The Power of Nightmares

[ovyyus]

I recently watched the BBC documentary, "The Power of Nightmares". It is very interesting and well done and might shed some light on current global politics. I think it's well worth a look.

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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"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm

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 http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/sto ... 04,00.html
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 http://www.fightingterror.org - 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 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm
(The first hour of the program, in a more viewable format, is also available here http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/no ... tmares.htm

For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete
transcript is here http://www.silt3.com/index.php?id=573

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. http://www.thomhartmann.com

[Trev]

Hi Ovy,
I've been trying to get to see those documentaries for a while now, I cant get the BBC here in S.W Ireland.
I was searching around the net yesterday to see if it is available yet on DVD but apparently the BBC have no intention of releasing it or repeating it!
I did though find a guy in the UK who is selling it on VHS for 10 pounds, he specializes in suppressed films and documentaries - http://www.bilderberg.org/videos.htm

[ovyyus]

Hi Trev,

Anyone can download it from bit torrent sites such as http://www.lokitorrent.com For example, in here: http://www.lokitorrent.com/torrents.php ... 0&subcat=0 or here http://www.lokitorrent.com/torrents.php?cat=11

Not that I would nessessarily condone that sort of thing :)

[Trev]

Hi Bill,
If only... I get a Whopping 3kb/s on my aging phone line and there's NO broad band available here :(

[ovyyus]

Hi Trev,

Well that's going to be a problem. Why don't you send me a PM and maybe I can help you out :)

[epistemologicide]

guys i found this via a search,

The Power of Nightmares explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.

Part I: Should we be worried about the threat from organised terrorism or is it
simply a phantom menace being used to stop society from falling apart?

Part II: The Power of Nightmares continues its assessment of whether the
threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. Part two, the
Phantom Victory looks at how two groups, radical Islamists and neo-conservatives
with seemingly opposing ideologies came together to defeat a common enemy.

Part III: The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden
and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the
programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.

Part I: Baby It's Cold Outside
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/washing ... 1_1of3.avi
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/washing ... 1_2of3.avi
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/washing ... 1_3of3.avi

Part II: The Phantom Victory
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... _Part_2.rm

Part III: The Shadows In The Cave
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/washing ... mares_3.rm

[Patrick]

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