the other three, is the
important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history of what I
have called structural deep events: events, like the JFK assassination, the
Watergate break-in, and 9/11, which repeatedly involve law-breaking or
violence, are mysterious to begin with, are embedded in ongoing covert processes,
have had consequences that enlarge the scope of covert government (placing it
further beyond legal authority), and are subsequently covered up by systematic
falsifications in media and internal government records.
I have come to believe that these structural deep events
should be studied as part of a single process. I need this term to distinguish
between two kinds of deep events. Some, like the U-2 incident in 1960 that led
to cancelation of a proposed Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting, or the Tonkin
Gulf U.S. North Vietnam Tonkin
Gulf
In its origins the American deep state was no more than a
milieu or arena of action involving three important areas beyond public
consciousness: the underworld of organized crime, the overworld of wealthy
persons and interests with contacts in organized crime, including both
America’s old Protestant Ascendancy (as Burton Hersh has named it) 61 and
also America’s self-made new ascendancy (chiefly Catholic and Jewish) Finally
it included the state itself, particularly the state’s semi-legal covert
elements like the FBI and CIA with their
special relationships to both underworld and overworld. In short, it was a
widespread milieu of many relationships which are normally suppressed in the
public consciousness and above all in the governing media. But the deep state
slowly acquired more and more elements of coherence, as Hoover
These normally suppressed relationships exist, and affect
history; but they did not cohere until recently. Thus I will refer more often
to deep powers and only sparingly to acts of the “deep state,” even then not so
much to attribute blame to it as obliquely to exonerate the public state itself
– much as we use the term “act of God,” not to blame God (still less to prove
God’s existence), but obliquely, to indicate humans are not responsible. There
are two kinds of deep powers referred to in this essay: both those that Hoover
The concept of a “deep state” is however useful in all
developed societies, because of the failure of the state to live up to Max
Weber’s definition of it: as an entity which successfully “claims the monopoly
of the legitimate use of physical force within a given
territory."62 This is true even in a state with vast military power
and no significant external security threat from another nation or group of
nations.
As I studied the JFK assassination, I quickly recognized
that Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, through his involvement with
local prostitution (and allegedly drugs), had special relationships with
organized crime in Chicago, Dallas, and Cuba, with wealthy oilmen and other
members of the Dallas overworld (some of them friends of J. Edgar Hoover), and
most significantly with the Dallas police.63 All these relationships were
“deep” in the sense that they were suppressed or downplayed by the Warren
Commission in its report.
The Warren Report was systematic in its suppressions, in
order to marginalize both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby as forces external to
the American political system. For example, the Warren Commission reported
their belief “that the evidence does not establish a significant link between
Ruby and organized crime.”64 They chose to suppress many credible reports
that Ruby could secure Dallas police protection for high-level gambling and
narcotics transactions; and they also chose not to transmit the discovery by
one of their junior staff attorneys “that one of Ruby’s suspicious phone
contacts, the convicted Teamster organizer Barney Baker, had phoned Dave Yaras
[one of the Chicago nob’s most notorious assassins] the night before the
assassination.”65
Ruby’s relationships were not just local but international.
Ruby, in a vain attempt to be interviewed by Earl Warren in Washington rather
than Dallas, dropped the name of a mutual lawyer acquaintance, Alfred McLane;
the name was so sensitive that the Warren Hearings in four instances never once
spelled his last name correctly. Yet Warren New
York
McLane was general counsel for an oil company, Rimrock
Tidelands, whose representative in New York, Santo Sorge, was listed in
Congressional Hearings as “one of the most important [Sicilian] mafia leaders…
probably [with] liaison duties between highest ranking Mafiosi in the United
States and Italy.”66 Mafia representatives are expert in government
corruption, which may explain why Sorge’s paper company was able to obtain oil
leases in Tunisia, leases then farmed out to legitimate development companies
and ultimately to the oil majors.67
The Role of Covert Agencies in Combating Deep Political
Research
To my knowledge none of the hard facts in the preceding
paragraphs is disputed. Nevertheless, these relationships are usually
suppressed (perhaps because of their importance to the deep forces in our
society). They were avoided altogether by the Warren Commission, and later
perversely distorted by its successor, the House Select Committee on
Assassinations (which portrayed Ruby as a mobster, rather than as a connection
between the mob and the Dallas
In like fashion the 9/11 Commission suppressed significant
evidence in order to marginalize the alleged highjackers, and relied instead on
virtually worthless testimony about al Qaeda obtained by torture.68 For
example, the 9/11 Report, relying on torture testimony, called torture victim
Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn) a ‘Bin Ladin lieutenant,’ [261]
and an ‘al Qaeda lieutenant.’”[ 277], saying that he had been “a major figure in
the [2000] millennium plots” [255].
All of this was subsequently questioned, and to date
Zubaydah has never been charged with anything. In 2009 theWashington
Post reported, Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda,
according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and
interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military
sources…. [O]ne former Justice Department official [said] “To make him the
mastermind of anything is ridiculous."69
In the same year the U.S.
