Systemic Destabilization as “A Strategy of Tension”: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing

Global Research
Peter Dale Scott

Introduction: Structural Deep Events and the Strategy of Tension in Italy

From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20^th 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.”²

The examples in Italy, well known to Italians, include the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, the Piazza della Loggia bombing of 1974, and the Bologna railway bombing of 1980.

These bombings, in which over one hundred civilians were killed and many more wounded, were attributed at the time to marginal left-wing elements of society. However, thanks chiefly to a series of investigations and judicial proceedings, it is now clearly established that the bombings were the work of right-wing elements in collusion with Italian military intelligence, as part of an on-going “strategy of tension” to discredit the Italian left, encourage support for a corrupt status quo, and perhaps move beyond democracy altogether.³ As one of the conspirators, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, later stated, “The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency.”⁴

Vinciguerra also revealed that he and others had also been members of a paramilitary “stay-behind” network originally organized at the end of World War II by the CIA and NATO as “Operation Gladio.”

In 1984, questioned by judges about the 1980 Bologna station bombing, Vinciguerra said: “With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages…[it] lies within the state itself…There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army…A secret organisation, a super-organisation with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them…A super-organisation which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on Nato’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.⁵

Gladio connections to sustained false-flag violence, again involving NATO and the CIA, were subsequently revealed in other countries, notably Belgium and Turkey.⁶

The original purpose of Gladio was to consolidate resistance in the event of a Soviet takeover. But many of the senior Italians involved in the bombings implicated the CIA and NATO in them as well:

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, … was formed under a secret agreement with the United States and within the framework of NATO.” Former Italian defense minister Paulo Taviani told Magistrate Casson during a 1990 investigation “that during his time in office (1955-58), the Italian secret services were bossed and financed by ‘the boys in Via Veneto’—i.e. the CIA agents in the U.S. Embassy in the heart of Rome.” In 2000 “an Italian secret service general [Giandelio Maletti] 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.”⁷

Another conspirator, Carlo Digilio, “described how he passed on details of planned bomb attacks to his CIA contact, Captain David Carret, who had told him that the bombing campaign was part of a US plan to create a state of emergency.”⁸ Daniele Ganser, in his important book Nato’s Secret Armies, has endorsed a Spanish report that in 1990 NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner (aGerman politician and diplomat) secretly confirmed that NATO’s headquarters, SHAPE, was indeed responsible:

The Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), directing organ of NATO’s military apparatus, coordinated the actions of Gladio, according to the revelations of Gladio Secretary-General Manfred Wörner during a reunion with the NATO ambassadors of the 16 allied nations.⁹

Extrapolating from such testimony, Ola Tunander has compared the strategy of tension in Italy, with its false-flag bombing attacks, to “what the Turkish military elite might describe as the correction of the course of democracy by the ‘deep state’ [a Turkish term].”¹⁰

Strategy of Tension

But I believe it would be too simplistic an analysis to blame the Italian strategy of tension exclusively on Vinciguerra’s “super-organisation which… took up the task [of false-flag bombings], on Nato’s behalf.” There appear to have been other directing forces besides NATO and those elements Vinciguerra was aware of through Italian military intelligence (the SID, later SISMI). It is important to recall that the Italian trials of those convicted for the 1980 Bologna bombing implicated not only Vinciguerra, SISMI, and Gladio, but also elements of the Italian mafia (the Banda della Magliana) and the Italian Masonic Lodge Propaganda-Due (P-2), with links to criminal bankers and the Vatican.¹¹

In short, if we suggest that something like the Turkish deep state was involved in the Italian strategy of tension, this does not suggest a solution to the Italian mystery, so much as a zone, or interlocking network, for further research.

Has a Strategy of Tension Been Exercised in America?

Gladio connections to sustained false-flag violence, again involving NATO and the CIA, were subsequently established in other countries, notably Belgium and Turkey.¹² I wish to propose that America, as well as Europe, has also suffered from a similar series of false-flag structural deep events, including bombings, that have, in conformity with the same strategy of tension, systematically moved America into its current condition, a state of emergency.

