[Mb-civic] Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman? Robert Scheer

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer11jan11.story

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 documentary 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 documentary 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 documentary 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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