Anyone who even questions the governmental account of 9/11
earns the title “conspiracy theorist.” In the wake of 9/11 the U.S. Government
website has, since 2005, supported various versions of a "Conspiracy
Theories and Misinformation" page, which still seeks to debunk “9/11 conspiracy
theories;” and for a while attempted, unsuccessfully, to prove that “conspiracy
theories” about Dallas
Since 1963 both the FBI and the CIA
have taken steps to counter the efforts of critics to challenge the official
story on Dallas
For example, when Drew Pearson reported [correctly] that the
FBI had interviewed Oswald [just] before the assassination, yet failed to warn
the Secret Service about him, the FBI tried to silence the columnist…. The FBI
even resorted to “dirty tricks” to suppress dissent over its conclusions. In
February 1964, when Mark Lane New York
The CIA also took steps,
not just to refute critics of the Warren Commission, but to discredit them. In
1967, for example, the CIA sent out to its
stations a guidance memo, entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,”
which advised its officers to, among many other things, “point out…that the
critics are…politically interested…financially interested…hasty and inaccurate
in their research;”73
*
The Source of Hoover’s Illicit Power: the FBI’s Intelligence
Division
By the 1960s Hoover had become one of the most powerful
political figures in America, thanks chiefly to his ability to use the FBI’s
Investigative Division to intimidate, blackmail, or destroy the careers of
those he deemed dangerous political dissidents.
Hoover had first exercised this power during the Red Scare
of 1919, when, as head of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence
Division, he had without trial deported hundreds of aliens in the so-called
Palmer Raids (along with Emma Goldman, who was arguably an American citizen).74 Hoover
had acted at times without consulting or informing President Wilson, in
collaboration with a huge army of volunteer spies, the American Protective
League, which had been organized by business executives.75 Hoover did not
by any means act alone: to help put down a national steel industry strike at
this time, the U.S. army imposed martial law in certain areas.76
One should acknowledge that Hoover himself briefly played a
different role, professionalizing the Bureau of Investigation, and accepting for
about a decade the directive given him by Attorney General Harlan Stone on May
13, 1924: “The activities of the Bureau are to be limited strictly to
investigations of violations of law.”[77] Although he had been a major
player in the Palmer Raids of 1919-20, Hoover now dismantled his Investigative
Division (for over a decade), concentrated on solving personal crimes already
committed, such as bank robberies, and never again involved the Bureau in
anything like the Palmer Raids. On the contrary, in 1941 he was a leading
opponent within the government of the decision (which originated with a local
Army field commander) to round up and intern Japanese
Americans.78 This wholesale internment program overrode Hoover’s own
proposal for the selective detention of those Japanese already identified on
the FBI’s Custodial Detention list (described below). It represented, in
effect, an unexpected Army rebuff to Hoover
Instead, the Bureau of Investigation, which in 1935 became
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pursued bootleggers, bank robbers and
other gangsters, from John Dillinger to Al Capone. Non-criminal intelligence
files on the general public only became the hallmark of the FBI after 1936,
when Roosevelt told Hoover he was interested in “’obtaining a broad picture’ of
the Communist and Fascist movements” in America.”79
Roosevelt was responding to a troubling message from Hoover
about American right-wing activity at the highest level. In 1935 Marine Corps
Major General Smedley Butler reported to Hoover that he had been approached by
two representatives of Wall Street to lead a right-wing coup d’état against
President Roosevelt. Curt Gentry writes that “Hoover informed Butler that since
there was no evidence that a federal criminal statute had been violated, he did
not have the authority to order an investigation.”80 We see here a key to
Hoover’s political astuteness: his refusal ever to involve himself in disputes
among those whose power was equal to or greater than his own. (We see this
again in his refusal, for years, to involve the FBI in the investigation of
either organized crime or the international drug traffic.)
However Hoover sought and obtained authority from FDR to
reestablish his Investigative Division, after a second report from General
Butler: that the indigenous American Fascist, Father Charles Coughlin, had
“approached General Butler and urged him to lead an armed expedition into Mexico
This time Hoover reported Butler’s information to Roosevelt;
and obtained from the president, on August 24, 1936, a verbal go-ahead to
conduct investigations on a wide range of domestic political activities, right
and left.82 With this go-ahead, Hoover reestablished an Intelligence Division,
which eventually evolved into the source of his power over others, including
law-abiding Americans.83 According to Marc Aronson,
That secret conversation was the moment when Hoover’s life
story changed American history. He was given real authority to protect the
nation, which he slowly but surely transformed into the right to play by his
own rules, even if that totally undermined the laws and principles of the
democracy he was protecting.84
Because no law or written document had conferred this power
on him, Hoover Hoover
His method of dealing with Father Coughlin is a good example
of this.
