The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America.
University of California Press, September 2007.
Book information: publisher, Google Books, Amazon.com.
Peter Dale Scott:
- Peter Dale Scott, Wikipedia.
- Peter Dale Scott: Poetry and Political Writings, his personal webpage (alternate URL).
- Conversations With History - Peter Dale Scott
Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley
Conversations with History, Series Host Harry Kriesler
"Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America"
A Conversation with Peter Dale Scott, Emeritus Professor of English
08 August 2007
In this interview Scott states "secrecy is the source of the problem."
Notes and Comments:
For me the most insightful feature of this book, and apparently a feature of Scott's political writings generally, is his distinction between the "public state" and the "deep state" (his preferred nomenclature, in place the more common and conspiratorial-sounding "secret government"). While this book is not a work of Constitutional history and analysis (Dale focuses on the people and events related to 9/11) it seem clear to me that the National Security Act of 1947 (which created the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency and reorganized the Department of Defense) has allowed the emergence of an Executive Branch that is fixated on secret decisions and actions which directly contradict the spirit and letter of the Constitution of 1787 in which such government decisions and actions were to be arrived at through public debate in Congress. A symptom of this emerged in 2007 as the public realized that Congressional opposition to the excesses of the Bush administration had been effectively neutralized due to the complicity of the Congressional leadership in Bush and Cheney's excesses from the beginning. That is, Congressional leaders were informed along the way as the Executive Branch engaged in torture, warrantless wiretaps, etc. and yet such excesses continued, Congress failed to stop them, and today Congress as a body does not object to them nor impeach government officials who authorized or engaged in what were previously regarded as obviously illegal and unconstitutional acts and even internationally recognized war crimes. In the last few years, as people realized that Bush et al. have delivered a mortal blow (several mortal blows, actually) to the old republic, many have reflected on where the nation went wrong, what were the turning points. I would argue that the National Security Act of 1947 formalized / ratified the beginning of the Empire phase of American history (ignoring the imperial nature of the U.S. since its inception). By the end of his term in 1961 President Eisenhower recognized that the old republic was threatened (or had ended) and tried to warn the people in his Farewell Address. With the Bush Jr. administration the politicians no longer bother to hide their contempt for the old republic and its Constitution ("just a piece of paper" - Bush Jr.).
These assertions about the U.S. Constitution, turning points, and the National Security Act of 1947 require justifications that I am unable to provide at this time. As a novice to this topic, the following books look to me like good places to start learning more.
- John W. Dean. Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. Little, Brown & Company, 2004; paperback edition with an additional chapter, New York: Warner Books, 2005; now published by: Grand Central Publishing / Hachette Book Group USA.
(publisher, Amazon.com) - David Cole & James X. Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security, Revised and Updated Edition / third edition. New York: The New Press, January 2006.
(publisher, Amazon.com) - Ted Gup. Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life. Doubleday, May 2007.
(publisher, Amazon.com) - Harold Koh. The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran-Contra Affair. Yale University Press, 1990.
(publisher, Amazon.com) - Melvyn P. Leffler. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford University Press, 1992.
(publisher, Amazon.com) - Michael J. Hogan. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
(publisher, Amazon.com) - Joel D. Aberbach & Mark A. Peterson, editors. Institutions of American Democracy: The Executive Branch. Oxford University Press USA, December 2005.
(publisher, Amazon.com) - Robert M. Pallitto and William G. Weaver. Presidential Secrecy and the Law. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
(publisher, Amazon.com)
[John M. Ackerman, Book Review, Political Science Quarterly, Volume 122, Number 4, Winter 2007-08.]
Scott, as he discusses in the "Conversations with History" interview, considers the Ford administration (1974-1977) a key turning point, with the decline of the Kissinger strategy of living with the Soviet Union (Détente) to a new strategy initiated and implemented by people like Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Casey which sought the destruction of the Soviet Union; this policy produced American provocations in Afghanistan in 1979 before the Soviets invaded that country and American sponsorship of the "Arab-Afghans" in the 1980s, which we now know resulted in the emergence of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban as organized forces in the 1990s. The Ford administration was also the time when Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense) and Dick Cheney (White House Chief of Staff) first attained high executive branch positions. Note that John Dean's book Worse Than Watergate discusses the secrecy and foreign policy orientations that we think of as characteristic of the Bush Jr. administration were first practiced by Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense (1989-1993) during the Bush Sr. administration.
One cannot discuss this book without observing that Scott has been very active in the 9/11 Truth Movement. However there is nothing in this book that I would describe as speculative nor what some would describe as conspiracy theories. The only issue Scott addresses that is anywhere near those topics around which speculation swirls is his careful consideration of what George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were doing between about 9:15am and 10:00am on 11 September 2001 when they very likely participated in a secret telephone call to discuss Continuity of Government (COG) but which has not yet been documented in the public record. The absence of any mention of COG by the 9/11 Commission and its Report is regarded by many as one of the indicators that the 9/11 Commission and its Report were a cover-up.