Conversations With History - Peter Dale Scott

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Peter Dale Scott Peter Dale Scott is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley and he is his new book just published by UC press is the road to 9/11 wealth power in the future of America Peter welcome to our program Thank You Harry glad to be here where were you born and raised I'm a Canadian and I was born in Montreal and my first job was teaching at McGill University where I got my PhD and looking back how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world well my both my father and mother were quite visible in Canada my mother was an artist and my father was a poet but politician he helped start a political party that is still going in Canada and I think the party is that what is now the new Democrats and he wrote a book or contributed to a book for it called social planning for Canada and for me that epitomizes the difference between Canada and America you the people in Canada had the illusion that by thinking about the country and organizing they could affect the history of the country America is so huge by comparison that it's much harder to have that kind of a few people have it like Bill Clinton but it's not common what was a talk around the dinner table like as you were growing up a lot of politics politics and art I mean it was a nice mix from my point of view with your degree what was your degree in from McGill you're kind of I got a PhD in political side and what what in political science interested you I I was I did a it was a political theory thesis I wanted to write about Hegel and they assured me I would never get a job if I study I was ahead of the wave by about two years and so they said write about anything and I said anything they said yes so I said how about the political ideas of TS Eliot and they said great so I managed to marry the two parts of my schizophrenic self by writing them about a poet in a political science dissertation so so you you actually have brought both of these genes to the table as you've developed your career because you're in the English department here at Berkeley but you you do a lot of writing on issues of international politics most of my publication has been in politics and all of my teaching for 35 years was English yes what what what did you do after you left the university with a PhD well I taught one year but I I was I've partly for family reasons my father was a professor I wanted very much to get out of the university business right my feeling was I'd do anything with my life except being a professor and there was a chance to take the foreign service exams in Canada and I took them in path so I was a diplomat for four years and and enjoyed it very much and it was in some nice places the UN Geneva Austria Poland but then I realized that I'd probably be better off in a university after all so I came back with my tail between my legs and I've been teaching it until I retired and and what did you take from this experience as a diplomat because I at one point you were you were stationed in Poland I believe you told me and that the experience there and this range of experience sort of informed your your perspective in the way you looked at international politics mm-hmm well in a general way it was very interesting to live behind the curtain and I saw some of the things that are really very bad about life behind the iron curtain and other things that weren't so bad so I had a mixed evaluation of the in Poland Poland was probably the best place to be if you're going to be behind the iron curtain and then in a much narrower way it had a huge influence on my later life because just by coincidence I was there 59 to 61 and he's in Poland and in Warsaw more so I was four years in the diplomatic and the last two were in Warsaw and as it happened Canada India and Poland had been charged with overseeing the enforcement of the Geneva Accords of 1954 in Indochina so we used to get by see huge stacks of cables about Indochina and because I was the junior member of the embassy it was my chore to read them I never thought that it we had nothing to do with it in Warsaw it was just for information in case something came up nothing ever did but it meant that when I left the Diplomatic Service came to Berkeley in 1961 I didn't carry any specific memories from the cables except a sense that something is going terribly wrong and that most of the other countries can it was one of the rare times that Canada and America really had a different point of view because Canada was interested in seeing the the Geneva Accords enforced that would have meant the peaceful reunification of Vietnam by an election in 1956 and America of course Dulles made it very clear that he did not agree with the Accords and that he did not feel bound by them the United States did not sign the agreements and it spent the next year's successfully wrecking them and so that got me interested in Indochina even though I was teaching English here I've for two years circulated petitions and then in 1965 there was a visiting Jesuit who was very pro-war and they somehow picked me out to debate against him I was supposed to be the naive liberal who didn't know anything about these which was almost true at that time but that got me started in a career of opposing the war in Vietnam and and so this this luck of the draw that brought you to Berkley you were essentially positioned to think about what was going on in the world yes it was a good place to be doing it I had no intentions of ever doing anything with politics again and this thing was sort of thrust at me it wasn't even my choice to go out and speak first of all the right wing asked it and then John Searle drafted me to teach and the first teacher I said don't get me I'm a Canadian get an American they said there's no one else I gave a speak at I was the lead speak me main speaker at the first teach in here in Berkeley with Berkeley and Michigan were the two first we