Power of Nightmares, The : The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004)

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Part 1



In the past,
politicians promised to create a better world.

They had different ways of achieving this.

But their power and authority
came from the optimistic visions

they offered to their people.

Those dreams failed.

And today,
people have lost faith in ideologies.

Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as

managers of public life.

But now,
they have discovered a new role

that restores their power and authority.

Instead of delivering dreams

politicians now promise to
protect us from nightmares.

They say that they will rescue
us from dreadful dangers

that we cannot see and do not understand.

And the greatest danger of
all is international terrorism.

A powerful and sinister network

with sleeper cells in
countries across the world.

A thr*at that needs to be
fought by a w*r on terror.

But much of this thr*at is a fantasy

which has been exaggerated
and distorted by politicians.

It's a dark illusion

that has spread unquestioned through
governments around the world

the security services,
and the international media.

This is a series of films

about how and why that
fantasy was created

and who it benefits.

At the heart of the story are two groups:

the American neoconservatives,
and the radical Islamists.

Both were idealists

who were born out of the
failure of the liberal dream

to build a better world.

And both had a very similar explanation

for what caused that failure.

These two groups have changed the world

but not in the way that either intended.

Together, they created today's
nightmare vision of a secret

organized evil that threatens the world.

A fantasy that politicians then
found restored their power

and authority in a disillusioned age.

And those with the darkest fears
became the most powerful.

The Power of Nightmares

The Rise os the Politics of Fear

Part Baby it's cold outside

The story begins in the summer of

when a middle-aged school
inspector from Egypt

arrived at the small town of Greeley,
in Colorado.

His name was Sayyed Qutb.

Qutb had been sent to the U.S.
to study its educational system

and he enrolled in the local state college.

His photographs appear
in the college yearbook.

But Qutb was destined

to become much more
than a school inspector.

Out of his experiences of
America that summer

Qutb was going to develop
a powerful set of ideas

that would directly inspire those

who flew the planes on the
att*ck of September the th.

As he had traveled across the country

Qutb had become increasingly
disenchanted with America.

The very things that,
on the surface

made the country look
prosperous and happy

Qutb saw as signs of an
inner corruption and decay.

This was Truman's America

and many Americans today regard it

as a golden age of their civilization.

But for Qutb,
he saw a sinister side in this.

All around him was crassness, corruption

vulgarity. Talk centered on movie
stars and automobile prices.

He was also very concerned

that the inhabitants of Greeley

spent a lot of time in lawn care.

Pruning their hedges,
cutting their lawns.

This, for Qutb,
was indicative of the selfish

and materialistic aspect of American life.

Americans lived these isolated
lives surrounded by their lawns.

They lusted after material goods.

And this,
says Qutb quite succinctly

is the taste of America.

What Qutb believed he was seeing

was a hidden and dangerous reality

underneath the surface
of ordinary American life.

One summer night,
he went to a dance at a local church hall.

He later wrote that what he saw that night

crystallized his vision.

He talks about how the pastor
played on the gramophone

one of the big-band hits of the day

"Baby, It's Cold Outside."

He dimmed the lights so as to
create a dreamy, romantic effect.

And then,
Qutb says that

"chests met chests,
arms circled waists

and the hall was full of lust and love."

To most people watching this dance

it would have been an innocent
picture of youthful happiness.

But Qutb saw something else:

The dancers in front of
him were tragic lost souls.

They believed that they were free.

But in reality

they were trapped by their
own selfish and greedy desires.

American society was not going forwards;

it was taking people backwards.

They were becoming isolated beings

driven by primitive animal forces.

Such creatures,
Qutb believed

could corrode the very bonds
that held society together.

And he became determined that night

to prevent this culture
of selfish individualism

taking over his own country.

But Qutb was not alone.

At the same time,
in Chicago

there was another man

who shared the same fears
about the destructive force

of individualism in America.

He was an obscure political philosopher

at the University of Chicago.

But his ideas would also have
far-reaching consequences

because they would
become the shaping force

behind the neoconservative movement

which now dominates the
American administration.

He was called Leo Strauss.

Strauss is a mysterious figure.

He refused to be filmed or interviewed.

He devoted his time to creating
a loyal band of students.

And what he taught them was

that the prosperous liberal
society they were living in

contained the seeds of its own destruction.

He didn't give interviews,
or write political essays

or appear on the radio

there wasn't TV yet-or things like that.

But he did want to get a school of students

to see what he had seen:

that Western liberalism led to nihilism

and had undergone a development

at the end of which it could
no longer define itself

or defend itself.

A development which took everything
praiseworthy and admirable

out of human beings

and made us into dwarf animals.

Made us into herd
animals-sick little dwarves

satisfied with a dangerous life

in which nothing is true
and everything is permitted.

Strauss believed that the liberal
idea of individual freedom

led people to question everything

all values,
all moral truths.

Instead, people were led by
their own selfish desires.

And this threatened to tear
apart the shared values

which held society together.

But there was a way to stop this,
Strauss believed.

It was for politicians to assert
powerful and inspiring myths

that everyone could believe in.

They might not be true,
but they were necessary illusions.

One of these was religion;

the other was the myth of the nation.

And in America,
that was the idea

that the country had a unique destiny

to battle the forces of
evil throughout the world.

This myth was epitomized,
Strauss told his students

in his favorite television
program: Gunsmoke.

Strauss was a great fan
of American television.

Gunsmoke was his great favorite

and he would hurry
home from the seminar

which would end at,
you know, : or so

and have a quick dinner

so he could be at his seat
before the television set

when Gunsmoke came on.

And he felt that this was good,
this show.

This had a salutary effect
on the American public

because it showed the conflict
between good and evil in a way

that would be immediately
intelligible to everyone.

Let's see what happens!

No!

The hero has a white hat;

he's faster on the draw than the bad man;

the good guy wins.

And it's not just that the good guy wins

but that values are clear.

That's America!

We're gonna triumph over the evils of

that are trying to destroy us

and the virtues of the Western frontier.
Good and evil.

Leo Strauss' other favorite
program was Perry Mason.

And this, he told his students,
epitomized the role that they

the elite,
had to play.

In public,
they should promote the myths

necessary to rescue America from decay.

But in private,
they didn't have to believe in them.

Perry Mason was different from Gunsmoke.

The extremely cunning man who,
as far as we can see

is very virtuous and uses
his great intelligence

and quickness of mind to
rescue his clients from dangers

but who could be fooling us
- because he's cleverer than we are.

Is he really telling the truth?
Maybe his client is guilty!

In , Sayyed Qutb traveled
back to Egypt from America.

He too was determined to
find some way of controlling

the forces of selfish individualism.

And as he traveled,
he began to envisage a new type of society.

It would have all the modern benefits

of Western science and technology

but a more political Islam would
have a central role to play

keeping individualism in check.

It would provide a moral framework

that would stop people's selfish
desires from overwhelming them.

But Qutb realized

that American culture was
already spreading to Egypt

trapping the masses
in its seductive dream.

