Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?
Los Angeles Times: Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?
[Another point: where is the deluge of detailed biographical studies of
the 9/11 hijackers and their fellow conspirators that one would expect
to have seen marketed by the American establishment media by now?
Where are the exploitation books, magazine articles and TV do***entaries?
It is exceedingly strange that the media have shown not the slightest
interest in looking into every minute detail of the lives of the perps
who engineered the most spectacular terrorist event in American history.
Nothing about 9/11 adds up in a sensible way -- anomalies,
inconsistencies, non-barking dogs, etc. abound wherever you look.]
. If Osama bin Laden does, in fact, head a vast international
terrorist organization with trained operatives in more than 40 countries,
as
claimed by Bush, why, despite torture of prisoners, has this
administration failed to produce hard evidence of it?
. How can it be that in Britain since 9/11, 664 people have been
detained on suspicion of terrorism but only 17 have been found guilty,
most of them with no connection to Islamist groups and none who were
proven members of Al Qaeda?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheer11jan11,0,4938608,print.column
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ROBERT SCHEER
Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?
Robert Scheer
January 11, 2005
Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the
center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy,
does not exist?
To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is
heretical, especially in the context of the U.S. media's supine
acceptance of administration claims relating to national security. Yet a
brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading do***entary
filmmakers systematically challenges this and many other accepted articles
of faith in the so-called war on terror.
"The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear," a
three-hour historical film by Adam Curtis recently aired by the British
Broadcasting Corp., argues coherently that much of what we have been told
about the threat of international terrorism "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."
Stern stuff, indeed. But consider just a few of the many questions the
program poses along the way:
.. If Osama bin Laden does, in fact, head a vast international
terrorist organization with trained operatives in more than 40 countries,
as
claimed by Bush, why, despite torture of prisoners, has this
administration failed to produce hard evidence of it?
.. How can it be that in Britain since 9/11, 664 people have been
detained on suspicion of terrorism but only 17 have been found guilty,
most
of them with no connection to Islamist groups and none who were proven
members of Al Qaeda?
.. Why have we heard so much frightening talk about "dirty bombs" when
experts say it is panic rather than radioactivity that would kill
people?
.. Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on "Meet the Press"
in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in
Afghanistan, when British and U.S. military forces later found no such
thing?
Of course, the do***entary does not doubt that an embittered,
well-connected and wealthy Saudi man named Osama bin Laden helped finance
various affinity groups of Islamist fanatics that have engaged in terror,
including the 9/11 attacks. Nor does it challenge the notion that a
terrifying version of fundamentalist Islam has led to gruesome spates of
violence throughout the world. But the film, both more sober and more
deeply provocative than Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," directly
challenges the conventional wisdom by making a powerful case that the Bush
administration, led by a tight-knit cabal of Machiavellian
neoconservatives, has seized upon the false image of a unified
international
terrorist
threat to replace the expired Soviet empire in order to push a
political agenda.
Terrorism is deeply threatening, but it appears to be a much more
fragmented and complex phenomenon than the octopus-network image of Al
Qaeda, with Bin Laden as its head, would suggest.
While the BBC do***entary acknowledges that the threat of terrorism is
both real and growing, it disagrees that the threat is centralized:
"There are dangerous and fanatical individuals and groups around the
world who have been inspired by extreme Islamist ideas and who will use
the techniques of mass terror - the attacks on America and Madrid make
this only too clear. But the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful
hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion.
Wherever one looks for this Al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of
Afghanistan to the 'sleeper cells' in America, the British and Americans
are chasing a phantom enemy."
The fact is, despite the efforts of several government commissions and
a vast army of investigators, we still do not have a credible narrative
of a "war on terror" that is being fought in the shadows.
Consider, for example, that neither the 9/11 commission nor any court
of law has been able to directly take evidence from the key post-9/11
terror detainees held by the United States. Everything we know comes from
two sides that both have a great stake in exaggerating the threat posed
by Al Qaeda: the terrorists themselves and the military and
intelligence agencies that have a vested interest in maintaining the
facade
of an
overwhelmingly dangerous enemy.
Such a state of national ignorance about an endless war is, as "The
Power of Nightmares" makes clear, simply unacceptable in a functioning
democracy.
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