invented the word teaching and the spring of 1965 how did this this body of experience that you brought to the table affect your perspective as you looked at politics over the the following years well I was different from those people because there were on the one hand a number of people who worked with the government and were anxious to defend the government including my very good friend Aaron Wildavsky and there were a number of people who had never had anything to do with government who saw you know it was a time of very intense revolutionary rhetoric about overthrowing the government and all nonsense really and my position was that I felt that America did some good things in the world I thought they were quite beneficent in Poland much more so later on with solidarity but so I was not anti-american the way a lot of these student radicals were and I was very uncomfortable with the many of the faculty defending the government but also very uncomfortable with the rhetoric of the students attack I was against the war for America's sake I was against the war as well as for Vietnam sake so there weren't too many people like me I was in the middle in some ways you you are a poet and you you have taught in English poetry and and poetry is is is the use of words I'm curious how that sensibility your sensibility as an artist informs your political writing your writing about politics that have been such an important part of your life do the two go together well I think this book is the first time that one becomes aware that I am a poet and not just in fact one of the nice blurbs talks about me writing as a poet because in the last chapter this is not you know I say some rather harsh things about American policy but I make it very clear at the beginning that America is I'm still a Canadian citizen but in America as a country that I truly love I'm here by choice I love the American people I don't have I could never say I love the American government particularly not the present administration but I see a case of a country that when I came here in 61 was still informed by a kind of visionary ideals that a poet would appreciate and as I say in the preface to the book there were some very acute social problems in the 1960s in this country but the difference was there was the belief that something could be done about them a number of people inspired to go out and work for them I think the the history of the civil rights movement in the 1960s is one of the the the a few radiant successes in a dismal century of violence and bloodshed and in my last chapter I'm trying to reawaken interest in those ideals and I do so by pointing not only to the civil rights movement but also the success of solidarity in Poland which was largely inspired by the great poet Czeslaw Milosz so poetry can help a country sometimes let's talk about the book and I will show it again to our audience the road to 911 how long did it take you to write the book six years six years and and that's I think a very overarching theme here is the difference between a deep state what you call the deep state in the public state help us understand the difference between the two the term deep state comes from Turkey and they had two inchoate after there was a the wreck of a car in which in the people who are in the car were a member of parliament a beauty queen a local police quite senior police captain and the leading drug trafficker in Turkey who was also the head of a criminal paramilitary organization the gray wolves that went around killing people and it became very obvious in Turkey that there was some covert relationship doing all of these people yeah but particularly between the police who officially were looking for this man even though he was there in the car and these people who committed crimes on behalf of the state well the the state that you commit crimes for is not a state that can show its hand to the people it's a hidden state a covert state and they called it the deep state of knife Del's been talking about deep politics so it fits very well with my own analysis the public state is the one we're taught about in school and it's true as far as it goes but all over the world particularly since World War Two but even before public states have little escape hatches for when they want to do something illegal and in this country the most visible but not the only sign of it is the CIA which was actually charged quite early on in 1948 to start committing crimes against governments and other parts of the world so we do have a deep state in America and the thesis of my book is its secret it's not properly controlled it can it gets involved in larger and larger enterprises which were never envisaged by the way when the CIA was first created which become more and more disastrous for everybody including the United States and the balance between the public state and the deep state has been shifting more and more towards the deep state because there are checks and balances on the public state and nothing that works by way of checks and balances with the CIA and DIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration the various components of the deep State with your background what factors do you see accounting for essentially the continuing enlargement of the deep state the secret activities and the the essential essentially the inability of the public state in the case of the United States the Congress the system of checks and balances to stop this expansion well here I follow a number of other authors like Chalmers Johnson and particularly Kevin Phillips or Kennedy you know the rise and fall of the empires there's a dynamic if you have a successful democracy it will prosper particularly in contrast to its neighbors and as it prospers it expands out beyond its borders and it becomes involved in other parts of the world and without any conscious decision it begins to look more and more like an empire the institutions that deal with the rest of the world it's you know what America it's