Al Qaeda: Fact or Myth

[cynatnite]

I just finished watching The Power of Nightmares. It's a three part documentary shown on BBC. Basically, it says that 'Al Qaeda' isn't real and that it was a coined term from neocons to exaggerate the terrorist threat post 9/11. He also claims that Bin Laden and his henchmen are nothing more than that and not this vast network working through 60 countries including the United States.

They pointed to examples of people arrested here in the states and in the UK for terrorism but in most cases the charges were dropped. It did give the impression that the attacks prior to 9/11 were due to a group of guys who wanted to 'get back' at the US or whatever government was on their 'I hate you' list.

Overall, it's saying that there is no 'Al Qaeda' and the terrorists aren't organized enough to have that sort of network. The neocons have used 9/11 to pump it up in order to have this unknown and invisible enemy to put fear into the populace.

[GetTheRightVote]

1. I hope we have some document come to light on this one,

Both this should blow the Repubs into pieces of nothingness.

:kick:

[LuPeRcALiO]

2. Afghanistan did not attack the U.S.A.

That much we know.

[DrDebug]

3. Both

The Al Qaeda they want us to believe doesn't exist, but Al Qaeda does exists and was a joint CIA / ISI / Saudi operation

According to admissions by Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA director Bill Casey, efforts were being made to destabilize the country. Six months later the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden was selected for the head Al Qaeda by Turki al-Faisal al-Saud, head of Saudi intelligence 1977-2001, currently Saudi ambassador to the UK. Osama bin Laden and al-Faisal have reportedly maintained close ties to this day. The CIA / ISI had requested a Saudi prince, but al-Faisal couldn't find any that was willing.

Who Is Osama Bin Laden?

by Michel Chossudovsky Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montréal Posted at globalresearch.ca 12 September 2001

(...)

Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an "international terrorist" for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Osama bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders".

In 1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.

With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.

The Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade

(...)

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html

[cynatnite]

8. Everything I found says that Bin Laden wasn't appointed by anyone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda

One of these was the organization that would eventually be called al-Qaeda, which was formed by Osama bin Laden in 1988.

[DrDebug]

10. There are quite a number of stories about it

Search for Al Qaeda Pakistan ISI. Because the ISI had a primary role in it. The CIA and the Saudi thought it was a good idea and provided backup in setting it up, but Mahmoud Ahmad has the biggest finger in the whole operation.

[DrDebug]

14. The story

http://www.countercurrents.org/ipk-saleem150703.htm

As copied from The News International (Pakistan) 15 July , 2003

On 25 December 1979, Leonid Brezhnev sent in troops to invade
Afghanistan. Within two days the Red Army had secured Kabul. On 21 January 1980, US President James E Carter made his State of the Union Address. The Carter Administration had identified Pakistan as a "Front-line state" in America's global struggle against Communism.

At the heart of America's struggle against Communism was the CIA plan to destabilise the Soviet Union through the spread of Islamic fanaticism across Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics. Between 1980 and 1989, CIA poured in some $6 billion (other estimates go as high as $20 billion) in arms, ammunition, recruiting, establishing an extensive madrassa network, training, feeding and arming of recruits. Saudi Arabia matched the US dollar-for-dollar. Wealthy Arabs poured in additional millions. Egypt and China also helped out.

In 1980, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the then head of Istakhbarat, Saudi Arabia's secret service, handpicked Osama bin Laden to provide engineering and organisational help to the fighting Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Osama was provided hundreds of millions with which he bought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia destined for Afghanistan's guerrilla camps.

Ronald Reagan took over the White House on 20 January 1981. The game-plan then revolved around the production of a hundred thousand religious fanatics to fight the 'godless Russians'. In 1979 an estimate on the total number of madrassas stood at around 1,000. Most of these madrassas concentrated on the formal instruction of Islamic theology. Between 1983 and 1988, CIA aid had helped establish an additional 1,891 madrassas. The new ones doubled as guerrilla training camps producing an average of at least fifty battle-ready alumni a year. That's roughly a hundred thousand Mujahideen a year. Osama bin Laden on his own is estimated to have recruited, financed and trained an additional 35,000 non-Afghans.

....

http://www.countercurrents.org/ipk-saleem150703.htm

And what does this have to do with Pakistan? Pakistan wanted to destabilize Afghanistan as well. The wars in Afghanistan have been very good for Pakistan.

Edit: Pakistan connection

[wuushew]

4. The name "Al Queda" was invented by the U.S. government

Although "al-Qaeda" is the name of the organization used in popular culture, the organization does not use the name to formally refer to itself. The name "al-Qaeda" was coined by the American Federal Government based on the name of a computer file of bin Laden's that listed the names of contacts he had made in Afghanistan, which talks about the organization as the al_Qaeda_al_Jihad ("the base of the jihad").

