Gore Vidal

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, known better simply as Gore Vidal, (born October 3, 1925) is a well-known American "man of letters", a writer of novels, plays and essays, and a public figure for over fifty years.

Views on September 11, 2001

Vidal is critical of the Bush administration, as he has been of previous U.S. administrations that he considers to have either an explicit or implicit expansionist agenda. He has frequently made the point in interviews, essays, and in a recent book that Americans "are now governed by a junta of oil-Pentagon men ... both Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld and so on". He claims that for several years this group and their associates have aimed to control the oil of central Asia (after, in his view, gaining effective control of the oil of the Persian Gulf in 1991). Specifically regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks, Vidal writes how such an attack, which he claims American intelligence warned was coming, politically justified the plans the administration already had in August 2001 for invading Afghanistan the following October.

Related Topics:
Bush - Cheney - Rumsfeld - Central Asia - Persian Gulf - September 11, 2001 attacks - Afghanistan

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He discusses the lack of defense, including the delay in getting fighter planes into the air to intercept the hijacked airliners, compared with the time one might expect after a hijacking report. If, he says, these huge failures were incompetence, they would deserve "a number of courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown in". Instead there is to be only a limited inquiry into how the "potential breakdowns among federal agencies ... could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur." This, concludes Vidal, opens the possibility that the administration in fact let the attack happen, in order to capitalize on a catalyzing event that would enable it to achieve controversial policy goals under the rubric of a War on Terror.

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