75. Gareth Porter, “Attack Iran? Cheney’s Already Tried,” AlterNet, June 10, 2008, http://www.alternet.org/audits/87488: “Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer [2007] for air strikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W. Bush administration official. J Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department officials and the JCS used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal. McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposal several weeks earlier ‘launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran,’ citing two officials involved in Iran policy.”
76. Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw, 13. Even former George W. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has referred to the media in his book as “complicit enablers” of Bush administration war propaganda (Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception [New York: Public Affairs, 2008], 70, 125).
77. Washington Post, September 8, 2006. Cf. BBC, “Paranoia Paradise,” April 4, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1909378.stm. The common tactic of such essays is to focus on absurdly eccentric beliefs and try to pass them off as representative of all those criticizing received anticonspiratorial opinion.
78. E.g., Paul L. Atwood, “War and Empire Are and Always Have Been the American Way of Life,” Global Policy Forum, February 2006, http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2006/022006history.htm.
79. Alexander Cockburn, “The Age of Irrationality: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the American Left,” CounterPunch, November 28, 2006, http://www
.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html.
80. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 123, cf. 13–14; Herbert Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Random House, 1974).
81. Michael Klare, Beyond the “Vietnam Syndrome” (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981).
82. E.g., Robert Wright, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Slate, October 11, 2001 http://www.slate.com/id/117170.
83. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 57–61. Cf. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End Press, 1983).
84. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (1997), http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST.
85. Prouty, The Secret Team, chap. 2.
86. G. William Domhoff, quoted in Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America, by Jonathan Vankin (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 125–26.
87. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 11.
88. Parenti, Dirty Truths, 188.
89. This has been doubted in the case of the JFK assassination, notably by Noam Chomsky. For my latest contribution to this old argument, see Scott, The War Conspiracy, 285–340.
90. Scott, The War Conspiracy, 14; Michael Standaert, Skipping towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006), 112–14.
91. Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (New York: Little, Brown, 2007), 51. Strangely, Savage does not mention COG by name, but he refers to the decade of COG planning in the 1980s as evidence for his case that a “cabal of zealots” has been planning for “the return of the imperial presidency” ever since Cheney and Rumsfeld lost their posts in the Ford administration.
