more on TSA Says It Can Decide Who Can Learn

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "John S. Quarterman" <jsq () quarterman org>
Date: October 24, 2004 7:30:56 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: "John S. Quarterman" <jsq () quarterman org>
Cc: Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on TSA Says It Can Decide Who Can Learn

> I think that the whole terrorism thing has been greatly overblown.
> Why are we scared by a few thousand terrorist deaths when Americans
> kill 50,000 of our own citizens every year, year after year, in
> automobile accidents?  When we kill 24,000 people per year using guns?
> When 36,000 people are killed by influenza?  I know that nobody will
> listen to me, but I think we ought to regard terrorism as yet another
> inescapable hazard of life, like tornados and hurricanes, deal with
> the risk in proportion, and stop talking about "winning the war on
> terror".  We lost the war on poverty (many people are still poor), and
> the war on drugs (many people are still using, buying, and selling
> drugs).  What reasonable person expects us to win the war on terror?

Here's a story about a UK documentary that attempts to answer some
of those questions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.html

The making of the terror myth

Since September 11 Britain has been warned of the 'inevitability' of
catastrophic terrorist attack. But has the danger been exaggerated? A
major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a 
politically
driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion. Andy Beckett reports

Friday October 15, 2004
The Guardian

Since the attacks on the United States in September 2001, there have 
been
more than a thousand references in British national newspapers, working
out at almost one every single day, to the phrase "dirty bomb". There
have been articles about how such a device can use ordinary explosives
to spread lethal radiation; about how London would be evacuated in the
event of such a detonation; about the Home Secretary David Blunkett's
statement on terrorism in November 2002 that specifically raised the
possibility of a dirty bomb being planted in Britain; and about the
arrests of several groups of people, the latest only last month, for
allegedly plotting exactly that.

Starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast a three-part documentary
series that will add further to what could be called the dirty bomb
genre. But, as its title suggests, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of
the Politics of Fear takes a different view of the weapon's potential.

"I don't think it would kill anybody," says Dr Theodore Rockwell,
an authority on radiation, in an interview for the series. "You'll
have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise." The
American department of energy, Rockwell continues, has simulated a dirty
bomb explosion, "and they calculated that the most exposed individual
would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life-threatening." And
even this minor threat is open to question. The test assumed that no
one fled the explosion for one year.

During the three years in which the "war on terror" has been waged,
high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer
number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has
left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the
central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive 
and
provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international
terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated
and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread
unquestioned through governments around the world, the security 
services,
and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even
bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear 
of
a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their 
power."

Adam Curtis, who wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the
difficulty of saying such things now. "If a bomb goes off, the fear
I have is that everyone will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if
the incident doesn't touch my argument. This shows the way we have all
become trapped, the way even I have become trapped by a fear that is
completely irrational."

So controversial is the tone of his series, that trailers for it were
not broadcast last weekend because of the killing of Kenneth Bigley. At
the BBC, Curtis freely admits, there are "anxieties". But there is also
enthusiasm for the programmes, in part thanks to his reputation. Over
the past dozen years, via similarly ambitious documentary series such
as Pandora's Box, The Mayfair Set and The Century of the Self, Curtis
has established himself as perhaps the most acclaimed maker of serious
television programmes in Britain. His trademarks are long research,
the revelatory use of archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth,
insistent voiceovers concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents
of recent history, narrated by Curtis himself in tones that combine
traditional BBC authority with something more modern and sceptical:
"I want to try to make people look at things they think they know about
in a new way."

The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely
believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is
not an organised international network. It does not have members or a
leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall
strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about
cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

Curtis' evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He
tells the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an
unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed,
short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective
terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name
until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin
Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the
existence of a named criminal organisation.

Curtis also cites the Home Office's own statistics for arrests and
convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664
people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found
guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or
members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody
has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.

In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but
increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having
similar doubts. "The grand concept of the war has not succeeded," says
Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal
United Services Institute. "In purely military terms, it has been an
inconclusive war ... a rather haphazard operation. Al-Qaida managed the
most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the
way that we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq, 
Indonesia,
the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your
resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it."

Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis
at King's College London, says: "The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to
the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident
in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no
real evidence that all these groups are connected." Crispin Black, a
senior government intelligence analyst until 2002, is more cautious but
admits the terrorist threat presented by politicians and the media is
"out of date and too one-dimensional. We think there is a bit of a gulf
between the terrorists' ambition and their ability to pull it off."

Terrorism, by definition, depends on an element of bluff. Yet ever
since terrorists in the modern sense of the term (the word terrorism
was actually coined to describe the strategy of a government, the
authoritarian French revolutionary regime of the 1790s) began to
assassinate politicians and then members of the public during the 19th
century, states have habitually overreacted. Adam Roberts, professor of
international relations at Oxford, says that governments often believe
struggles with terrorists "to be of absolute cosmic significance", and
that therefore "anything goes" when it comes to winning. The historian
Linda Colley adds: "States and their rulers expect to monopolise 
violence,
and that is why they react so virulently to terrorism."

