In this exclusive
excerpt from his powerful new book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the
Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press), UC Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott asks whether
there is a connection between Americas historical use of terror as a
political weapon and the recent moves by the Bush administration to suspend the
Constitution and create a "shadow government" in the wake of the next
terrorist attack:
The
strategy of tension in Europe and America
The idea that
sectors of government might sponsor extremists in acts of terrorism against
their own people is, initially, almost unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable
possibility has clearly happened in Italy,
with the celebrated bombings of Milans
Piazza Fontana in 1969 and the Bologna
railway station in 1980. (Sixteen people were killed in Milan,
and eighty-five in Bologna.)
Although anarchists took part in these bombings, and were initially blamed for
them, it developed that the bombings were part of a strategy of
tension orchestrated by Italian military intelligence.1
The
responsibility of Italian intelligence services has been definitively
established by Italian courts and parliamentary investigations. As Stanford
historian Thomas Sheehan wrote in the New
York Review of Books, Later the [Piazza Fontana] massacre was
traced to two neofascists, Franco Freda and Giovanni
Ventura, and to an agent of the Secret Services (SID) named Guido Giannettini. Giannettini fled the country, but continued to receive
checks from SID
for a full year. He and three high SID officials were eventually jailed for
conspiracy in the massacre.2
But the
Italians found responsible have implicated U.S.
covert actions in Italy,
beginning with the efforts by the Office of Policy Coordination to defeat the
Communists in the 1948 Italian elections. General Vito Miceli,
the Italian head of military intelligence, after his arrest in 1974 on a charge
of conspiring to overthrow the government, testified that the incriminated
organization, which became known as the Parallel SID, was formed under a
secret agreement with the United
States and within the framework of NATO.3
Former Italian defense
minister Paulo Taviani
told Magistrate Casson during a 1990 investigation
that during his time in office (195558), the Italian secret services
were bossed and financed by the boys in Via Venetoi.e. the CIA agents
in the U.S. Embassy in the heart of Rome.4 In 2000 an Italian
secret service general said . . . that the CIA gave its tacit approval
to a series of bombings in Italy
in the 1970s to sow instability and keep communists from taking power. . . .
The CIA
wanted, through the birth of an extreme nationalism and the contribution of the
far right, particularly Ordine Nuovo,
to stop (Italy)
sliding to the left, he said.5
The evidence for
some degree of U.S. involvement is massive but also problematic.6 There is no
doubt that the United States, operating partly through NATO, sponsored and funded
so-called stay-behind paramilitary groups in Italy and other NATO countries (in Operation Gladio); and there is no doubt also that the cadres and
munitions of these groups were used in the strategy of tension.
For some time
critics of U.S foreign policy have stressed the role of CIA assets and Gladio terrorism in the Greek Colonels coup of 1967:
The Gladio Sheepskin group was
involved in a campaign of terrorist bombings, which were blamed on the left,
and two days before the election campaign was to begin, a military coup brought
to power a junta led by George Papadopoulos, a member of the Greek intelligence
service KYP
[who had been on CIA
payroll since 1952].7 This was the climax of a period in which Greece was
afflicted with an intelligence service gone wild and a shadow
government with powers beyond the control of the nations nominal
leaders.8
Even clearer is
the continuous U.S.
intervention in Italian politics after 1948, to block the formation of any
government supported by the Communist Party. In 1972, for example, CIA
disbursed $10 million to political parties, affiliated organizations, and
twenty-one candidates, mostly Christian Democrats. Ambassador Graham Martin,
against CIA
advice, gave a further $800,000 to General Miceli,
the Italian head of military intelligence.9 Miceli
would be tried two years later for his involvement in the 1970 Borghese coup
attempt, which the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969 was designed to assist.
