Works by
Peter Dale Scott
(Writer)
[1929 - ]

Non-fiction

• The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam (1966) by Franz Schurmann, Peter Dale Scott, and Reginald Zelnik
  A Citizens' White Paper. A study of United States responses to pressures for a political settlement of the Vietnam War: November, 1963-July, 1966.

• The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina war (1972)
  Out of print

• The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond : A Guide to Cover-Ups and Investigations  (1976) by Paul Hoch, Peter Dale Scott, and Russell Stetler

• Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977)

• The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in Reagan Era (1987) by Jane Hunter, Jonathan Marshall, and Peter Dale Scott

• Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (1991) by Jonathan Marshal and Peter Dale Scott
  When the San Jose Mercury News ran a controversial series of stories in 1996 on the relationship between the CIA, the Contras, and crack, they reignited the issue of the intelligence agency's connections to drug trafficking, initially brought to light during the Vietnam War and then again by the Iran-Contra affair. Broad in scope and extensively documented, Cocaine Politics shows that under the cover of national security and covert operations, the U.S. government has repeatedly collaborated with and protected major international drug traffickers. A new preface discusses developments of the last six years, including the Mercury News stories and the public reaction they provoked.

• Deep Politics And The Death of JFK (1993)
  Peter Dale Scott's meticulously documented investigation uncovers the secrets surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. Offering a wholly new perspective--that JFK's death was not just an isolated case, but rather a symptom of hidden processes--Scott examines the deep politics of early 1960s American international and domestic policies.
  
  Scott offers a disturbing analysis of the events surrounding Kennedy's death, and of the "structural defects" within the American government that allowed such a crime to occur and to go unpunished. In nuanced readings of both previously examined and newly available materials, he finds ample reason to doubt the prevailing interpretations of the assassination. He questions the lone assassin theory and the investigations undertaken by the House Committee on Assassinations, and unearths new connections between Oswald, Ruby, and corporate and law enforcement forces.
  
  Revisiting the controversy popularized in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Scott probes the link between Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam that followed two days later. He contends that Kennedy's plans to withdraw troops from Vietnam--offensive to a powerful anti-Kennedy military and political coalition--were secretly annulled when Johnson came to power. The split between JFK and his Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the collaboration between Army Intelligence and the Dallas Police in 1963, are two of the several missing pieces Scott adds to the puzzle of who killed Kennedy and why.
  
  Scott presses for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination, not as an external conspiracy but as a power shift within the subterranean world of American politics. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK shatters our notions of one of the central events of the twentieth century.

• Deep Politics II: Essays on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba (1995)
  Peter Dale Scott has written extensively on the Kennedy assassination and other dark corners of the American political scene. His encyclopedic knowledge enables him to connect the dots among the players, the organizations, and the unacknowledged collusions - the deep politics - of our often troubled political system.
  
  Deep Politics II narrows the focus of Scott's earlier Deep Politics and the Death of JFK; more than half the book is taken up with the most detailed treatment yet of the mysterious sojourn of Lee Harvey Oswald, or someone using his name, to Mexico City in the fall of 1963. It is now known that allegations of communist conspiracy in the wake of the JFK assassination, emanating mostly from Mexico City, caused Lyndon Johnson to put together a "blue ribbon commission" to "lay the dust" of Dallas. LBJ told Warren Commissioner Richard Russell that "we've got to take this out of the arena where they're testifying that Khruschev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour."
  
  If, as Peter Scott's analysis suggests, the evidence from Mexico City was part of a frame-up, then this puts a whole new light on the "communist conspiracy" allegations.

• Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (2003)
  This brilliantly researched tour de force illuminates the underlying forces that drive U.S. global policy from Vietnam to Colombia and now to Afghanistan and Iraq. He brings to light the intertwined patterns of drugs, oil politics, and intelligence networks that have been so central to the larger workings of U.S. intervention and escalation in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies. The result has been a staggering increase in global drug traffic. Thus, the author argues, the exercise of power by covert means, or parapolitics, often metastasizes into deep politics--the interplay of unacknowledged forces that spin out of the control of the original policy initiators. Scott contends that we must recognize that U.S. influence is grounded not just in military and economic superiority but also in so-called soft power. We need a soft politics of persuasion and nonviolence, especially as America is embroiled in yet another disastrous intervention, this time in Iraq.

• 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Vol. 1 (2006), David Ray Griffin, ed. with Peter Dale Scott
  Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world's strongest and most technologically sophisticated country?
  
  Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend imperial control at home and abroad.
  
  Contributors include Richard Falk, Daniele Ganser, David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Karin Kwiatkowski, John McMurtry, Peter Phillips, Morgan Reynolds, Kevin Ryan, Peter Dale Scott, Ola Tunander.

Poetry

• Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989)

• Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992)

• Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994)

• Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 (2000)
  Minding the Darkness completes one of the most exciting trilogies of our time, which began with Coming to Jakarta (1989) and Listening to the Candle (1992). Minding the Darkness is the final volume of Peter Dale Scott's landmark trilogy, following Coming to Jakarta and Listening to the Candle. It brings to a stunning, triumphant conclusion a remarkable and sui generis poem. "There is nothing quite like these books," as the American Book Review remarked: "Scott's trilogy, only two-thirds completed as yet, is certain to be one of the most remarkable and challenging works of our time." The apogee of Scott's long hypnotic epic poem about the political and the personal, and their darkly powerful relationships, Minding the Darkness gathers extraordinary energy by way of its Poundian collage and tight three-line stanzas.