<p>Dstark,
I believe some of this info has been out there in bits and pieces, especially regarding the neocons. I’ve never seen it pulled all together in a piece quite like this and I certainly didn’t know the seeds of the Islamic revolution stretched so far back.</p>
<p>Wow, you guys have done some heavy documentary viewing in the hours that I have been sleeping! Really this is not a conservative or liberal thing! It gives the background information that makes it possible to view what is going on on this planet today from a broader perspective. BBC news can at times rankle me but I try to keep an open mind and yes this was made before the bombings of London. Doesn’t change a thing. BBC documentaries are a totally different “ballgame.” They are intelligent, I think the best made by any “group” today. This documentary does not rankle. It makes me go “what in the heck is going on.” It makes me question.</p>
<p>You may want to catch a glimpse of this one as well:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/[/url]”>http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/</a></p>
<p>In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the locus of the investigation quickly shifted to Europe and the network of radical Islamic jihadis who are part of “Eurabia,” the continent’s expanding Muslim communities. Since 9/11 America has been spared what authorities feared and expected: a second wave of attacks. Instead Europe, once a logistical base for Islamic radicals and a safe haven, has itself become the target.</p>
<p>Across Europe, the long, hard work of intelligence gathering, surveillance and investigation has been paying off. It is estimated 34 substantial terrorist attacks have been planned but intercepted since 9/11, and some planned on a scale of 9/11. About 600 suspected terrorists have been arrested, packed off to jail or held in indefinite detention. And these are not all illegal foreigners, but European citizens with full legal rights under the rule of law. Each country has its own legal system, but they all have the problem of how to hold them and how to make cases against them.</p>
<p>Plans for bombings. Madrid provided enough evidence of that. The bombing here last March succeeded in having Spain withdraw from Iraq. Yet eight months later, Madrid was in the crosshairs again. In November, police busted yet another jihadist cell. They were driven, it seems, by Salafist jihadist propaganda that the lands of Andalusia belong back in the Islamic caliphate. And this time, seven targets, selected for symbolism, bombing plans that would have eclipsed the carnage of March 11th.</p>
<p>The targets included a skyscraper by the architect who designed the World Trade Center in New York City, the Audencia Nacional, where the anti-terrorist judge Balthazar Garzon has his offices, the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, home of the Real Madrid soccer club. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess what a bomb would do here during a football match.</p>
<p>Indeed, a bunch of crock!</p>
<p>OK, after watching all three segments, I would say that the treatment of the neo-cons is a bit simplistic and manipulative in a Limbaughesque/Mooresian sort of way. What is presented is essentially accurate, but clipped and edited for effect.</p>
<p>However, the questions raised about Al Quaeda strike me as very plausible and go a long way towards answering something that’s been bothering me. Namely…with this all out “war on terror”, how can it be that we haven’t rounded up anybody of consequence? Sure, we pick up an occasional “Number 3”, who is replaced the following week by a new “Number 3”. It is quite possible that we are chasing an illusion. It is certainly obvious that we were fighting an illusion of WMD in Iraq. I would entertain the notion that what we are really fighting is simply random groups of “jihadist” nutcases, who occasionally get lucky.</p>
<p>Xiggi, did you watch the videos?</p>
<p>Interesteddad, one of the parts I found telling was listening to Rumsfeld in the 80’s and listening to him now. He was pretty inaccurate both times. </p>
<p>He had that guy from Meet the Press eating out of his hand.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes. I was struck by the same scene. It concerns me that it is exactly the same cast of characters who so grossly miscalculated the strength of the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, you were in favor of the war when it first started, right?</p>
<p>well I was going to watch them but the first clip was an hour… are they an hour each? I will have to set aside time at another point.</p>
<p>They are an hour each, but worth the time.</p>
<p>DS, I am glad you enjoyed it so much. I do tend to like the BBC as long at its analysis is confined to Europe. When the BBC turns its views towards the United States, they tend to sound like that guy who joined Nightline after covering Michael Jackson. Sensationalist but with little foundation, and VERY annoying. </p>
<p>Me thinks I’ll wait for a sequel that includes a few events which happened in Europe of 2005. Inasmuch as you can’t tell much about a book from its cover, you can get a good idea of what to expect from the people who read it. I won’t say a word about it until I find the time to watch it, but the temptation to spend three hours was greatly reduced by the comments of its supporters on CC.</p>
<p>Xiggi, I’m watching your link.</p>
<p>You don’t have to watch the BBC links.</p>
<p>dsark:</p>
<p>More accurately, I was not opposed to the invasion of Iraq. That was based on three elements:</p>
<p>a) The obvious fact that Sadaam was a brutal thug dicatator.</p>
<p>b) My assumption that the Bush administration was telling the truth about WMD.</p>
<p>c) An assumption that the Bush administration had some reasonable plan for a post-war reconstruction.</p>
<p>The two things that really make me angry are that the Bush administration outright lied about the WMD intelligence and that the UN/French/Russians were involved in a corrupt kickback scheme that funded Sadaam and actually turned the UN sanctions into a policy that strengthened his power.</p>
<p>This issue of whether or not Al Quaeda is an illusion is critical. If there is no worldwide terror network, then our “war on terror” is 180 degrees the wrong policy. At this point, it is very difficult for me to believe a single word our government tells us. The Bush administration squandered its credibilty on the WMD issue.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, my thinking was similar to yours before the war, and I no
longer believe anything this administration says.</p>
<p>Before the Iraq War, my Middle Eastern friends, along with my Indian and European friends told me there wasn’t a terror network and we shouldn’t go into Iraq. I’m not sure why I didn’t believe them when they all have IQs much higher than Bush’s. :)</p>
<p>Xiggi, there are terrorists. Is there a terror network? Was there one before we invaded Iraq? </p>
<p>“The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.”</p>
<p>I watched the video from Frontline.