not officially an empire but there's no shortage of books now that are including books which support what's happening admit that it's an empire the the the institutions the public state is set up to govern a democracy and the checks and balances apply at home they don't apply overseas so the the gap is filled by the deep state the CIA is the main presence of the United States in those parts of the world where we do not have formal alliances which is most of the world and particularly because we're very dependent on raw materials from the rest of the world and particularly oil from the rest of the world the CIA is our main presence in those areas where there is oil and very foolish enterprises III cannot think of a single real success story and here I'm mostly joined by authors like Tim Reiner who's just done this book legacy of ashes the history of the CIA gives you or John produces book safe for democracy which is ironic term they see maybe one or two successes and they often point to Afghanistan in the 1980s as the success I see that as one of the biggest disasters of all because that gave us al-qaeda and the terrorist threat that we now face so the I it's going to be very difficult to do but I think we have to somehow get this country to recognize that the deep state is not serving the interests of America it may be serving the interests of American oil companies but it is certainly a danger to the American public State and that's been particularly true in the last five years particularly true since I began my book let's before we look at particular examples of the way this this unfolds and Afghanistan is obviously a likely candidate in our support of the jihadists there I want to explore something you just raised which is an important theme in in your other works and in this work namely the link between oil secret government acting abroad and drugs there is an important nexus here namely if you're doing all of this off the books and you can't get approval for budgets then you need to develop an income stream and talk a little about that well I think it's no coincidence that if you look at the areas where America counts on to get its oil which is not primarily the Middle East actually most of that goes to Europe but there was great talk of oil from Central Asia particularly as a way of weakening the power of OPEC to to set prices and this this would have been in the 80s and then especially in the 90s yeah and during this period the Soviet Union Falls right and but also if you look in Colombia since 1984 has been there the can you name own oil field has been an important source Southeast Asia wherever the oil is these are areas where America cannot send its own armies so it creates alliances with local powers and time after time almost without exception in one way or another America has created its CIA alliances with what I call drug proxies because they have their own armies they you do their own enforcement they're very right when is the drug drug people yes yeah they they have to protect themselves against being hijacked by other drug people so they they have their own forces and we we either we find them there and create alliances with them but in some significant cases we've the CIA virtually created them this was true and Burma for example the first major export of opium out of Burma came with the so called common armies there in the 1950s they were installed and supplied and financed all the infrastructure was CIA and in and we had as a result an opium and heroin epidemic that didn't really end until the end of the Vietnam War and then starting again in 1980 because we went into Afghanistan and sent most of our arms to a man who was already a drug trafficker by the name of GU Bedan Hekmatyar we 79 there were almost no drugs from that part of the world in the United States by 1981 according to the US government 60% of the heroin coming into America was coming from the afghan-pakistani border as a result of our operations there the trucks would go up with arms and the trucks would come back down with opium and heroin and we had a second we had a second involvement in Southeast Asia and we had a second heroin epidemic which is still with us so my way to just say that now it's something like 95 percent of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan which didn't used to export any back before 1980 so that's what I mean by a disaster and as I listen to you I it's as if the at one level you're saying the left hand namely the public state doesn't know what the right hand the the secret state is doing but on the other hand it does but but I mean we're talking about this increase in a drug trade at a time when at home the public state was saying on drugs we had a war on drugs and we were saying just say no right well the war on drugs of course is a bonanza for the drug traffickers because it keeps the prices up I think there's a lot of hypocrisy I think that the so-called McGovern reforms in the nineteen 70s which established congressional control over the CIA in theory I certainly would have supported them at the time but actually I think they've made the problem worse because the real problem is secrecy where you have secrecy you have no rational assessment from outside and it has to be said that the program in Afghanistan was never publicly debated in Congress but there the Oversight Committee knew all about it and was encouraging it and and appropriating money which the CIA didn't even want so they became part of the problem because secrecy is part of is the source of the problem another theme in your book and this will if we talk about this so we can get into specific examples is the extraordinary continuity of u.s. foreign policy across administration's Democrat or Republican go in this area in this yeah in this area of covert operations and so on so that at the end of World War two you CIA is established with modest goals which then grow over time and then in fact even Democratic administrations become a party to this