What was needed,
he believed, was an elite

a vanguard who could see
through these illusions of freedom

just as he had in America

and who would then lead the
masses to realize the higher truth.

The masses need to be led.

And it is this vanguard group
that will be responsible

for the task of leading the
people out of the darkness

and into the light of Islam.

Because the masses had succumbed
to their own selfish desires

and he wanted the vanguard
to be different, to be pure

to be standing together outside
all of this corrupt situation

bringing people back to the truth.

On his return,
Qutb became politically active in Egypt.

He joined a group called
the Muslim Brotherhood

who wanted Islam to play a major role

in governing Egyptian society.

And in

the Brotherhood supported the
revolution led by General Nasser

that overthrew the last
remnants of British rule.

But Nasser very quickly made it clear

that the new Egypt was
going to be a secular society

that emulated Western morals.

He quickly forged an alliance with America.

And the CIA came to Egypt to
organize security agencies

for the new regime.

Faced with this

the Muslim Brotherhood began
to organize against Nasser

and in Qutb and other leading
members of the Brotherhood

were arrested by the security services.

What then happened to Qutb

was going to have
consequences for the whole world.

In the s,
this film was made

that showed what happened
in Nasser's main prison

in the ‘ s and ‘ s.

It was based on the testimony of survivors.

Torturers who had been trained by the CIA

unleashed an orgy of v*olence

against Muslim Brotherhood members

accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser.

At one point

Qutb was covered with animal fat

and locked in a cell with dogs
trained to att*ck humans.

Inside the cell,
he had a heart att*ck.

Sayyed Qutb thought of himself
as a superior sort of person.

He saw himself as an
important Islamist thinker

and a strong character.

And so on and so on.

But at the end of the day

when he was in the m*llitary prison

he gave us the exact details
about his secret group

and the orders he had given.

The most dangerous was the order

to flood the whole of the Nile delta

and drown this corrupt land of infidels.

Qutb survived,
but the t*rture

had a powerful radicalizing
effect on his ideas.

Up to this point

he had believed that the
Western secular ideas

simply created the
selfishness and the isolation

he had seen in the United States.

But the t*rture,
he believed

showed that this culture also unleashed

the most brutal and barbarous
aspects of human beings.

Qutb began to have an
apocalyptic vision of a disease

that was spreading from the
West throughout the world.

He called it jahilliyah
- a state of barbarous ignorance.

What made it so terrifying and insidious

was that people didn't
realize that they were infected.

They believed that they were free

and that their politicians
were taking them forward

to a new world.

But in fact,
they were regressing to a barbarous age.

The sense is that jahilliyah
is so dangerous now

because not only is it
advanced by Western powers

but Muslims
- this is like a charge of false consciousness -

Muslims have become
infected with this jahilliyah

so now the thr*at to
Islam is also from within.

It's from without,
and within.

It's a state of emergency

because jahilliyah is a condition

that pervades everything and everybody.

It's even infected our powers of imagination.

We don't even know that we're sick!

That we now worship materialism,
and the self

and individual truths over the real truths.

Um, so it's an incredible
sense of epic confrontation

where Islam is being insulted on all fronts.

From within,
from without

culturally, militarily, economically, politically.

And under those circumstances

any way of fighting it becomes
justified and legitimate

and in fact has a kind of existential weight

because somehow it's
doing God's will on earth.

To Qutb,
this force of jahilliyah

had now gone so deep
into the minds of Muslims

that a dramatic way had
to be found to free them.

In a series of books he
wrote secretly in prison

which were then smuggled out

Qutb called upon a revolutionary
vanguard to rise up

and overthrow the leaders

who had allowed jahilliyah
to infect their country.

The implication was

that these leaders
could justifiably be k*lled

because they had become so corrupted

they were no longer Muslims,
even though they said they were.

Faced with this,
Nasser decided to crush Qutb and his ideas

and in Qutb was
put on trial for treason.

This is the only known film of
Qutb as he awaits sentence.

The verdict was a foregone conclusion

and on August , ,
Qutb was ex*cuted.

But his ideas lived on.

The day after his execution

a young schoolboy set up a secret group.

He hoped that it would one
day become the vanguard

that Qutb had hoped for.

His name was Ayman Zawahiri

and Zawahiri was to become
the mentor to O*ama b*n L*den.

But at the very moment

when Sayyed Qutb's ideas
seemed dead and buried

Leo Strauss' ideas about
how to transform America

were about to become
powerful and influential

because the liberal political order

that had dominated America
since the w*r started to collapse.

Law and order have broken
down in Detroit, Michigan.

Pillage, looting, m*rder.

Only a few years before.

President Johnson had promised policies

that would create a new
and a better world in America.

He had called it "the Great Society."

The Great Society is in place

where every child can find
knowledge to enrich his mind.

It is a place where the City of Man.

But now

in the wake of some of the
worst riots ever seen in America

that dream seemed to have
ended in v*olence and hatred.

One prominent liberal
journalist called Irving Kristol

began to question

whether it might actually
be the policies themselves

that were causing social breakdown.

If you had asked any liberal in

we are going to pass these laws,
these laws, these laws

and these laws,
mentioning all the laws

that in fact were passed
in the s and ‘ s

would you say crime will go up,
drug addiction will go up

illegitimacy will go up,
or will they get down?

Obviously, everyone would have said,
they will get down.

And everyone would have been wrong.

Now, that's not something

that the liberals have
been able to face up to.

They've had their reforms

and they have led to consequences

that they did not expect and
they don't know what to do about.

In the early ‘ s,
Irving Kristol became the focus

of a group of disaffected
intellectuals in Washington.

They were determined to understand

why the optimistic liberal policies had failed.

And they found the answer in
the theories of Leo Strauss.

Strauss explained that it was the
very basis of the liberal idea

"the belief in individual freedom"

that was causing the chaos

because it undermined the
shared moral framework

that held society together.

Individuals pursued their
own selfish interests

and this inevitably led to conflict.

As the movement grew

many young students who
had studied Strauss' ideas

came to Washington to join this group.

Some, like Paul Wolfowitz

had been taught Strauss' ideas
at the University of Chicago

as had Francis Fukuyama.

And others,
like Irving Kristol's son William

had studied Strauss' theories at Harvard.

This group became known
as the neoconservatives.

Well, many of them couldn't
get academic jobs

and the political science
and philosophy faclities

were not terribly friendly to those

of a conservative or moderately
conservative disposition.

And the truth is that a lot of people

who ended up in Washington
started out as academics.

I did; Paul Wolfowitz did;
and decided

they probably didn't have very
good prospects in the academy.

What we all had in common,
I think

was a certain doubt about

what once seemed a
kind of great certainty

and confidence in liberal progress.

The philosophic grounds for liberal
democracy had been weakened.

So I think Straussians who
came to Washington

they didn't think of themselves
as Churchill or Lincoln

let me assure you,
but they did that, you know

there's something noble about public life,
and about politics

and they tried to make a
contribution in many different areas.

The neoconservatives were idealists.

