[Mb-civic] Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power
by Thom Hartmann 
What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the 
Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two 
decades based on phony WMD threats? 
What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the 
administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life? What if our 
"enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by 
rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam? 
What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, 
electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair? 
And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions 
of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 
1970s and today? 
It happened. 
The myth-shattering event took place in England the first three 
weeks of October, when the BBC aired a three-hour documentary 
written and produced by Adam Curtis, titled "The Power of 
Nightmares." If the emails and phone calls many of us in the US 
received from friends in the UK - and debate in the pages of 
publications like The Guardian are any indicator, this was a seismic 
event, one that may have even provoked a hasty meeting between 
Blair and Bush a few weeks later. 
According to this carefully researched and well-vetted BBC 
documentary, Richard Nixon, following in the steps of his mentor 
and former boss Dwight D. Eisenhower, believed it was possible to 
end the Cold War and eliminate fear from the national psyche. The 
nation need no longer be afraid of communism or the Soviet Union. 
Nixon worked out a truce with the Soviets, meeting their demands 
for safety as well as the US needs for security, and then announced 
to Americans that they need no longer be afraid. 
In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union 
with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the 
beginning of a process Kissinger called "détente." On June 1, 1972, 
Nixon gave a speech in which he said, "Last Friday, in Moscow, we 
witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. 
With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations. We 
have begun to reduce the level of fear, by reducing the causes of 
fear-for our two peoples, and for all peoples in the world."  
But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary 
of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) 
believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound 
by fear. Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated? 
Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and 
then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild 
the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War. 
And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 
Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the 
Soviets had secret weapons of mass destruction that the president 
didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody but 
them knew about. And, they said, because of those weapons, the 
US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs 
and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these 
two men would one day work. 
"The Soviet Union has been busy," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld 
explained to America in 1976. "They've been busy in terms of their 
level of effort; they've been busy in terms of the actual weapons 
they 've been producing; they've been busy in terms of expanding 
production rates; they've been busy in terms of expanding their 
institutional capability to produce additional weapons at additional 
rates; they've been busy in terms of expanding their capability to 
increasingly improve the sophistication of those weapons. Year after 
year after year, they've been demonstrating that they have 
steadiness of purpose. They're purposeful about what they're 
doing."  
The CIA strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete 
fiction" and pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating 
from within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would 
collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone. 
But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was 
something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid 
of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a 
commission including their old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that 
the Soviets were up to no good. 
According to Curtis' BBC documentary, Wolfowitz's group, known as 
"Team B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed 
several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a 
nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't 
depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current 
technology. 
The BBC's documentarians asked Dr. Anne Cahn of the U.S. Arms 
Control and Disarmament Agency during that time, her thoughts on 
Rumsfeld's, Cheney's, and Wolfowitz's 1976 story of the secret 
Soviet WMDs. Here's a clip from a transcript of that BBC 
documentary: 
    " Dr ANNE CAHN, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 
    1977-80: They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic 
    means of picking up American submarines, because they 
    couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-
    acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. 
    But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic 
    system. They're saying, 'we can't find evidence that they're 
    doing it the way that everyone thinks they're doing it, so they 
    must be doing it a different way. We don't know what that 
    different way is, but they must be doing it.'
"INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence.
"CAHN: Even though there was no evidence.
"INTERVIEWER: So they're saying there, that the fact that the 
weapon doesn't exist.
"CAHN: Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we 
haven't found it."
The moderator of the BBC documentary then notes: 
    " What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden 
    and sinister reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there 
    many secret weapons the CIA hadn't found, but they were 
    wrong about many of those they could observe, such as the 
    Soviet air defenses. The CIA were convinced that these were 
    in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos 
    in the Soviet Union. Team B said that this was actually a 
    cunning deception by the Soviet régime. The air-defense 
    system worked perfectly. But the only evidence they 
    produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, 
    which proudly asserted that their air-defense system was 
    fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused 
    Team B of moving into a fantasy world."
Nonetheless, as Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA's Office of 
Soviet Affairs, 1976-87, noted in the BBC documentary, 
    " Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that 
    was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of 
    that battle, Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul 
    Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA. And their mission was 
    to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, 
    Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a 
    nuclear war."
Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new 
Soviet WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved 
that undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their 
charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to 
selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the 
Reagan administration. 
But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had 
been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, 
Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet 
WMDs. 
Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and 
impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact, 
decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what 
the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - 
as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet 
economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was 
disintegrating. 
As arms-control expert Cahn noted in the documentary of those 
1970s claims by Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld: 
    "I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at 
    radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, 'This is a laser beam 
    weapon,' when in fact it was nothing of the sort. ... And if you 
    go through most of Team B's specific allegations about 
    weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, 
    they were all wrong."
"INTERVIEWER: All of them?
"CAHN: All of them.
"INTERVIEWER: Nothing true?
"CAHN: I don't believe anything in [Wolfowitz's 1977] Team B was 
really true."
But the neocons said it was true, and organized a group - The 
Committee on the Present Danger - to promote their worldview. The 
Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided 
guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard 
to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, 
particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the 
defense contractors for whom neocons would later become 
lobbyists. 
And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the 
United States, and making themselves and their defense contractor 
friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world. 
The Cold War was good for business, and good for the political 
power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Reagan. 
Similarly, according to this documentary, the War On Terror is the 
same sort of scam, run for many of the same reasons, by the same 
people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq - we may well be 
bringing into reality terrors and forces that previously existed only on 
the margins and with very little power to harm us. 
Curtis' documentary suggests that the War On Terror is just as 
much a fiction as were the super-WMDs this same group of 
neocons said the Soviets had in the 70s. He suggests we've done 
more to create terror than to fight it. That the risk was really quite 
minimal (at least until we invaded Iraq), and the terrorists are - like 
most terrorist groups - simply people on the fringes, rather easily 
dispatched by their own people. He even points out that Al Qaeda 
itself was a brand we invented, later adopted by bin Laden because 
we'd put so many millions into creating worldwide name recognition 
for it. 
Watching "The Terror of Nightmares" is like taking the Red Pill in 
the movie The Matrix. 
It's the story of idealism gone wrong, of ideologies promoted in the 
US by Leo Strauss and his followers (principally Wolfowitz, Feith, 
and Pearle), and in the Muslim world by bin Laden's mentor, Ayman 
Zawahiri. Both sought to create a utopian world through world 
domination; both believe that the ends justify the means; both are 
convinced that "the people" must be frightened into embracing 
religion and nationalism for the greater good of morality and a stable 
state. Each needs the other in order to hold power. 
Whatever your plans are for tonight or tomorrow, clip three hours 
out of them and take the Red Pill. Get a pair of headphones (the 
audio is faint), plug them into your computer, and visit an unofficial 
archive of the Curtis' BBC documentary at the Information Clearing 
House website. (The first hour of the program, in a more viewable 
format, is also available here.) 
For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but 
complete transcript is on this Belgian site. 
But be forewarned: You'll never see political reality - and certainly 
never hear the words of the Bush or Blair administrations - the same 
again. 
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project 
Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally 
syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com 
His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," 
"Unequal Protection," "We The People," The Edison Gene, and 
"What Would Jefferson Do?."




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