Review of Peter Dale Scott's book "The Road to
9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America".
Writing with a touch of the charm of the poet
that he is, Dr. Scott has been walking us through
this political-historical shadow land for some
time now. The Road to 9/11, which as the title
indicates, provides historic origins of the
terrorist strikes of September 11th 2001, builds
on and extends his prior research into secret
intelligence activities as presented in his two
past UC Press books; Cocaine Politics: Drugs,
Armies, and the CIA in Central America (1993) and
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1996) (among
others) by speaking both about current concerns
with the Bush-Cheney administration in relations
to the events on 9/11/01 and by going further
backwards sscrutinizing secret American
governmental activities just after the end of
World War II. It vividly concentrates on Richard
Nixon's failed regime and Tricky Dick's early
forays into threatening constitutional democracy
as revealed during the Watergate hearings. He
then depicts and examines the activities of
Nixon's successor Gerald Ford, concentrating on
his (what would later become neo-con) team of
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Scott pays close
attention to the Rumsfeld-Cheney collaboration
under Ronald Reagan's regime on what is known as
the Continuity of Government (COG) strategy: a
parallel planning structure in lieu of nuclear
war which includes plans for warrantless
surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, and
the arrangements for mass detention; proposals
which can also be described as plans for a
potential military-civilian coup. By now the
narrative of shadow government - what Scott calls
"deep politics" has taken hold and the book
beginss to read like an airport page-turner;
scorching the eyes with tale after tale of
intrigue and deception. But the characters are
real (Kissinger, Casey, Brzezinski, Carter,
Reagan, the Rockefellers, bin Laden, Clinton, et
al) and the events - which rotate around big oil,
terrorism, drug trade, arms deals, covert
financing and secret security configurations are
heavily documented in the copious footnotes
(which I equally read with jaw-dropping
fascination). Highlighted are the adventures of
multiple intelligence agencies and their
involvement with terrorist organizations that
they once backed and helped create, including al
Qaeda. At this point Scott's deep political
analysis has a kind of Rimbaudian poetics to it,
astutely avoiding moral condemnation. He is just
letting the deviant facts speak for themselves.
Already there is material here for numerous
Hollywood blockbuster films, but 3/4th through
this dark narrative thoroughly takes off. Enter
the reckless American empire of George W. Bush
and his neo-con administration. With the
intelligence of a scholar and the sensitivity of
a poet, Scott's description puts forward here
evidence that the 9/11 attacks were the zenith of
long-standing, but secret, trends that menace the
existence of American democracy as an open
society. Additionally, he questions why the U.S.
trillion dollar defense system failed to protect
on 9/11. He also shows through extensive research
that there has been a substantial cover-up of the
events on 9/11. Here Scott specifically zooms in
on suspicious statements and actions made by Vice
President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld;
before, during and after September 11th. He
focuses our attention specifically on the
Continuity of Government plan that was called
into action that morning, outlining Cheney's
secret communications with Rumsfeld and President Bush before or about 10 AM.
<http://www.logosjournal.com/?q=node/62>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/04/road-to-911.htm>monochrom
at 4/14/2009 11:43:00 AM