Their aim was to try and stop
the social disintegration

they believed liberal
freedoms had unleashed.

They wanted to find a way
of uniting the people

by giving them a shared purpose.

One of their great influences in doing this

would be the theories of Leo Strauss.

They would set out to recreate
the myth of America

as a unique nation

whose destiny was to battle
against evil in the world.

And in this project

the source of evil would be
America's Cold w*r enemy:

the Soviet Union.

And by doing this,
they believed

that they would not
only give new meaning

and purpose to people's lives

but they would spread the good
of democracy around the world.

The United States would not only

according to these
- the Straussians

be able to bring good to the world

but would be able to overcome

the fundamental weaknesses
of American society

a society that has been suffering,
almost rotting

in their language,
from relativism, liberalism

lack of self-confidence,
lack of belief in itself.

And one of the main political
projects of the Straussians

during the Cold w*r

was to reinforce the
self-confidence of Americans

and the belief that America

was fundamentally the only
force for good in the world

that had to be supported,
otherwise evil would prevail.

But to do this,
the neoconservatives were going to have

to defeat one of the most
powerful men in the world.

Henry Kissinger was the Secretary
of State under President Nixon

and he didn't believe in
a world of good and evil.

What drove Kissinger was a ruthless

pragmatic vision of power in the world.

With America's growing
political and social chaos

Kissinger wanted the country to
give up its ideological battles.

Instead, it should come
to terms with countries

like the Soviet Union

to create a new kind of
global interdependence.

A world in which America would be safe.

I believe that with all the dislocations we know
- now experience

there also exists an
extraordinary opportunity to form

for the first time in history,
a truly global society

carried by the principle of interdependence.

And if we act wisely and with vision

I think we can look back to all this turmoil

as the birth pangs of a more
creative and better system.

Kissinger had begun this process in

when he persuaded the Soviet Union

to sign a treaty with
America limiting nuclear arms.

It was the start of what was called "detente."

And President Nixon
returned to Washington

to announce triumphantly
that the age of fear was over.

Last Friday,
in Moscow

we witnessed the beginning
of the end of that era

which began in .

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 a world without fear was not

what the neoconservatives
needed to pursue their project.

They now set out to destroy
Henry Kissinger's vision.

What gave them their opportunity

was the growing collapse
of American political power

both abroad and at home.

The defeat in Vietnam

and the resignation of
President Nixon over Watergate

led to a crisis of confidence
in America's political class.

And the neoconservatives
seized their moment.

They allied themselves
with two right-wingers

in the new administration of Gerald Ford.

One was Donald Rumsfeld,
the new Secretary of Defense.

The other was d*ck Cheney,
the President's Chief of Staff.

Rumsfeld began to make speeches

alleging that the Soviets

were ignoring Kissinger's treaties

and secretly building up their weapons

with the intention of attacking America.

The Soviet Union has been busy.

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.

Now, your question is

what ought one to be doing about that?

The CIA,
and other agencies

who watched the Soviet
Union continuously

for any sign of thr*at

said that this was a complete fiction.

There was no truth to Rumsfeld's allegations.

But Rumsfeld used his position

to persuade President Ford to
set up an independent inquiry.

He said it would prove

that there was a hidden thr*at to America.

And the inquiry would be run

by a group of neoconservatives

one of whom was Paul Wolfowitz.

The aim was to change the way
America saw the Soviet Union.

And Rumsfeld won that very intense

intense political battle

that was waged in
Washington in and .

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 w*r.

The neoconservatives chose,
as the inquiry chairman

a well-known critic and historian

of the Soviet Union called Richard Pipes.

Pipes was convinced that whatever
the Soviets said publicly

secretly they still intended to
att*ck and conquer America.

This was their hidden mindset.

The inquiry was called Team B

and the other leading
member was Paul Wolfowitz.

And the idea was then

to appoint a group of outside experts

who have access to the
same evidence as the CIA

used to arrive at these conclusions

and to see if they could come
up with different conclusions.

And I was asked to chair it

because I was not an
expert on nuclear weapons.

I was, if anything,
an expert on the Soviet mindset

but not on the weapons.
But that was the real key

was the question of the Soviet mindset

because the CIA looked only at -

they were known as "bean counters,"

always looking at weapons.

But weapons can be used in various ways.

They can be used for defensive purposes

or offensive purposes.

Well, all right,
I collected this group of experts

and we began to sift through the evidence.

Team B began examining all the
CIA data on the Soviet Union.

But however closely they looked

there was little evidence
of the dangerous weapons

or defense systems they claimed
the Soviets were developing.

Rather than accept that this meant

that the systems didn't exist

Team B made an assumption

that the Soviets had developed systems

that were so sophisticated,
they were undetectible.

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
thr*at that was there

even though there was no evidence for it.

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."

Even though there was no evidence?

Even though there was no evidence.

So they're saying there

that the fact that the
w*apon doesn't exist

Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

It just means that we haven't found it.

Now, that's important, yes.

If something is not there,
that's significant.

By its absence.

By its absence.
If you believe

that they share your view
of strategic weapons

and they don't talk about it,
then there's something missing.

Something is wrong.
And the CIA wasn't aware of that.

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 regime.

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.

The CIA was very loath to deal with issues

which could not be demonstrated
in a kind of mathematical form.

I said they could consider the soft evidence.

They deal with realities,
whereas this was a fantasy.

That's how it was perceived.

And there were battles all
the time on this subject.

Did you think it was a fantasy?

No!
I thought it was absolute reality.

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 w*apon,"

when in fact it was nothing of the sort.

They even took a Russian m*llitary manual

which the correct translation
of it is "The Art of Winning."

And when they translated
it and put it into Team B

they called it "The Art of Conquest."

Well, there's a difference between
"conquest" and "winning."

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.

All of them?

All of them.

Nothing true?

I don't believe anything in
Team B was really true.

The neoconservatives set up a lobby group

to publicize the findings of Team B.

It was called the Committee
on the Present Danger

and a growing number
of politicians joined

including a Presidential hopeful,
Ronald Reagan.

Through films and television

the Committee portrayed a world

in which America was under
thr*at from hidden forces

that could strike at any time

forces that America
must conquer to survive.

A concentration of world evil,
of hatred for humanity

is taking place.

And it is fully determined
to destroy your society.

Must you wait until the young
men of America have to fall

defending the borders of their continent?!

This dramatic battle between good and evil

was precisely the kind of myth
that Leo Strauss had taught

his students would be
necessary to rescue the country

from moral decay.

It might not be true,
but it was necessary

to re-engage the public in a
grand vision of America's destiny

that would give meaning
and purpose to their lives.

The neoconservatives were succeeding

in creating a simplistic fiction -

a vision of the Soviet Union

as the center of all evil in the world

and America as the only country
that could rescue the world.

And this nightmarish vision
was beginning to give

the neoconservatives
great power and influence.

The Straussians started to create
a worldview which is a fiction.

The world is not divided into good and evil.

The battle in which we are
engaged is not a battle

between good and evil.

