[Peace-discuss] The myth of al-Qaida's vast power

[Phil Stinard]

I stumbled upon this in Spanish on Radio Nacional de Venezuela's website, 
but found that this article is already a week old.

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The myth of al-Qaida's vast power

By ROBERT SCHEER
For the Los Angeles Times
January 17. 2005 8:00AM

Is it conceivable that al-Qaida, 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-Qaida?

# 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-Qaida 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-Qaida, 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-Qaida 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 an 
army of investigators, we still don't have a credible narrative of a "war on 
terror" 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-Qaida: 
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.