Coughlin’s subsequent silence, which lasted for decades, is
usually attributed to an order from his bishop, after a deal negotiated with
Attorney General Biddle.86 But after Coughlin’s death in 1979, his
psychiatrist revealed that what silenced the priest had not been
sudden obedience to his bishop, whom he had successfully
defied for several years. That cover story was circulated in May 1942 by church
authorities…. Coughlin felt the effects of… J. Edgar Hoover [who] had proof of
Coughlin’s homosexual activity. That proof, communicated in the verbal exchange
between Hoover and Coughlin, was sufficient to silence Coughlin’s public voice
until May 24, 1972…. Hoover
Armed in 1936 with Roosevelt ’s verbal
authorization, Hoover
When Truman proved uninterested in Hoover’s dire warnings,
Hoover turned instead to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and
the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), sharing his files above all
with two selected spokesmen, young Congressman Richard Nixon of HUAC in 1947,
and later Senator Joseph McCarthy of the SISS in 1950.89 Armed with
information from Hoover to capture headlines, first Nixon and later Ronald
Reagan were launched into careers of public prominence that led them to the
White House.90 Both men, in different ways, would then contribute to the
further institutionalization of the covert intelligence powers first developed
by Hoover
Hoover eventually collected information on all those with
political influence, from members of Congress to the very wealthy; and he
retained personal control over this information in his files to protect his
position. For example he reportedly had
343 closely held case files on the business activities of
Joseph P. Kennedy, starting with the bootlegging years and including coverage
of several illegal – treasonous, even – transactions brought off while Kennedy
was Ambassador to the Court of Saint James.91
By all accounts, Hoover’s wealth of such information is what
enabled him to retain his office as Director for life, and perhaps influence
other major political decisions.92
Hoover’s Powers and the Strengthening of the American Dual
State
The election of Eisenhower in 1952 enhanced Hoover Washington
Between May 1953 and June 1955 only 8 persons were dismissed
as security risks but 273 submitted their resignations…. The result was a
self-censorship which undoubtedly had an effect on American foreign policy, few
daring to express their opinions freely for fear they would be accountable to
McLeod and, eventually, McCarthy, with whom he shared the findings of his
investigations. Through McLeod and his cadre, Hoover was tapped into every part
of the State Department. Aides say he knew many of [John Foster] Dulles’s
decisions even before the president did.94
The victims particularly affected were old “China KMT .
Thus was officially instituted a system whereby one part of
government, the FBI, gained the power to install its agents in another, for the
purpose of affecting its policies by purging its personnel. The resulting
demoralization and reorientation of State long outlasted the fall of McCarthy.
It led to two decades of unreal China policy, accompanied by a long-lasting
inability of State to oppose reckless CIA
and Pentagon escalations of anticommunist violence in Southeast Asia. State
Department veteran James C. Thomson, after resigning in 1966 over the Vietnam
War, wrote an important article blaming America Southeast Asia on the purging of
expertise in the McCarthy era, along with Democratic Party remembrance of the
"loss of China
Criticizing this state of affairs from the perspective of
someone who had witnessed the SS purges in Nazi Germany, political science
professor Hans Morgenthau in 1955 deplored the condition of a similar “dual
state” in America, in which the “authorities charged by law” were subordinated
to a hostile right-wing clique with “an effective veto over the decisions of
the former.”96
Swedish professor Ola Tunander, expanding on Morgenthau’s
critique, called the second state a “deep state.”97 Following him in 2007
and 2008, I also defined the deep state somewhat restrictively, as an
unrepresentative “restricted locus of top-down power,” or as a parallel
structure or “hard-edged coalition,” consisting primarily of the covert
agencies (like the CIA ) that are
“responsive…to the overworld, but with little or no other public
constituency.”98
I now use the term “deep state” for the larger aggregation
of extralegal powers inside and outside government that Hoover
Yet these very examples prove, on closer examination, to
have been no exceptions at all. The full story of Watergate is far from
understood; yet it is conceded now that a major source for the stories
that in 1974 brought down Nixon was Mark Felt, then the Associate Director and
highest permanent agent in the FBI.100 In other words Felt was merely
perpetuating a practice of controlled leaks that had been practiced for years
by Hoover. The media turn against the Vietnam War occurred chiefly in 1968,
when many in the USG , including the “Wise
men” under Clark Clifford whom LBJ appointed to advise him, had decided that
the search for a victory in Vietnam America
The Orwellian silencing of the American media is best
illustrated by comparing them with the British. In theory America is
constitutionally committed to a free press, whereas the British press is guided
by a system of Defence Advisory Notices, disregard of which can lead to
prosecution under the UK Official Secrets Act.[102] But in practice it has
become notorious that scandals involving both countries are regularly broken in
the United Kingdom, with the American media following belatedly if at all.
Take for example, the so-called “Manning memorandum” on a
top secret meeting about Iraq
The memo also shows that the president and the prime
minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside
Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned
invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation,
including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors
of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr.