Eventually he and all other defendants would be acquitted.10
What is not yet
clear, at least to me, is the degree and level of conscious U.S. direction
for Italian state violence against civilians. The official Italian Senate
investigation into Gladio concluded without the
shadow of a doubt that elements of the CIA started in the second half of the 1960s to
counter by the use of all means the spreading . . . of the left.11
But at what level
were these elements, and with what central authorization? Undoubtedly Gladio units contributed to the Eurofascism
of the 1980s, but by then many if not most Eurofascists
were anti-American as well as anti-Soviet. Whatever the details, the perversion
of Operation Gladio into sanctioned attacks on
innocent civilians illustrates the dangers of top-down power, especially when
it is off-shored and removed from the checks and balances of an open public
state.12
At least some
Americans believed themselves in the strategy of tension. William Harvey,
when CIA
station chief in Rome, reportedly recruited his own action squads
and suggested that the head of the Italian intelligence service SIFAR (later
SID)
use his action squads to carry out bombings against
Christian Democrat Party offices and certain newspapers in the north, which
were to be attributed to the left.13
More important,
European sources allege that one of the masterminds of the 1969 plot, Guido Giannettini, was
invited in late 1961 to give a three-day lecture course to U.S. military
officers in Annapolis, on Techniques and Possibilities of a Coup dEtat in Europe.14 A few weeks later Pentagon officials
began drafting the plans known as Operation Northwoods,
the first known American application of a strategy of tension. As
summarized by ABC
News, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban imigris, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas,
hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S.
ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.15 This was at a
time of developing U.S. Army interest in so-called counterterror
as a technique in counterinsurgency, as developed by Nazis, French
theorists of guerre rivolutionnaire, and East European imigris now attached to the U.S. Army.
Thus one cannot
clearly distinguish between the managed violence advocated by Italian
strategists of tension and those aping them in the United States. International
security analyst John Prados has put the issue very
forcibly: In this age of global concern with terrorism it is especially
upsetting to discover that Western Europe and the United States collaborated in
creating networks that took up terrorism. In the United States such nations are
called state sponsors and are the object of hostility and sanction.
Can it be the United States
itself, Britain, France, Italy, and others who should be on
the list of state sponsors?16 It is alarming moreover to note that the
Piazza Fontana
bombing was planned by a parallel structure, outside government
control, as a prelude for a military coup.17
Cheney, Rumsfeld and COG Planning in the 1980s
Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld have been associated since the
1980s with a parallel planning structure in the United States. The formal goal of this
planned parallel structure was called continuity of government (COG), but
the name is misleading. The Progressive
Review referred more descriptively to plans for a
possible military/civilian coup.18
The plans for
what journalist James Bamford has called the
secret government of COG
had been slowly developing, chiefly but not only under Republican
administrations, since the 1950s.19 As mentioned in chapter 4, a major step was
the creation in 1979 of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But
FEMAs emergency planning was radically politicized under President Reagan.
By 1984, in the words of journalist Ross Gelbspan,
Lt. Col. Oliver North was working with officials of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency . . . to draw up a secret contingency plan to surveil political dissenters and to arrange for the
detention of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens in case of an
unspecified national emergency. The plan, part of which was codenamed Rex
84, called for the suspension of the Constitution under a number of scenarios,
including a U.S. invasion of
Nicaragua.
. . . But in addition to groups opposing United
States policies in Central America,
the FEMA
plan reportedly included environmental activists, opponents of nuclear energy
and refugee assistance activists.20
Earlier, Governor
Reagan in California
had authorized the development of a counterinsurgency plan (known as Cable
Splicer) and exercises to deal with such crises, in conjunction with the U.S.
Sixth Army and the Pentagon (Operation Garden Plot). The cadres developing
Cable Splicer (headed by Louis Giuffrida), were with
Reagans elevation to the presidency transferred into FEMA. As head of FEMA, Giuffrida pursued plans for massive detention of
dissidents; these became so extreme that even Reagans attorney general,
William French Smith, raised objections.21
As developed in
the mid-1980s by Oliver North in the White House, the plans called for not just
the surveillance but also the potential detention of large numbers of American
citizens. During the Iran-Contra hearings North was asked by the
congressman Jack Brooks about his work on a contingency plan in the
event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. The
chairman, Democratic senator Daniel Inouye, ruled that this was a highly
sensitive and classified matter, not to be dealt with in an open hearing.