almost inexorable force the problem you're saying is because it's not discussed publicly this publicly this is done you know all behind closed doors and let's focus on President Carter his national security adviser Brzezinski the time is the late 70s the the Soviet Union still exists Brzezinski is from Poland and very concerned about Poland and Eastern Europe and he focuses on essentially the hundred cuts that he can impose on the Soviet body and and how does that play out in Afghanistan well first of all we we have to recognize that Carter you know is member of the Trilateral Commission of which Brzezinski was the executive director and the whole idea of the trilateral commission was a rather attractive picture of a multipolar world in which america would mediate between the second world which was a soviet bloc and the third world which were the what we used to call in those days the underdeveloped or lesser developed countries though i hate that term having lived in thailand in some ways they're very much more developed than we are and that's part of the problem but when they they were elected carter had a genuine trilateral with cyrus vance a secretary of state and he had as his national security adviser his big knife Brzezinski who was determined to use the deep state to inflict as much damage on the soviet union as he could and a lot of things which are thought of as the successes of the reagan regime clearly had their origins under Brzezinski and it was a total repudiation of what trilateral ism stood for Carter and port the poor man he elected promising cuts in the defense budget and before he had left he had committed the Defense Department to huge increases which actually again we associate with the Reagan administration but were initiated before what I see happening there's something we haven't talked about yet Harry very important in my book there's why is the deep state so important in America why can't we just say oK you've made you've you've you've screwed up you've made it made things very bad well cut you back the problem is and this goes back to the dynamic of democracies becoming empires we have created a great deal of new wealth in this country and we have an increasing split between the richest and the poorest I've never considered myself a Marxist and I used to say very emphatically that Marxist class analysis just didn't work in America it works better in the last decade than it ever did before because of the amount of wealth which depends on things overseas it isn't just raw materials like oil it's also outsourcing have your shoes made in Vietnam instead of in America all of these things they wreck the public economy of the public state so they are weakening the whole you know the the civil society that sustains the public state and in the case of Carter now in the 70s the 70s was a time of a really quite radical shift in the nature of wealth in this country largely because of the Vietnam War you Eisenhower left warning us about a military-industrial complex and saying it could be a threat in his own way he saw what I'm talking about that there was a force inside society that was threatening to the public order the Vietnam War vastly increased that military-industrial complex and then it also created a situation where the the what we call the the traitors in the economy who count on working with the rest of the world symbolized mostly by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York they became very worried about the war in Porter Nixon Nixon had a terrible it was a terrible time to be president because there were powerful forces to continue the war and the deep state was behind him Lee and there were powerful forces saying ended and Nixon sort of got caught in the jam there Carter really wanted to go back I'm sure he sincerely and his heart was a trilateral list who wanted to cut back on the military machine but the enormous wealth of the over world set up a sustained drumbeat of subsidized by a huge amount of money in the 70s saying no no no the Soviet Union is a threat and the CIA has underestimated how dangerous they are we we need to change the estimates we need to go back to a new but and this was nothing it Carter's personal feelings about this Cyrus Vance's feelings had very little to do with it but Brzezinski was in tune with this new force going on so he became the important man much more important than the president in the carters in space so that that what what a president is elected in being open to a new way of looking at the world but in fact the domestic forces at work really tilted the balance in his own administration so that a man like Brzezinski who was focused very much on the Soviet Union and the threat it posed could essentially say let's support jihadists in Afghanistan and create a trap and bring the Soviets in and the Soviets then did invade Afghanistan have their Vietnam or that was Brzezinski zone phrase to Carter he warned Carter he said you know we're going to because the the first steps in Afghanistan were taken by America by the deep state without many people being aware of it it's usually the ones that most books talk about or is the Brzezinski sending you know stirring things up against the government in June or July of 1979 knowing that the Soviets may have to respond by invading and wanting that because he wants to see the Soviet Union bogged down in as he said their Vietnam War it actually started in 78 the gets rather technical yeah but here's an example of policy which seems small at the beginning and therefore not much consultation there are already people in the State Department who say don't do this but the State Department doesn't count they're the public state this is going on in the deep state and because Basinski is in tune with that part of the overworld the military-industrial complex now is essentially the economy of this country where our our you know we have other things we have air well aircraft is in between we certainly have electronics but even