jimbob

I saw the first and last of the 3 episodes, missing the one where the neo-cons turned their attention towards Clinton as 'the enemy within' after the fall of communism. The adverts for the series ran along the lines of "Politicians used to woo us with visions of a brighter future (cue film of a 50's-style futuristic car zooming along an empty road with an Aryan nuclear family within) but those visions were not true. Nowadays they have found a stronger emotion to engage with us - fear. But just as their dreams of the future were not true, neither are their nightmares."

The first programme centred on 2 figures who were in America in the 50's and disliked the liberalism of the day, thinking that it had gone too far, and that people needed an enemy to focus on to bring society back together. One figure was Leo Strauss, an American academic, and the other was an Egyptian (Egypt had adopted much of the American liberalism) whose name I forget. They influenced the neo-cons and the muslim fundamentalists respectively. That the foundations of the two 'sides' is apparently based on the same reasoning is quite a coincidence don't you think?

I can't remember too much of the muslim side but followers of Straus's philosophies sought positions of power in the government and intelligence agencies where they could push for a branding of the soviet union as an 'Evil Empire'. This is despite the CIA finding that the USSR was much less capable than the US militarily and therefore the threat of an attack was low. Using circular logic like "they're our enemy and nobody would be our enemy without being militarily our equal or superior, so they must be strong and therefore they are our enemy," the neo-cons launched 'Team B' and reversed the CIA's earlier analysis. They also suggested that the lack of evidence for large fleets of submarines was actually evidence for their existence. After all, if your enemy had fleets of submarines they'd keep them pretty secret wouldn't they! The documentary had neo-cons explaining the logic above and had plenty of people to say that the USSR wasn't strong militarily.

The third program was on al Qaida (the new enemy after Clinton), which it turns out was formed in a New York courtroom in early 2001. For Bin Laden to be tried for the 1993 WTC bombing (or maybe the USS Cole, I can't remember) he had to belong to an illegal group, and al Qaida was its name. Bin Laden didn't mention the name in his first videos after 9/11, only later adopting the name himself.

The episode was pretty much a compendium of lies told about 9/11 and events since. For example, there was the James Bond Villain-style 7-storey al Qaida headquarters built into a mountain in Afghanistan. A cross section diagram was published in a Rupert Murdoch-owned British newspaper which has always had close ties to the intelligence community, but soldiers sent to look for Bin Laden said they'd found absolutely nothing in any of the places they'd been told to examine. There was a clip of Bush talking to a crowd about how terrorists had been stopped in various US cities and the war was being won. This would no doubt scare people but the cases never came to trial (there were no clips of Bush telling anyone this!) and the evidence shown in the documentary was just laughable. Eg a camcorder left turned on and carried on a shoulder strap around Disneyland was supposed to have been recording the distance between various attractions; film of a person by a trash can in Disneyland was supposed to be a suggestion that bombs should be placed in the trash; scribblings on a piece of paper found under a sofa in a rented house were said to be the plans of a building or complex (I forget precisely what, but it was a likely terrorist target) but were later identified as belonging to a previous occupant with learning difficulties.

The bit in the article above about dirty bombs probably refers to the sources who claim in the 3rd show that a dirty bomb in a big city would possibly kill a handful of people, at the most. Apparently the science that tells us hundreds of people would be dead makes the assumption that those people would be right next to the bomb when it explodes and then not move for 300 years! The dirty bomb threat was, as we all know, spread far and wide in the media.

The gist of the series is that modern politicians want us to believe that we're under attack and that they are the only ones who can protect us. The narrator points out that this is a technique first used by the environmentalist lobby!

Definitely worth watching if you can.