The Power of Nightmares

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p

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 18:55:

Must read: The Power of Nightmares

 

 

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.html>

 

The making of the terror myth

 

Since September 11 Britain has been warned of the 'inevitability' of

catastrophic terrorist attack. But has the danger been exaggerated? A

major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a

politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion. Andy

Beckett reports

 

Friday October 15, 2004

The Guardian

 

Since the attacks on the United States in September 2001, there have

been more than a thousand references in British national newspapers,

working out at almost one every single day, to the phrase " dirty bomb " .

There have been articles about how such a device can use ordinary

explosives to spread lethal radiation; about how London would be

evacuated in the event of such a detonation; about the Home Secretary

David Blunkett's statement on terrorism in November 2002 that

specifically raised the possibility of a dirty bomb being planted in

Britain; and about the arrests of several groups of people, the latest

only last month, for allegedly plotting exactly that.

 

Starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast a three-part documentary

series that will add further to what could be called the dirty bomb

genre. But, as its title suggests, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise

of the Politics of Fear takes a different view of the weapon's potential.

 

" I don't think it would kill anybody, " says Dr Theodore Rockwell, an

authority on radiation, in an interview for the series. " You'll have

trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise. " The

American department of energy, Rockwell continues, has simulated a

dirty bomb explosion, " and they calculated that the most exposed

individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not

life-threatening. " And even this minor threat is open to question. The

test assumed that no one fled the explosion for one year.

 

During the three years in which the " war on terror " has been waged,

high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer

number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war

has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this

context, the central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily

counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived

threat from international terrorism, the series argues, " is a fantasy

that has been

exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has

spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security

services, and the international media. " The series' explanation for

this is even bolder: " In an age when all the grand ideas have lost

credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left

to maintain their power. "

 

Adam Curtis, who wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the

difficulty of saying such things now. " If a bomb goes off, the fear I

have is that everyone will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if the

incident doesn't touch my argument. This shows the way we have all

become trapped, the way even I have become trapped by a fear that is

completely irrational. "

 

So controversial is the tone of his series, that trailers for it were

not broadcast last weekend because of the killing of Kenneth Bigley.

At the BBC, Curtis freely admits, there are " anxieties " . But there is

also enthusiasm for the programmes, in part thanks to his reputation.

Over the past dozen years, via similarly ambitious documentary series

such as Pandora's Box, The Mayfair Set and The Century of the Self,

Curtis has established himself as perhaps the most acclaimed maker of

serious television programmes in Britain. His trademarks are long

research, the

revelatory use of archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth,

insistent voiceovers concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents of

recent history, narrated by Curtis himself in tones that combine

traditional BBC authority with something more modern and sceptical: " I

want to try to make people look at things they think they know about

in a new way. "

 

The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely

believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is

not an organised international network. It does not have members or a

leader. It does not have " sleeper cells " . It does not have an overall

strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about

cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

 

Curtis' evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells

the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an

unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed,

short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective

terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name

until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute

Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required

the existence of a named criminal organisation.

 

Curtis also cites the Home Office's own statistics for arrests and

convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the

664 people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been

found guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh

militants or members of other groups with no connection to Islamist

terrorism. Nobody

has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.

 

In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but

increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having

similar doubts. " The grand concept of the war has not succeeded, " says

Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal

United Services Institute. " In purely military terms, it has been an

inconclusive war ... a rather haphazard operation. Al-Qaida managed the

most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the

way that we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq,

Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you

divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it. "

 

Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security

analysis at King's College London, says: " The reality [of the al-Qaida

threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one

incident in

the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no real

evidence that all these groups are connected. " Crispin Black, a senior

government intelligence analyst until 2002, is more cautious but admits

the terrorist threat presented by politicians and the media is " out of

date and too one-dimensional. We think there is a bit of a gulf between

the terrorists' ambition and their ability to pull it off. "

 

Terrorism, by definition, depends on an element of bluff. Yet ever since

terrorists in the modern sense of the term (the word terrorism was

actually coined to describe the strategy of a government, the

authoritarian French revolutionary regime of the 1790s) began to

assassinate politicians and then members of the public during the 19th

century, states have habitually overreacted. Adam Roberts, professor of

international relations at Oxford, says that governments often believe

struggles with terrorists " to be of absolute cosmic significance " , and

that therefore " anything goes " when it comes to winning. The historian

Linda Colley adds: " States and their rulers expect to monopolise

violence, and that is why they react so virulently to terrorism. "

 

Britain may also be particularly sensitive to foreign infiltrators,

fifth columnists and related menaces. In spite, or perhaps because of,

the absence of an actual invasion for many centuries, British history is

marked by frequent panics about the arrival of Spanish raiding parties,

French revolutionary agitators, anarchists, bolsheviks and Irish

terrorists. " These kind of panics rarely happen without some sort of

cause, " says Colley. " But politicians make the most of them. "

 

They are not the only ones who find opportunities. " Almost no one

questions this myth about al-Qaida because so many people have got an

interest in keeping it alive, " says Curtis. He cites the suspiciously

circular relationship between the security services and much of the

media since September 2001: the way in which official briefings about

terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become

dramatic press stories which - in a jittery media-driven democracy -

have prompted further briefings and further stories. Few of these

ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless:

" There is no fact-checking about al-Qaida. "

 

In one sense, of course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida

industry. The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something

else, the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested

in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago

in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral

and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief

in America's unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's

certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form

of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such

as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary. They came to

prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and

have applied a similar strategy in the war on terror.

