View The Power of Nightmares

[Guest guest]

THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES

BBC Documentary broadcast November 3, 2004

-WATCH IT NOW

Click on link to view this documentary:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1040.htm

 

This three part BBC documentary covers the history of

the neoconservative movement and the Islamic movement

over the past three decades. It offers essential

historical background information. Like all stories,

it is not all true, but I think it is well done and an

important attempt to explain how we got to the point

we are at.

 

Interestingly, the film paints Kissinger, Bush Sr, and

Clinton in very benign terms as only wanting to

stabilize the world. In cosntrast to the neocons, who

wanted to exapnd their base of power. Also,

documentary presents the standard party line that

Bin Laden was the mastermind of the Trade Tower

Bombings. There are many websites on the Internet

which provide evidence that the neocons were behind

the Trade Tower Bombings. (see

http://www.prisonplanet.com and

http://www.infowars.com for extensive audio/visual

references on this viewpoint) I personally have to

wonder how it would be possible to not learn about

this contrary evidence, but it seems the powere that

be do not surf the Internet.

 

At any rate, The Power of Nightmares is well worth the

time to study. It explains a lot for those of us who

lived through Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, and offers

background for those in their 20’s who were small

children at that time.

 

Here is the article that was posted earlier about

this documentary.

 

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

Andy Beckett

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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