From Colin Johnson
Re: review of Neck Deep in Lobster 54. I think your reviewer missed the main point. The book intended to demonstrate, perhaps over verbally because much of the material comes from articles previously published on Consortiumnews.com mail out, that over the period of George ‘Woodentop’ Bush’s presidency the republic of America was being lost.
The ‘war on terror’ has lead to the loss of many fundamental freedoms, which the Parrys detail. They also detail the de facto rule by oil company influences. And the refusal to correctly count the votes in the Florida fiasco, where five Republican judges let Bush in, is feared heralds the loss of what democracy was left. We shall shortly see how deep the damage is.
From Peter Dale Scott
Thank you for the generous and well crafted review of my book – the first one in print from anywhere, except for one Internet review that was reprinted in a freebie US paper. However I don’t think I’m quibbling if I take major issue with three sentences near the end of your generally accurate review:
‘He suspects, and tries to show by micro-analysis of the events around the White House just before, during and immediately after the plane strikes, that COG procedures were implemented by Rumsfeld and Cheney on 9/11. How important this is – if true – I am unable to decide. Since the Pentagon has control of most things which affect its well-being, why would they bother with a formal coup?’
As I make abundantly clear in my book (e.g. pp. 225-26, citing the 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 38, 326, and Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, p. 8) there is no ambiguity: COG measures were implemented around 10 am on September 11. What this meant is more ambiguous: it was certainly far more than just keeping the President away from Washington that day, and certainly far less than ‘a formal coup’ (which I never suggested).
We need to know the activities in the next weeks of what The Washington Post called ‘a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers’ (Washington Post, 3/1/02; Scott, Road to 9/11, p. 237) who decamped with Cheney to the COG bases outside Washington. What I argue is that they implemented now familiar programs which we know dated back to the 1980s: warrantless surveillance, warrantless detention, suppression of habeas corpus, and possibly the preparations for use of the U.S. Army in domestic security matters. The creation of NORTHCOM represented a significant break with the past in this respect.
My apologies to Peter Dale Scott. I read his book when I first received it and then wrote the review months later while typesetting/editing the rest of the issue and didn’t give it a careful enough second reading.
RR