Excerpts from a book review -
The Road to 9/11 by Peter Dale Scott
I was able to get an advance copy of Peter Dale Scott's new book The Road to 9/11 from its publisher (University of California Press) so I thought I would share my review of it here. It will be available in your local bookstores this month, perhaps on the 11th itself.
*snip*
Chapter Eleven is perhaps the most important part of the book, discussing the Orwellian-named "Continuity of Government" (COG) planned structure. This has Rumsfeld's and Cheney's fingerprints all over it. The COG plan, according to Alfonso Chardy of the Miami Herald quoted in the book, calls for "suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to FEMA, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declarations of martial law during a national crisis."
By the time Scott comes to 9/11 itself in chapters twelve and thirteen, the main point of the book has already been made. The author writes "I argue that although much of the 9/11 Commission Report is well researched, professional, and credible, on the matter of Cheney's orders, the report resorts to deceptive and contrived misrepresentations of the truth." I won't get into the details of this section, but considering that the author has made a convincing representation of the buildup to secrecy by certain elements of the Government in the previous eleven chapters, it is not much of a leap to entertain the notion that such activities continued during, and after, the attacks. Scott meticulously documents contradictions within the testimony given to the 9/11 commission from various sources, in a way that I haven't seen before, that really makes one wonder just what Cheney was really doing that morning, and why.
The final two chapters are past the day of 9/11; they return to the subject of COG. (Scott quotes from a Washington Post article about the actual implementation of COG and, in my "it would be funny if it weren't so frightening" category, war games against Bloggers.) Scott concludes: "If there is merit to this analysis, then we must say that the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission have taken us still further in the wrong direction. As I and many others have written, a change in U.S. policies in the Middle East would do far more to reduce terrorism than consolidating the security bureaucracies in Washington." (I hope that our next President coughEdwardscough follows this advice!)
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