The United States,
as anyone who observes understands

has done some good and some bad things.

It's like any great power.
This is the way history is.

But they wanted to create a
world of moral certainties

so therefore they invent mythologies
- fairytales -

describing any force in the world

that obstructs the United
States as somehow Satanic

or associated with evil.

By the late s,
Egypt had been transformed.

On the surface,
it had become a modern

Westernized state with a
prosperous middle class

who were benefiting from
a flood of Western capital

that was being invested in the country.

One member of this
prosperous Egyptian elite

was Ayman Zawahiri.
He was now a young doctor

just starting his career.

Ayman, he was an ideal person

who was a doctor coming
from a very good family.

His father was a professor in the university

his grandfather was an ambassador

his other grandfather
was Sheikh of Al-Azhar;

very well-respected family.

He used to be the the sort of person

that acted by the book.
Not looking for prestige

not looking for money,
not looking for propaganda.

Ayman became a leader
because of his attitudes.

In reality

Zawahiri was the leader of
an underground Islamist cell.

The group that he had
started as a schoolboy

which he had modeled on the
ideas of Sayyed Qutb, had grown.

Sayyed Qutb's ideas were now
spreading rapidly in Egypt -

above all,
among students -

because his predictions about
the corruption from the West

seemed to have come true.

The government of President Sadat

was controlled by a small
group of millionaires

who were backed by Western banks.

The banks had been let in by

what Sadat called his open-door policy.

To the Western media,
Sadat denied any corruption.

All Egyptians knew that this was a blatant lie.

Who has benefited now
from the open-door policy?

Taxi drivers.
The liberals.

All of those have benefited
from the open-door policy.

It is not like they say

that there are millionaires here and so.

No, not at all.
This is pure, um

pure black propaganda from
the side of the Soviet Union

and agents here in the country.

Zawahiri was convinced that the time

was now approaching to fulfill Qutb's vision.

The vanguard should rise up and
overthrow this corrupt regime.

And the man who would give
the Islamists that opportunity

would be Henry Kissinger.

As part of his attempt to create
a stable and balanced world

Kissinger had persuaded President Sadat

to begin peace
negotiations with the Israelis.

To Kissinger,
the ruthless pragmatist

religious divisions and
hatreds were irrelevant.

The most important thing
was to create a safer world.

And in ,
Sadat had flown to Jerusalem

to start the peace process.

To the West, it was a heroic act.
But to the Islamists

it was a complete betrayal.

It showed that Sadat's mind had
become so corrupted by the West

that he was now completely
under their control.

And under the theories of Sayyed Qutb

this meant that he was
no longer a Muslim

and so could justifiably be k*lled.

And then, in ,
the Ayatollah Khomeini showed Zawahiri

that his dream of creating
an Islamist state was possible.

God is Great! that his dream of
creating an Islamist state was possible.

God is Great!

God is Great! Khomeini had inspired
an uprising against the Shah of Iran.

Khomeini had inspired an
uprising against the Shah of Iran.

The Shah was another leader

who had allowed Western
banks to corrupt his country.

Armed struggle is the read to
freedom! who had allowed Western
banks to corrupt his country.

Armed struggle is the read to freedom!

Armed struggle is the read to
freedom! Khomeini had put forth
the idea of an Islamist state

Khomeini had put forth the
idea of an Islamist state

Death to the Shah's mercenary
army! Khomeini had put forth
the idea of an Islamist state

Death to the Shah's mercenary army! that
was remarkably similar to Qutb's ideas.

Death to the Shah's mercenary army!

He acknowledged this
by placing Qutb's face

on one of the postage stamps
of the new Islamic republic.

In his first sermon,
Khomeini addressed the West.

"Yes," he told them,
"we are reactionaries

and you are enlightened intellectuals.

You who want freedom for everything

the freedom that will corrupt our country,
corrupt our youth

and freedom that will pave
the way for the oppressor

freedom that would drag
our country to the bottom."

You sound very dissatisfied

with what's happening in Iran now.

Not MORE than dissatisfied,
this is disgraceful! Really!

I was myself

I was the Secretary-General of
the Muslim Congress at one time.

This, putting the name "Islamic revolution,"
is a crime.

A crime against Islam in the first hand.

President Sadat,
do you expect

that the Shah will accept the invitation?

It seems like a good solution right now.

Quote me: My aeroplane is ready
to bring him here. Any moment.

At the end of ,
Ayman Zawahiri

with a number of other followers
of Qutb who had formed cells

came together.
They created an organization

they called Islamic Jihad.

Its leader was a man
called Abdel Salam Faraj.

And Faraj argued that they should k*ll Sadat

in a spectacular way that
would shock the masses.

It would make them see

the true reality of the
corruption surrounding them

and they would rise up
and overthrow the regime.

The jihadi movement – some of
the leaders are still alive – I was
one and so was Ayman Zawahiri.

We spearheaded the jihadi
state of mind rather than the
earlier more moderate ideas..

in the liberal era that
simply accepted reality.

Psychologically we thought
we were superior to reality.

We despised the everyday vision
of the world. And we wanted to
transform or change this reality.

Therefore our dream was to get rid of Sadat.

Those who carried out the assassination

were a group of Army officers
who were a part of Islamic Jihad.

They were immediately arrested

and the regime launched a
massive manhunt for those

behind the plot.

But the effect of the assassination
on the Egyptian people

was not what Zawahiri had hoped for.

That night, Cairo remained calm.
The masses failed to rise up.

And in the following weeks, Zawahiri

and many other
conspirators were arrested.

The assassins were tried
immediately and ex*cuted.

But then, nearly Islamists,
including Zawahiri

were put on trial in a pavilion

in Cairo's industrial exhibition park.

It was agreed that Zawahiri
would be their spokesman.

for (unintelligible), for the whole world,
this is our world Doctor Ayman Zawahiri!

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,
both as an ideology and practice.

And hence,
we tried our best

to establish Islamic
state and Islamic society!

La illah la-illallah!

La illah la-illallah!

Zawahiri, the man is an aristocrat.

He comes from a major
Egyptian -Saudi family.

And he thinks that,
you know, he is a visionary

and the means do not matter,
just as in Lenin -

I mean, revolution in one
country or revolution worldwide.

He was convinced that this was a
means to mobilize the masses

that they had tried something,
that it had not worked

then he failed that
- you know

the masses that were still
under the spell of ideology

the ideology of America.
And he is looking for a new strategy.

At the trial, Zawahiri was sentenced
to three years in prison

along with many others of Islamic Jihad.

He was taken to cells behind
the Police National Museum

where, like Sayyed Qutb,
he was tortured.

And under this t*rture,
he began

to interpret Qutb's theories
in a far more radical way.

The mystery, for Zawahiri,
was why the Egyptian people

had failed to see the truth and rise up.

It must be because the infection
of selfish individualism

had gone so deep into people's minds

that they were now as
corrupted as their leaders.

Zawahiri now seized on a terrible
ambiguity in Qutb's argument.