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Al_Queda

[michael098762001]

5. The Power of Nightmares.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050620&s=bergen
review | posted June 2, 2005 (June 20, 2005 issue)
Beware the Holy War: The Power of Nightmares

Peter Bergen
excerpt>...The parallel is provocative, to be sure, but Curtis takes it several steps too far when he argues that Strauss "would become the shaping force behind the neoconservative movement, which now dominates the American Administration." In fact, Qutb and Strauss are not of equal weight for the Islamists and the neocons. In al-Zawahiri's 2001 autobiography, Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, he repeatedly cites Qutb, while Qutb's brother taught bin Laden at university in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s. And Qutb's claim that Muslim rulers who preside over countries in a state of jahiliyyah are effectively non-Muslims was the intellectual underpinning of the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Moreover, all Islamists are well versed in, and deeply influenced by, Qutb. By contrast, while it's true that former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz took a couple of courses from Strauss at the University of Chicago, and a number of Straussians have found jobs in the Bush Administration, Strauss's work as a political philosopher has had little impact on the world outside the academy. Indeed, the key drivers of American foreign policy--Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--are in all likelihood more familiar with the works of Johann Strauss than with the dense, recondite works of Leo Strauss. (Curtis would have improved his case by focusing not on Strauss but on Albert Wohlstetter, a colleague of Strauss's at the University of Chicago who, during the 1970s and '80s, strongly advocated the view that Soviet military power was underrated, and who was an important mentor to both Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.)

The next pillar of Curtis's thesis is that the neocons and their allies exaggerated the Soviet threat, a precursor of their later inflation of the menace posed by Al Qaeda. It is positively eerie to watch then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deliver a supremely self-assured speech in a 1976 press conference about the gathering strength of the Soviet war machine that just as easily could have been one of his gung-ho Pentagon briefings decades later. Curtis explains that the CIA found Rumsfeld's view of the Soviet military buildup to be a "fiction"; but that did not stop Rumsfeld from establishing a commission of inquiry into the putative buildup that was known as Team B and was run, in part, by Wolfowitz. In one of the strongest sections of the documentary, Curtis explains:

Team B made an assumption that the Soviets had developed systems that were so sophisticated they were undetectable. For example, they could find no evidence that the Soviet submarine fleet had an acoustic defense system. What this meant, Team B said, was that the Soviets had actually invented a new non-acoustic system, which was impossible to detect. And this meant that the whole of the American submarine fleet was at risk from an invisible threat that was there, even though there was no evidence for it.

This was an early formulation of the Rumsfeldian doctrine that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. To devastating effect Curtis deploys Dr. Anne Cahn, a government arms-control expert during the 1970s, who explains, "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." Team B's exaggerations, according to Curtis, were all in the service of the neoconservative creation of "a simplistic fiction, a vision of the Soviet Union as the center of all evil in the world." Central to this fiction was the idea that the Kremlin was behind the violence of militant nationalist insurgencies from Belfast to Palestine (not to mention the attempt on Pope John Paul II's life). Claire Sterling expounded this theory, which has since been thoroughly debunked, in The Terror Network, a book that influenced the thinking of Reagan officials and neoconservative analysts like Michael Ledeen, who now argues that Tehran has replaced Moscow as the terror network's base of operations. Curtis can be faulted for overlooking the horror of the Soviet system, something the neoconservatives appreciated better than most leftists, but he is correct that the neoconservatives injected a theological fervor into American foreign policy and that they were willing to look past the flaws of anyone willing to confront America's enemy--such as the fanatical Islamist Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose party received at least $600 million in US aid to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, and who is now one of the most wanted terrorists in Afghanistan.

Just as Curtis gets his account of Team B right, so too he deftly charts the history of Islamist militancy over the past several decades. But he blows it when he concludes that Al Qaeda is a phantasmagorical construct of US officials. Curtis tells the story of al-Zawahiri, who, like Qutb before him, was radicalized by the three years he spent in an Egyptian prison during the early 1980s, emerging in jail as a spokesman for his fellow Islamist prisoners. Curtis shows powerful footage of al-Zawahiri at his trial shouting toward the camera in excellent English:

Now, we want to speak to the whole world. Who are we? Who are we? Why did they bring us here? And what we want to say? About the first question: We are Muslims. We are Muslims who believed in their religion, in their broad feelings, as both an ideology and practice. We believed in our religion as both an ideology and practice. And hence, we tried our best to establish an Islamic state and Islamic society.... The real Islamic front against Zionism, communism and imperialism.