This dramatic exchange was virtually ignored by the establishment media.22
In the wake of
Brookss question in Congress, the public was told how attorney general
William French Smith, in an August 1984 letter to NSC chair Robert McFarlane,
had written that FEMAs proposed executive order exceeds its proper
function as a coordinating agency for emergency preparedness.23 To this
day it is usually reported that Smiths objections apparently killed
the draft executive order.24 But the authorizing National Security
Decision Directive (NSDD
55 of September 14, 1982, on Enduring National Leadership) continued
in effect for a decade. It was augmented by President Reagan on
September 16, 1985, with National Security Decision Directive 188 (NSDD 188,
Government Coordination for National Security Emergency
Preparedness). The directives were part of a series, augmented by
additional executive orders, that authorized ongoing continuity
planning.25
Some of the
highest-level planning for COG
was conducted by a parallel extragovernmental group.
This parallel structure, operating outside normal government channels, included
the head of G. D. Searle & Co., Donald Rumsfeld,
and then congressman from Wyoming Dick Cheney.26 Overall responsibility for the
program, hidden under the innocuously named National Program Office, was
assigned to Vice President George H.W. Bush, with Lt. Col. Oliver North .
. . as the National Security Council action officer.27
It is not
fanciful to link this private parallel government to 9/11. As detailed in
chapter 12, Cheney and FEMA
were reunited in May 2001: President George W. Bush appointed Cheney to head a
terrorism task force and created a new office within FEMA, the innocuously
named Office of National Preparedness, to assist him. In effect, Bush was
authorizing a resumption of the kind of planning that Cheney and FEMA had
conducted under the heading of COG.
And on September 11 the planning bore fruit: a classified continuity of
operations plan was implemented, at least partially, for the first time.28
This chapter and
especially the next explore the consequences of this arresting coincidence:
that the COG
planning team of the 1980s was essentially reconstituted by Bush the younger in
May 2001 as a terrorism task force, and then (after planning activities of
which we know next to nothing) a major attack on the United States (of which we
also still know next to nothing) resulted in implementation of COG. The
public also knows next to nothing about COG, except that its powers
to disrupt constitutional government are considerable.
Continuity of government is a reassuring title. It would be more
honest, however, to call it a change of government plan, since
according to Alfonso Chardy of the Miami Herald, the plan called
for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government
over to FEMA,
emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments
and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.29 The plan
also gave the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had been involved in
drafting it, sweeping new powers, including internment.30
The team was
planning, in effect, for the supplanting in a major crisis of the public state
by an alternative one.
According to author and journalist James Mann: Rumsfeld
and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs
of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S.
officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the
federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the
legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a
secret procedure for putting in place a new President and his staff.
The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve continuity of
government, and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the
House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would
play a greatly diminished role.31
But the
planning eventually called for suspension of the Constitution, not just
after a nuclear war but for any national security
emergency.
This was defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as any occurrence,
including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other
emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security
of the United States.32
Clearly 9/11 met this definition.
COG planning was eventually
integrated into planning by a number of groups corresponding to different
departments, dealing with different functions. One group, the Continuity of
Government Interagency Group, dealt with devolution and relocation of
government leaders, to prevent decapitation of the government in a crisis. Another
group dealt with command and control problems, to ensure security for
communications and computers so that decisions could be made and implemented.
Another group, focused on the Department of Defense, planned for retaliation
against the nations attackers.33
In April 1994, Tim Weiner announced in The New York Times that
in the post-Soviet Clinton
era, the Doomsday Project, as it was known was to be closed.