It wasn't just leaders like Sadat

who were no longer real Muslims,
it was the people themselves.

And Zawahiri believed that this meant

that they too could legitimately be k*lled.
But such k*lling

Zawahiri believed,
would have a noble purpose

because of the fear and the terror

that it would create in the
minds of ordinary Muslims.

It would shock them into
seeing reality in a different way.

They would then see the truth.

Ayman Zawahiri came to the conclusion

that because you have what you
believe to be a sublime objective

then the means can be
as ugly as they can get.

You can k*ll as many people as you wish

because the end means is noble.

The logic is that "we are the vanguards

we are the correct Muslims,
everybody else is wrong.

Not only wrong,
but everybody else is not a Muslim

and the only means available to us today

is just to k*ll our way to perfection."

And at this very same moment

religion was being mobilized
politically in America

but for a very different purpose.

And those encouraging this
were the neoconservatives.

Many neoconservatives
had become advisers

to the Presidential
campaign of Ronald Reagan.

And as they became more
involved with the Republican Party

they had forged an alliance

with the religious wing of the party

because it shared their aim of
the moral regeneration of America.

The notion that a purely secular society

can cope with all of the
terrible pathologies

that now affect our society

I think has turned out to be false.

And that has made me
culturally conservative.

I mean,
I really think religion has a role now

to play in redeeming the country.

And liberalism is not prepared
to give religion a role.

Conservatism is,
but it doesn't know how to do it.

By the late ‘ s

there were millions of
fundamentalist Christians in America.

But their preachers had
always told them not to vote.

It would mean compromising with
a doomed and immoral society.

But the neoconservatives and
their new Republican allies

made an alliance with a
number of powerful preachers

who told their followers to
become involved with politics

for the first time.

I'm sick and tired of hearing
about all of the radicals

and the perverts,
and the liberals, and the leftists

and the Communists
coming out of the closet!

It's time for God's people
to come out of the closet

out of the churches,
and change America! We must do it!

The conservative movement,
up to that point

was essentially an intellectual movement.

It had some very powerful thinkers

but it didn't have many troops.
And as Stalin said of the Pope

"Where are his divisions?"

Well, we didn't have many divisions.

When these folks became active

all of a sudden the conservative
movement had lots of divisions.

We were able to move
literally millions of people.

And this is something that

we had no ability to do prior to that time.

Literally millions?

Literally millions.

And at the beginning of

Ronald Reagan took power in America.

The religious vote was crucial in his election

because many millions
of fundamentalists

voted for the first time.
And as they had hoped

many neoconservatives were given power

in the new administration.
Paul Wolfowitz became

head of the State Department policy staff

while his close friend Richard Perle

became the Assistant
Secretary of Defense.

And the head of Team B,
Richard Pipes

became one of Reagan's chief advisers.

The neoconservatives believed

that they now had the chance
to implement their vision

of America's revolutionary destiny -

to use the country's power aggressively

as a force for good in the world

in an epic battle to defeat the Soviet Union.

It was a vision that they shared

with millions of their new religious allies.

I take a personal and public
stand as a minister

a stand against Communism.
To destroy it

to wipe it from the face of the Earth

because believe you me,
these people are dedicated

to the destruction of the
United States of America

and freedom as we know it.

But the neoconservatives
faced immense opposition

to this new policy.

It came not just from the
bureaucracies and Congress

but from the President himself.

Reagan was convinced that the
Soviet Union was an evil force

but he still believed that he
could negotiate with them

to end the Cold w*r.

Reagan at first didn't quite understand

that their aggressiveness
is rooted in the system.

He had a rather benign
view of human beings.

He was a very kindly man

and he attributed kind motives to others.

There was another form of mirror imaging.

And he would say on
more than one occasion

something like this:

"If I could just sit down
with the Soviet leaders

and explain to them that they're
following a wrong ideology

and if they adopt the right ideologies

they could make their people
happy and prosperous."

So we says "Mr.
President..

..That is not going to do it!

You have to go after the system.

Force them to reform the system."

It took him a very long time
to assimilate this view.

To persuade the President

the neoconservatives set out to prove

that the Soviet thr*at was
far greater than anyone

even Team B,
had previously shown.

They would demonstrate that
the majority of terrorism

and revolutionary
movements around the world

were actually part of a secret network,
coordinated by Moscow

to take over the world.

The main proponent of this theory
was a leading neoconservative

who was the special adviser
to the Secretary of State.

His name was Michael Ledeen

and he had been influenced
by a best-selling book

called The Terror Network.

It alleged that terrorism was not
the fragmented phenomenon

that it appeared to be.

In reality,
all t*rror1st groups

from the PLO to the
Baader-Meinhof group in Germany

and the Provisional IRA

all of them were a part of a
coordinated strategy of terror

run by the Soviet Union.
But the CIA completely disagreed.

They said this was just another
neoconservative fantasy.

The CIA denied it.
They tried to convince people

that we were really crazy.
I mean, they never believed

that the Soviet Union was a driving force

in the international terror network.

They always wanted to believe

that t*rror1st organizations were
just what they said they were:

Local groups trying to avenge
terrible evils done to them

or trying to rectify
terrible social conditions

and things like that.

And the CIA really did buy into the rhetoric.

I don't know what their motive was.
I mean

I don't know what people's motives are,
hardly ever.

And I don't much worry about motives.

But the neoconservatives had a powerful ally.

He was William Casey,
and he was the new head of the CIA.

Casey was sympathetic to
the neoconservative view.

And when he read the Terror Network book,
he was convinced.

He called a meeting of the
CIA's Soviet analysts

at their headquarters,
and told them

to produce a report for the President

that proved this hidden network existed.

But the analysts told him that
this would be impossible

because much of the
information in the book

came from black propaganda
the CIA themselves had invented

to smear the Soviet Union.

They knew that the terror
network didn't exist

because they themselves had made it up.

And when we looked through the book,
we found very clear episodes

where CIA black propaganda
- clandestine information

that was designed under
a covert action plan

to be planted in European newspapers -

were picked up and put in this book.

A lot of it was made up.
It was made up out of whole cloth.

You told him this?

We told him that,
point blank.

And we even had the operations
people to tell Bill Casey this.

I thought maybe this might have an impact

but all of us were dismissed.
Casey had made up his mind.

He knew the Soviets were
involved in terrorism

so there was nothing we
could tell him to disabuse him.

Lies became reality.

In the end,
Casey found a university professor

who described himself as a terror expert

and he produced a
dossier that confirmed

that the hidden terror network did,
in fact, exist.

Under such intense lobbying

Reagan agreed to give the
neoconservatives what they wanted

and in he signed a secret document

that fundamentally changed
American foreign policy.

The country would now fund covert wars

to push back the hidden
Soviet thr*at around the world.

The specter of Marxist-Leninist
controlled governments

with ideological and political
loytities to the Soviet Union

proves that there's a direct
challenge to which we must respond.

They are the focus of
evil in the modern world.

It was a triumph for the neoconservatives.