Watching this footage you get a strong sense of both the forcefulness of al- Zawahiri's intellect and of his religious beliefs. After his release from prison he and bin Laden encountered each other in Pakistan in the mid-1980s during the Afghan war against the Soviets and forged a partnership. It is in recounting the nature of that partnership that Curtis makes his most explosive charge: "Beyond his small group, bin Laden had no formal organization, until the Americans invented one for him."

In support of this view Curtis relies, in part, on an interview with the British journalist Jason Burke, a friend of mine who has written an excellent book on Al Qaeda. Burke tells Curtis: "The idea...that bin Laden ran a coherent organization with operatives and cells all around the world of which you could be a member is a myth. There is no Al Qaeda organization. There is no international network with a leader; with cadres who will unquestioningly obey orders, with tentacles that stretch out to sleeper cells in America, in Africa, in Europe." However, in his 2003 book, Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, Burke is less dismissive of the idea that Al Qaeda was an organization than this soundbite suggests. Burke wrote that while the "al-Qaeda hardcore" consisted of relatively few people, "by late 2001, bin Laden and the men around him had access to huge resources, both symbolic and material, which they could use to project their power and influence internationally"--that sounds suspiciously like a "coherent organization" to me.

Indeed, there is an excellent example of how this global organization operated that, for obvious reasons, goes unmentioned in Curtis's documentary. In December 2001 Singaporean authorities arrested thirteen operatives of Jemaah Islamiyah, the largest Southeast Asian terrorist group, for planning to blow up the US Embassy there. It transpired that those operatives had videotaped the embassy as part of their preparations for attacking it and had sent a copy of the tape to Mohammed Atef, Al Qaeda's military commander in Afghanistan, so he could give the operation his blessing. In addition, a man who went by the alias of Hambali was simultaneously Jemaah Islamiyah's operational commander and a member of Al Qaeda's shura council, or deliberative body. Although Burke in his book was correct to emphasize that lumping together all the jihadist groups from around the world as "Al Qaeda" is a serious oversimplification, that does not change the fact that there was an Al Qaeda organization (an organization that has now largely been replaced by the militant jihadist ideological movement from which Al Qaeda first sprang and to which Al Qaeda has now given a tremendous boost).

Curtis claims that "Al Qaeda" was first "invented" in 2001 when US prosecutors put four men involved in the 1998 plot to blow up two US embassies in East Africa on trial in New York. During the trial they drew heavily on the testimony of former bin Laden associate Jamal al-Fadl, who spun a story about the Saudi militant that would make it easier for US prosecutors to target bin Laden using conspiracy laws that had previously put Mafia bosses behind bars. Curtis explains:

The picture al-Fadl drew for the Americans of bin Laden was of an all-powerful figure at the head of a large terrorist network that had an organized network of control. He also said that bin Laden had given this network a name, Al Qaeda....But there was no organization. These were militants who mostly planned their own operations and looked to bin Laden for funding and assistance. He was not their commander. There is also no evidence that bin Laden used the term "Al Qaeda" to refer to the name of a group until after September the 11th, when he realized that this was the term the Americans had given it.

This is nonsense. There is substantial evidence that Al Qaeda was founded in 1988 by bin Laden and a small group of like-minded militants, and that the group would mushroom into the secretive, disciplined organization that implemented the 9/11 attacks. Two years ago the minutes of the founding meetings of Al Qaeda (which had been discovered in Bosnia) were described in court documents in a trial in Chicago. Those meetings took place in August 1988 and involved bin Laden and Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, who would later become Al Qaeda's military commander. The participants in the meetings discussed "the establishment of a new military group" consisting of a "qaida," or "base." In a handwritten organizational chart of the new group, bin Laden, who then went by the alias of Abu Abdullah, is at the top.

In a 2001 interview with the Arab News, Hasan al-Seraihi, a militant Saudi cleric who had recently been released from jail, gave a description of Al Qaeda's beginnings during the late 1980s: "Al-Banshiri turned to me and started speaking in a quiet voice: 'You know that Brother Osama has spent a lot of money to train and buy weapons for the Arab Mujahedeen. We should not waste this investment after the jihad against the Russians. We should reorganize them under an Islamic army with the name al Qaeda. The army should be always ready to uphold the cause of Islam and Muslims in any part of the world.'" Similarly, Nasser Ahmad Nasser Al-Bahri, a bin Laden bodyguard who is now living in Yemen, recalled in an interview earlier this year with Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper that when bin Laden "returned to Afghanistan in 1996, he...opened branches of the al Qaeda organization in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and elsewhere."

