http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/14/legendary_author_gore_vidal_on_the But he wants to show off: ‘I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime president!’ He goes yap, yap, yap. He’s like a crazed terrier. And look where he got us.
I didn’t realize—I think I’ve always had a good idea about my native land, but I didn’t think that institutionally we were so easy to overthrow, because it was a coup d’etat, 9/11. The whole went crashing. And when we got rid of—when they got rid of Magna Carta, I
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AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, Gore Vidal, when you say you think what happened after 9/11 was a coup?
GORE VIDAL: Well, it was. The first move they made at the time when Timothy McVeigh decided to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City—he started to write me letters, and I wrote him back, and he’s a brilliant kid, very interested in law, would have made a good constitutional lawyer, and a patriot. He’s a professional soldier. But he has to be depicted as a monster, because who else would blow up little children?
But he didn’t know he was blowing up any little children. He was acting out of a fit of rage at what had happened at Waco, when that whole religious community was set fire to by the Army. And as a soldier, he thought to himself, you see, the one thing that divides our country from being another military or militarized republic, it is not only due process of law, but it is also the Posse Comitatus Act of 1875, which the Army may not be used in any action against the citizens of the United States. And they just wandered—bang! bang!—they set fire to the place, burned down more children and mothers and so on than ever Mr. McVeigh did.
So, at that time, it happened during the—must have been what’s-her-name, Janet Reno, when she was Attorney General. It was during Clinton’s watch, which was a sloppy one. And they got some panicky legislation, because they thought, and with some reason, that there was a group of people, many of them ex-soldiers, who were ready to overthrow the government. And they were anti-Semites, they were—I mean, anything you can think of, they were that. They were in rebellion against this country.
And I wrote about it in warning terms. I went so far as to write Mr. Mueller, who was the new director of the FBI. And I saw he was never going to follow up. They did all these interviews with various guys living in the woods around Fort Hood. I said, “They’re going to be trouble one day, and you don’t even follow up on them? Yet you go on inventing stuff about McVeigh which isn’t true.” They tried to pretend he was a crazy and this and that. Well, he got the Silver Star, I think it was.
AMY GOODMAN: Persian Gulf War.
GORE VIDAL: Yeah. So the coup d’etat comes out of this.