that has primarily got a military component this is an a' militarized economy that we have and that's why the overworld is so strengthened the deep state and the poorer members of Congress they can't even talk about it because they have to get funds from the military-industrial complex to be reelected that's a quote I want to quote you here because you you make a reference to Adam Smith and then and his invisible invisible hand in the economy and then you write it's almost as if there's a comparable invisible hand operating in political affairs as well an impersonal calculus that dictates where a presidency when guided only in the by the pursuit of power will end up despite the president's stated intention so in in with in the case of Carter the dynamic pushes him in this direction and in fact he also is the one who creates the rapid deployment forces for intervention in the Middle East which then becomes the central Brzezinski's idea even though he wasn't Secretary of Defense he was but but then we elect a conservative president President Reagan he appoints as head of the CIA and what we might call a cowboy named Bill Casey who had a long experience in the in the OAS and was OSS OSS and was a New York banker and and they really ratchet up the ante because what what Carter and Brzezinski have done is laid the groundwork for Americans secret involvement in Afghanistan against the Soviets by supporting the Islamic fundamentalists along comes Casey and ups the ante and really cashes in you might say that quote you gave him it was actually about the foreign administration and it applies insight you know the the the more you go back the more you see the seeds further and further back which is why this understanding the historical continuity is very important Ford of course came in after Nixon resigned never elected and his stated purpose was to heal the nation which badly needed healing at that time and yet before he left of Ford appointed a chief of staff by the name of Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld hired a deputy by the name Chaney and what happened in the course of the very the two years of the Ford administration was that Ford shifted the country away from Kissinger's policies of day taunt with the Soviet Union towards Reagan's policy of heightening the cold war against the Soviet Union Cheney and Rumsfeld were who became very much more important later on we'll come back to them III say this of them that I'm not even sure that they came into office with this goal in mind but the dynamics of what was happening in particularly this huge public relations campaign going on outside the the administration this is the Ford administration and the Ford administration the crucial year 75 I call that the critical you know originally I wrote the whole book with I thought I just skipped for it and then I realized that I could drop any other chapter but I could not avoid forward because that's the shift from Kissinger's goal of living with the Soviet Union to what became eventually the explicit Reaganite goal of destroying the Soviet Union and and that it really happened under Ford and then as you know as you said Casey came in and the largest most expensive by far and covert operation covert it was it was a war it was a technically it was covered in the American sense we didn't know what we were some of the whole world was getting good news about it except the United States and the US press were remarkably silent and Casey didn't even trust he can't he's put in over the CIA partly because these right-wingers which now had taken over the government they didn't like the CIA because they had been giving these unfortunately accurate estimates of Soviet strength which was not all that much the Soviet the Soviet regime was already in acute problems which only became worse through the 80s and he conducted a lot of his operations not even through well you know I don't want to make a general pattern but often he would go outside he had the power of being director of Central Intelligence he would go off and meet with people in Saudi Arabia or he had meet with the head of something called the bank of credit and commerce international and commit to all kinds of engagements with the drug traffickers in Afghanistan which don't show up in CIA records and which had cast an enormous shadow over the history of the world because there are the true seeds of al-qaeda and the terrorists it's not even just al-qaeda but the the terrorist threat which we face in Asia and to some extent now in Europe and even Latin America you you enumerate and we don't have to go into this in detail because there's so much to discuss here but I just put it on the table and people should go out and read your book and buy it the the KC legacy includes favoring the Islamic fundamentalists over the native Sufi nationalist so in deciding with one side of the yeah in Afghanistan sponsoring the Afghan Arabs namely hell yeah I'm sorry the Arab Afghans in the sense of moving people from the Arab world who were jihadists to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviet yes not and not just in Afghanistan but also over the river the Aero River and into the a mood area into what was then the Soviet Union they were actually conducting raids in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan so the whole idea of financing this international force was eagerly supported by Casey and Brzezinski is responsible too you know and there was a famous interview he had with Luna Valley Observatory in France in the 1990s and they said aren't you when you look back on that aren't you a little upset at what you did and creating this terrorist movement and Brzezinski said them and he may wish he hadn't but he said what's more important the fall of the Soviet Union or a few agitated Muslims well the few agitated Muslims have become absolutely central now to American foreign policy third third element in this case Kaycee equation was exploiting narcotics as a way to weaken the