Tuesday, January 27, 2009

"The Power of Nightmares" - a BBC Documentary Series (2004)


The Power of Nightmares - BBC
AVI | 704x384 | XviD, 1100 kbit / sec | MPEG-1 Audio layer 3, 128 kbit/sec | 50 min each episode | 3x350 MB

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares. "The Power of Nightmares" explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organized terrorist network is an illusion. It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.This series, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is written and produced by Adam Curtis. It consists mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration, which have been aired in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. The film was awarded a BAFTA in the category of “Best Factual Series” in 2005. Additional awards were given by the Director’s Guild of Great Britain and the Royal Television Society.



Brief descriptions for each episode:

Part 1 - Baby It's Cold Outside

In the 1950s Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian civil servant turned revolutionary, and Leo Strauss, a Jewish-American professor of political philosophy who fled Nazi persecution, were both in America at the same time. Qutb came to see Western liberalism as corrosive to morality and to society. Qutb had been sent to the U.S. to learn about its public education system but was disgusted by what he saw of its society. They each argued that radical measures (in Strauss's case, deception along the lines of the Plato's Noble Lie, and in Qutb's case, the creation of an Islamic state) could be justified in an effort to restore shared moral values to society, and their arguments heavily influenced American neo-conservatism and radical Islamism, respectively. Senior American civil servants and politicians influenced by neo-conservatism came to see communism as an evil force against which the U.S. should be presented as a force for good. This propaganda included Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney's formation of Team B, which over-estimated Soviet military technology, and the William Casey-led CIA assertion that various terrorist organisations were backed by the Soviet Union. The CIA's internal analysts (that Team B was arguing against), held that most terrorist groups were independent, in part because the book that laid out the theory of Soviet control of all terrorism, The Terror Network - The Secret War of International Terrorism (ISBN 0425053407), was full of lies the CIA had knowingly released as Black Propaganda. Meanwhile, Qutb became influential in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and was then jailed after some of its members attempted to assassinate President Nasser.


Part 2 - The Phantom Victory

In the 1980s the Islamist mujaheddin and the neo-conservative-influenced Reagan administration temporarily cooperated in fighting a common enemy, the Soviet Union and the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. Although the Soviet Union was already on the verge of collapse, both groups came to believe that it was their actions in Afghanistan that had caused it to fall. However, other attempts by Islamists to incite popular revolution failed, and the neo-conservatives lost power in the U.S. as the presidency passed to George H. W. Bush and subsequently to Bill Clinton. Both groups, having failed to achieve lasting political influence, identified new targets to attack: the neoconservatives sought to demonise Clinton while the radical Islamists decided that those who had not aided their cause were legitimate targets for violence.


Part 3 - The Shadows in the Cave

In the late 1990s the Taliban set up military training camps in Afghanistan for Islamist fighters. Most were only interested in fighting in their home countries, but Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and follower of Sayyid Qutb, paid the Taliban to allow them to recruit volunteers for attacks on the U.S. from these camps. Prosecutors for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings believed bin Laden organised them and wanted to convict him in absentia by showing that he headed a criminal organisation. Jamal al-Fadl, a former associate of bin Laden, conveniently described just such an organisation to them, which the investigators called al-Qaeda. While bin Laden apparently aided the attacks he had no organisation through which he could command and control them; al-Fadl seems to have told investigators what they wanted to hear in return for money and witness protection. Similarly, while bin Laden provided funds and volunteers to carry out the September 11, 2001 attacks, they were actually planned by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Following this attack, the neo-conservatives were able to convince George W. Bush to begin a War on Terror and to paint al-Qaeda as an international network of terrorists. The war in Afghanistan removed bin Laden's main source of recruits, but the U.S. military and the Afghan Northern Alliance also captured and killed many people in the Taliban camps that had nothing to do with him. The story circulated that bin Laden and the core of al-Qaeda had retreated to an underground complex in Tora Bora, but an exhaustive search revealed no sign of this. Al-Qaeda could not be found because it never really existed; Islamist terrorists are connected only by ideology and not by an organisation that can be cut off at its root.
LINKS
http://rapidshare.com/files/177577657/Documentary.The.Power.Of.Nightmares.01.Baby.Its.Cold.Outside.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/177289964/Documentary.The.Power.Of.Nightmares.01.Baby.Its.Cold.Outside.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/26388940/The.Power.of.Nightmares.2of3.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/26389056/The.Power.of.Nightmares.2of3.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/26389110/The.Power.of.Nightmares.2of3.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/26389268/The.Power.of.Nightmares.3of3.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/26389414/The.Power.of.Nightmares.3of3.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/26389466/The.Power.of.Nightmares.3of3.part3.rar

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