Nato headquarters

Among the false flag structural deep events I wish to consider today are

The John F. Kennedy assassination of 1963, or 11/22, which led to the CIA’s Operation Chaos against the anti-Vietnam War movement. (11/22 was clearly a deep event: many documents in the area of Lee Harvey Oswald’s relations to CIA operations are still being withheld, despite statutory and court orders to release them.¹³

The Robert Kennedy assassination of 1968, followed immediately by emergency legislation which led to state-sponsored violence at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention.

The 1993 first World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which led to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

9/11 and the subsequent false flag anthrax attacks of 2001, which led to the imposition of Continuity of Government (COG) measures, the Patriot Act, and the proclamation, on September 14, 2001, of a State of Emergency which remains in effect. (In September 2012 it was once again renewed for another year).¹⁴

These structural deep events have had a common and cumulative result: the erosion of public or constitutional power, and its progressive replacement by unconstrained repressive force. I have argued elsewhere that

1) as in Italy, all of these events were blamed on marginal left-wing elements, but in fact involved elements inside America’s covert intelligence agencies, along with their shadowy underworld connections.

2) some of these structural deep events bore a relationship to the ongoing secret planning – known in the Pentagon as the Doomsday Project – for Continuity of Government (or COG) in an emergency, which entailed its own secret communications network, and arrangements for what (in the Oliver North Hearings) was called “suspension of the American Constitution.”

3) in every case, the official response to the deep event was a set of new repressive measures, usually in the form of legislation.

4) cumulatively, these events suggest the on-going presence in America of what I have called a “dark force” or “deep state,” analogous to what Vinciguerra described in Italy as a “secret force…occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the [successive] outrages.”¹⁵

The Oklahoma City Bombing (4/19) and 9/11

Recently I viewed for a film, “A Noble Lie,” about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.¹⁶ This gave me a chance, for the first time, to test these hypotheses against the case of Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, or what I shall call 4/19. More than I could have anticipated, 4/19 fit into and strengthened this analysis.

Oklahoma City Bombing

The film “A Noble Lie,” itself points to some striking similarities between the events of 1995 and of 2001. The most obvious is the alleged destruction of a steel-reinforced building by external forces (a truck bomb in the case of the Murrah Building in 1995, flying debris in the case of Building Seven in 2001). Experts in both cases have asserted that the buildings in fact could only have been brought down by cutting charges placed directly against the sustaining columns inside the building. Here for example is a report to Congress from General Benton K. Partin, a retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General and expert on non-nuclear weapons devices:

When I first saw the pictures of the truck-bomb’s asymmetrical damage to the Federal Building, my immediate reaction was that the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementing demolition charges at some of the reinforcing concrete column bases…. For a simplistic blast truck-bomb, of the size and composition reported, to be able to reach out on the order of 60 feet and collapse a reinforced column base the size of column A-7 is beyond credulity.¹⁷

There is now a broad and growing consensus among architects, engineers, and other experts, that the three buildings which collapsed on 9/11 in the World Trade Center were also most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges.¹⁸

False Flag Terror and Conspiracies of Silence

Global Research

Prof. James F. Tracy

The news media’s readiness to accept official pronouncements and failure to more vigorously analyze and question government authorities in the wake of "domestic terrorist" incidents contributes to the American public’s already acute case of collective historical amnesia, while it further rationalizes the twenty-first century police state and continued demise of civil society.

Some may recall "Bugs Raplin" (Giancarlo Esposito), the resolute investigative journalist depicted in Tim Robbins’ 1992 political mockumentary Bob Roberts. After being framed as the culprit in a false flag assassination attempt by corrupt political huckster Bob Roberts (Robbins), Raplin delivers a perceptive soliloquy that among other things effectively describes the American public's moribund civic condition and short-circuited democracy. “The reason Iran-Contra happened,” Raplin begins, is because no one did anything substantial about Watergate. And the reason Watergate happened is because there were no consequences from the Bay of Pigs. They’re all the same operatives—the foot soldiers at the Bay of Pigs, the plumbers that got busted at Watergate, the gunrunners in Iran-Contra—all the same people, same faces. Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the connection here: A secret government beyond the control of the people and accountable to no one. And the closer we are to discovering the connection, the more Congress turns a blind eye to it. “We can’t talk about that in open session,” they say. “National security reasons.” The truth lies dormant in their laps and they stay blind out of choice. A conspiracy of silence.