It looks to me like Europe doesn’t believe in Bush’s policies.</p>
<p>Why are we in Iraq?</p>
<p>“Before the Iraq War, my Middle Eastern friends, along with my Indian and European friends told me there wasn’t a terror network and we shouldn’t go into Iraq. I’m not sure why I didn’t believe them when they all have IQs much higher than Bush’s.”</p>
<p>This doesn’t even make sense.</p>
<p>The Frontline video really supported the main thesis of the BBC piece – that these terrorist “cells” are really homegrown, decentralized outfits linked only through ideology, not through some elaborate Dr. Evil style organization.</p>
<p>BTW, a lot of my thinking on Al Quaeda and Iraq was influenced by a book written by a House Intelligence Committee expert who traced the linkages among Hizballah, Hamas, Bin Laden, and the Iranians back staring in the 1980s including detailed accounts of Mogudishu massacre as a Bin Laden funded operation, passport assistance from Sadaam, and Iran as a nexis. This was never presented as a unified structured organization, but rather as a collection of like-minded enterprises with common goals. The book was richly detailed giving dates of key meetings and strategic approvals, but I am now questioning whether it was a neo-con treatise.</p>
<p>FWIW, I said that the PBS report could be a bit more balanced. </p>
<p>One issue to think about is the source of funding of those separate groups and access to technology.</p>
<p>Xiggi, the first seven minutes of part 2 answers your questions.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1038.htm[/url]”>http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1038.htm</a></p>
<p>Dstark, after viewing all three segments I was left feeling that some of the information was a bit exaggerated. I have no doubt that the Bush administration has manipulated evidence about Al Quaeda,especially regarding WMD and Iraq. They found that fear helps them win elections as evidenced by all the terror alert threats in the run up to the 2004 election. That being said it is still worth watching. This wikpedia site has some good links and further reading.</p>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares</a></p>
<p>This nation article has a particularly good critique of the piece - quite balanced, critical but not dismissive:
<a href=“http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050620/bergen[/url]”>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050620/bergen</a></p>
<p>"The Power of Nightmares, a three-hour BBC documentary directed by Adam Curtis, is arguably the most important film about the “war on terrorism” since the events of September 11. It is more intellectually engaging, more historically probing and more provocative than any of its rivals, including Fahrenheit 9/11. But although it has been shown at Cannes and at a few film festivals in the United States, it has yet to find an American distributor, and for understandable reasons. The documentary asserts that Al Qaeda is largely a phantom of the imagination of the US national security apparatus. Indeed, The Power of Nightmares seeks nothing less than to reframe the past several decades of American foreign policy, from the Soviet menace of the 1970s to the Al Qaeda threat of today, to argue that neoconservatives in the American foreign policy establishment have vastly exaggerated those threats in their quest to remake the world in the image of the United States.</p>
<p>The fact that the film has not been widely shown here is our loss, since it raises important questions about the political manipulation of fear. Yet The Power of Nightmares is also troubling for reasons other than the ones Curtis supposes. For the thesis he advances–that the war on terrorism is driven by nightmares rather than nightmarish potentialities–is one that merits considerable skepticism. It may be that Al Qaeda is less organized and monolithic than George W. Bush would have us believe, but it is a fierce and determined organization that has spawned a global ideological movement led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose influence and plans we have every reason to be deeply concerned about."</p>
<p>There are many good excerpts, probably one per page so I recommend reading the whole piece. It’s long but engaging.</p>
<p>I don’t believe the message of the film is that there is no threat of terrorist attacks. There obviously is a continued threat and it would be excellent if the US and European governments would do a better job tracking known terrorists than they have previously done.</p>
<p>The issue is whether or not the image of a monolithic terror network is accurate and beneficial.</p>
<p>By declaring war on Islam, are we fanning the flames? By focusing on Bin Laden as Dr. Evil are we elevating a crackpot to hero status? Is it worth traipsing around the mountain peaks of Afghanistan when 9/11 was planned and executed by a group operating and recruiting out of a mosque in Hamburg, Germany?</p>
<p>lizschup, thanks for providing the links.</p>
<p>Maybe, the most amazing thing about this series is it can’t get an airing by a television network, cable network, or even PBS.</p>
<p>There is a style of arguing where you nitpick at details and then say the whole premise in untrue.</p>
<p>I don’t really care if Strauss was the real inspiration or not of the neo-cons. The neo-cons exist. There are plenty of facts out there that support the premise that the neo-cons exaggerate potential enemies. That they are factually incorrect. All you have to do is watch actual footage of these people. </p>
<p>They also have a vision that I don’t support and they use questionable ways to see that vision come true.</p>
<p>As for the terrorists, are we safer after going into Iraq? Are there now more terrorists or fewer terrorists?</p>