Britain may also be particularly sensitive to foreign infiltrators,
fifth columnists and related menaces. In spite, or perhaps because of,
the absence of an actual invasion for many centuries, British history
is marked by frequent panics about the arrival of Spanish raiding
parties, French revolutionary agitators, anarchists, bolsheviks and
Irish terrorists. "These kind of panics rarely happen without some sort
of cause," says Colley. "But politicians make the most of them."

They are not the only ones who find opportunities. "Almost no one
questions this myth about al-Qaida because so many people have got an
interest in keeping it alive," says Curtis. He cites the suspiciously
circular relationship between the security services and much of the
media since September 2001: the way in which official briefings about
terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become
dramatic press stories which - in a jittery media-driven democracy -
have prompted further briefings and further stories. Few of these
ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless:
"There is no fact-checking about al-Qaida."

In one sense, of course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida
industry. The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of
something else, the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was
interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of
Chicago in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as
amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived
belief in America's unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's
certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form
of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such
as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary. They came to
prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and have
applied a similar strategy in the war on terror.

As Curtis traced the rise of the "Straussians", he came to a conclusion
that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian
conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with 
Islamism:
from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the
enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against
the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both 
movements
have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the
Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks
on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way,
Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the "fantasy"
of the war on terror.

Some may find all this difficult to swallow. But Curtis insists,"There
is no way that I'm trying to be controversial just for the sake of
it." Neither is he trying to be an anti-conservative polemicist like
Michael Moore: "[Moore's] purpose is avowedly political. My hope
is that you won't be able to tell what my politics are." For all the
dizzying ideas and visual jolts and black jokes in his programmes, 
Curtis
describes his intentions in sober, civic-minded terms. "If you go back
into history and plod through it, the myth falls away. You see that 
these
aren't terrifying new monsters. It's drawing the poison of the fear."

But whatever the reception of the series, this fear could be around
for a while. It took the British government decades to dismantle the
draconian laws it passed against French revolutionary infiltrators;
the cold war was sustained for almost half a century without Russia
invading the west, or even conclusive evidence that it ever intended
to. "The archives have been opened," says the cold war historian David
Caute, "but they don't bring evidence to bear on this." And the danger
from Islamist terrorists, whatever its scale, is concrete. A sceptical
observer of the war on terror in the British security services says:
"All they need is a big bomb every 18 months to keep this going."

The war on terror already has a hold on western political culture. 
"After
a 300-year debate between freedom of the individual and protection of
society, the protection of society seems to be the only priority," says
Eyal. Black agrees: "We are probably moving to a point in the UK where
national security becomes the electoral question."

Some critics of this situation see our striking susceptibility during 
the
90s to other anxieties - the millennium bug, MMR, genetically modified
food - as a sort of dress rehearsal for the war on terror. The press
became accustomed to publishing scare stories and not retracting them;
politicians became accustomed to responding to supposed threats rather
than questioning them; the public became accustomed to the idea that
some sort of apocalypse might be just around the corner. "Insecurity
is the key driving concept of our times," says Durodie. "Politicians
have packaged themselves as risk managers. There is also a demand from
below for protection." The real reason for this insecurity, he argues,
is the decay of the 20th century's political belief systems and social
structures: people have been left "disconnected" and "fearful".

Yet the notion that "security politics" is the perfect instrument for
every ambitious politician from Blunkett to Wolfowitz also has its
weaknesses. The fears of the public, in Britain at least, are actually
quite erratic: when the opinion pollsters Mori asked people what they
felt was the most important political issue, the figure for "defence and
foreign affairs" leapt from 2% to 60% after the attacks of September 
2001,
yet by January 2002 had fallen back almost to its earlier level. And
then there are the twin risks that the terrors politicians warn of will
either not materialise or will materialise all too brutally, and in both
cases the politicians will be blamed. "This is a very rickety platform
from which to build up a political career," says Eyal. He sees the war
on terror as a hurried improvisation rather than some grand Straussian
strategy: "In democracies, in order to galvanize the public for war,
you have to make the enemy bigger, uglier and more menacing."

Afterwards, I look at a website for a well-connected American foreign
policy lobbying group called the Committee on the Present Danger. The
committee features in The Power of Nightmares as a vehicle for alarmist
Straussian propaganda during the cold war. After the Soviet collapse,
as the website puts it, "The mission of the committee was considered
complete." But then the website goes on: "Today radical Islamists
threaten the safety of the American people. Like the cold war, securing
our freedom is a long-term struggle. The road to victory begins ... "

· The Power of Nightmares starts on BBC2 at 9pm on Wednesday October 
20.


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