Hussein.103
This was almost two months after the news-making memo had
been first reported in three British newspapers, along with Channel Four
TV.104 For years afterwards the memo story continued to make headlines in
the British, Australian, and New Zealand newspapers, but from a review of
Lexis-Nexis I can find no other reports of it in the major newspapers of the
United States or Canada.105
I should add that the Orwellian behavior of the U.S. CIA operations
in Southeast Asia were partly financed by proceeds from the KMT -controlled
drug traffic, the U.S. routinely parroted the false claims of Harry Anslinger,
chief of the federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN ),
that KMT drugs reaching America via Bangkok
and Hong Kong were coming instead from Communist China.106 (Anslinger “had
established a working relationship with the CIA
by the early 1950s.”)107
In a major FBN bust in
1959, for example,
The arrests were delayed until after the ringleader, Chung
Wing Fong, a former Hip Sing president and official of the San Francisco
Anti-Communist League (a KMT front) had been
ordered by the US consulate in Hong Kong to travel to Taiwan. In this way Fong
became no more than an unindicted conspirator, and the KMT
disappeared from view; [George] White then told the US press that the heroin
had come from Communist China (“most of it from a vast poppy field near
Chungking”).108
(FBN official George
White was simultaneously a CIA operative.)
The FBN propaganda line
on Asian opium, which effectively protected the pro-KMT
societies distributing it in America, went essentially unchallenged in the US
press until the 1970s, when Nixon began revising U.S. policy towards China. In
the 1980s the press would similarly unite to transmit government lies
protecting the major cocaine traffickers and distributors who were
simultaneously supporting Reagan’s Contra army in Nicaragua.109 And in the
1990s when Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Gary Webb showed how major cocaine
dealers supporting the Contras were allowed to traffic with impunity, the major
media united to destroy his career, in what Alexander Cockburn called “one of
the most venomous and factually inane assaults…in living memory.”110
It would of course be foolish to blame Hoover CIA , for this particular
propaganda line. We now know quite a lot about the CIA ’s
Operation Mockingbird: its extensive program, or “mighty Wurlitzer,” to
influence American media beginning in the 1950s.111 But the CIA ’s
manipulations of the press built upon a governing media that had already been
conditioned by Hoover
A key event in this conditioning was the extended media
drama of the Alger Hiss case and the Pumpkin Papers, in which the on-stage
performance of young Richard Nixon was backstopped by Hoover.112
The evidence suggests that Hoover’s careful cultivation of
the media, together with the information he had gathered on journalists and
above all Congressmen, made him, more than any other individual, responsible
for the manipulability of the U.S. media. This is well illustrated by Hoover
In the same summer of 1963 the British press was obsessed
with the Christine Keeler sex scandal, a complex story of a prostitution ring
where one of a call girl’s johns had been Secretary of War John Profumo, and
another a suspected Soviet spy. The scandal led inexorably to the resignation
of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in October 1963.
|
Ellen Rometsch
|
On June 10, the president had spoken at American
University
All of these potential changes were of concern to Hoover Britain Hoover New York Britain
But the pressures continued. On October 26, a story by Clark
Mollenhoff reported that Rometsch had been expelled from the country, after
“attending parties with congressional leaders and some prominent New
Frontiersmen from the executive branch of government.”
Clark Mollenhoff …was one of Edgar’s “friendly” reporters.
His article added that Senator John Williams…”had obtained an account” of
Rometsch’s activity. It would later emerge that the Senator had come into
possession of documents from the FBI, a leak that only Edgar could have
approved.117
The article added that Williams intended to present his
information to the Senate body already investigating the host of the Rometsch
parties, former Senate aide Bobby Baker.
Now the Kennedy brothers were facing a crisis not just in
the press but in Congress. Bobby dealt with it by going as a supplicant to
Hoover, the man who (in the words of Taylor Branch), “more than any other
person, had the power to determine whether the Rometsch affair stayed as quiet
as [Inga] Arvad [an early JFK mistress, who allegedly had also slept with Adolf
Hitler] or became as noisy as the Profumo scandal in England.”[118] Burton
Hersh agrees: “Only he, Hoover
The Bobby Baker inquiry continued without reference to
Rometsch, and the U.S. England
As a result of Hoover
But the relationship of the Kennedys to Hoover was now far
more subordinate than before. Bobby promptly issued four wiretaps on Martin
Luther King that Hoover Hoover
The whole episode illustrated dramatically how the U.S. CIA ’s Wurlitzer, but Hoover
On another level, it illustrates the importance of the
organized sex business and organized crime in reinforcing the influence of deep
powers over public politicians, not just in the case of the Kennedys, but also
in the Koreagate sex scandal of 1976, and allegedly in Watergate as well.122
Find the second half of this essay here.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English
Professor at the University of California Berkeley
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "America's
Unchecked Security State: Part I: The Toxic Legacy of J. Edgar Hoover's Illegal
Powers," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 2, April 29,
2013.
Articles on related subjects
• Peter Dale Scott, Systemic Destabilization in
Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination and the Oklahoma City
Bombing as a Strategy of Tension
• Peter Dale Scott, Why
Americans Must End America's Self-Generating Wars
• Jeremy Kuzmarov, Police Training, “Nation
Building” and Political Repression in Postcolonial South Korea
• Peter Dale Scott, The NATO Afghanistan War
and US-Russian Relations: Drugs, Oil, and War
• Peter
Dale Scott, Norway
• Tim
Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South
Korea
Notes
1 As reported by FBI Special Agent Arthur Murtagh, in
Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 376; citing Pike Report, Pt 3, 1968.
3 Brian Fitzgerald, McCarthyism: The Red
Scare (Minneapolis , Minn.
