DEATH OF A NATION: 9/11 and the Rise of Fascism in America

[Anthony Thorne]

I agree with your comments. I read the preview and it is probably better than my initial impressions. The book does not have footnoted references, and the author says as much in the opening chapter, arguing that he was after readability and that most of his assertions can be confirmed with a general online search. Peter Dale Scott would not approve. I can see his point but I think general or cursory footnoting and references should be a minimum as it helps with credibility, and that additional time spent by the author will help the reader in the long run.I was debating writing a similar book myself - 9/11 (+ background) to present day - and seeing this volume appear takes some of the urgency away from that task. I think the unexplored grounds for 9/11 research lie in the years prior, in particular through two periods. The first is the Team B / Safari Club era of the late 70's when the anti-detente forces were gathering together, and the threat of 'international terrorism' became a talking point among militarists - Stefan Possony published a book on the matter a year before the notorious 1979 Jerusalem Conference on terrorism, and Brian Crozier was pushing the matter sometime before that. The second period is through the several years prior to 9/11 when Aspen Strategy Group members, neocons, RAND Corporation militarists and various foreign intelligence and military folk gathered again and again, and undertook a number of prescient commissions, think tank gatherings, and other propaganda initiatives. I've been returning to both those periods in my own reading this year, and have found things of interest pretty much every time I looked, including a lot of pointed stuff that should by now have been highlighted in a number of 9/11 research books, but has not been. I'd like to see a few more writers attempt volumes like Kevin Ryan's ANOTHER 19, which touches on some of the subject matter I've mentioned above, but by my count Ryan's nineteen could have been doubled or tripled, with the same amount of useful material to cover.Edited to add, more pages are readable via the Google Books preview here. Checking the author's website, he's pushing the anti-Trump / Russia-did-it stories and seems not to have noticed how the Neocons - Kagan and others - rallied behind hawkish Hillary in the months prior to the 2016 election. Trump is hugely problematic, obviously, but I think he's misses a trick by not paying closer attention to the deep state battles with the incumbent. It all ties back in to 9/11, but possibly not in the way he's arguing. He pushes the Saudi financing / 28 pages angle a lot as well. The Corbett Report had a useful video cautioning people going too far with that one.Not mentioned in his chapter summary regarding the Project for a New American Century as far as I can tell - Lockheed Martin helped provide the seed money for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard, and the PNAC operated out of the offices Lockheed Martin had helped pay for, and then Thomas Donnelly, the Lockheed Martin Director of Communications, wrote the REBUILDING AMERICA'S DEFENCES document with the premonition of a New Pearl Harbour. Bruce Jackson, the Lockheed Martin V.P for Strategy and Planning through this period, is the son of the late C.D. Jackson, the OSS psychological operations specialist who bought the Zapruder Film and locked it up for years later. James Woolsey - the former CIA head and PNAC signatory who later took part in anthrax drills with Operation Dark Winter, and who sat alongside Rumsfeld on the latter's Missile Commission meeting with Washington hawks, Boeing and CIA figures exactly concurrent with Zelikow and Carter's working group on Catastrophic Terrorism - spent his spare time at Shea and Gardner, a Lockheed favourite law firm.