the power of nightmares

from the Nation. Katrina van den Heuvel writes:

"Last week, the BBC re-broadcast a provocative documentary series which challenges the idea that Al Qaeda is the center of a uniquely powerful, unified and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy.

"The attacks on September 11th," according to the film's director Adam Curtis--one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers--"were not the expression of a confident and growing movement. They were acts of desperation by a small group frustrated by their failure which they blamed on the power of America. It is also important," Curtis adds, "to realize that many within the Islamist movement were against this strategy." (This view accords with those held by terrorism experts--like Peter Bergen--who argue that Al Qaeda is largely a spent force that has changed from a tight-knit organization capable of carrying out 9/11 to more of an ideological threat with loose networks in many nations.)

"The film also challenges other accepted articles of faith in the so-called war on terror, and documents that much of what we have been told about a centralized, international terrorist threat "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicans. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media."

"The series does not claim that terrorism poses no threat, nor does it challenge the idea that radical Islamism has led to gruesome violence throughout the world. "The bombs in Madrid and Bali showed clearly the seriousness of the threat--but they are not evidence of a new and overwhelming threat unlike any we have experienced before. And above all they do not--in the words of the British government--'threaten the life of the nation.' "

"First broadcast in Great Britain last November, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear has yet to air on this side of the Atlantic. Why is it that no television outlet in the United States has yet to broadcast this critically-acclaimed film?. . . [cut]

"America has become trapped by that fear--riven by nightmare visions of 'sleeper cells' in its midst for which there is little or no evidence. The series attempts to explain why this strange state of affairs has come about and it argues that politicians have found in fear a way of restoring their power. In a populist consumerist age where their authority and legitimacy has declined dramatically politicians have simply discovered in the War on Terror a way of making themselves indispensable to their populations again by promising to protect us from something that only they can see."

"Curtis has promised to send me a copy of the documentary. But millions of Americans deserve to see a film that offers a rigorously documented and credible counter to the conventional narrative of a "war on terror."

"If you agree, write HBO and ask why it isn't showing this BBC documentary. You can also call on PBS stations to be true to their missions by asking them to air The Power of Nightmares.