Re. The Power of Nightmares

"Letter to Editor"

12/02/2006

I've glanced at all 3 BBC video hours and watched carefully the 3rd
hour, which focuses on the past 8 years, when bin Laden has been on our
mind.


It's amazing in that it claims there was no terrorist network even when
9-11 occurred in 2001. Bin Laden, having failed to get his movement
going at home hit on the strategy of making remote attacks on US
facilities first in other countries and then in NYC and DC. Our FBI
invented the "al Queda network" to literally prosecute bin Laden in
absentia for the acts he directed in 1998-. (I guess that being a
leader of a group, whether invented or not, is a legal requirement, as
it was the case when Mason was prosecuted for murders he inspired.)
Anyway, this video says there was/is no network, and that we have been
chasing a phantom enemy. Supposedly there are or, at least then, were
no "sleeper cells" in Portland, Buffalo, Detroit or anywhere else where
our news media bought fantasies in which various nuts claimed to be
involved.


In other words, the entire war on terror and even al Queda are
fantasies, so says this video, very convincingly. It says that we
(esp. neo-conservatives) at first expressed legitimate concerns,
meaning about the very real terrorist attacks. But those concerns
escalated into fantasies, spun for politically power grabbing purposes
in BBC's UK, in the US, and even in the Middle East, where bin Laden's
original purpose of executing a few remote terrorist attacks -- to aid
his recruitment efforts at home -- seems to have worked.


The neo-conservative fantasy, of course, pre-dated bin Laden, as the
earlier two videos explain. Neo-cons simply see it to be the US
destiny to fight evil, first communism in the Cold War in nations like
Russia and now al Queda as a imagined network in a new Terror War.
Ashcroft said we had to shift to a preventative paradigm or a
precautionary principle to lock people up before they strike and to
launch preemptive wars. Such is the power of nightmares.


The videos further explain that 30 years ago, with our political
idealism failing, both the neo-cons and radical Islam emerged -- both
to fight evil, as they each see it. (That lose-lose mentality on both
"sides" is always required in wars they seek.) What are we going to do
about all of this?

_____


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- Chandler Harrison Stevens