Twenty years later amidst the vast outsourcing of intelligence and military operations many more events may arguably be added to such a shadow government’s achievements—the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing, the September 11 terror attacks, the non-existent weapons of mass destruction prompting the occupation of Iraq, the July 7, 2005 London tube bombings, the shoe and underwear "bombings"—all of which have contributed to the official justification of imperial wars abroad and an ever-expanding police state at home.

Lacking meaningful contexts with which to understand such events in their totality the general public is incapable of recognizing the road it is being forced down. The most recent set of events that give pause are the horrific, military-style shootings in Aurora Colorado and Oak Creek Wisconsin that authorities maintain were carried out by "lone wolf" gunmen.

Operation Gladio in America?

A potential backdrop and precursor to the Colorado and Wisconsin events is the oft-forgotten Operation Gladio, a campaign involving US and British intelligence-backed paramilitaries anonymously carrying out mass shootings and bombings of civilian targets throughout Europe. Hundreds of such attacks took place between the late 1960s and early 1980s by “stay behind armies” of right wing and fascist saboteurs in an overall effort to terrorize populations, deploy a “strategy of tension,” and thereby maintain a centrist political status quo.[1] In the uncertain environment the petrified citizenry pled for stepped-up security and stood poised to part with personal freedoms. At the same time the maneuver allowed for political adversaries---in Gladio's time socialist and communist groups—to be blamed for the attacks and thereby demonized in the public mind.

The string of still unresolved US political assassinations throughout the 1960s suggest how such practices were not restricted to foreign countries. Nor were they solely the terrain of intelligence agencies. Along lines similar to Gladio, in the early 1960s the US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed Operation Northwoods, where terrorist attacks would be initiated against US civilians in American cities and the violence blamed on Cuban combatants to justify war against the island nation.[2] The Kennedy administration rejected the proposal. While Northwoods exhibited the capacity for government to conceive and propose such plans, Gladio was demonstrably carried out against Western civilian populations in multiple locations over many years.

Consideration of Gladio and Northwoods might be dismissed were it not for early eyewitness accounts following the Colorado and Wisconsin shootings contending how there were two or more killers present at each incident—testimonies contradicting official government narratives that have accordingly been suppressed in the public mind.[3]

As communications historian Christopher Simpson observes, “the tactics that created the [Gladio] stay behinds in the first place are still in place and continue to be used today. They are standard operating procedure.”[4] Such potential explanations will appear foreign to an American public that is systematically misinformed and easily distracted. And in times of crisis especially that very public is tacitly assured of its safe remove from such practices, looking instead to political authorities and experts to reestablish a stasis to the carefully constructed “reality” major media impose on the mass psyche.

In this alternate reality Gladio has effectively been “memory-holed.” A LexisNexis Academic search for “Operation Gladio” retrieves a mere 31 articles in English language news outlets—most in British newspapers. In fact, only four articles discussing Gladio ever appeared in US publications—three in the New York Times and one brief mention in the Tampa Bay Times. Barring a 2009 BBC documentary [5] no network or cable news broadcasts have ever referenced the maneuver.

Almost all of the articles related to Gladio appeared in 1990 when Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted Italy’s participation in the process. The New York Times downplayed any US involvement, misleadingly calling Gladio “an Italian creation” in a story buried on page A16.[6] In reality, former CIA director William Colby revealed in his memoirs that covert paramilitaries were a significant agency undertaking set up after World War II, including “the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington [and] NATO.”[7]