The nuclear tensions of that era having subsided, the project has less
than six months to live. On Oct. 1, its history, a
Pentagon official said. Weiner added that while some
continuity of government programs continue under the aegis of
Pentagon planners, they are pale versions of the vision laid out by
President Reagan in 1983. They are realizing these requirements are
throwbacks to the cold war, [nuclear analyst Bruce] Blair said. They
are not relevant to todays world.34
This article
persuaded authors James Mann and James Bamford that
Reagans COG
plans had now been abandoned, because there was, it seemed, no longer any
enemy in the world capable of . . . decapitating Americas
leadership.35 In fact, however, only one phase of COG planning had been
terminated, a Pentagon program for response to a nuclear attack. Instead,
according to author Andrew Cockburn, a new target was found:
Although the
exercises continued, still budgeted at over $200 million a year in the Clinton era, the
vanished Soviets were now replaced by terrorists. . . .There were other
changes, too. In earlier times the specialists selected to run the shadow
government had been drawn from across the political spectrum, Democrats
and Republicans alike. But now, down in the bunkers, Rumsfeld
found himself in politically congenial company, the players roster
being filled almost exclusively with Republican hawks. It was one way
for these people to stay in touch. Theyd meet, do the exercise, but also
sit around and castigate the Clinton
administration in the most extreme way, a former Pentagon official with
direct knowledge of the phenomenon told me. You could say this was a
secret government-in-waiting. The Clinton
administration was extraordinarily inattentive, [they had] no idea what was
going on.36
Cockburns
account requires some qualification. Richard Clarke, a Clinton Democrat, makes
it clear that he participated in the COG games in the 1990s and indeed drafted Clintons
Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 67 on Enduring Constitutional
Government and Continuity of Government.37 But COG planning involved different
teams for different purposes. It is quite possible that the Pentagon official
was describing the Department of Defense team dealing with retaliation.
The Pentagon
officials description of a secret government-in-waiting (which
still included both Cheney and Rumsfeld) is very
close to the standard definition of a cabal, as a group of persons secretly
united to bring about a change or overthrow of government. In the same era
Cheney and Rumsfeld projected change also by their
public lobbying, through the Project for the New American Century, for a more
militant Middle East policy.
In light of
how COG
was actually implemented in 2001, one can legitimately suspect that, however
interested this group had been in continuity of government under Reagan, under Clinton the focus of
Cheneys and Rumsfelds COG planning was now a change
of government.
So we should not
be surprised that with the implementation of COG came the warrantless detentions that Oliver North had planned two
decades earlier, and the warrantless
eavesdropping that is their logical counterpart. The only question is this:
Were these practices decided on after 9/11, as the Bush administration
maintains? Or were they already being prepared for as part of the COG planning
revived by Cheney and FEMA
in May 2001? I return to this question in chapters 12 through 14.
Oil and
Cheneys Energy Task Force
There is the same
impression of preparation for 9/11 and its consequent war from Cheneys
other task force, the Energy Task Force. By May 2001 it had already set
out, urgently and in some detail, plans for taking control over Iraqi oil.
As many observers have pointed out, the second Bush administration was the
first in which the vice president and his own national security staff wielded
powers comparable to, perhaps even surpassing, those of the president.
Some have gone
even a step further, as journalist Steve Perry wrote in 2005: Cheneys
office is the Pandoras Box of the Bush administration campaign to invade Iraq. Most
of the planning as to both the waging and selling of the war occurred under
his direction, along with that of Donald Rumsfeld and
Paul Wolfowitz
at the Pentagon. It was Cheney who played the point in beating up CIA for its
unhelpful analysis of the non-threat posed by Saddam, and Cheney along with
his Defense Department pals who effectively circumvented CIA by setting up the Office
of Special Plans at the Pentagon to funnel the administration the kind of
intelligence it wanted, largely courtesy of their longtime double-dealing
stooge, Ahmed Chalabi.38
Perry also quotes
an op-ed by former Powell chief of staff Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson (U.S.