Bin Laden himself recounted how the name "Al Qaeda" first emerged in an interview with an Al Jazeera correspondent shortly after the 9/11 attacks: "Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri established the training camps for our mujahedeen against Russia's terrorism . We used to call the training camp al Qaeda. And the name stayed." As early as 1999, in an interview with leading Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, bin Laden started publicly referring to Al Qaeda, at one point explaining that he didn't personally know everyone in his organization: "The number of brothers is large, thank God, and I do not know everyone who is with us in this base or organization." Bin Laden went on to note that someone named Mamdouh Salim, who had recently been extradited from Germany to the United States on terrorism charges, was "never a member of any jihad organization. He is not a member of the base." Indeed, when Al Jazeera broadcast a major documentary about bin Laden in 1999, the network called it The Destruction of al Qaeda, an odd choice of title if Al Qaeda did not in fact already exist.

Materials recovered in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban demonstrate that people within Al Qaeda referred to it as such and saw themselves as part of a larger organization led by bin Laden. Alan Cullison, a Wall Street Journal reporter, for instance, purchased a computer in Kabul that turned out to have been used by members of Al Qaeda, including Ayman al-Zawahiri himself. One memo on the computer dated April 1998, written by Tariq Anwar, was addressed to "Al-Qaeda Members in Yemen" and described the hassles of daily life in Afghanistan. Other memos were written in what Cullison describes as "language mimicking that of a multinational corporation." Bin Laden was referred to as "the contractor," while acts of terrorism became "trade." A memo from al-Zawahiri griped about how salaries had been halved for the militants living in Afghanistan and bemoaned the lack of accounting of monies spent in Yemen, the kind of memo familiar to anyone who has toiled inside a bureaucratic organization. Similarly, New York Times reporters recovered documents in Kabul such as one titled "Al Qaeda Ammunition Warehouse," which the organization used for tracking weapons and ammunition.

The 9/11 plot itself amply demonstrates the fact that Al Qaeda was an organization of global reach led by bin Laden. Although, as Curtis correctly points out, the 9/11 plot was the "brainchild of an Islamist militant called Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who came to bin Laden for funding and help in finding volunteers," Mohammed's scheme for crashing jets into American landmarks would have remained only a powerful nightmare without Al Qaeda, as the plot needed not only hundreds of thousands of dollars but, above all, a large pool of young men sufficiently indoctrinated that they would willingly "martyr" themselves in the operation. The 9/11 plot subsequently played out across the globe, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, money transfers from Dubai and the recruitment of suicide operatives from countries around the Middle East--all activities that were ultimately overseen by Al Qaeda's leaders in Afghanistan.

While bin Laden did not involve himself in the details of the 9/11 operation, he was its ultimate commander. In 2002, when Al Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda interviewed Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who had together coordinated the 9/11 attacks, bin al-Shibh told Fouda that he had traveled to Pakistan from Hamburg in late August 2001 to insure that bin Laden was apprised of the timing of the attacks five days before they happened. Bin Laden's supervisory role in the attacks on Washington and New York is amplified in The 9/11 Commission Report, which explains that in 1999 bin Laden appointed Mohamed Atta to be the lead hijacker. The report concludes, "It is clear, then, that Bin Laden and Atef were very much in charge of the operation." The same can also be said of Al Qaeda's attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. In 1993 bin Laden dispatched an aide to case the US Embassy in Kenya, and when he was shown photographs from that trip he pointed to the exact location where he thought the truck bomb should be detonated.

Because Curtis does not believe that Al Qaeda is an organization directed by Osama bin Laden, he unwittingly aligns himself at times with the Bush Administration, whose failure to capture bin Laden remains such a source of embarrassment that it seldom dares to utter his name. Take, for instance, Curtis's discussion of the battle at Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, where bin Laden and his followers battled with several hundred soldiers of the Northern Alliance and a handful of US Special Forces during the first two weeks of December 2001. Just as the Bush Administration minimizes the significance of Tora Bora, since it was the one moment after 9/11 when the United States had a good idea of bin Laden's location, so Curtis suggests that Tora Bora is but a "few small caves" and finds no convincing evidence that Al Qaeda members had holed up there. Those who followed the American elections will remember that when Senator John Kerry said President Bush had squandered an opportunity to nab bin Laden "when we had him cornered in the mountains," Bush dismissed Kerry's assertion as "a wild claim."

