JFK And 9/11

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Insights Gained from Studying Both

By Dr. Peter Dale Scott

December 20, 2006
Global Research,

The assassination of John F. Kennedy took place 43 years ago on Friday, November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. The following text is the transcript of a lecture delivered by Peter Dale Scott in Dallas on November 18, 2006.

To view the webcast of Peter Dale Scott's lecture, click here

DALLAS – November 18, 2006. [posted December 20, 2006. Revised version December 21, 2006]

When I first imagined doing this talk I thought: well, I probably knew more at this stage about 9/11 than most people here, who are professionally concerned with JFK. But in preparing this talk, which I only began last Monday, has been a real learning experience for me. Taking a lot of things which I had already knew about each, but which I had never really put together before -- when I did they gave me a clearer view of what was happening behind the scenes in both operations. Because certain things repeat themselves. [1]

These things that repeat themselves include what we might call external features – which you are very familiar with in the JFK case - the ability of the government to establish a guilty party or parties immediately, and the press and media consumption of that product to the exclusion of all other possibilities.

Eventually, in both cases a commission is set up – the Warren Commission in 1963 and the 9/11 Commission this time in 2003.

And the starting point for both commissions is to validate what was already decided by the FBI on the day in question. That is the first of the common features that I would like to look at a bit more closely because it sort of hit me between the eyes when I thought about the two together.

Now if you remember the case of Oswald (and I have to do this from memory here, so correct me if I am wrong about the details) within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, they put out on the police network and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – five foot ten – 165 pounds (WR 5; 17 WH 397), which exactly matches what is in his FBI file, exactly matches what’s in CIA documents about him.[2]

One of the problems is it doesn’t match the actual height and weight of the man picked up and charged, which is more like five foot nine and 140 pounds.[3] And it’s also very suspect because as far as we can trace the origins of this exact fit with the FBI file, it’s attributed to Howard Brennan[4] – who saw someone two blocks from here in the sixth floor window, from the waist up. So you’ll have to figure out how they were able to get that exact measurement. It appears someone had already decided who was going to be charged before the police found Oswald in the Texas Theater.

Now the parallel to that for 9/11 is, I have to say, even more astounding, because of Richard Clarke, who was director for counter-terrorism activities in the White House, and a very important eyewitness. His book Against All Enemies is almost totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission, and it had to be ignored by the Commission because it is at odds, in many important respects, with what the 9/11 Report says (which I will get back to). But he tells us that at 9:59 am on September 11, which is the time when the second tower collapses, the North Tower, the FBI already had a list of the alleged hijackers.[5]

This is extraordinary in the first place because the FBI always says about itself that it doesn’t do much intelligence in the field of terrorism; its specialty is criminal investigation afterwards. They had the names of hijackers at 9:59; at 9:59 am Flight 93 had not yet crashed. And even more astonishingly, if we believe the 9/11 Report (which of course on this point I do not believe), NORAD, which was searching for the hijacked planes, wasn’t aware that Flight 93 had been hijacked until 10:08, which is nine minutes later.

("I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming," a former FBI official with extensive counter-terrorism experience has since said. "Within 24 hours [of the attack] the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and somebody was sitting on it.")[6]

So it’s worth thinking about that for a moment, the two events together. And then in the other cases that we know about, how the identity of the person who is ultimately going to be identified as the culprit is established at the very beginning - Sirhan Sirhan, the bag with the gun that identifies James Earl Ray – it isn’t investigative work AFTER the assassination, that finds these people, it is just following up what is already there, from the very beginning.

As I say that is the first thing that strikes my mind about the similarities between the two events. And then we come to what I call the internal continuity of content. Historically I was first drawn to this because in the news of the Watergate break-in in the New York Times, on June 17, 1972, which I remember quite vividly, there was Frank Sturgis, alias Frank Fiorini. I had already written about him in The Dallas Conspiracy a year before, because of his role in perpetuating false Oswald stories, what I now call Phase One Oswald stories, linking Oswald falsely to Cuba [7]

I could go on and on about that, but I just wanted to say, in the new paperback edition of Lamar Waldon’s book Ultimate Sacrifice, we find validation of a very old story that Hunt and McCord, who we may loosely call two of the Watergate burglars, certainly the two who were controlling the fate of the rest, worked together in 1963.[8]

This is an old charge, which was largely forgotten, but is revived in this book, and in my mind credibly. I’ll just put myself on record that I was not impressed with the hardbound edition of Ultimate Sacrifice, and only this week just began reading my copy of the paperback edition. And I have issues with a lot of the things in there, but I am convinced it has to be taken seriously. Whether or not he is right about his central thesis, he is more right about the supporting details that he has gathered for it and his book has the advantage of being thoroughly documented. The quality of the documentation goes up and down, but there is a great deal of it.

THE WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY

Now I want to come to a common denominator between what happened in 1963 and what happened in 2001. It is not often discussed, but by coincidence, I think it is being discussed right now in the other place, as we call it [i.e. the Lancer Conference], the role of the White House Communications Agency. You are all JFK researchers. How many of you have ever asked yourself about the role of the White House Communications Agency – WHCA on 11/22/63–? Anybody?

Rex![9] (laugh) Well I am indebted to Rex [Bradford], who of course is administering the web site of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. There are quite a few documents there, and I am going to draw on those documents. That is what’s so wonderful about the Mary Ferrell Foundation, you never have to go to the National Archives again, you just give a few touches of the fingers on the keyboard and you get these things.

