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

445 Pages·2007·3.154 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 reg-
ular ‘public state’ ruled by law. Scott’s brilliant work not only reveals the over-
whelming importance of these parallel forces but also presents elements of a strat-
egy for restraining their influence to win back the ‘public state,’ the American
democracy.”
Ola Tunander,International Peace Research Institute, Oslo
“The Road to 9/11is vintage Peter Dale Scott. Scott does not undertake conven-
tional 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 respon-
sibility and does not name the guilty. Rather, he maps out an alien terrain, sur-
veying 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 impossi-
ble 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 ofcharacters 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 agen-
cies—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’smagnum opus.”
David Ray Griffin,author ofDebunking 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
9/11and 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
BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
University of California Press, one of the most
distinguished university presses in the United States,
enriches lives around the world by advancing scholar-
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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
First paperback printing 2008
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.
isbn978-0-520-25871-6 (pbk : 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
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/nisoz39.48-1992 (r1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
To the many trailblazers for a sane society, whose message must be
rediscovered by each generation. Andamong 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)
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface. The America We Knew and Loved:
Can It Be Saved? xi
1 Introduction: Wealth, Empire, Cabals, and
the Public State 1
2 Nixon, Kissinger, and the Decline of the Public State 26
3 The Pivotal Presidency: Ford, Rumsfeld, and Cheney 50
4 Brzezinski, Oil, and Afghanistan 65
5 Carter’s Surrender to the Rockefellers on Iran 80
6 Casey, the Republican Countersurprise, and the Bank
of Credit and Commerce International, 1980 93
7 Afghanistan and the Origins of al Qaeda 114
8 The Al-Kifah Center, al Qaeda, and the U.S. Government,
1988–98 138
9 The Pre-9/11Cover-up of Ali Mohamed and al Qaeda 151
10 Al Qaeda and the U.S. Establishment 161
11 Parallel Structures and Plans for Continuity
of Government 180
12 The9/11Commission Reportand Vice President Cheney 194