Academically, objectively, this book is about as carefully laid out and sourced as one could want. The quotes that it offe
rs from official State Department officers complaining they were ordered to give visas to clearly unqualified terrorists being trained and supported by CIA stand out, as do the retrospective quotes on everything the FBI failed to do against the first World Trade Center bombing. This book is, in brief, everything the 9/11 Commission was not. The two taken together, along with the Aspin-Brown Commission, give us a good sense for reality.
Having been a part of the CIA when it was committing high crimes and misdemeanors in Central America, and having been a youth in Viet-Nam when CIA was in charge of the Phoenix assassination program and learning how to fly drugs and launder money for its warlords, and based on my extensive reading, I am persuaded of the three core propositions in this book:
1) That CIA and FBI managed clandestine relations with those who blew up the World Trade Center for years, and generally concealed and obstructed Justice investigations after 9/11 because of their antecedent mis-behavior;
2) That both the Clinton and Bush White Houses actively supported the Taliban and the secret Enron negotiations with the Taliban to build energy pipelines, not realizing at the time (as we know today) that the extraction and transportation of the energy as envisioned then is actually not supportable; and
3) That the Bush White House was already planning to invade Afghanistan, with all of the operational plans drawn up as early as July 2001, and 9/11 was treated as a Pearl Harbor pretext.
Having read most of what has been written by Brzezinski, Kissinger, and others I find the author's speculation that the U.S., the U.K., and France, among others, have been actively using terrorists, nurturing terrorists, as part of a geopolitical and economic strategy, and that in their naivete, they nurtured a force they cannot control today, to be completely credible.
I recommend this book be read together with Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin by Larry Beinhart, and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Kuntsler. The first examines information that can be known, as in this book, but that is ignored if not over-shadowed by “spin”; while the second examines the pathological implications of cheap oil and all that cheap oil has made possible, including the creation of huge cities that are unsustainable into the future; the transport of vast quantities of water over long distances to places that will be dry in the near term; and the shipping of very cheap goods over very long distances from China by Wal-Mart.
Bottom line: cheap oil is the fool's gold of this century, only it is toxic and radioactive. The White House, Enron, and a cast of rather poorly-read bureaucrats came together to create a toxic mold called sub-state terrorism. The bureaucrats were following orders or had good intentions–the politicans and their corporate cronies were and are out and out thieves who are looting the Republic for their own selfish gains, firm in the belief that enough people will be fooled until they are out of office and laughing all the way to the Cayman Islands. They are probably right.
EDIT of 11 Dec 07: See also, with reviews:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
and of course the 9-11 DVDs, which I find compelling.