Army, retired): In President Bushs first term, some of the most
important decisions about U.S.
national security including vital decisions about postwar Iraqwere made
by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of
people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. . . . I believe that the decisions of this
cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president
and sometimes with something less. . . . Its a disaster. Given the choice,
Id choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every
time.39
The vice
presidents first major assignment was to discuss energy policy in his
Energy Task Force, which brought in leaders from the petroleum industry. In
fact, Cheney could be called an oil industry leader himself. As reported in The New Yorker, he served
immediately before becoming Vice-President, as chief executive of
Halliburton, the worlds largest oil-and-gas-services company. The
conglomerate, which is based in Houston, is
now [2004] the biggest private contractor for American forces in Iraq; it has
received contracts worth some eleven billion dollars for its work there.
Cheney earned forty-four million dollars during his tenure at Halliburton.
Although he has said that he severed all my ties with the company, he
continues to collect deferred compensation worth approximately a hundred and
fifty thousand dollars a year.40
It is clear that
from at least February 2001 Cheneys task force discussions extended to the
capture of oil resources in Iraq: One intriguing piece of
evidence pointing in this direction was a National Security Council document,
dated February 2001, directing NSC
staff to cooperate fully with Cheneys task force. The NSC document, reported in The New Yorker, noted that the
task force would be considering the melding of two policy areas:
the review of operational policies towards rogue states and
actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.
This certainly implies that the Cheney task force was considering geopolitical
questions about actions related to the capture of oil and gas reserves in
rogue states, including presumably Iraq.41
The task
forces concerns are well illustrated by two documents, released to the
public-interest law firm Judicial Watch only after a fierce court struggle. The
first document is a map of Iraq,
whose detail is all about Iraqs
oil. The southwest is neatly divided, for instance, into nine
Exploration Blocks. Stripped of political trappings, this map shows a
naked Iraq,
with only its ample natural assets in view. Its like a supermarket meat
chart, which identifies the various parts of a slab of beef so customers can
see the most desirable cuts. . . . Block 1 might be the striploin,
Blocks 2 and 3 are perhaps some juicy tenderloin, but Block 8 ahh, that could be the filet mignon.
The second
task force document, also released under court order, was a two-page chart titled
Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfields. It identifies 63 oil companies
from 30 countries and specifies which Iraqi oil fields each company is
interested in and the status of the companys negotiations with Saddam
Husseins regime. Among the companies are Royal Dutch/Shell of the Netherlands, Russias
Lukoil and Frances
Total Elf Aquitaine,
which was identified as being interested in the fabulous, 25-billion-barrel Majnoon oil field. Baghdad
had agreed in principle to the French companys plans to develop
this succulent slab of Iraq.
There goes the filet mignon into the mouths of the French!42
Cheneys task
force was the final stage in a lobbying process by the oil majors that had begun
under Clinton.
As early as April 1997, a report from the James A. Baker Institute of Public
Policy at Rice University
addressed the problem of energy security for the United States,
noting that the country was increasingly threatened by oil shortages. It
concluded that Saddam Hussein was still a threat to Middle Eastern security and
still had the military capability to exercise force beyond Iraqs
borders. The second Bush administration returned to this theme as soon as
it took office in 2001, by following the lead of a second report from the same
institute. This task force report was cosponsored by the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York, another group historically concerned about U.S. access
to overseas oil resources.43 The report, Strategic Energy Policy: Challenges
for the 21st Century, concluded that the U.S. should conduct an immediate
policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and
political/diplomatic assessments.44
Meanwhile, the BBC
heard from State Department insiders that planning for regime change in Iraq
began within weeks of Bushs first taking office in 2001,
long before the September 11th attack on the U.S.45 The
administrations concern for controlling oil in the Middle East
intermingled with strategic concerns in the area, especially with increasing
uncertainty about the future of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia. The White House
was also impressed by the report of an AEI-based discussion group,
commissioned by Paul Wolfowitz, that a strategy to deal with Middle East
terrorism would require two generations of conflict, in which Iran is more
important. . . . But Saddam Hussein was . . . weaker, more vulnerable.46