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The Road to 9/11 by Peter Dale Scott
Peter Dale Scott is a Canadian poet and a former English professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The son of the noted poet and constitutional lawyer FR Scott, he is known for his anti-war stance and criticism of US foreign policy both of which date back to the Vietnam War. He's researched and written many investigative books about the role of the deep state, but rejects the label of conspiracy theorist. He is the author of the 2007 book "The Road to 9/11."
Q: The 911 Commission was incurious many times.
A: Yes. And also credulous many times. The 911 Report has a huge section on the alleged hijackers which, by their own account, is based on the testimony of people who were being tortured, and any ordinary person knows that people will say things under torture that aren't true.
Q: We've discovered recently just to what extent the primary witnesses were tortured and water-boarded.
A: Right. And there is a new New York Times story just yesterday about this man who was tortured in Egypt and then offered up information that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. I think this was frankly the purpose of the torture with everybody. I think they knew that they would get false information by the use of torture and they wanted the false information that it was all dreamed up by Iraq. And they actually got it from one person and they used it, but eventually it was so inconsistent with everything else that they dropped it.
Q: Yes. And when you start looking at all the various bits of misinformation that was put out around the time of the attacks of 911, about Iraq, and specifically involving the anthrax attacks...
A: Exactly. I think people were so relieved that we weren't all forcibly inoculated with anti-anthrax vaccine that now we don't think about it as often as we should. Here was an anthrax attack that targeted democrats in the congress and not republicans and that came at a time when Saddam Hussein was being accused of anthrax research. Leading figures in the field, possibly in good faith, were accusing Saddam Hussein of having a very active program. It turned out in the end not to be the case, but that doesn't mean that they were necessarily lying. I think they probably did believe it, but in that context for this anthrax that had a domestic source, connected to a US biological weapon's lab, for there to be this appearance begs for an investigation. It was an attack that very clumsily was disguised to look like an attack coming from abroad, and it needs to be investigated. Unfortunately I can't believe that the FBI and the various government investigative agencies will ever give us the truth about that because it's just too embarrassing to them.
Q: What has come out is just the extent to which we are in the dark about the anthrax attacks. I think that's been made fairly clear in the last year or so.
A: But I wish that more Americans were not only aware that we don't know what happening, but that what happened has been withheld from us, and that this is very threatening to the survival of democracy in this country.
Let's come back to COG. That was something that was brought in by Cheney with the approval of Bush because they wanted to do all kinds of special things like warrantless surveillance and warrantless detention, and essentially prepare for martial law.
We now have a democratic President, and back in the beginning of this year Dan Hamburg, a former congressman, and I launched an appeal to the White House to end this state of emergency, and we launched an appeal to Congress to get them to do what they are required to do by statute, by the National Emergencies Act, which is to review the conditions of the national emergency and either extend it or terminate. Not only has nothing happened in this direction, we can't even get an email answer from our congressional representatives.
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