Soviet Union that is getting narcotics to Soviet soldiers I guess so to demoralize the army and then the fourth that you mentioned you talked about in the book which you just touched upon expanding the Afghan resistance to a global arm to attack the Soviet Union itself so in other words seeing the movement of these jihadists out of Afghanistan into the various stand States that were part of the serene and then later into Bosnia and that's quite true and in Kosovo yeah except they were our allies in Kosovo yeah and then finally sort of our allies in Bosnia too is very complex situation Ewing to supply the Islamists after the Soviet withdrawal yes I'm going to say a bit one thing I didn't stress in my book but really belongs in that list and it was definitely Casey was who you know after 1985 we had Gorbachev and eventually first Margaret Thatcher and eventually Ronald Reagan decided that they liked Gorbachev and liked and wanted to deal with him Casey never stopped trying to destroy Gorbachev and something which I don't talk about much about my book but is definitely the case manipulating the price of oil driving it way way down so that oil was the main source of foreign exchange earnings for the Soviet Union and gorban of Gorbachev's reforms would work because the predicted income from the sale of oil to Europe Western Europe never materialized and so he successfully destroyed Gorbachev was that for the good of the world I mean I I'm not anti Putin particularly or anti Elson but there was a moment of opportunity with Gorbachev which case he was destroying even when Reagan wanted him now that is to me a symptom that the deep State has become very dangerous to the policy goals of the public state of this country and on the narcotics thing this is where you there's some very good books about the CIA being written recently one by Tim whiner one by john Prados but because they talked to the CIA officers and they looked it's not they've been shown I think it's a great a few particularly whiner has looked at the recently declassified CIA documents they don't talk about the drugs because the drugs are so deep they're not even in the CIA documents but they're certainly there and if you read the best history of the bank of credit and commerce international which which was a bank which was a vehicle for moving a lot of this drug money and he it was a global drug laundering bank and it was huge and it was corrupting by the way with with its budget with its resources corrupting leading politicians presidents prime ministers all over the world and a lot of that money if there's not much talked about but it's true was reaching politicians in the United States politicians of both parties which is one reason why we don't get a congressional investigation of BCCI there was actually a report this thick that came out one Republican Hank Brown one Democrat John Kerry and Hank Brown congratulated Kerry on having the courage to do this when so many people who in his party you know affected by the bank the bank was a big factor in the creating the connections with people like Hekmatyar materially in the 80s was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world and he was the leading recipient of CIA largesse supplemented by an equal amount of Saudi Arabian money there's something terribly wrong in a situation like this some up here you what you're basically saying is the secret government let's call it that because well many people do yeah I try to avoid the phrase because it's like fascism you know it's a bit tarnished but the secret government funds operations and the consequences of its mistaken choices which are not debated publicly in the United States leads to outcomes away so that for example in supporting HEC mati are you're supporting a guy who's into drugs and who doesn't have a base of support you know in Afghanistan so you're you're really distorting democracy you know the hopes that we might have for democracy elsewhere you raised that point before and I should have responded to it you know it's always presented in America that we were helping the acts and freedom fighters we weren't they there were Afghan freedom fighters and as you already said they were largely Sufi it was a traditional Islam that would be easy to live with but because we were working with proxy governments Pakistan and Saudi Arabia we worked with their favorite candidates who were and especially in the case of Pakistan Pakistan was a bit worried about the indigenous Afghan resistance because they laid claim to the the northwestern provinces of Pakistan which are mostly Pashtun and they in Afghanistan they feel they should be part it was a British boundary layer and line and the the real freedom fighters didn't recognize that line Hekmatyar recognized the line because he was a creation of the Pakistani Secret Service he is and so Pakistan insisted that the money go to these two there were the two leaders Hekmatyar who was Pakistan's creation and Abdul Razak who who was safe scheming Abdul CF who was the creation of the Saudis neither of them had much support inside Afghanistan but much worse both of them were Islamic fundamentalist Islamists extremists as opposed to this indigenous Sufi Islam that I wish we could get back was still there of course but in that and they feel victimized by these people they in came these Arab Afghans and they smashed cemeteries said you shouldn't have tombstones they were the Afghans were not being liberated by these people they were being terrorized by these people I'm gonna show you a book again and recommend it at this point because we can't go into all this detail in this interview but but I think it's suggestive as to why the audience should go out and buy the book but I want to bring up another element which i think is very important and that is the books called the road to 9/11 which we've really just discussed but I want to talk about your ideas in the book about the importance of what is called cog Co G the the the continuity of