Deep Politics 101- Preview to the Tipping Point

DEEP POLITICS 101 & JFK – Preview to the Tipping Point

The assassination of President Kennedy is one of the enduring historical enigmas of our times, not because it can’t be solved and resolved to a legal and moral certainty, but because those in control over the legal mechanisms of the government refuse to do so.

The sitting grand jury, the normal legal procedure used to investigate and prosecute an unsolved homicide, has not been properly utilized, and in one of the more recent attempts to resolve a legal issue – the testing of CE 345, it was expressly excluded from the proceedings.

Without the normal legal procedures available to investigators and researchers, alternative approaches must be devised, and Peter Dale Scott (PDS) has provided some, a few of which I have adopted in the course of my own research.

For starters, PDS explains how he finds common issues in the course of studying Deep Political events including the assassination of President Kennedy, Watergate, Iran/Contra and 9/11. I include Pearl Harbor and the Guatemalan and Iranian coups of 1954 and the Arab Spring to those that he also considers Deep Political events worth studying, but for the purpose of this essay I will concentrate only on the assassination of President Kennedy.

I.                    Archival research & Deep Political Events

In his glossary of terms used in his analysis, Scott describes Archival history as “A chronological record of events, as reconstructed by archival historians from public records; as opposed to deep history, which is a chronology of events concerning which the public records are often either falsified or nonexistent.”

For more of Scott’s Glossary [2]  see: http://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/GlossaryOfOpenPol.html

II – Common Characters

Scott, in his presentations and books, - I encourage everyone to read in full, [1 – PDS Links ] calls attention to the overlapping elements of such Deep Political events as common characters who appear in more than one event, - “there are symptomatic overlaps in personnel between the perpetrators of each of these deep events and the next.”

III – Underworld Activities – Drugs & Guns

While Scott also focuses on the Overworld industrial activities that often instigate assassination, coups and wars, such as oil, he also calls attention to other frequently appearing elements – such as drugs and arms sales, often part of Underworld deals of which there are few witnesses and no documentation.

IV - The “Negative Template.”

Scott’s “negative template” thesis proposes that those records that are destroyed, missing or withheld from the public are the ones most significant, and in regard to the assassination of President Kennedy, unlike the other Deep Political events, we have a plethora of records, millions of pages of documents that were previously withheld that are now available for scrutiny because of the JFK Act. [3]

At the same time, many more records, ostensibly the most important, are still being with held. [4]

Since we now have salvaged some records that were slated to be destroyed, but weren’t, the most significant include the New Orleans Grand Jury transcripts, the Andrews AFB Log book, the Clifton tape of the Air Force One radio transmissions.

While the New Orleans Grand Jury transcripts, now on line, [5] provides a guide to that 1968 case, for the purposes of this essay, only the Andrews Log and the Air Force One tapes will be used extensively as a window into these events because they should have been destroyed or kept out of the public record, and as a substantiation of the value of the “negative-template” approach.

V – Backchannel Communications

Also among the common attributes of Deep Political events that Scott discusses are off the public record back channel communications, which we see practiced in Kennedy’s dialog with Castro through the journalists and UN intermediaries, and in the radio and telephone conversations on the day of the assassination.

VI – Provocative – Northwoods Style Ops

Another element Scott brings to the table is the military’s use of provocation operations, of which the assassination itself was one that was designed but failed to provoke a military invasion of Cuba, but as Scott demonstrates, was successfully adopted at Tonkin Gulf in furthering the interests of defense contractors (Bell Helicopter, Gen. Dynamics, Collins Radio) as a pretext for the expansion of the Vietnam War.

VII – “Phase One” – “Phase Two” Cover Stories

With the vivid description of the provocative Northwood plans, and how it was applied over the course of the assassination of President Kennedy, Scott calls the prearranged plot to blame the Dealey Plaza operation on Castro and Communists as a “Phase One” operation and the fall back position of placing the sole responsibly for the assassination on a deranged lone-nut “Phase Two.” While the “Phase One” allegations can be clearly traced to their origins and shown to be a prearranged black propaganda operation, and the “Phase Two” position equally false, either is preferable than the truth, at least as far as those actually responsible for the assassination.

VIII – Continuity of Government – COG & Doomsday Planning

And finally, and probably the most significant of his contributions, Scott shows how the Continuity of Government (GOG) and Doomsday plans have been used, beginning at Dealey Plaza and refined with the assassination attempt on President Reagan and 9/11, but will only be dealt with here in regards to JFK.

What I originally set out to do was to look at the extant archival record, and together with the documents reluctantly released under the JFK Act, the Andrews Log and recently discovered Air Force One tape, and try to determine exactly when and where the decision was officially made to forgo the “Phase One” provocation operation and adopt the “Phase Two” deranged lone nut excuse.

While the “Phase One” operation continued long past the official decision to discard it, and in some respects continues today (via Russo, Houseman, et al), Carl Francis Tagg’s 1982 master thesis dissertation concludes, “…no persuasive evidence to suggest that Castro’s agents participated in the murder…the Cuban Government’s cooperation with the HSCA explained why Cuban complicity in the Kennedy assassination never took place.”

Nevertheless, an exploration into the events in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, as I have tried to do, leads one to clearly see that the decision to forego the “Phase One” attempts to blame Castro was made by LBJ in the Vice President’s offices in the Executive Office Building next door to the White House between 8 and 9 PM on the evening of the assassination, and reveals the existence of other “black holes” in the extant archival record that now need to be filled in.