It’s going to help us with what I consider a very crucial and unresolved question of 9/11, and I’m sorry I have to telescope here. My big question and the focus of my forthcoming book - The Road to 9/11 - out of that huge book with 14 chapters, there are only two on 9/11 itself, and both of them are looking almost exclusively at what Dick Cheney did between 9 am and 10:39 on that morning -- because there are different accounts of it, and interestingly there are different accounts from Dick Cheney himself, incompatible accounts.

I believe it is a very important issue because either he was in the bunker, what we call the PEOC under the White House, or not, when two crucial orders were made, a Stand Down order that got all the planes down on the ground, that came out of the bunker, and a Shoot Down order, to shoot down any remaining hijacked planes. (At this point there was only one – Flight 93, which of course is the plane that should not have been shot down, according to the official version, because the passengers were taking care of the problem themselves.)

And there is no doubt, everybody agrees, including the 9/11 Report, that both these orders occurred. There is no doubt that the first was at 9:42.[10] However there is great confusion as to whether the second order was around 9:45-9:55 (Richard Clarke says it was before Air Force One took off at 9:54);[11] or when the Report indicates: probably about 10:15, which of course is after Flight 93 had already crashed.[12]

Now when did Dick Cheney go into the PEOC? He spoke to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” five days afterward, on September 16, and said he got there before the plane, if that is what it was, flew into the Pentagon, which was at 9:37. And I believe what he said on September 16.

Then he was interviewed by Newsweek, and that appeared in Newsweek on December 31; and it is the basis for the story in the 9/11 Report: that he “arrived”, and that’s the Report’s word, in the bunker “shortly before 10 [am], perhaps at 9:58.”[13]

You notice if that was the case, he was not present for either order, though we have many sources to say that he was there for the first, and the only coherent reading of Richard Clarke’s book is that he transmitted to Clarke the shoot down order sometime before 9:54.

What I think happened -- and this is where we will get back to JFK -- is that Cheney did indeed arrive quite early in the bunker, as Norman Mineta, who was also there, testified. (There’s a very interesting story there that I can’t get into here.)[14] And THEN Cheney left, and this is the interesting thing, he left the bunker, went back into the tunnel leading to the bunker – and from the tunnel he made the crucial phone call to Bush and perhaps an even more crucial phone call to Rumsfeld, which Rumsfeld has referred to but which the Report ignores, which was about three things:

1) protecting Air Force One, which was irrelevant;
2) orders (disputed) about planes, which may have involved the shoot-down order;
3) Continuity of Government.[15]

I wish I could get into this -- it is the heart of my book: instituting COG, Continuity of Government (which I call Change in Government, because it is often called a plan for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution – and that is a pretty accurate summary of it).[16]

How many of you did know that it was actually instituted on 9/11? That is perhaps one of the most important things that happened on 9/11, and it happened because of this phone call, and there is no record of the phone call.[17] And I think it’s pretty obvious that there is no record of the phone call because he wasn’t in the bunker where people were taking notes and logs were being kept. He went to a back channel from a secure phone somewhere else. There’s no question, everyone agrees, even Cheney himself, that he used a secure phone in the tunnel at this time.[18]

Now this matter could be resolved by going to the records of the White House Communications Agency. They kept logs. The Secret Service kept logs. And we have logs from that day that which record a trivial phone call at 9:15 am and another trivial phone call at 10:15 am.

But Thomas Kean, the commission chairman, complained publicly that the logs were not complete.[19] We have the equivalent of an 18 minute gap, which some of you will remember from the Watergate investigation.[20] The 9/11 Commission does not present any records from the logs for the time of the phone call, either because they never saw them, possibly because the logs had been massaged and cleansed and purged before they got to them, possibly because the commission purged them themselves or, and this is what I believe, and I think you should think about very seriously, because the phone in the tunnel was a back channel for which normal logs were not kept, possibly because it was a higher classification because it involved Continuity of Government.

And one of the things I would press for is for Congress -- when we start suing for the records that don’t get released in 2009[21] – to get released all of the documents pertaining to COG. I believe these will tell us about warrant-less wiretapping, about the building of detention camps for large numbers of undesirable people like US, and so on and so on. I think this is a very important topic.[22]

Let me see where I am from my notes here. Anyway, so I noticed this gap. First of all by the way, I had a researcher contact the press officer of the WHCA and they very helpfully said to put in a FOIA request. Well, the poor old ARRB wasn’t able to obtain significant documents from the WHCA, so I didn’t bother to try on my own.[23] I did go however, to their web site, and what I read there was, and this is a direct quote now: “WHCA was …a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.”[24]

Well, this struck me as extremely interesting! Because I don’t know who they documented it for; but on the basis of my research, they didn’t document it for the Warren Commission. Because the Warren Commission never got their records. And neither did the ARRB. And there is actually a section of the ARRB Report where they say – and I think they were much too limited in their curiosity, but it came to their attention that edited phone calls out of Air Force One flying back to Washington were, in of all places, the LBJ Library. Well then they figured if the edited records are at the LBJ Library we should get the unedited set released. Their report said, though, “The WHCA could not produce any records.”[25]

What they really should have asked for, and I believe this would have documented the assassination, were WHCA records BEFORE the shots were fired, leading up to the moment the shots were fired, but as I said, they only requested records from Air Force One, which is to say some time after.

However a few documents from 1963 were released. (And this is the beauty of the Mary Ferrell Foundation: you can read them there.) And what we read there is remarkably resonant to what I found out in respect to 9/11. In the post-shooting period, the regular switchboard in Washington was out of touch with Dallas, and the only way they could communicate was to patch though to Fort Worth, which in turn would then patch through to Dallas. But at the same time there was a back channel, just like I was talking about 9/11. The back channel was set up at Parkland Hospital, through the Secret Service, and the main WHCA switchboard was unaware of it.[26]

Source:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SCO20061220&articleId=4207