A Plausible Narrative / Conclusion

Gladio's successful concealment for so many years demonstrates how mass atrocities can be carried out by a shadow network with complete impunity. Most incidents from the Gladio period remain unsolved by authorities. In the US, however, a plausible narrative appears to be required for public consumption. For example, just a few hours after the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials swept in and wrested the case from Oak Creek authorities by classifying it as an act of "domestic terrorism."[8]. Less than twenty four hours later one of the federal government's foremost de facto propaganda and intelligence-gathering arms—the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)—developed a storyline that was unquestioningly lapped up by major news media.[9]

In an August 6 Democracy Now interview with SPLC spokesman Mark Potok and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Don Walker, Potok explained in unusual detail how the alleged killer was involved in "white supremacist groups," "Nazi skinhead rock bands," and that the SPLC had been “tracking” the groups he was in since 2000. Potok’s remarks, which dominate the exchange and steer clear of the suspect's experience in psychological operations, contrasted sharply with Walker's, who more cautiously pointed out that the suspect’s “work in [US Army] PsyOps is still a bit of a mystery to all of us ... We talked to a psychiatrist who said that [being promoted to PsyOps is] like going from the lobby to the 20th floor very quickly.”[10]

Like the Aurora Colorado storyline of a crazed shooter who expertly booby-trapped his apartment with exotic explosives, such appealingly sensationalistic narratives serve to sideline the countervailing testimonies of eyewitnesses and are difficult to contest or dislodge once they are driven home by would-be experts through almost every major news outlet.

A similar scenario played out in the wake of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing when the ATF, FBI and SPLC together constructed the dominant frame of Timothy McVeigh as the lone bomber, an account that likewise diverged with the local authorities’ initial findings, early news reports of unexploded ordinance and a mysterious accomplice of McVeigh, and the overall conclusions of the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation Committee’s Final Report.[11] The narrative nevertheless served to maintain the political status quo while securing the Clinton administration's second term in office. To this day most Americans believe McVeigh was solely responsible for the bombing despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

For its time Raplin’s prognosis was an accurate description of America's cascading socio-political nightmare. Elected officials abdicate their responsibility of oversight for personal gain and thus perpetuate “a conspiracy of silence.” Yet over the past two decades, the quickening pace of “terrorist” events suggests how shadow networks have grown in boldness and strength, while each attack has contributed to the steady erosion of civil society and constitutional rights.

With this in mind both the mainstream and "alternative" news media, through their overt censorial practices, their consistent failure to place events in meaningful historical contexts, and their overall deliberate obeisance to dubious and unaccountable authorities, compound this conspiracy by ensnaring the public in questionable realities from which it cannot readily escape.

Notes

Records show FBI practice of hiding evidence in secret databases

KSL
By Dennis Romboy

SALT LAKE CITY — A federal court hearing regarding allegedly hidden Oklahoma City bombing videotapes raised questions about the FBI evidence filing system that a Salt Lake attorney says shows a pattern of deception.

"They hide things. That's for sure," said Jesse Trentadue.

Court documents from various cases, an Associated Press story and a recent court order in California suggest the FBI has routinely concealed evidence from defense attorneys and others seeking records through the Freedom of Information Act.

Trentadue believes the agency has withheld from him surveillance footage from the Alfred P. Murrah Building and police dashcam video of Timothy McVeigh on the day of the deadly explosion.

The Salt Lake attorney began looking into the 1995 bombing case after his brother died in a federal detention center in Oklahoma. He believes federal agents mistook Kenneth Trentadue for a suspect and beat him to death during an August 1995 interrogation. He claims the video will reveal a second bombing suspect who resembles but is not his brother.

FBI storage systems
 
In a U.S. District Court hearing this week, Trentadue recited a recent history of FBI information storage systems bearing names such as "june files," "zero files, "I-drive" and now "S-drive."

The S-drive apparently is where the FBI currently stores documents. Kathryn Wyer, a Department of Justice attorney representing the FBI in the Trentadue case, acknowledged its existence during the hearing. But she said there's nothing nefarious about it.

"The S in S-drive stands for shared drive, not secret drive," she said.

In his ruling after the hearing, Judge Clark Waddoups ordered the FBI to further explain the S-drive and prove it searched that database in the Trentadue matter.

