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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as “events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”
1 This essay is adapted from a talk I presented at the 2012 Oakland 9/11 Film Festival presented by the Northern CA 9/11 Truth Alliance.
2 Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 21, 2011, http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/36 50.
3 Daniele Ganser, Nato's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Routledge, 2005); Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991).
4 Vincenzo Vinciguerra, in “Strage di Piazza Fontana spunta un agente USA,” La Repubblica, February 11, 1998, here.
5 “Secret agents, freemasons, fascists … and a top-level campaign of political ‘destabilisation,’“ The Guardian, December 5, 1990, here; quoted in Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 7.
6 Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, 125-47, 224-44.
7 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 181. Cf. Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, 6.
8 Ola Tunander, “The War on Terror and the Pax Americana, “ in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2007), I, 164.
9 Ganser, Nato's Secret Armies, 26; citing El Pais, November 26, 1990.
10 Tunander, “The War on Terror,” 164.
11 Cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 30: “In February 1989 Italian Special Prosecutor Domenico Sica asserted that responsibility for at least some of the terror bombings during the past decade lay also with the Mafia—that is, what I am referring to as the global drug connection.”
12 Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, 125-47, 224-44.
13 Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery,” New York Times, October 16, 2009, here. For my analysis of deep similarities between 11/22 and 9/11, see Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: The Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 341-96.
14 See White House, “Message from the President Regarding the Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks,” September 11, 2012, here.
15 For my ambivalent use of the term “deep state,” see Scott, American War Machine, 20-23.
16 For an introduction to the film, see “A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995 with James Lane and Chris Emery,” Alex Jones Channel, December 16, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmHnePnaR 6E.
17 General Benton K. Partin, letter to members of Congress, May 17, 1995; in David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1998); on line at here. Another explosives expert, Samuel Cohen, wrote to a Congressman that “It would have been absolutely impossible and against the laws of nature for a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil… no matter how much was used… to bring the building down” (ibid.). Anders Breivik's ammonium nitrate car bomb in front of the Norwegian Prime Minister's office would seem to corroborate Partin and Cohen: Breivik's bomb shattered windows but caused no structural damage whatever to the building.
18 “9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out,” a film prepared by AE911Truth, PBS, September 16, 2012; viewable on line at here. Cf. Bill Christison (a former senior official of the CIA), “Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11,” Dissident Voice, August 14, 2006, here. www.dissidentvoice.org: The WTC buildings “were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings.”
19 Charles Doyle, “Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996: A Summary,” Federation of American Scientists, June 3, 1996, here. In a December 2000 memo, Richard Clarke confirmed that this assistance was being supplied “through the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC) and State's AntiTerrorism Program (ATA)”
20 Scott, “Launching the U.S. Terror War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, here; citing Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day (New York: Ballantine Books, c2011), 396.
21 Scott, “Launching the U.S. Terror War.” This withholding of information is a significant parallel with the CIA's withholding of significant information about Lee Harvey Oswald from the FBI in 1963, in the weeks just before the 11/22 JFK assassination.
22 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280; quoted in Scott, “Doomsday Project.”
23 Church Committee, Report, Book III - Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 682.
24 Nate Jones, “Document Friday: ‘Garden Plot:’ The Army's Emergency Plan to Restore “Law and Order” to America.” National Security Archive, August 11, 2011, here.
25 Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House, 1976), 443-46; quoted in Scott, “Doomsday Project.”
26 Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there was a great increase in their number. The Washington Star later explained that “the big build-up in [Army] information gathering…did not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King” (Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728); quoted in Scott, “Doomsday Project.”
27 George O'toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278-79, also Scott, “Doomsday Project.”
28 Peter Dale Scott, “Overview: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,” History Matters, here; citing Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 22. “Phase-One” stories, followed by “Phase-Two” media rebuttals, have continued ever since, most recently in 2012 with the publication by former CIA officer Brian Latell of an informant's claim that Castro had prior knowledge of what would happen in Dallas (Brian Latell, Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012]).
29 Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2002, here; “Take AIM: Jayna Davis on OKC Third Terrorist,” AIM.org, here. Cf. Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, “The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There A Foreign Connection?” Report, December 26, 2006, here.
30 Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 97-99.
31 Jim Naureckas, “The Oklahoma City Bombing: The Jihad That Wasn't,” Extra! (Fair), July/August 1995, here.
32 Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing (Nashville TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004); Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman's Report, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation.
33 Clarke, Against All Enemies, 167.
34 Tim Weiner, “Pentagon Book for Doomsday Is to Be Closed,” New York Times, April 17, 1994: quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 186.
35 Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy(New York: Scribner, 2007), 88; quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 187.
36 Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events.”
37 Over and over the daily news provides instances of new deep events that involve informants. As I write, the headlines report widespread Muslim violence throughout the world, in response to a despicable anti-Muslim film one of whose promoters admitted to be a deliberate provocation (Sheila Musaji, “The Tragic Consequences of Extremism,” The American Muslim, September 14, 2012, here). I was not surprised to read later that one of the men responsible for the film, Nakoula Nakoula, was also a federal informant (“Producer Of Anti-Islam Film Was Fed Snitch,” The Smoking Gun, September 14, 2012, here). As I wrote on my Facebook page, “I don't think anyone should leap to sweeping conclusions from this revelation that one of the film's makers, Nakoula Nakoula, was a government informant. But this fact so complicates the background of this allegedly “amateurish” film that I feel justified in my original assumption: that we might be facing here another deep event (as defined in my book American War Machine).”