government plans because part of the the the the way the government has adopted adapted to its concerns about the world is to create a set of plans as to how the government would respond in the case of nuclear attack and this is attacked this would be in the 80s and the the people involved in this centrally were rumsfeld and cheney even when they were in the bye over north and george HW bush right and and but but even with it when any of these individuals were not in government they were part of these play which were exercises to how to confront the possibility of a nuclear attack and what you're arguing in a latter part of your book is that these plans were implemented partly partially as the 9/11 attacks began to talk a little about that because what you're suggesting is that they led to a situation where on that day there were exercises being undertaken to to deal with a possible attack not knowing that attack was going to happen that day which may have led to confusion there were changes in the rules of engagement and then there's the mysterious disappearance of of Cheney and Rumsfeld during a brief period when the attack was underway it's a lot to cover but the idea here basically is that there are plans and they got off let's deal with the broader yes first there's a CO G so another thing which we associate with Reagan but actually began under Carter although Carter may never been aware of it he did Carter did create FEMA the Federal Emergency Management Agency which has always been charged with being the infrastructure for this planning what is kind of shocking really I mean these are extreme plans Congress didn't know about them in the 80s about a small group of people were assigned to work on them by an executive order from Reagan it came up in the iran-contra hearings so a congressman asked Oliver North is it true that you've been working on plans to suspend the American Constitution and Senator Inouye wrapped his gavel and said we can't go into that here this was what what congressman Brooks was asking about was CEO G and it was happening and as you just said Cheney was a congressman at the time from representing Wyoming but Rumsfeld was not in the government at all he was the head he was the CEO of a drug company and yet they were planning for the suspension of parts of the American Constitution and Congress didn't know now talk about the deep state going sailing completely free here the deep state is planning to suspend the public state I always say CEO G really stands for change of government if you're suspending the Constitution that's not continuity that is a very significant change in the ninth the the two best books on this by James man and James Bamford are not aware that the the planning continued under Clinton in the 1990s and according to Andrew Coburn in his new book on Rumsfeld Clinton didn't know about them but now neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld are in the government but they're still planning for the suspension of the Constitution and somebody who worked with them and was a source for Coburn said you know they were they before it had always been a mix of Democrats and Republicans now they were all Republicans and they all hated Clinton and they acted like a government in Waiting well one of the first things that happened when Bush was I don't want to say elected but when George W became the president he put Cheney in charge of a group to plan for a terrorist attack this is May of 2001 five months before 9/11 and he's to work with FEMA well he was being working with FEMA for 20 years so it wasn't like there was any real change here and the everyone recognizes that one of the crucial reasons why those planes were able to get to the buildings on 9/11 okay the attackers the hijackers without interception is because on June 1st of 2001 the rules for intercepting a plane were changed and were before it was just an automatic thing a plane goes off course fighter planes go up and they intercept it doesn't mean they shoot it down they just get there to see what's going to happen some people may remember when the golfer Payne Stewart his plane went off course the fighter planes were up there the system which was able to intercept Payne Stewart's plane was not able to intercept any of the planes on 9/11 and the reason this is according to the 9/11 Commission report is one of the very few things where I agree with them is because of a new rule instituted on June the 1st which said now you had to get approval from National Command Authority what a crazy rule I mean absolutely insane rule I understand that the rule was repealed in December of 2001 but but this is clearly a reason why it was difficult to intercept the planes on the really impossible didn't so so in other words the the centralization of power yes essentially put it in a deep state put it in the deep state and prevents the kind of flexible response yes that may at a lower level maybe not have stopped the planes but would have alerted the government doesn't you know what I mean different yeah and now I've given you some facts up to now and one more fact is it is absolutely clear fact see og was instituted on September the 11th it was and a number of people left Washington that you know we have these hollowed-out mountains which would become the emergency headquarters and those buildings were occupied for several weeks after 9/11 by about a hundred bureaucrats we don't really know what they're doing but I that what they were doing are all these things because they produce the Patriot Act I would have no it like a magician bringing a rabbit out of a hat or Lyndon Johnson producing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution out of a hat they produce the Patriot Act which i think is an out you know I'm speculating an outgrowth of Co G planning the things that we know were planned for in the 1980s under Co G warrantless wiretapping warrantless detention possibly even massive detention that hasn't happened yet but planning