4 Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project, Deep Events,
and the Shrinking of American Democracy,”
5 Patrick A. Thronson, “Toward Comprehensive Reform of
America’s Emergency Law Regime,” University of Michigan Journal of Law
Reform, Vol. 46, No. 2, Winter 2013, 737.
6 See “How the Anti-Terrorism Bill Allows for Detention
of People Engaging in Innocent Associational Activity,” ACLU, October 23, 2001 , link.
7 Len Colodny and Tom Schachtman, The Forty Years
War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama(New
York Hoover CIA .
8 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Report, Book II -
Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (henceforth Church
Committee, Book II), 91. For whatever reason, The Church Committee Report is
silent about the detention provisions of the Huston Plan (loc. cit., 112-15).
9 Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the Cold War
consensus: the political economy of U.S.
10 See e.g. Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans:
Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1978), 99-100; Paul D. Borman, “The Selling of Preventive
Detention 1970,” Northwest Law Review, 65 (January-February 1971),
879-931.
11 Athan Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A Comprehensive
Guide (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999), 158. We shall see below (at footnote
131) that Hoover
12 As we shall see below (at footnote 127) the new
Administrative Index (ADEX ). was in turn
discontinued in 1978. But the list was again not destroyed, and remained
available for use by a committee of Continuity of Government (COG )
planners (including Rumsfeld and Cheney) in the new Reagan Administration. It
has been in active use since 9/11.
13 In three magisterial books (Blowback, Nemesis, and
Dismantling the Empire) Chalmers Johnson documented how America
14 See Mark Perry, Eclipse: The Last Days of the CIA (New
York: William Morrow, 1992), 47-49, 319-320; Gregory F, Treverton, Covert
Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic
Books, 1987); David Aaron,Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1987,
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-18/books/bk-15321_1_covert-action: “CIA
Director William Casey, angry at his experts on terrorism for coming up with
little evidence linking the Soviet Union to terror groups, ordered them to read
Claire Sterling's famous book "The Terror Network." They did and
found that virtually all of the examples she cited turned out to be CIA
disinformation--false stories planted in the foreign press that she unwittingly
used in good faith.”
16 McCarthy’s “certain manic brilliance” was noted at
the time by commentator Eric Sevareid (Conrad Black, Richard Milhous
Nixon: the invincible quest [London Lanham , MD Washington U.S.
17 For Angleton as “the CIA ’s
manic molehunter,” see Lori Lyn Bogle (ed.) The Cold War (New
York Brooklyn ,
NY
18 Likewise Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s fellow Vulcan, Paul
Wolfowitz, after leaving the Pentagon, was forced out of his position as president
of the World Bank because of similar hubristic excesses, such as granting his
mistress salary raises far in excess of those allowable under Bank rules. Both
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were ousted after successful revolts by their own
subordinates. For Rumsfeld’s downfall after “the revolt of the generals”
against his “reign of terror,” see Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise,
Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (New York
19 Peter Dale Scott. “Northwards without North: Bush,
Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power,” Social Justice,
Summer 1989; reprinted as "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project:
The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning,"
Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February
21, 2011 , link. I offer the
notion of personal power autointoxication as a more personalized and more
sympathetic interpretation of the phenomenon increasingly described by some
criminologists as “state criminality.” See e.g. G. Barak, “Crime, criminology
and human rights: Towards an understanding of state criminality,” Journal
of Human Justice, 1990; Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory:
Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” American Behavioral Scientist
(February, 2010), 795-825. Some of my critique of “state crimes” analysis
can be found in "Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History:
9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of
Tension," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, September 23, 2012 ,
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3835.
20 Our economy’s recent recurrent flux between
exaggerated bubble (moving in Alan Greenspan’s terms from “irrational
exuberance” to “infectious greed”) and then recession, has been compared by a
psychologist to “the cycle of manic depression” (Peter C.
Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough [New York: W.W.
Norton, 2005], 127).
21 Scott, “The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the
Shrinking of American Democracy,”
22 Tim Weiner, “The Pentagon’s Secret
Stash,” Mother Jones Magazine, Mar-Apr 1992, 26.
23 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth,
Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley ,
CA University
of California Press 18
November 1988 .
24 Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and
Catastrophic Legacy (New York
25 CNN, November
17, 1991 , quoted in Shirley Anne Warshaw, The Co-presidency of
Bush and Cheney [Stanford , Calif.
26 The xenophobia of the 18th century was of
course perpetuated in the nativist movements such as the Know-Nothings in the
19th Century and the anti-Bilderberg right today; see David Harry.
Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in
American History (New York: Vintage, 1990). Some historians, notably
Richard Hofstadter, have analyzed McCarthyism itself as a replication of
19th century nativist populism (Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in
American Politics” (Harper’s Magazine, November 1964), 77-86, link).
But to understand McCarthyism, both then and now, this paper will focus on the
extent to which McCarthy’s fear tactics were both inspired and guided from
above, and principally by Hoover
27 John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson :
The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York Oxford University
28 Described below in this essay. Cf. Lou Dubose and
Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (New
York November 24, 2005 ; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 51-54.