In fact, according to a widely reported background briefing by Pentagon officials in mid-December 2001, there was "reasonable certainty" that bin Laden was at Tora Bora, a judgment based on intercepted radio transmissions. Last year, Luftullah Mashal, a senior official in Afghanistan's Interior Ministry, told me that based on conversations he had had with a Saudi Al Qaeda financier and bin Laden's cook, both of whom were at the battle, bin Laden was indeed at Tora Bora. In June 2003 I met with several US counterterrorism officials, one of whom explained, "We are confident that was at Tora Bora and disappeared with a small group." And the editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, Abdel Bari Atwan, a consistently accurate source of information about Al Qaeda, has reported that bin Laden was wounded in the shoulder at Tora Bora. Indeed, in an audiotape released on Al Jazeera television two years ago, bin Laden recounted his own vivid memories of the Tora Bora battle. "We were about 300 holy warriors. We dug 100 trenches over an area of one square mile, so as to avoid the huge human losses from the bombardment." And last August Al Sharq Al Awsat newspaper published the account of a Moroccan guard of bin Laden's, Abdallah Tabarak, who was also at Tora Bora: "We entered Tora Bora, where we stayed for twenty days. From there, Ayman al-Zawahiri fled.... Afterward, bin Laden fled with his son Muhammad." In short, there is plenty of evidence that bin Laden and hundreds of his followers were at Tora Bora, a fact that undercuts both the Bush Administration's and Curtis's reconstruction of the battle.

In his effort to portray Al Qaeda as a construct of US officialdom, Curtis misses the real story about the Bush Administration and Al Qaeda. It's not that Bush officials created the myth of a nonexistent organization but that Al Qaeda simply did not fit their worldview of what constituted a serious threat, and so they largely ignored it until they evacuated their offices on the morning of September 11, 2001. A database search for any statements by senior Bush officials about bin Laden or Al Qaeda that were made before the 9/11 attacks yields negligible results. And we know from the 9/11 Commission that while Bush Cabinet officials met thirty-three times before 9/11, only one of their meetings was about terrorism. Al Qaeda was not a subject that exercised senior Bush officials either privately or publicly before 9/11 because they were preoccupied by state-based threats--hence their focus on China, Iraq and ballistic missile defenses (which do nothing, of course, to protect against terrorist attacks).

This was especially odd because rarely have our enemies warned us so often about their intentions. Imagine for a minute that officials in the Japanese high command, beginning in 1937, repeatedly stated that they were intending to attack the United States. Imagine then how differently the events of Pearl Harbor might have played out four years later. Well, that's exactly what bin Laden did beginning in 1997, repeatedly warning in widely broadcast interviews on CNN, ABC and Al Jazeera that he was launching a war against the United States. But those warnings were taken by certain members of the Bush Administration as the fulminations of a wannabe rather than a capable adversary. As former counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke recounts in his book Against All Enemies, when the Deputies Committee of sub-Cabinet officials met for the first time in April 2001 to discuss terrorism, Wolfowitz--who had long been preoccupied by discredited conspiracy theories that Iraq was behind the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993--testily said, "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning talking about this one man bin Laden." In short, Wolfowitz, at least until the 9/11 attacks, would have agreed with Curtis's assessment that the threat posed by Al Qaeda was a "fantasy." The leading neoconservative in the Administration did not seek to inflate the Al Qaeda threat but rather misunderstood its significance--until it was too late.

It is in the final hour of his documentary that Curtis's argument that Bush officials have distorted the Al Qaeda threat takes its strongest shape. A critical element of the Bush Administration's approach to the threat is that there are "sleeper cells" in the United States, a "greens under the bed" fixation that Curtis characterizes as a chase for a "phantom enemy":

Thousands were detained, as all branches of the law and the military were told to look for terrorists.... And, bit by bit, the government found the network: a series of hidden cells in cities around the country from Buffalo to Portland.... The Americans called them "sleeper cells" and decided that they had just been waiting to strike. But in reality there is very little evidence that any of those arrested had anything at all to do with terrorist plots.

Curtis illustrates this with a story that owes something to the Keystone Kops and Inspector Clouseau. After 9/11 four Arab teenagers living in Detroit were arrested on suspicion of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell, following a tip from a known con man. US officials subsequently found a videotape of a trip the teenagers had made to Disneyland and became convinced that it was a "casing tape" for a future terrorist attack. As Ron Hansen, a reporter for the Detroit News, explains,

I could never get past the fact that the tape just looked like a tourist tape. The Disneyland ride, for example, was a lengthy queue, people just making their way to the ride. The camera occasionally pans to look at the rocks on the wall, made to look like an Indiana Jones movie, and after several minutes the camera, it pans across and shows a trash can momentarily, and then continues off to look into the crowd. The expert basically said that, by flashing on that trash can for a moment, the people who are part of this conspiracy to conduct these kinds of terrorist operations--they would understand what this is all about: how to locate a bomb in Disneyland in California.