America was now setting out to do battle

against the forces of evil in the world.

But what had started out
as the kind of myth

that Leo Strauss had said

was necessary for the American people

increasingly came to be seen as the truth

by the neoconservatives.

They began to believe their own fiction.

They had become what they called
"democratic revolutionaries,"

who were going to use
force to change the world.

We were aiming for an expansion
of the zone of freedom

in the world. And in part that had
to do with fighting Communism

and in part that had to do with
fighting other kinds of tyrannies.

But that's what we were about,
and that's what we're still about.

When you say you were
democratic revolutionaries

what do you mean?

It meant that we wanted
to support the people

who wanted to carry out revolutions
against tyrannical regimes

in the name of democracy

in order to install a democratic system.

As simple as that.

Yeah. It's not nuclear physics,
you know.

I mean,
freedom is a fairly simple thing to get.

It's a chancy job
- makes a man watchful and a little lonely.

But somebody has to do it.

The neoconservatives now set
out to transform the world.

In next week's episode,
they find themselves joining forces

with the Islamists in Afghanistan

and together they fight an epic
battle against the Soviet Union.

And both come to believe that
they had defeated the Evil Empire.

But this imagined victory would
leave them without an enemy.

And in a world disillusioned
with grand political ideas

they would need to invent new
fantasies and new nightmares

in order to maintain their power.

[bunniefuu]

Part 2:



In the past,
politicians promised to create a better world.

They had different ways of achieving this.

But their power and authority
came from the optimistic visions

they offered to their people.

Those dreams failed.

And today,
people have lost faith in ideologies.

Increasingly, politicians are seen
simply as managers of public life.

But now, they have discovered a new role
that restores their power and authority.

Instead of delivering dreams,
politicians now promise to protect us

from nightmares.

They say that they will rescue
us from dreadful dangers

that we cannot see and do not understand.

And the greatest danger of
all is international terrorism.

A powerful and sinister network

with sleeper cells in
countries across the world.

A thr*at that needs to be
fought by a w*r on terror.

But much of this thr*at is a fantasy

which has been exaggerated
and distorted by politicians.

It?¯ a dark illusion

that has spread unquestioned through
governments around the world

the security services,
and the international media.

This is a series of films about how and why
that fantasy was created : : ,
--] : : , and who it benefits.

At the heart of the story are two groups:

the American neoconservatives,
and the radical Islamists.

In this week's episode,
the two groups come together

to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

And both believe that they
defeat the Evil Empire

and so had the power
to transform the world.

We will fight for an Islamic State,
we will die for it!

But both failed in their revolutions. We will
fight for an Islamic State, we will die for it!

In response, the neoconservatives
invent a new fantasy enemy

Bill Clinton,
to try and regain their power.

While the Islamists descend into a
desperate cycle of v*olence and terror

to try and persuade the
people to follow them.

Out of all this come the seeds
of the strange world of fantasy

deception, v*olence,
and fear in which we now live.

The Power of Nightmares

The Rise of the Politics of Fear

Part The Phantom Victory

In , Ronald Reagan dedicated
the Space Shuttle Columbia

to the resistance fighters in Afghanistan.

Just as the Columbia, we think,
represents man's finest aspirations

in the field of science and technology

so too does the struggle
of the Afghan people

represent man's highest
aspirations for freedom.

I am dedicating,
on behalf of the American people

the March nd launch of the Columbia

to the people of Afghanistan.

Since , the mujaheddin
resistance had been fighting

a vicious w*r in Afghanistan
against the Soviet invasion.

But now,
a small group in the Reagan White House

saw in these fighters a way of achieving

their vision of transforming the world.

To them,
they were not just nationalists

they were freedom fighters

who could bring down the Soviet Union

and help spread
democracy around the world.

It was called the Reagan Doctrine.

It was a small group of people and yes,
we did have

Everyone thinks, "Oh, the Reagan Doctrine,
the Reagan Administration,"

like everybody was for. No.
It was a small little cabal, within the Soviet

within the Reagan White House,
that really pulled this off.

What united this small group
of ours was the vision

of bringing more freedom to the world,
more security to the world

to actually get rid of the Soviet Union itself!

As a result,
supporting the freedom fighters

became the premier cause for the
entire conservative movement

during the Reagan years.

But the Americans were setting out
to defeat a mythological enemy.

As last week's episode showed,
the neoconservatives

who were now in power
in Reagan's White House

had created an exaggerated
and distorted vision

of the Soviet Union as the
source of all evil in the world.

One of their main influences were the
theories of the philosopher Leo Strauss.

He believed that liberal
societies needed simple

powerful myths to inspire
and unite the people.

And in the s,
the neoconservatives had done just this.

Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle,
and other neoconservatives

had set out to reassert the myth
of America as a unique country

whose destiny was to struggle
against evil throughout the world.

Now in power,
they had come to believe this myth.

They saw themselves as revolutionaries
who were going to transform the world

starting with the defeat of the Evil Empire.

We're closer to being revolutionaries
than conservatives

in the sense that we want to change
some deeply entrenched notions

about the proper role of
American power in the world.

We want to see that power
used constructively

and to enlarge the opportunity for
decent governance around the world.

We're not happy about the old,
cozy relationships with dictators.

And the man who was going to
help the neoconservatives do this

was the new head of the CIA,
William Casey.

He was convinced that Afghanistan was one
of the keys to this aggressive new policy.

America was already sending limited
amounts of aid to the mujaheddin.

But now,
Casey ordered one of his agents

to go and form an alliance
with the freedom fighters

and give them as much
money as they wanted

and the most sophisticated weapons

to defeat the Soviet m*llitary forces.

For Casey, Afghanistan seemed
to be possibly one of the keys.

So he tapped me one day to go.

He says, "I want you to go out to
Afghanistan, I want you to go next month

and I will give you whatever
you need to win." Yeah.

He said,
"I want you go to there and win."

As opposed to, "Le? go there and bleed
these guys," make it be a Vietnam

"I want you to go there and win.
Whatever you need, you can have."

He gave me the Stinger
missiles and a billion dollars.

God if Great!

American money and
weapons now began to pour

across the Pakistan border into
Afghanistan. : : , --]
: : , CIA agents trained the
mujaheddin in the techniques

of assassination and terror,
including car bombing.

And they gave them satellite images of
Russian troops to help in their att*cks.

Move your far arse and
sh**t the f*cking rocket!

At the very same time, another group
began to arrive in Afghanistan

to fight alongside the mujaheddin.

They were Arabs from
across the Middle East

who had been told by
their religious leaders

that their duty was to go and free
Muslim lands from the Soviet invader.

I saw the fatwa,
the order saying that

every Muslim has a duty to help

the Afghans to liberate their land.

But I had no idea, where is this Afghanistan?
How can I go there?

I've never heard about Afghanistan,
and I've never heard in the map.

Which airline goes there?
From where can I take the visa?

It questions!
But I did meet Abdullah Azzam.

Abdullah Azzam was a
charismatic religious leader

who had begun to organize the
Arab volunteers in Afghanistan.