38 Scott, Road to 9/11, 151-60.
39 Scott, War Conspiracy, 355-56, 357-63 (“The Role of Double Agents”); Cf. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 247-53, 257-60.
40 See Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: PocketBooks, 1994), ch.29, n4; Harrison E. Livingstone, The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy (Bloomington, IN: Trafford, 2006), 131 (Oswald); Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 339-44 (al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar).
41 This is in line with other features he exhibited in conformity with those I had previously pointed to in the designated culprit stereotype. One is the absurd ease and speed with which he was soon arrested for driving without license plates. In 2008 I compared Oswald with the alleged 9/11 hijackers under the heading “Instant Identification of the Culprits” (Scott, War Conspiracy, 347-49). David Hammer, who was on Death Row with McVeigh, has written that McVeigh confided to him at length how in fact he was a federal undercover agent in a sting operation targeting right-wing extremists. See David Paul Hammer, Deadly Secrets: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (B.oomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010).
42 Jefferson Morley and Michael Scott, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, Kansas:
University of Kansas Press, 2008) [11/22]; Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2011) [9/11].
43 J.M. Berger, “Patriot Games: How the FBI spent a decade hunting white supremacists and missed Timothy McVeigh,” Foreign Policy, April 18, 2012, here.
44 “First organized by Tom Posey as part of his Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) organization, the CMA operated as a shadow wing of the Reagan administrations illegal Contra network. Posey and the CMA began as an adjunct to the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. They were first active in smuggling weapons to Central America with the assistance of a Defense Intelligence Agency operation called “Yellow Fruit” and later absorbed into Oliver North's Contra re-supply operation. Posey was later indicted for violations of the Neutrality Act for his gunrunning activities. North and Reagan administration officials intervened in the trial and the charges were dismissed under the curious grounds that the Neutrality Act only applied during peacetime and the Contra operation was the equivalent of a formal state of war” (Paul de Armond, “Racist Origins of Border Militias”).
45 “John McCain has worked with white racists before,” Daily Kos, October 12, 2008, here. I have not been able to determine whether this is the Tom Posey whom David Koch named to be Treasurer of his Citizens for a Sound Economy. Cf. “Tom-Posey, KKK, Koch Brothers, CSE,” here.
46 Berger, “Patriot Games.”
47 John Berger, “Witness Mahon Claimed He Was Third Man in Oklahoma City Bombing,” Intelwire, January 10, 2012, here.
48 Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman's Report, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation.
49 For Strassmeir as an intelligence agent, see e.g. Investigative Report prepared for Oklahoma Representative Charles Key, in Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, Final Report, 460-62; David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Venice City, CA: Feral House, 1998), 121-47.
50 Athan G. Theoharis, The FBI : A Comprehensive Reference Guide (Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 1999), 94.
51 Ralph Blumenthal, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” New York Times, October 28, 1993, here.
52 “Top Italian Judge Refers 9/11 to International Criminal Court,” Aangirfan, September 11, 2012, here.
53 Scott, Road to 9/11, 151-61. Both before and after 1993, and again before and after 2001, a key role in the cover-up was played by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. See Scott, Road to 9/11, 152, 155-59; Peter Lance, Triple Cross (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006), 219-23, 274-79, 298-301, 317-18, 358-64, etc.
54 Scott, American War Machine, 20-23.
55 Bill Moyers, The Secret Government, PBS 1987; here.
56 Peter Dale Scott, “Northwards without North,” Social Justice (Summer 1989); revised 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, here.
57 See e.g. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 396-404; Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 125-64. (Posey),
58 North's ventures into illegality eventually involved the mobilization of known drug- traffickers in support of the Contras. One of his more dubious assets was the patriot paramilitary group Civilian Military Assistance of Tom Posey, which eventually became a prime target of PATCON (Berger, “Patriot Games).
59 For the distinction between traders and warriors or “Prussians,” see Michael Klare, “Beyond the “Vietnam Syndrome” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981); Peter Dale Scott, “Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, June 22, 2008, here.
60 A personal note: when I was at a think tank in Washington dealing with Iran-Contra, I was videotaped at length by the two producers of Moyers’ show. One week before the show aired on PBS, they assured me that I would be in it. But in the end, all that remained of me in the show was my forearm, in an unexplained group shot of the think tank sitting around a conference table. At the time my research focused on the activities of Bush and North (including North's alleged plans for “suspension of the constitution”) that the Committees, like the Moyers program, did not pursue. See Scott, “North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project.”
61 Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” American Behavioral Scientist, 53, 796; citing Lance deHaven-Smith, “When political crimes are inside jobs: Detecting state crimes against democracy. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 28(3).
62 Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “State Crimes Against Democracy,” Media Freedom International, Mar 2, 2010, here.
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