 

As Curtis traced the rise of the " Straussians " , he came to a conclusion

that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian

conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with

Islamism: from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism

was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration

against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both

movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going).

Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then,

as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are

in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining

the " fantasy " of the war on terror.

 

Some may find all this difficult to swallow. But Curtis insists, " There

is no way that I'm trying to be controversial just for the sake of it. "

Neither is he trying to be an anti-conservative polemicist like Michael

Moore: " [Moore's] purpose is avowedly political. My hope is that you

won't be able to tell what my politics are. " For all the dizzying ideas

and visual jolts and black jokes in his programmes, Curtis describes his

intentions in sober, civic-minded terms. " If you go back into history

and plod through it, the myth falls away. You see that these aren't

terrifying new monsters. It's drawing the poison of the fear. "

 

But whatever the reception of the series, this fear could be around for

a while. It took the British government decades to dismantle the

draconian laws it passed against French revolutionary infiltrators; the

cold war was sustained for almost half a century without Russia invading

the west, or even conclusive evidence that it ever intended to. " The

archives have been opened, " says the cold war historian David Caute,

" but they don't bring evidence to bear on this. " And the danger from

Islamist terrorists, whatever its scale, is concrete. A sceptical

observer of the war on terror in the British security services says:

" All they need is a big bomb every 18 months to keep this going. "

 

The war on terror already has a hold on western political culture.

" After a 300-year debate between freedom of the individual and

protection of society, the protection of society seems to be the only

priority, " says Eyal. Black agrees: " We are probably moving to a point

in the UK where national security becomes the electoral question. "

 

Some critics of this situation see our striking susceptibility during

the 90s to other anxieties - the millennium bug, MMR, genetically

modified food - as a sort of dress rehearsal for the war on terror. The

press became accustomed to publishing scare stories and not retracting

them; politicians became accustomed to responding to supposed threats

rather than questioning them; the public became accustomed to the idea

that some sort of apocalypse might be just around the corner.

" Insecurity is the key driving concept of our times, " says Durodie.

" Politicians have packaged themselves as risk managers. There is also a

demand from below for protection. " The real reason for this insecurity,

he argues, is the decay of the 20th century's political belief systems

and social structures: people have been left " disconnected " and " fearful " .

 

Yet the notion that " security politics " is the perfect instrument for

every ambitious politician from Blunkett to Wolfowitz also has its

weaknesses. The fears of the public, in Britain at least, are actually

quite erratic: when the opinion pollsters Mori asked people what they

felt was the most important political issue, the figure for " defence and

foreign affairs " leapt from 2% to 60% after the attacks of September

2001, yet by January 2002 had fallen back almost to its earlier level.

And then there are the twin risks that the terrors politicians warn of

will either not materialise or will materialise all too brutally, and in

both cases the politicians will be blamed. " This is a very rickety

platform from which to build up a political career, " says Eyal. He sees

the war on terror as a hurried improvisation rather than some grand

Straussian strategy: " In democracies, in order to galvanize the public

for war, you have to make the enemy bigger, uglier and more menacing. "

 

Afterwards, I look at a website for a well-connected American foreign

policy lobbying group called the Committee on the Present Danger. The

committee features in The Power of Nightmares as a vehicle for alarmist

Straussian propaganda during the cold war. After the Soviet collapse, as

the website puts it, " The mission of the committee was considered

complete. " But then the website goes on: " Today radical Islamists

threaten the safety of the American people. Like the cold war, securing

our freedom is a long-term struggle. The road to victory begins ... "

 

· The Power of Nightmares starts on BBC2 at 9pm on Wednesday October 20.

[Guest guest]

I will be so happy to get a new President. One that stands a chance at reducing

terrorism to a " nuisance " !!!

Living in earthquake territory most of my life and up here (Lake Tahoe) for 35

years, I'm used to disasters. Don't much care for them. Kind of like snow. Yup,

I'm used to it...but I still don't like it.

Early February of about 85 (bad winter!), it had snowed and snowed and snowed.

Then it started to rain. Some idiot down in Carson City was doing something with

one of those big pieces of equipment and cut the natural gas line into the

basin. At the same time something happened in Idaho, or somewhere...and suddenly

we had only one trunk line of electricity! Mid-winter...no gas, no lights. Ever

try to take a cold (I mean really cold) shower and get out of it into an icy

bathroom?

Natural gas was restored in 'just' 3 weeks.

And that's just one story of life in Lake Tahoe.

I would ask each and every member of this group...HOW PREPARED ARE YOU FOR

DISASTER???

Do you have a way to cook if your utilities are cut off?? Cooking in a pretty

fireplace takes a little more effort than does toasting marshmallows.

Do you have enough non-perishable food in the house/garage??

Do you have enough water stored?????

Blankets?

Batteries?

Water?

Water?

Water?

The water supply could easily become contaminated. Utilities could resonably

become rationed.

And remember FEMA has no regulators. Answers only to itself.

The military is there to maintain order...not to help individuals.

Sound harsh? Give it some thought, and then some preparation.

 

califpacific <califpacific wrote:

 

 

p

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 18:55:

Must read: The Power of Nightmares

 

 

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.html>

 

The making of the terror myth

 

 

http://pets.care2.com/

 

" The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. " --

Plato " Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing

health care to all Americans is socialism. " -- anon