The FBI has already turned over 30 videotapes and 200 documents to Trentadue, and Wyer said there is nothing more in the files. She said the FBI does not have to prove whether other tapes exist or not, but show it conducted a reasonable search of databases where the records are likely to be.

Spokespersons for FBI in Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C., and the Department of Justice said they could not comment on the FBI's evidence storage systems, citing the ongoing litigation.

How the FBI uses those systems illustrates a practice of deception that is well documented in the public record, Trentadue said.

Zero files, for example, were reports containing information the agency did not want disclosed to defense counsel and which were kept separate from specific case files, according to a former FBI agent's affidavit in the Terry Lynn Nichols criminal case. The file name arose from the zero placed at the end of a report's assigned number to set it apart from other documents.

In 2004, the Associated Press revealed the existence of the "I-drive," a temporary  storage device created for FBI field office computer networks. Starting in 1996, agents used the I-drive to upload investigative documents for their supervisors to decide whether to place in the agency's official case files.

According to the story, the FBI did not routinely search the I-drive to see whether requested materials should be sent to defense lawyers, Congress or special investigative bodies such as the 9/11 inquiry.

The FBI acknowledged that some documents the AP unearthed for a 2004 story on the Oklahoma City bombing were inexplicably never given to its own investigators or lawyers for McVeigh, who was executed for the crime. And in 2001, the agency found 4,000 relevant documents that also were never turned over, which delayed McVeigh's execution for a month, according to AP.

FBI concealed documents in Calif. FOIA case
 
Just last month, a federal judge in the Central District of California called the FBI and its records manager David M. Hardy on the carpet for submitting false declarations in an attempt to conceal documents from plaintiffs in a FOIA case. Hardy also has been involved with Trentadue's FOIA request.

In that case, the FBI asserted authority to provide false information to the court.

"The government argues that there are times when the interests of national security require the government to mislead the court. The court strongly disagrees," wrote Judge Cormac J. Carney. "The government’s duty of honesty to the court can never be excused, no matter what the circumstance."

Wyer said that case isn't relevant in Trentadue because it doesn't involve national security.

All of those factors feed Trentadue's suspicion that FBI is concealing videotapes in his case. He believes the video will somehow help unravel what happened to his brother.

History of Trentadue's lawsuit
 
Kenneth Trentadue was a convicted bank robber who was taken to the federal transfer center in Oklahoma City after violating probation in San Diego in June 1995. His official cause of death was listed as suicide. But when his body was returned to the Trentadue family, it was covered with blood and bruises that Jesse Trentadue contends could have only come from a beating.

In a letter to Trentadue, the FBI said its search of the I-drive in the Oklahoma City field office yielded no records concerning him or his brother.

Still, Trentadue raised enough questions in court about how the FBI handles information requests that Waddoups ordered the agency to provide answers.

In addition to explaining the S-drive, the judge wants the FBI to prove it searched the I-drive. He wants Hardy and other FBI employees to indicate if they made truthful statements in the Trentadue case. He also wants the agency to address whether it searched evidence control centers in Oklahoma City and FBI headquarters and the FBI crime lab.

Finally, Waddoups ordered the FBI to explain how burdensome it would be to check the Oklahoma City bombing case file for entries in the two weeks after the explosion.

Trentadue said now that he knows about the different storage drives, his next FOIA request will specify searches of the A-drive, B-drive, C-drive, etc.

Death row prisoner: Timothy McVeigh told him government was involved in Oklahoma City bombing

INN World Report

David Paul Hammer, a fellow death row inmate of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh says McVeigh told him he was trained by undercover government agents to blow up the Murrah building in 1995. Hammer, author of “Deadly Secrets: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing,” told journalist Alex Jones Saturday McVeigh was trained by a man known as “the Major” who funded McVeigh $60,000 over a two-year period. Hammer reported McVeigh told him the Major said there was in fact a second, deadlier bomb made of C4 explosives that went off inside the building. Hammer says McVeigh’s military records show he had a secret military clearance that expired in 1996, four years after he left the New York National Guard. Hammer says: “It really amazes me that the public continues to buy the official version of the Oklahoma bombing,” adding: “I want the truth to come out.”
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