The case became even more bizarre when officials also charged that the Detroit teenagers were planning to attack a US base in Turkey. The drawings, discovered in a diary, were later determined to be the demented doodles of a Yemeni who believed he was the minister of defense for the entire Middle East and who had committed suicide a year before any of the accused had arrived in Detroit. Eventually, the terrorism convictions of the teenagers were overturned.

The Detroit case is emblematic of so many of the "terrorism" cases that US officials have prosecuted since 9/11, which have often followed the trajectory of a tremendous initial trumpeting by the government only to collapse, or to be revealed as something less than earth-shattering, when the details emerge months later. Who can forget Chaplain James Yee, the Al Qaeda spy at Guantánamo who turned out to be cheating not on his country but on his wife? Or the unfortunate Oregon lawyer busted for his alleged role in the Madrid bombing attacks? Or, as Curtis points out, how the Justice Department held a press conference to announce the disruption of an "Al Qaeda terrorist cell" in Buffalo, New York, when in reality those arrested had made the dumb mistake of lying to federal investigators about briefly attending a Taliban training camp at a moment when it was unclear that this was a crime, and there was no evidence that they were involved in terrorism? The Buffalo case was, in sum, the ex post facto criminalization of bad judgment, not the discovery of an Al Qaeda cell or the prevention of a terrorist attack.

Indeed, an authoritative survey by NYU's Center on Law and Security released in February found that of the 119 criminal cases the Bush Administration has pursued under the rubric of the war on terrorism since 9/11, "the courts have indicted relatively few individuals on the charge of direct acts of terrorism and convicted only one ," the so-called "shoe bomber," who, of course, wasn't an American sleeper cell but a British-Jamaican who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight he boarded not in Paris, Texas, but in Paris, France.

The American sleeper-cell phenomenon has been much exaggerated by both US officials and hyperventilating stories in the media, which is not to say that sleepers have not existed in the past. For instance, Ali Mohamed, Al Qaeda's military trainer, was a US Army sergeant in the late 1980s who married a Mexican-American woman and was working as a computer network specialist in California when he was arrested in 1998, thirteen years after first arriving in the States. Mohamed was the aide bin Laden dispatched to case the US Embassy in Kenya in 1993, five years before it was destroyed by Al Qaeda's local cell.

However, since 9/11 there has been no evidence of sleepers like Mohamed operating in the United States. Either these sleeper cells are so asleep they are effectively dead, or they simply don't exist. The onset of the Iraq War and the presidential election both offered perfect occasions for the supposed cells to strike, but nothing happened. And the 9/11 Commission, building on the work of the largest criminal investigation in history, concluded that the hijackers did not have a support network in this country. This fact, taken together with the lack of real terrorism cases or terrorist attacks in the United States, leads one to surmise that there are no American sleeper cells. And support for this view came from an unlikely quarter in March: The FBI, in a leaked report, concluded that "US Government efforts to date also have not revealed evidence of concealed cells or networks acting in the homeland as sleepers."

That's the good news. But is that the real problem, anyway? There have been sleepers such as Ali Mohamed who have embedded themselves in American society for many years, but the real threat from Islamist terrorists has historically come from visitors to the country. That was the case in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center--the mastermind of which, Ramzi Yousef, arrived from Pakistan intent on attacking American targets--and that was also the case in the 9/11 attacks. It was also true of Ahmed Ressam, who was stopped at a Canadian border crossing in December 1999 on a mission to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, and also of Reid.

In fact, the Islamist terrorist threat to the United States today largely emanates from Europe, not from domestic sleeper cells or, as is popularly imagined, the graduates of Middle Eastern madrasas, functional idiots who can do little more than read the Koran. Reid is British, Al Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui is French and the 9/11 pilots became militant in Hamburg. The attacks in Madrid last year that killed 191, and the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, demonstrate that men animated by Al Qaeda's worldview have recently conducted significant acts of terrorism in Europe, a trend that is likely to accelerate as continued heavy Muslim immigration into Europe collides with widespread racism to create a population of alienated Muslims who often feel that no matter how much money they make, or how long their families have been in the country, as Pakistanis in London they are never quite British, or as Algerians in Paris they are not quite French, or as Moroccans in Madrid they can never be really Spanish. These are not powerful nightmares; they are a reality, a view that Curtis may finally come around to when a significant terrorist attack is carried out in London, which British authorities regard as inevitable.

