Books by Peter Dale Scott

The book explores, in interview format, issues raised but not fully explored by Scott's poem Coming to Jakarta on the 1965 Indonesian massacre. In addition, Scott reflects on ways that poetry can serve as a non-violent higher politics, contributing to the evolution of human culture and thus our "second nature."

Now in a new edition updated through the unprecedented 2016 election, this timely book makes a compelling case for a hidden deep state of intelligence agencies, private companies, and billionaires that influence and often oppose U.S. policies.

A devastating revelation of violence, exploitation, and corrupt politics, Coming to Jakarta derives its title from the role played by the CIA, banks, and oil companies in the 1965 slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians. A former Canadian diplomat and now a scholar at the University of California, Peter Dale Scott has said that the poem "is triggered by what we know of the bloody Indonesian massacre... However it is not so much a narrative of exotic foreign murder as one person's account of what it is like to live in the 20th century, possessing enough access to information and power to feel guilty about global human oppression, but not enough to deal with it. The usual result is a kind of daily schizophrenia by which we desensitize ourselves to our own responses to what we read in the newspapers. The psychic self-alienation which ensues makes integrative poetry difficult but necessary." With a brilliant use of collage, placing the political against the personal--childhood acquaintances are among the darkly powerful figures--Scott works in the tradition of Pound's Cantos, but his substance is completely his own.

This is an ambitious, meticulous examination of how U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s has led to partial or total cover-ups of past domestic criminal acts, including, perhaps, the catastrophe of 9/11. Peter Dale Scott, whose previous books have investigated CIA involvement in southeast Asia, the drug wars, and the Kennedy assassination, here probes how the policies of presidents since Nixon have augmented the tangled bases for the 2001 terrorist attack. Scott shows how America's expansion into the world since World War II has led to momentous secret decision making at high levels. He demonstrates how these decisions by small cliques are responsive to the agendas of private wealth at the expense of the public, of the democratic state, and of civil society. He shows how, in implementing these agendas, U.S. intelligence agencies have become involved with terrorist groups they once backed and helped create, including al Qaeda.

Presents a documented investigation that uncovers the secrets surrounding John F Kennedy's assassination. Offering a different perspective - that JFK's death was not just an isolated case, but rather a symptom of hidden processes - this title examines the deep politics of early 1960s American international and domestic policies.