He had set up what he
called the Services Bureau

in Peshawar on the Afghan border.

It became the headquarters of an
international brigade of Arab fighters.

Azzam quickly became one
of the most powerful figures

in the battle against the Soviets.

He was allowed to visit
America on many occasions

both to raise funds and
recruit volunteers for the jihad.

When, Abdullah Azzam
became so instrumental

in marketing the Afghan
cause among the Arabs

he became very important.

He became called "the emir
of the Arab mujaheddin."

The leader of the Arab mujaheddin.
And he set up

an office in Peshawar
which provided services to

Arabs who came and wanted
to participate in the jihad.

There were no doors closed,
all doors were opened

because the Americans, the Saudis,
the Pakistanis, and many other people

wanted the Soviet Union to lose in
Afghanistan, and to be humiliated.

That brought about huge numbers of Arabs

from different backgrounds
in the jihad in Afghanistan.

He went to America,
he went to Saudi Arabia

he traveled wherever he wanted,
because the Afghan cause

was a cause that everybody
was happy supporting.

But like the neoconservatives

Azzam also saw the
struggle against the Soviets

as just the first step in
a much wider revolution.

He was a member of the
Muslim Brotherhood

who wanted Islam to play a political
role in governing Muslim societies.

And Abdullah Azzam believed
that the Arabs in Afghanistan

could be the nucleus
of a new political force.

They would return to their own
countries and persuade the people

to reject the corrupt, autocratic
regimes that dominated the Middle East.

But these regimes, Azzam insisted,
must be overthrown by political means.

He made every fighter pledge
they would not use terrorism

against civilians in the
pursuit of their vision.

One of Azzam's closest aides was a Saudi,
O*ama b*n L*den.

Osama came to participate in ' .

When he was
when he came

as you know, he is
He came from a rich family from Saudi

and he had much,
much money to spend.

Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was a scholar,
he can organize the Afghans

but he is not a rich man.

So when Osama came,
he filled in this gap.

So the main duty of Osama in
that time was spending money.

Beside his good personal qualities.

But then, in ,
a new force began to arrive in Afghanistan

who were going to
challenge Azzam's approach.

They were the extreme radical Islamists

who were being expelled from
prisons across the Arab world.

And then, very quietly,
most of the

governments in the Middle East,
the Arab governments

began to empty their prisons

of their bad guys

and send them off to the jihad with
the very fondest hope that they

would become martyred.

Many of them were the people in Egypt

that had not been ex*cuted
after the m*rder of Sadat

but were implicated in it and
had been in prison. Off they go.

One of the most powerful of these
newcomers was Ayman Zawahiri.

He was the leader of a radical faction
from Egypt called Islamic Jihad.

And he was convinced that they,
not the moderates, were the true Islamists.

We are here! We are here!
The real Islamic front! We are here!

The real Islamic front and the real
Islamic opposition against Zionist.

We are here!

The real Islamic front against Zionism,
Communism, and imperialism.

Ayman Zawahiri was a follower of the
Egyptian revolutionary Sayyed Qutb

who had been ex*cuted in .

As last week's program showed

Qutb believed that the liberal
ideas of Western societies

corrupted the minds of Muslims

because they unleashed the most
selfish aspects of human nature.

Zawahiri had interpreted Qutb's
theories to mean that this corruption

included the Western system of democracy.

Democracy, Zawahiri believed,
encouraged politicians

to set themselves up as
the source of all authority

and by doing this, they were rejecting
the higher authority of the Koran.

This meant they were no longer
true Muslims, and so they

and those who supported them,
could legitimately be k*lled.

The terror this created, he said,
would shock the masses

into seeing the truth behind
the corrupt facade of democracy.

When the Egyptians,
the jihadi group, came from Egypt

with their own explanation,
with their own ideas

that anybody participating in any
parliament, or any political party

or going to elect,
or call people for the election

and sort of these activities,
is totally rejecting the Koran.

So when you say that, it means when
a Muslim is rejecting the Koran

simply must be k*lled.

And should be k*lled,
must be k*lled!

And tha? what happened.

Zawahiri and his small
group settled in Peshawar.

They began to spread this new
idea among the foreign fighters

radicalizing the Islamist movement.

It was not only a drect challenge to the
moderate ideas of Abdullah Azzam

but it also involved a militant rejection
of all American influence over the jihad

because America was the
source of this corruption.

The only times that I ever ran into
any real trouble in Afghanistan

was when I ran into these guys.

You know,
there'd be kind of a moment or two

where it looked a little bit like
the bar scene in Star Wars

each group kind of jockeying around

and finally somebody has to
sort of defuse the situation.

The indicator lights aren't on.
Please adjust them.

Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev has issued a decree.

Then, in ,
the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev

decided he was going to withdraw
Russian troops from Afghanistan.

Gorbachev was convinced that the whole
Soviet system was facing collapse.

He was determined to try and
save it through political reform

and this meant reversing the
policies of his predecessors

including the occupation of Afghanistan.

The state of the Soviet
Union and its society

could be described very
simply with a phrase used

by people across the country:

"We can't go on living like this any longer."

And that applied to everything.
The economy was stagnating.

There were shortages.
And the quality of goods was very poor.

We had to finish this w*r,
but in such a way that the Russian people

would understand why
tens of thousands had d*ed.

We couldn't just run away
from there in shame, no.

We needed to find a process.

Gorbachev asked the Americans
to help him negotiate a peace

that would create a stable
government in Afghanistan.

But the hard-liners in
Washington refused point-blank.

They would continue to
help the mujaheddin

until the last Russians left,
without any negotiation.

The future of Afghanistan would
then be decided, they said

by the freedom fighters.

I think that basically, we've asked the
United States to help us get out

if you're really interested
in stopping the bloodshed.

But can you get out and leave
a government in Afghanistan

that supports
that is a friend of the Soviet Union?

I believe that we can get out, provided
that indeed no more aid is given to what

people here call freedom fighters,
and we call counterrevolutionaries.

I believe tha? possible,
provided that

the United States is also
interested in the same.

Well, I? not very complicated.

they could be home by Christmas Eve,
if they decided to

leave Afghanistan and let the
Afghans decide their own future.

If you leave, the problem of support
to the mujaheddin solves itself.

Gorbachev was shocked by the
intransigence of the U.S. Administration.

He sent a private message through the KGB,
warning the Americans

that if they allowed the mujaheddin
to take control in Afghanistan

it would not produce democracy.

Instead, he predicted,
the most extreme forms of Islamism

would rise up and triumph.

But Gorbachev's warning was ignored.

As Soviet troops left Afghanistan,
both the Americans and the Islamists

came to believe that they had not
only won the battle for Afghanistan

they had also begun the
downfall of the entire Evil Empire.

I felt we won,
because I was part of it.

I'm sure that the Afghan
Arabs thought "We won,"

and then all summer long,
the East Germans begin to gather

a hundred here, a thousand,
tens of thousands

until November th,
when the wall was opened. And tha? it.