29 Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of
Power (New York
30 Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, ENDGAME: Office of Detention and Removal Strategic
Plan, 2003-2012, 11; link;
cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of
America (Berkeley University
of California Press
31 The massive internment and relocation of
Japanese-Americans was a program initiated by the U.S. Army, not Hoover Hoover United States United States Bloomington ,
IN
32 Glenn Greenwald, “Three key lessons from the Obama
administration's drone lies,” Guardian (London April 11, 2013 ,here.
Cf. Micah Zenko, “An Inconvenient Truth: Finally, proof that the United
States
33 William Binney, quoted in Jane Mayer, “The Secret
Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?” New Yorker, May 23, 2011 ,
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all.
34 “Even as some senior former American security
officials question whether the strikes are beginning to do more harm than good,
65 percent of Americans questioned in a Gallup poll last month approved of
strikes to kill suspected foreign terrorists; only 28 percent were opposed”
(Shane, “Targeted Killing Comes to Define War on Terror, New York Times,
April 8, 2013, 3). As in the McCarthy era, public xenophobia is trumping common
sense. See Martha Stout, The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our
Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior--and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), described as “a groundbreaking
clinical, neuropsychological, and practical examination of what terror and fear
politics have done to our minds, and to the very biology of our brains.”
35 See e.g. Tom Engelhardt, “The Enemy-Industrial
Complex,”TomDispatch, April 15, 2013 ,
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175687/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_cathedral_of_the_enemy/:
“All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a
“global war on terror." We’ve poured money into national security as
if there were no tomorrow. From our police to our borders, we’ve
up-armored everywhere. We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to
the “homeland.” And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,”
there’s seldom anyone home.
Few in this country have found this striking. Few seem
to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening, and deeply
dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this
last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through
significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century.” Engelhardt
accurately blames this psychotic condition on neocons, who “they needed an
American public anxious, frightened, and ready to pay.” But his trenchant essay
ends of a note of gloom, even despair: “They may indeed be a crew of
Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global
war. …. It’s their religion. They are, after all, the
enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they. The comic
strip character Pogo once famously declared: ‘We have met the enemy and he is
us.’ How true. We just don’t know it yet.”
36 Weiner, Enemies, 443. A classified U.S.
intelligence report of around 2006 concluded that Iraq had become a “cause
célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the
Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement” (Mark
Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA ,
a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth [New York: Penguin
Press, 2013], 138).
37 The counter-productivity is of course welcome to
those who profit from the American war machine, as well as to those
multinational corporations who welcome an American military presence around the
globe. See Peter Dale Scott, "Why Americans Must
End America's Self-Generating Wars," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan
Focus, August 26, 2012 ,
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3819.
38 FBI manual quoted in
Weiner, Enemies, 447-48.
39 David K. Shipler, “Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the
F.B.I.” New York Times,
40 Robert W. Worth, Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane,
“Drone Strikes’ Risks to Get Rare Moment in the Public Eye,” New York
Times, February 5, 2013, link.
On CIA and JSOC killer squads in general,
see Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife.
41 Jonathan Turley, “The NDAA's historic assault on
American liberty,” Guardian (London), January 2, 2012: “The almost
complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking…. On the
NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is
already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges
to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts
agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the constitution.”
42 Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret
America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little
Brown, 2011), 52.
43 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death
of JFK, 310-11; cf. David Alan Scherer, The Dawn of Hooverism: J. Edgar
Hoover His Impact and Legacy Upon McCarthyism (dissertation, Simmons
College Boston
44 This is a welcome corrective to the efforts of
Richard Hofstadter, David Caute, and others to depict McCarthyism as an example
of populist paranoia. See above, footnote 18.
45 Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes:
McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998), 203.
46 Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, 215-16; cf.
Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the
Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover that Transformed America New
York
47 Anne Applebaum, in an important recent book, has
reminded us how brutal and alarming was Stalin’s repression in Eastern
Europe (Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern
Europe, 1944-1956 [New York: Doubleday, 2012]).
48 This does not mean that Hoover was politically
neutral or objective. His long-time preference for and aid to pro-FBI
right-wing politicians like Ronald Reagan is well documented by Seth Rosenfeld
(Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to
Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012]). But unlike the Doomsday planners he
worked within the political system (with all of its corrupt and even criminal
elements), not to supplant it by a shadow government. I’d be surprised if this
distinction held up well.
49 Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The
Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1993), 353.
50 Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden's
Master Spy Penetrated the CIA , the Green
Berets, and the FBI -- and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New
York: Regan/ HarperCollins, 2006), 123-25. Cf. Toronto Globe and
Mail, November 22, 2001 ;
Weiner, Enemies, 397.
51 Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside
Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (New York
52 J.M. Berger, “Paving the Road to 9/11,”
Intelwire, link:
“Ali Mohamed was the utility player who created al Qaeda's terrorist
infrastructure in the United States -- a series of connections, ideas,
techniques and specific tools used by the [9/11] plot's hijackers and
masterminds…. Mohamed described teaching al Qaeda terrorists how to
smuggle box cutters onto airplanes.”
