By Peter Dale Scott (excerpt from The Road To 9/11 chap. 15)

9/11 represents a double challenge to the American way of life: the external threat of terrorists attacks and also the internal threat of subversion of the Constitution by cabals and a deep state that are threatening to get out of control. The U.S. faces a fundamental choice of what and of whom to trust. Will we deal with the problem of terrorism primarily by working to resolve issues that provoke conflict and projecting values that the rest of the world will wish to share?

Our will we trust in our own military power and become increasingly a garrison state and empire, conducting more and more of our global strategies in secret and projecting our military and covert strength into further and further corners of the earth?

The cult of secrecy in government, though necessary in some areas, has become counterproductive. On an operational level it makes it easy for special interests to falsify intelligence input and not be corrected. We saw this recently with Ahmed Chalabi's disastrous advice on Iraq, with the false stories linking Iraq to uranium from Niger, and with the hijacker Mohammed Atta. We need to admit that the secret powers of our government helped to create and train this enemy, whose presence is now invoked to further augment the government's secret powers.

Those secret powers themselves are becoming  the major threat to the survival of the open republic. If we now want to strengthen democracy and reduce the threat of terrorism, we must look in a different direction.

What is urgently needed is not a reinforcement of Washington's inner citadels of secret decision making, but a totally different and more open approach. America's true strength is not its military and paramilitary resources, but what Harvard professor Joseph Nye has called its soft power-its ability to influence the rest of the world culturally and and by example. America's strongest resource is ultimately its people. The best antidote to Islamic terrorism will come when the chief contract of Muslims abroad is with American people , not GIs breaking down doors or bombing from the air with missiles.