[1] In the single month of March 1962, the OAS set off an average of 120 bombs per day (“The Generals' Putsch”).

[2] BBC News, November 24, 2006: “Alexander Litvinenko wrote a book in which he alleged Federal Security Service (FSB) agents in Russia coordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in the country that killed more than 300 people.”

[3] Gareth Jenkins, “Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey's Dirty War,” Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008.

[4] Nicholas Birch, Irish Times, November 26, 2005. Former Turkish president and prime minister Suleyman Demirel later commented on this incident that “It is fundamental principle that there is one state. In our country there are two.…There is one deep state and one other state. … The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one.” (Jon Gorvett, “Turkey's ‘Deep State’ Surfaces in Former President's Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006).

[5] Jenkins, “Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey's Dirty War.” A Google search on June 7, 2008, for “Semdinli + PKK” in major world English-language publications yielded 157 results. Of these just two were from the United States. Of these one (Washington Times, December 6, 2005) did not mention the deep state's involvement in the incident at all. The other (Newsweek, November 28, 2005) defined the deep state without mentioning its underworld involvement. A similar search for “deep state” revealed the same paucity of coverage in the U.S. media.

[6] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 4-7, 14-17, etc.

[7] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 121-22, 124-27, 163-69.

[8] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 139-42, 150-60, etc.; 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).

[9] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 153; citing Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001. It is no accident that the mainstream U.S. press have been silent, not just concerning this important fact, but also about the two books recording it: Peter Lance's Triple Cross and my own The Road to 9/11. Triple Cross finally got mentioned by name in the New York Times, but only because its publisher, Judith Regan, was dismissed by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (New York Times, December 19, 2006).

[10] On October 18, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege in order to prevent disclosure of the nature of Edmonds' work on the grounds that it would endanger national security.

[11] Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06.

[12] Vanity Fair, September 2005. According to the ATC web site, “As one of the leading business associations in the United States, the American-Turkish Council (ATC) is dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse membership includes Fortune 500, U.S. and Turkish companies, multinationals, nonprofit organizations, and individuals with an interest in U.S.-Turkish relations.” It is thus comparable to the American Security Council, whose activities in 1963 are discussed in Scott, Deep Politics, e.g. 292.

Edmonds has been partially corroborated by Huseyin Baybasin, another Turkish heroin kingpin now in jail in Holland, in his book Trial by Fire: “I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England.” But as he adds: “I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part.” Baybasin claimed he was assisted by Turkish officers working for NATO in Belgium (“The Susurluk Legacy,” By Adrian Gatton, Druglink Magazine, Nov/Dec 2006).

[13] Also in 2003 former government consultant Chalmers Johnson declared, in an interview, that what happened in Florida after the 2000 election was a “coup d'état” (Critical Asian Studies, 35, no. 2 [2003], 303). In the same year Bill Moyers, a veteran of the Johnson White House, wrote of the G.W. Bush to realign government as “the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime” (Text of speech to the Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, June 4, 2003, Washington, DC).

[14] Interview with Alex Jones, November 2, 2006.

[15] Ed Encho, “9/11: Cover For a Coup D'Etat?” OpEdNews, May 27, 2008.

[16] 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, Road to 9/11, 228-29.

[17] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats, and the FBI: The Covert War against the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 184; Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.

[18] Robert Parry, “Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus,” Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007.

[19] Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II, 611, 613; quoting William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial, 1977), 315–21; whole passage quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 61. Cumings quotes further from Dean Rusk's testimony to Congress on June 20: “We see no present indication that the people across the border have any intention of fighting a major war for that purpose” (taking over South Korea). He notes that General Ridgway later said he “was shocked” by Dean Rusk's reassuring testimony.

[20] Cumings, Origins, II, 600-01. My selective quotations cannot do justice to the complexity of Cumings' book, which presents three different possible explanations for the outbreak of the war. Cumings depicts a contest for the future of the peninsula – and also Taiwan – in which local leaders on both sides were looking for support from their respective megapowers. B.R Myers has criticized Cumings' book severely, for arguing “that the Korean War started as ‘a local affair,' and that the conventional notion of a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the South was just so much Cold War paranoia” (Atlantic Monthly, September 2004). But Myers' quotations from the book are as selective as my own. Cumings' argument is capacious enough to assimilate the new information Myers contributes from Russian archives: “that Kim Il Sung had sent dozens of telegrams begging Stalin for a green light to invade, and that the two met in Moscow repeatedly to plan the event.”