53 Lance, Triple Cross, 123-24.
54 Soufan, The Black Banners, 561.
55 “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite
Warning,” New York November 8, 2009 ; cf.
Scott, American War Machine, 246-47. Cf. The Globe and
Mail (Canada), May 26, 2011: “FBI thought Mumbai massacre plotter worked
for them, court told.” Another much simpler domestic example of this puzzle is
Richard Aoki, the FBI informant who in the 1960s supplied the Black Panthers in
Oakland with arms (Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student
Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012], 418-24,
etc.).
56 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth,
Empire, and the Future of America Berkeley University of California
57 Cf. Washington Post, June 1, 2012: “Soufan's
case was unusual because he never worked for the CIA .
The PRB 's [Publications Review Board’s]
authority [i.e. legal authority] is grounded in the secrecy agreements signed
by agency employees that require them to submit any material prepared for
public disclosure ‘either during my employment . . . or at anytime
thereafter.’" In other words, the CIA ’s
PRB had no legal right to censor Soufan’s
book, but did so anyway – an example of the blurring of past bureaucratic
distinctions in today’s shadow state.
58 E,g, Sebastian Rotella, “Key witness ties Pakistan's
spy agency to terror group,” Washington Post, May 24, 2011: “In his
opening statement, Rana's attorney argued that Headley had manipulated Rana
just as he had manipulated multiple wives, extremist groups and government
agencies. Charles Swift also raised the possibility that Headley may have
continued working for the U.S. government well after he started training with
Lashkar.” This is the closest Rotella came to mentioning the role of the DEA in
releasing Headley at all. One day earlier, in the London Guardian of
May 23, the same Sebastian Rotella wrote much more directly that “Headley is a
former informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).” Cf.
Sebastian Rotella, “Feds Confirm Mumbai Plotter Trained With Terrorists While
Working for DEA,” ProPublica, Oct. 16, 2010, link:
“Federal officials acknowledged Saturday that David Coleman Headley, the U.S.
businessman who confessed to being a terrorist scout in the 2008 Mumbai
attacks, was working as a DEA informant while he was training with terrorists
in Pakistan.”
59 E.g. Toronto Globe and Mail, May 26, 2011:
“FBI thought Mumbai massacre plotter worked for them, court told.”
60 Daniel Coleman, Affidavit, Sealed Complaint, United
States of America v Ali Abdelseoud Mohamed, U.S. District Court, Southern
District of New York, September 1998 (obtained by INTELWIRE.com), p.7, link-facebook.
61 Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic
Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover that Transformed
America (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 67. The term is aptly borrowed from
Irish history.
62 Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From
Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1991), 78.
63 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death
of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998),
204-06.
64 Warren
65 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK,
131-33 (narcotics), 204-06 (gambling), 163 (Yaras).
66 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK,
202-04; citing U.S. Congress, Senate, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic
in Narcotics, Hearings (1964), 997; Seth Kantor, Who Was Jack
Ruby? (New York: Everest House, 1978),12.
67 Scott, Deep Politics, and the Death of
JFK 204; citing World Petroleum, February 1964.
68 For the 9/11 Commission Report and Marginalization,
see Peter Dale Scott, “9/11 as a Deep Event: How CIA
Personnel Helped Allow It To Happen,” in James R Gourley, ed., The 9/11
Toronto Report: International Hearings on the Events of September 11,
2001 (Seattle, WA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012),
109-28; Kevin Fenton.Disconnecting the Dots: How 9/11 Was Allowed to
Happen (Eugene, OR: Trine Day, 2011).
69 Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, “Detainee's Harsh
Treatment Foiled No Plots,” Washington Post, March 29, 2009 ,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/28/AR2009032802066.html.
70 “Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn v. Robert Gates,
Respondents Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Opposition to Petitioner’s
Motion for Discover and Petitioner’s Motion for Sanctions. Civil Action No.
08-cv-1360 (RWR), September 2009.;” quoted by Kevin Ryan, “Abu Zubaydah Poses a
Real Threat to Al Qaeda,”
WashingtonsBlog, October 25, 2012, check
it.
71 In 2010 the State Department appointed Todd
Leventhal “Chief of the Counter-Misinformation Team, U.S. Department of State”
(link) and “launched an
official bid to shoot down conspiracy theories….The "Conspiracy Theories
and Misinformation" page… insists that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F
Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on
9/11” Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010. When last consulted in
2012 the claim that Oswald “acted alone” remained, but the supporting page had
been suspended (cf. link). The site now
links to essays by private authors, beginning with John Ray, described as “a
sophomore decision science major at Carnegie-Mellon
University
72 Scott, Deep Politics, 45 (with supporting
details).
73 CIA Dispatch of April 1, 1967 , NARA
74 Weiner, Enemies, 24-25, 29, 31.
75 Weiner, Enemies, 15-16.
76 Weiner, Enemies, 28.
77 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 127.
78 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 244-45.
79 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 207. However Hoover had
already begun to violate Stone’s edict by 1933, when he began to collect
"derogatory information" on Alfred Einstein (Fred Jerome, The
Einstein file: J. Edgar Hoover's secret war against the world's most famous
scientist [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002], jacket; link) and 1934, when on FDR’s urging
he ordered what he termed a “so-called intelligence investigation” of pro-Nazi
elements, primarily the German-American Bund (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 205).
