Al-Qaida network a myth?

[Kulapavana 0]

Source: Vancouver Sun

Al-Qaida network a myth, program says

 

Governments tap into our fears

 

Rachel Sylvester

The Daily Telegraph

 

October 21, 2004

 

LONDON -- A current political theme is that we live in such a scary world it is better to re-elect the leader you know than to choose an unknown quantity who might let you down.

 

George W. Bush has played the security card in the U.S. presidential election campaign. In Australia, John Howard recently retained power by portraying himself as a safe pair of hands in an ever more dangerous world.

 

For a government, fear is a powerful tool -- it almost always favours the incumbent. It is impossible to argue rationally against fear or to prove categorically that a danger does not exist. But is the fear driven by genuine danger? Or is it just a useful device for politicians who want to assert their authority.

 

A provocative new British documentary series starting this week argues that it is the latter. The Power of Nightmares, directed by the award-winning documentary maker Adam Curtis, makes the case that in a post-ideological age, politicians increasingly use fear, rather than vision, to bolster their positions.

 

They create fantastical dangers against which they then offer to protect their increasingly terrified voters. Expert witnesses, who are keen to increase their own sense of importance, are complicit in the conspiracy. The media, always on the look-out for a story, have no motive to expose the fiction.

 

Controversially, the three-part series --to be screened on BBC2, which is available on some cable packages here -- focuses on international terrorism, a threat that, since the attack on the World Trade Center, few have dared to question. Much of the risk is, Curtis claims, a "dark illusion'' that has been exaggerated by politicians.

 

Al-Qaida does not, he says, exist as a global terrorist network -- it was invented by the Americans to allow them to try suspects under legislation designed for dealing with the Mafia, an organized grouping. Osama bin Laden, while funding individual acts of terror, is not the all-powerful mastermind of a unified strategy for world domination.

 

Although there are bad people in the world, there are no "sleeper cells'' waiting to be activated by their commanders. Of the 664 terrorist suspects detained in Britain, only 17 had been found guilty by the end of last month, and most of those were Irish Republicans and Sikh militants.

 

In Britain, Home Secretary David Blunkett warns, darkly, that terrorists will "come for us... with suicide bombers, with ricin." However, no traces of the chemical have ever been found in the U.K. Even the so-called dirty bomb, containing radioactive material, is a myth: Such a weapon would kill nobody, according to experts quoted on the program.

 

The attacks on New York, Beslan, Bali and Madrid were real, Curtis says. But by presenting the terrorists as a single evil organization, run by a man with a beard in a cave, the British and American governments actually misunderstand the real danger of a set of Islamist ideas that are inspiring different groups in different ways.

 

"Just as the dreams that politicians once promised turned out to be illusions,'' Curtis says in the last part of his series, "so too will the nightmares."

[AncientMariner 0]

I was listening to that Coast to Coast with George Noory and they had a guy named Charles Smith on. He made the claim that Clinton administration equipped the Chinese with various weapons technology that was then sold to Iraq and Al Qaeda and is now being used against our forces in Iraq. He claimed that China is secretly behind terrorist organizations and that China's ultimate goal is to spread out American resources and forces and take over America somewhere between 2015 and 2020. He even said that the Chinese press cheered on 9/11. Despite making all these claims none of the Clinton administration people have sued him because they don't want to be forced to comply to discovery motions that would have damning evidence against them. Apparently there is even evidence that John Kerry is in bed with the Chinese. More info can be found at www.softwar.net.