[21] Cumings, Origins, II, 547; citing Gavin McCormack, Cold War/Hot War (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1983), 97; E. Gough Whitlam, A Pacific Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), 57-58.

[22] Cumings, Origins, II, 527.

[23] Cumings, Origins, II, 600, 601. Yi P&Pring; msÅ k was a pro-Chiang advocate in Seoul of attacking North Korea. Kim S&Sring; k-won was a Korean commander who had previously attacked North Korea. Tiger Kim was a Korean veteran of the Japanese army close to Rhee, and a war criminal.

[24] James Bamford, Body of Secrets (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 301. William Bundy has taken issue with this judgment, arguing that escalating the war north “didn't fit in with our plans at all” (Robert McNamara, “The Tonkin Gulf Resolution,” in Andrew Jon Rotter, Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991], 83). But Ball was correct in reporting that bombing fit in with some people's plans.

[25] Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 178-215.

[26] Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132.

[27] Ray McGovern, “CIA, Iran & the Gulf of Tonkin,” ConsortiumNews, January 12, 2008.

[28] Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 132, cf. 67; citing Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 318, 314.

[29] Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 88, 93-103.

[30] “National Security Advisor Holds Press Briefing,” White House Website, May 16, 2002. We now know that on 9/11 there were a number of war games and exercises, including an exercise at the National Reconnaissance Office near Dulles Airport, testing responses “if a plane were to strike a building.” (Scott, Road to 9/11, 215-16; Evening Standard [London], August 22, 2002; Boston Globe, September 11, 2002).

[31] 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352-54 (FBI agent). After 9/11 another FBI agent was even bitter: “They [CIA] didn't want the bureau meddling in their business – that's why they didn't tell the FBI.… And that's why September 11 happened. That is why it happened.…They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands” (James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies [New York: Doubleday, 2004], 224).

[32] Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268; quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.

[33] Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 387-88.

[34] Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 388-89.

[35] Republican Senators Heinz and Tower also died in plane crashes, but after collisions between two aircraft. Conservative Democrat Larry McDonald died when the civilian airliner KAL 007 was shot down by Soviet interceptors in September 1983.

[36] Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 201, 206: “In the years before the fatal crash there had been assassination attempts against Walter and Victor [Reuther]. (Victor believes the attempt against him was intended as a message to Walter.) In each of these instances, state and federal law-enforcement agencies showed themselves at best lackadaisical in their investigative efforts, suggesting the possibility of official collusion or at least tolerance for the criminal deeds. … Third, like the suspicious near-crash that occurred the previous year, the fatal crash also involved a faulty altimeter in a small plane. It is a remarkable coincidence that Reuther would have been in two planes with the exact same malfunctioning in that brief time frame.…In a follow-up interview with us, Victor further noted: ‘Animosity from government had been present for some time [before the fatal crash]. It was not only Walter's stand on Vietnam and Cambodia that angered Nixon, but also I had exposed some CIA elements inside labor, and this was also associated with Walter. … There is a fine line between the mob and the CIA There is a lot of crossover. Throughout the entire history of labor relations there is a sordid history of industry in league with Hoover and the mafia. … You need to check into right-wing corporate groups and their links to the national security system. ‘Checking into such things is no easy task. The FBI still refuses to turn over nearly 200 pages of documents regarding Reuther's death, including the copious correspondence between field offices and Hoover. And many of the released documents-some of them forty years old-are totally inked out. It is hard to fathom what national security concern is involved or why the FBI and CIA still keep so many secrets about Walter Reuther's life and death.”

[37] See discussion in Jack N. Rakove, “Taking the Prerogative out of the Presidency: An Originalist Perspective,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37.1, 85–100; Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New York: Rodale, 2007), 153-58

[38] Interview with David Frost, aired May 11, 1977; in Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 159; Robert D. Sloane, “The Scope of Executive Power in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction,” Boston University Law Review 88:341, 346.

[39] Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (New York : W.W. Norton, 2007), 82.

[40] Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 183

[41] Minority Report, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100th Congress. 1st Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No. 100-216, p. 465.

[42] Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 174.

[43] Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 72; cf. Sloane, “The Scope of Executive Power,” 347.