80 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 204. Cf. Jules
Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the
Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR (New York New
York Bloomsbury Press, 2012),
200-01.
81 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 205.
82 Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 51; Gentry, J.
Edgar Hoover, 206-08; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Report, Book II - Intelligence
Activities and the Rights of Americans(henceforth Church Committee, Book II),
30.
83 Hoover
84 Marc Aronson, Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover
and America
(Somerville , MA Butler Hoover
85 “Intelligence Division operations were cloaked in
secrecy; were less accountable to public scrutiny…and spilled over into
unethical or illegal conduct. Coexisting with the professional culture of the
criminal division was a ‘counterculture’ that developed in the hidden side of
the Bureau’s intelligence operations” (Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A
Comprehensive Guide,183).
86 Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous
Life Of The Priest Of The Little Flower (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972),
216ZZ.
87 A.S. Richard Sipe, The Serpent and the Dove:
Celibacy in Literature and Life (Westport ,
CT
88 Weiner, Enemies, 144; Gentry, J. Edgar
Hoover, 350n. Cf. Kai Bird, The Chairman, 281.
89 Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan, The Arrogance
of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New
York
90 For Hoover
91 Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 15.
92 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson:
The Passage of Power (New York Hoover
93 Weiner, Enemies, 179-80. McLeod’s staff also
consisted mostly of former FBI agents, using extralegal techniques such as
“surveillances, mail openings, wiretaps, and break-ins” (Gentry, J. Edgar
Hoover, 408-09). McLeod’s office was established during the Eisenhower
administration by Presidential Executive Order 10450 of April 27, 1953 .
94 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 409.
95 James C. Thomson, “How Could Vietnam Vietnam Nevada
96 Hans Morgenthau, "The Corruption of
Patriotism," New Republic, 1955; reprinted in Hans Morgenthau
(ed.) Politics in the Twentieth Century, I, 407. Cf. Eric Wilson
(ed.) The Dual State Farnham ,
England
97 Ola Tunander, “Democratic State versus Deep
State Dual
State London
98 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 252, 258; Peter Dale
Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War(Ipswich ,
MA CIA
Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan Lanham ,
MD
99 Scott, Deep Politics, xi-xii; discussion in
Eric Wilson, “The Concept of the Parapolitical,” in Wilson
100 David von Drehle, “FBI’s No. 2 Was ‘Deep Throat’:
Mark Felt Ends 30-Year Mystery of The Post’s Watergate Source,”Washington Post,
June 1, 2005 , link;
Bob Woodward, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat (New
York
101 John Acacia, Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of
Washington (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Peter Dale
Scott, "The Vietnam War and the CIA -Financial
Establishment," in Mark Selden (ed.), Remaking Asia: Essays on the
American Uses of Power (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 107-26; Peter Dale
Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of
War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 185, reporting
on New York Times editorial of January 6, 1968.
102 Michael Temple Maidenhead , England
103 Don Van Natta, Jr., “Bush Was Set on Path to War,
Memo by British Adviser Says,” New York March 27, 2006 .
104 “Bush 'plotted to lure Saddam into war with fake UN
plane,’” Independent (London February 3, 2006 ; “Bush and
Blair 'plotted to provoke Saddam into war,’”
Daily Mail (London February 3, 2006 ; “Bush
wanted spy plane in UN colours to trick Saddam, claims book,” Herald(Glasgow February 3, 2006 .
105 E.g. “Iraq Iraq London June 21, 2009 . In the
interests of accuracy, I should note that the Times repeated the Van Natta
story in its wholly owned subsidiary, The International Herald
Tribune, March 28, 2006 .
106 Scott, American War Machine, 77, 84; cf.
Donald J. Mabry (ed.), The Latin American narcotics trade and U.S.
national security (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.), 24;
McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 124.
107 William O. Walker III , Opium
and Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1991), 206.
108 Scott, Deep Politics, 167; citing San
Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 1959, 4; New York Times, January 15,
1959, 4.
109 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. Cocaine
Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central
America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1998), 172-85. The press in this period did not just transmit government
lies; it occasionally transmitted gross lies of its own. See Cocaine
Politics, 179-81, a manufactured lie in the Washington Post of July
22. 1987, whose falsity I could confirm as an eyewitness.
110 Cockburn, Whiteout, 29.
111 Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA
Played America Cambridge ,
Mass. Harvard
University
112 Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power,
65-66; Kevin Cunningham, J. Edgar Hoover: Controversial FBI
Director (Minneapolis , Minn.
113 Caro, 290. Cf. B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 364:
“One of Rometsch's more durable recent relationships, Anderson Delaware
114 B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 364.
115 “Bowtie” file, link, 35, cf. 4.
116 Summers, Official and Confidential. 306-07.
117 Summers, Official and Confidential. 311.
118 Taylor America
119 B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 367.
120 Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis
Years (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), 616-17; quoted in
Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 232.
121 B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 368-69.
122 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK,
230-40. Cf. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (New
York
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