Still, despite my many disagreements with The Power of Nightmares, which sometimes has the feel of a Noam Chomsky lecture channeled by Monty Python, it is a richly rewarding film because it treats its audience as adults capable of following complex arguments. This is a vision of the audience that has been almost entirely abandoned in the executive suites of American television networks. It would be refreshing if one of those executives took a chance on The Power of Nightmares. After all, its American counterpart, Fahrenheit 9/11, earned more money than any documentary in history. And what Curtis has to say is a helluva lot more interesting than what Michael Moore had to say.

[DrDebug]

6. Welcome to DU :)

:toast:

I know I am a bit of an asshole with this remark, but in the future please limit to story to 4 paragraphs as per DU Copyright Rules.

Indeed I pasted 7 paragraphs, but three of them were my own so they are exempt.

[punpirate]

17. It's a technical point...

... among several, but Curtis did not, as the Nation article suggests, claim that bin Laden was not in Tora Bora. His comments in the film, and those made by the British general overseeing the operation, were that they only found ordinary caves, not the elaborate, well-financed underground facilities with advanced communications, ventilation, sleeping and meeting quarters which Rumsfeld had asserted as being there in an immediately preceding clip with Tim Russert.

I've watched the series several times, and what Peter Bergen says in the Nation article avoids one of Curtis' central theses, that politicians have created, for political purposes, an overriding fear in the public which enables them to have worth with the public again, and to create a broad, simplistic view of the world, in which we are good, and the "other" is evil--and that is profoundly Straussian in temperament, contrary to what Bergen suggests.

As well, suggesting that the "casing" tapes done by an Indonesian group to bomb a US embassy being sent to Pakistan is for approval from the head of al-Qaeda is subject to both the interpretation given to it by Bergen and that it was simply a way of getting the money necessary to do it.

Bergen glosses over this assertion of Curtis'--that bin Laden is the money man--because bin Laden has considerable money of his own and after his years as a CIA-paid operative and as a member of the family owning one of the biggest corporations in Saudi Arabia, he would be in a position to know where to find money and how to move it around the Middle East to where it was needed. This undercuts his assertions that Jason Burke simply didn't intend what he said on film about al-Qaeda not being a tightly-knit paramilitary organization of jihadists.

Nor does Bergen want to get to the heart of Curtis' implications. If, as Bergen intimates, al-Qaeda is a formally structured military organization with operations in sixty countries--Bush and Rumsfeld and Rice and Cheney have suggested, then the Bush administration's flinging of military troops far and wide across the world in a global "war on terror" might have been an appropriate response.

If, on the other hand, it's a loosely-knit aggregation of smaller jihadist organizations who beg a small core of well-connected Islamists with money for funding and recognition, then a military response is absurd--and unnecessary. Keep in mind that during the Clinton adminstration, the only military response to terrorism was to launch cruise missiles at the Sudan and Afghanistan, and neither of those missions were successful, in large part because of old intelligence. The government focus, in the time that terrorism directed at the US began to grow, was on capture and criminal prosecution--that occurred in both the first Trade Center bombing and the 1998 US embassy bombings. In fact, those criminal investigations and prosecutions were more effective than much of what the Bushies have been doing militarily.

The last point that Bergen mostly ignores is the role of torture in creating jihadists. Qutb and al-Zawahiri were both tortured in Egyptian prisons. There would be no reason to include the footage that Curtis did--especially the part about being locked up with vicious dogs--unless he were trying to make a point about what our military is unwittingly accomplishing today by the use of torture, that of creating a new generation of Islamists who will continue the cycle of violence--which plays neatly into the hands of those who would like to further authoritarian government in this country and the use of the US military in a global version of the "great game" over a very long term.

It's important, I think, to look at how terrorism was viewed, before and after the arrival of the neo-cons in government, and in the context of the manufacture of threat by the neo-cons beginning in the Ford administration. Prior to 2001, terrorism was seen by the government as a problem worthy of investigation, of increased intelligence activity, and the commitment of resources for prosecution of terrorists. After, 2001, all prior efforts were downplayed, and in some cases, investigations were called off by the Bushies because they involved Saudis. In Ashcroft's first budget for the Department of Justice, counter-terrorism wasn't even a line item.

Bergen prefers to see this as a case where "Al Qaeda simply did not fit their worldview of what constituted a serious threat, and so they largely ignored it...." The real question is did they do so out of indifference, as Bergen suggests, or did they do so with full knowledge that the consequences of ignoring terrorism would enable them to fulfill a previously-constructed plan to create a new, absolute evil to be combated and to wage war on Iran, Iraq and North Korea, which had been defined by them as obstacles to be overcome in documents preceding the 2000 election?

Cheers.