[44] Cf. the investigative journalist and media critic Philip Weiss, “When Black Becomes White,” in Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 186: “The mainstream media's response [to theories of the Kennedy assassination] has been a dull one – to solemnly and stoically report the government's assertions, over and over.”

[45] Scott, War Conspiracy, 10, 383, 395.

[46] Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1969), xii-xiii.

[47] James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. “Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls”, New York Times, December 21, 2005.

[48] Gareth Porter, “Attack Iran? Cheney's Already Tried,” AlterNet, June 10, 2008: Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W Bush administration official. J Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department (DoD) officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal. McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposal several weeks earlier “launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran”, citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

[49] Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg, “State of Emergency: The US in the Final Six Months of the George W. Bush Administration,” Dissent Magazine, June 14, 2008.

[50] Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw, 13. Even former George W. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has referred to the media in his book as “complicit enablers” of Bush administration war propaganda (Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception [New York: Public Affairs, 2008], 70, 125).

[51] Washington Post, September 8, 2006. Cf. BBC, “Paranoia paradise,” April 4, 2002. The common tactic of such essays is to focus on absurdly eccentric beliefs, and try to pass them off as representative of all those criticizing received anti-conspiratorial opinion.

[52] Washington Post, January 23, 2007. However on May 4, 2008, the Post discussed the remark in a favorable review of former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards' book Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost – And How It Can Find Its Way Back.

[53] Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.

[54] E.g. Paul L. Atwood, “War and Empire Are and Always Have Been the American Way of Life,” Global Policy Forum, February 2006.

[55] Alexander Cockburn, “The Age of Irrationality: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the American Left,” CounterPunch, November 28, 2006.

[56] Cumings, Origins, II, 123; cf. 13-14; Herbert Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Random House, 1974).

[57] Michael Klare, Beyond the “Vietnam Syndrome” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981).

[58] E.g. Robert Wright, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Slate, October 11, 2001.

[59] Scott, Road to 9/11, 57-61, etc. Cf. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).

[60] L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (1997).

[61] Prouty, The Secret Team (1997), Chapter II.

[62] G. William Domhoff, in Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 125-26.

[63] Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 11.

[64] Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996),

[65] This has been doubted in the case of the JFK assassination, notably by Chomsky. For my latest contribution to this old argument, see Scott, War Conspiracy (2008).

[66] Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 14; Michael Standaert, Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006), 112-14.

[67] Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (New York: Little Brown, 2007), 51. Strangely, Savage does not mention COG by name, but he refers to the decade of COG planning in the 1980s as evidence for his case that a “cabal of zealots” has been planning for “the return of the imperial presidency” ever since Cheney and Rumsfeld lost their posts in the Ford Administration.

[68] U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

[69] See “The Saudi Money Trail,” Newsweek, December 2, 2002.

[70] Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 54-55.

[71] “Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed ‘every 45 days’ as part of planning to assess threats to ‘the continuity of our government‘” (Christopher Ketcham, “The Last Round-Up,” Radaronline, May 15, 2008). Cf. President's Radio Address, December 15, 2005: “The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland.”

[72] Parry, “Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus,” Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007.

[73] 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 228-29.

[74] White House Notice of September 20, 2007.

[75] Jerome Corsi, “Bush makes power grab,” WorldNetDaily, May 23, 2007.

[76] Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, “National Emergency Powers,” updated August 30, 2007, pp. 10ss.

[77] Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

[78] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing James Mann, “The Armageddon Plan,” Atlantic Monthly (March 2004); James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 138–45; James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 70-74. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown”, Counterpunch, March 31, 2008.

[79] Peter Dale Scott, “Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown”, Counterpunch, March 31, 2008.

[80] Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.

[81] The National Archives started a pilot project for the declassification of Commission records. According to their interim report, dated June 22, 2007, they have made progress with the Commission's internal files. However the following excerpt shows that of other agencies, only the FBI was cooperating in 2007:

[82] John Farmer, “‘United 93‘: The Real Picture,” Washington Post, April 30, 2006. Cf. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 87: “The staff front office suggested that the NORAD situation bordered on willful concealment.”

[83] Public Law 107-306, Nov. 27, 2002, Title VI, Section 610.

[84] American Freedom Agenda; American Freedom Campaign.

[85] Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.

[86] Particularly conspicuous in the Iran-Contra scandal was, once again, the involvement of its major players – the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the Contras, and Contra supply network – in international drug trafficking. See Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago Review Press, 2001), 480, 490-500; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).