The Road to 9 11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America

526 Pages·2008·2.72 MB·English

by  Peter Dale Scott

Praise for Peter Dale Scott’s The Road to 9/11
“Peter Dale Scott exposes a shadow world of oil, terrorism, drug trade, and arms
deals, of covert financing and parallel security structures—from the Cold War to
today. He shows how such parallel forces of the United States have been able to
dominate the agenda of the George W. Bush administration, and that statements
and actions made by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
before, during, and after September 11, 2001, present evidence for an American
‘deep state’ and for the so-called Continuity of Government in parallel to the
regular ‘public state’ ruled by law. Scott’s brilliant work not only reveals the
overwhelming importance of these parallel forces but also presents elements of a
strategy for restraining their influence to win back the ‘public state,’ the
American democracy.”
Ola Tunander, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo
”The Road to 9/11 is vintage Peter Dale Scott. Scott does not undertake
conventional political analysis; instead, he engages in a kind of poetics, crafting
the dark poetry of the deep state, of parapolitics, and of shadow government. As
with his earlier work Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Scott has no theory of
responsibility and does not name the guilty. Rather, he maps out an alien terrain,
surveying the topography of a political shadow land, in which covert political
deviancy emerges as the norm. After reading Scott, we can no longer continue
with our consensus-driven belief that our so-called liberal order renders
impossible the triumph of the politically irrational.”
Eric Wilson, Senior Lecturer of Public International Law, Monash University,
and co-editor of Government of the Shadows
“A powerful study of the historic origins of the terrorist strikes of September 11,
this book offers an indispensable guide to the gluttonous cast of characters who,
since Watergate and the fall of Nixon, fashioned an ever-more-reckless
American empire. By exposing the corrupt U.S. ‘deep state’—transfer of public
authority to America’s wealthy and to the nation’s unaccountable secret
intelligence agencies—Peter Dale Scott’s The Road to 9/11 illuminates the path
toward a more democratic and inclusive republic.”
David MacGregor, King’s University College at the University of Western
Ontario ”The Road to 9/11 provides an illuminating and disturbing history of the
American government since World War II. Scott’s account suggests that the 9/11
attacks were a culmination of long-term trends that threaten the very existence of
American democracy, and also that there has been a massive cover-up of 9/11
itself. This book, which combines extensive research, perceptive analysis, and a
fascinating narrative, will surely be considered Scott’s magnum opus.”
David Ray Griffin, author of Debunking 9/11 Debunking
The publisher gratefully acknowledges
the generous
support of Stephen M. Silberstein as a
member of the
Publisher’s Circle of University of
California Press.
THE ROAD TO 9/11
BOOKS BY PETER DALE SCOTT
9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, edited with David Ray
Griffin (2007) Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan,
Colombia, and Indochina (2003) Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year
2000 (2000) Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994)
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, reissued 1996) Listening to the
Candle: A Poem on Impulse(1992)
Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, with Jonathan
Marshall (1991, reissued 1998) Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (1989)
The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the
Reagan Era, with Jonathan Marshall and Jane Hunter (1987) Crime and Cover-
Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977, reissued
1993) The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond—A Guide to Cover-Ups and
Investigations, edited with Paul L. Hoch and Russell Stetler (1976) The War
Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War(1972) Zbigniew
Herbert: Selected Poems, translated with Czeslaw Milosz (1968, reissued 1986)
The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam, with Franz Schurmann and Reginald
Zelnik (1966)
THE ROAD TO 9/11
WEALTH, EMPIRE,
AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICA
Peter Dale Scott
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses
in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in
the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported
by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals
and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Library
of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Peter Dale.
The road to 9/11 : wealth, empire, and the future of America / Peter Dale
Scott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-23773-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Transparency in government—United States. 2. Privacy, Right of—United
States. 3. War on Terrorism, 2001—Political aspects. 4. September 11 Terrorist
Attacks, 2001—Political aspects. 5. United States—Politics and government—
1945–1989. 6. United States—Politics and government—1989– 7. Democracy—
United States. 8. Elite (Social sciences)—United States. 9. National security—
United States. 10. Political corruption—United States—History—20th century. I.
Title.
JK468.S4S36 2007
973.931—dc22 2007018905
Manufactured in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% postconsumer waste
and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
To the many trailblazers for a sane society, whose message must be rediscovered
by each generation. And among them in particular to
William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879)
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Carl Schurz (1829–1906)
David Graham Phillips (1867–1911)
W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1923)
Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)
Scott Nearing (1883–1983)
A. J. Muste (1885–1967)
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Badshah Khan) (1890–1988)
Franz Jägerstätter (1907–1943)
I. F. Stone (1907–1989)
Simone Weil (1909–1943)
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004)
Nelson Mandela (b. 1918)
Paolo Freire (1867–1911)
Fred Shuttlesworth (b. 1922)
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)
Mario Savio (1942–1996)
Adam Michnik (b. 1946)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface. The America We Knew and Loved: Can It Be Saved?
1 Introduction: Wealth, Empire, Cabals, and the Public State
2 Nixon, Kissinger, and the Decline of the Public State
3 The Pivotal Presidency: Ford, Rumsfeld, and Cheney
4 Brzezinski, Oil, and Afghanistan
5 Carter’s Surrender to the Rockefellers on Iran
6 Casey, the Republican Countersurprise, and the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International, 1980
7 Afghanistan and the Origins of al Qaeda
8 The Al-Kifah Center, al Qaeda, and the U.S. Government, 1988–98
9 The Pre-9/11 Cover-up of Ali Mohamed and al Qaeda
10 Al Qaeda and the U.S. Establishment
11 Parallel Structures and Plans for Continuity of Government
12 The 9/11 Commission Report and Vice President Cheney
13 The 9/11 Commission Report’s and Cheney’s Deceptions about 9/11
14 Cheney, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Continuity of
Government
15 Conclusion: 9/11 and the Future of America
Glossary of Open Politics
Notes
Bibliography
Index