for massive detention has already happened and all of these and and in the Homeland Security homepage when they're talking about it say the planning was done in 2001 well I'm I think it was probably done in those hollowed-out mountains there is a very tight correlation between what Oliver North was accused of doing in the 1980s and what has actually happened in this country since 9/11 so you know there is a congressman Kucinich wants to impeach Vice President Cheney I think it's premature to impeach him I first of all I know it wouldn't succeed and secondly I don't think the evidence is there myself but I do think the evidence is there for a congressional committee to call in Vice President Cheney and say what were you doing in that group in May did you have anything to do with this the 9/11 Commission wasn't curious as to where this June 1st crazy ordinance came from he should be asked to testify about that under oath because Americans should understand that all kinds of people testified about 9/11 under oath to the 9/11 Commission but Bush and Cheney came together so they wouldn't contradict each other and were allowed to testify under not under oath well I would say it's a matter of the very highest priority that Cheney testified for the first time under oath I will just give our audience a teaser so they'll go out and buy the book but there's a very interesting period of time after the attacks by the hijackers have begun in which the the public record doesn't account for Cheney and Rumsfeld time suggesting you you are suggesting in the book that what the acog was activated and this decisions may have been made that should also be a a public discussion but we don't have time to go into that but I suggest that the audience read that and see if they agree with you but what I want to ask you I want to because our time is running out what I want to ask you is because somebody out there might be watching and saying well what's his evidence for this and obviously there is a public record books like Steve Cole's book on American involvement in Afghanistan and many others which you have named but but you are creating a mosaic here which is a much broader systemic look at what was happening and so your critics might say well we really have evidence for all that that you're charging or is it speculative is it so what I want to ask you is what is your theory of how you piece things together even though you may be wrong about some things and and what write about many more well I've been called a connective journalist I don't do much interviewing of people in high played mostly because they usually won't speak to me but I most of the book I would say 95% of the book is from publicly available sources and when possible I cite sources on the Internet now of course there's all kinds of crazy junk on the internet I'm the first to concede that I try to work its best I can with sources that are impeccable and not if of course is if a source is going to be challenged I would even if it's perfect for my purposes I'd rather not touch it so when we come to BCCI for example and well it's not there in the CIA records but this book about BCCI is written by to wall street journalists I think they won an award for it so I'm going to an impeccable unimpeachable source now in some areas admittedly I go beyond those sources but I try to be very explicit when I am and once it was one time when I cite a source about 9/11 and and I say you know I suspect this is true but this should be formulated as a question not as a fact and this is the sort of thing that change should be asked so in the 5% where I go beyond it's usually I would say the most reasonable extrapolation from the available evidence and it's the agenda for further inquiry and at one point you suggest that you actually look at the public record and the evidence and asked yourself well what's not there and why is it not there right and you were referring to that a moment in the case there's 10 crucial minutes or maybe 15 or 20 crucial minutes on the morning of 9/11 shortly before a 10:00 o'clock when the most important decisions were made including Co G and the Karl Rove's account of what the President did is visibly false the 9/11 Commission have a different account this is when Rumsfeld says he went out and helped put people on stretchers in the lower yard of the Pentagon what the the head of our armed forces is out there putting people on stretchers when the nation is under attack I don't think he was putting people understood in people on stretchers and then there's a similar mystery about Cheney because we decisions were made of which there is no record even in the records of the bunker they kept records in the bunker and there's suddenly a period when they're crucial decision decisions were made crucial phone calls were made they have a record of phone calls this phone call is not on the record and I think that 10 minutes of mystery is the key to the 9/11 mystery Peter I'm sorry to say we've run out of time I think that we want to show your book again it's available from UC Press and I think people it's in book stores ok so they can go out and get it and they're going to want to do that too to pursue some of these mysteries that that you've uncovered for so but I want to thank you for taking the time to be on our program and sharing with us the the the background and the history that involved in in revealing this mosaic of where we are and and really with the hopes that the future will be different I'm just sorry there wasn't time to talk about my last chapter because I do I am hopeful for America my hopes are with the American people good and they will read that last chapter because there is a plan of action there Peter thank you very much for being with us thank you Harry and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Keywords: uc, berkeley, ucberkeley, cal, education, yt:quality=high

Id: 4YFBzjlFuFQ

Length: 60min 50sec (3650 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 20 2008