BBC documentary exposes Bush myths

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Sun, 17 Oct 2004 10:55:37 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

Subject:Fw: BBC documentary exposes Bush myths

Of course it is!! They must have a Boogie Man in order to herd The

Sheople into place!

 

 

 

BBC documentary exposes Bush myths

 

 

BBC documentary exposes al-Qaeda as a US-manufactured myth

http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=26836

By: agitpapa on: 15.10.2004 [09:49 ] (702 reads)

 

A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a

politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion

 

Recovering from the Hutton purge, the BBC finds the guts to say the

obvious: al-Qaida is a US-manufactured myth to justify its reversion

to military colonialism by labeling it " war on terror. " Debunking the

Qaeda myth also exorcises the minor US phantoms like Zarqawi. A double

whammy against the US empire: The Green Zone gets redecorated with the

blood of US mercenaries and the muzzled BBC denounces loud and clear

the lies of the Bush junta and its mascot poodle Blair.

 

The making of the terror myth

 

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.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

 

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