[killbotfactory]

7. You can download it for free

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

for anyone interested

[allemand]

9. What I don't like about "The Power of Nightmares" is the way they took

Jason Burke's quotes completely out of context. Burke is the one who says "There is no Al Qaeda organization" in the film, but here is what he really wanted to say:

"What we have currently is a broad and diverse movement of radical Islamic militancy. (...) It involves tens of thousands of people, some merely individuals, some who have formed groups. (...) This movement is growing. Osama bin Laden did not create it nor will his death or incarceration end it. For all but five (or arguably three) years of his life, bin Laden was a peripheral player in modern Islamic militancy. He may have been the most charismatic and the best known, but there were, and are, and will be, many others who have the will and the capacity to foment violence, murder innocents and sow chaos around the world. (...)
The threat is grave. Thirty years ago a new Islamic political ideology began to resonate among millions of young men and women across the Muslim world. This ideology was a sophisticated and genuine intellectual effort to find an Islamic answer to the challenges posed by the West's cultural, economic and political dominance. Over the decades that ideology has changed and mutated into something different. Once, Islamic activists thought primarily in terms of achieving power or reforming their own nation. There was room in their programme for gradualism and compromise. There was room in their movement for a huge multiplicity of different strands of political thought. There was room for the parochial, radical and conservative movements of rural areas and for the clever, educated and aware ideologues of the cities. There was even room for those extremists who were committed to violence and who saw the world as a battlefield between the forces of good and evil, of belief and unbelief.
But increasingly, and this is a trend that is accelerating, the extremists are no longer perceived as the 'lunatic fringe'. Instead they are seen as the standard-bearers. And their language is now the dominant discourse in modern Islamic political activism. Their debased, violent, nihilistic, anti-rational millenarianism has become the standard ideology aspired to by angry young Muslim men. This is a tragedy."
Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda, The true story of radical Islam, Introduction, p.25-26

This idea of "the failure of political Islam" as described by Burke was first developed by Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel.

[cynatnite]

11. This was something I wondered about

Did the makers of the documentary try to minimize the terrorist threat? They were able to argue that much of what we've been told about Al Qaeda and it's capabilities were overblown.

But there was much they didn't mention that seems to have been intentionally ignored on their part. They didn't spend time discussing other terrorist attacks prior to 9/11.

And I know I don't have a great memory, but in my lifetime I don't recall Al Qaeda ever being mentioned until after 9/11.

I do think their point was that Al Qaeda was this dark menace hiding in corners and back alleys just waiting to strike at good and decent people when they least expect it. Sad to say that this is reminiscent of an antisemitic film that was shown in Germany when describing Jews.

The conclusion I came to was that while Al Qaeda is there and Bin Laden runs it...I don't think it's this network the bush regime and others have made it out to be. That's not to say there are no terrorists or few of them. I just think it's one more tool of fear that they've used to hang over our heads. It's what I call the 'or else' factor.

[pocket]

13. I first remember hearing about AL Queda in 1993

When they were blamed for the first trade-center attack.

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. Are you sure?

The web sites I've found say things like "Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine other Islamic extremists were convicted of conspiracy and other charges related to the bombing in 1993. and the so-called mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, was convicted in 1998", or "The men that committed this heinous crime have been linked to several terrorist groups including the Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Sudanese National Islamic Front". The 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa is generally thought to be the first major attack that bin Laden's organisation did.

[pocket]

19. I may be mistaken about the trade center

but they were definitely on the radar in 1993

http://www.middleeastfacts.com/middle-east/al-qaeda-al-queda.php

[Igel]

12. Probably the best way to think of al-qa'ida is as a resource center.

The university I last attended had a gay/lesbian resource center. It was an honest to goodness organization. It had an employee and everything, and a small office.

It did little by itself; the employee did, in fact, little. It had a large staff of volunteers, largely self-governing, in part trained by the employee, but with a large body of self-generated wisdom and knowledge. It was the nerve center for a lot of allied groups and initiatives; it relied mostly on outside funding, funnelling it to the appropriate groups and people. It brought groups/people together. It facilitated.

If you were a vehemently anti-GLBT administrator, it would be your target. So imagine the university kicked it out of its office and denied it official funding. The one employee had warning this was going to happen, applied to grad school, and became a grad student on campus.

Would the resource center still exist? In other words, was the resource center the one employee and the office, or the connections between student groups, volunteers, and accumulated wisdom? And, as students graduated, could the "ghost center" survive?

[radwriter0555]

15. I"ve said that since 2001. Al CIAda, as I call em, is largely a figment,

a boogie man... The great unknown, the abominable snowman and sasquatch and the serial killer with the axe.

[DrBlix]

16. Tim Osman

Google Tim Osman bin ladin al Qeada CIA