Start the clock running on the Soviet Union.

And it was over. The Soviet Union
was all crapped up and broken.

And that was done.

For the neoconservatives, the collapse
of the Soviet Union was a triumph.

And out of that triumph was
going to come the central myth

that still inspires them today:

that through the aggressive
use of American power

they could transform the
world and spread democracy.

But in reality, their victory was an illusion.
They had conquered a phantom enemy

an exaggerated and distorted fantasy
they had created in their own minds.

The real reason the Soviet Union collapsed

was because it was a decrepit system,
decaying from within.

I think probably one of the greatest myths
in American political discourse now

right now,
is that actions of the American government

were responsible for the
collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union collapsed
like a house of cards

because it was a house of cards.
It rotted away from within.

The economy was rotten,
the political process was rotten

they had developed a central
government that was no longer believed

by people outside of Moscow,
there was total cynicism

throughout the Soviet system of
governance, there was no real civil society.

But the Reagan Administration and their

the minions of the Reagan Administration

will tell you that Afghanistan led to
the collapse of the Soviet Union itself

the collapse of the Berlin Wall in

the collapse of the East European empire.

We were saying that this was entirely fanciful.

And the United States missed all of this

because they believed their own
myths and their own fanciful notions.

They had become their own
victims of their own lies.

And for the Islamists too

a great myth was born out of
the struggle in Afghanistan

that it was they who had
conquered the Soviet Union.

God is Great!

Death to Gorbachev!
Long live Afghanistan!

The Islamists believed that
this great victory would start

a revolution that would sweep across the
Arab world and topple the corrupt leaders.

But as with the neoconservatives,
this dream was built on an illusion.

The Islamists were convinced

that they were the key
instrument in the demise of

the Soviet Army in Afghanistan.

They just would not like to
remember that without

U.S. m*llitary help and training,
they couldn't have done anything.

And also the Afghans were the
ones who ousted the Soviets

not the Arab jihadis,
who didn't really fight

they were trained,
but they were not the fighters.

But the myth has it that
they were the ones who won.

I mean,
this was a jihad that had triumphed.

This was something very powerful

that was a mobilizing force
for Islamists worldwide.

But there was a deep rift within the
Islamist fighters based in Peshawar

between the moderates,
led by Abdullah Azzam

who believed this revolution
could be accomplished politically

and the extremists,
like Ayman Zawahiri

who saw violent revolution as the only way.

And Zawahiri now set out to extend
his influence over the movement

and to undermine Abdullah Azzam.

To do this, he seduced O*ama b*n L*den,
and his money, away from Azzam.

He promised Bin Laden that
he could become the emir

the leader of Zawahiri's small
extremist group, Islamic Jihad.

Ayman Zawahiri and another group

of Egyptians,
they refused to

pray behind Abdullah Azzam,
in Peshawar.

They used to create rumors in Peshawar

against Abdullah Azzam.

Tha? why we became angry about Osama,
why he became

he closed these people to him.

They accepted hm as an emir,
and he accepted them as a group.

Finally, I don't know who did use the other.

What do you think?
I think the other used him.

Because he had the money?
Yes.

Then, at the end of

Abdullah Azzam was assassinated
by a huge car b*mb in Peshawar.

It is still unknown who carried
out the assassination.

But despite his death

it seemed as if Azzam's vision of
a political revolution might prevail.

In the early ' s,
in countries across the Arab world

Islamist parties began
to gather mass support.

Islamic State!

In Algeria,
the Islamic Salvation Front

won overwhelming
victories in local elections

and looked certain to win
the coming general election.

And at the same time in Egypt,
the Muslim Brotherhood

began to win mass support,
and a growing number of seats in Parliament.

Both parties were riding to
power on an idealistic vision.

They would use Islam in a political way

to create a new type of model
society through peaceful means.

We can change people

throught education

and religional conviction.

We want to build a popular base.

This is the right way.

We do not want a m*llitary coup.

We do not want v*olence.

We want our rights.

If people believe in us

the goverment must comply

with the people's wishes.

But the governments in both Egypt
and Algeria faced a terrible dilemma.

At the heart of the Islamist vision
was the idea that the Koran

should be used as the political
framework for the society.

An absolute set of laws, beyond debate,
that all politicians had to follow.

The implication of this was that
political parties would be irrelevant

because there could be no disagreement.

The people were about to vote in

parties that might use that
power to end democracy.

But what a dilemma!

Do you find a way of stopping
the electoral process

and cancelling the second round?

Or do you let power go
to a party witch claims:

One man, one vote,
but only once!

We won't have any elections after this

because democracy is non-religious

Once we're in power,
we'll stay there forever

because we alone are the
keepers of religous truth

and we alone shall apply the Koran.

Faced by this dilemma,
in Algeria the army decided to step in

and in June they
staged a coup d'? at

and immediately canceled the elections.

Mass protests by the Islamists
were repressed violently

and their leaders arrested.

At the same time, in Egypt,
the government also clamped down.

They arrested hundreds of
Muslim Brotherhood members

and banned the organization
from any political activity.

What happened is a wave of

arresting Muslim brothers, a wave of
m*llitary courts for Muslim brothers

going to k*ll some of Muslim
brothers under t*rture.

And this wave, in this manner,
you open the doors of hell

for the violent groups who
were hidden underground

and stopped the moderates,
open the door for the v*olence.

For Ayman Zawahiri, this was a
dramatic confirmation of his belief

that the Western system of
democracy was a corrupt sham.

Groups of radical Islamists

who had developed his theories
into even more extreme forms

now set out to create violent
revolutions in Algeria and Egypt.

It would be the start of a jihad

that would liberate the
Muslim world from corruption.

The only way to eradicate
the humiliation and Kufr

that has overcome the
land of Islam is Jihad

b*ll*ts, and martyrdom operations.

Bin Laden and the others

started, from now on,
to wage their own jihad, I.e.

not to compromise, not to try to
compromise with more moderate groups

but thinking that an armed vanguard

would be able to implement
the seizing of power.

They were convinced that they could
duplicate the Afghan "victory"

that they could establish an Islamist
state in Algeria, in Egypt, and the like.

They thought that would capture the hearts
and minds of of the Muslim masses

that people would realize that the strength
and victory were on the side of the jihadis.

At this same time,
in Washington

the other group who believed that they
had brought down the Soviet Union

the neoconservatives

were also determined to push
on with their revolutionary agenda.

They were convinced that the
Soviet Union was just one of

many evil regimes in the world led
by tyrants that threatened America.

Regimes they had to conquer to liberate
the world and spread democracy.

We want, you know,
down with tyranny.

We want free countries.

We think that America is
better off if we live in a world

primarily populated with free countries,
who make their own

who have to appeal to their own
people for the source of their power

and to ratify their decisions.
And we think that if

if the whole world were like that,
then we would be much more secure

and that typically we
were att*cked by tyrants.

I think I? America's destiny

because I think that America's always
going to come under att*ck from tyrants.

So I think that our only choice is

whether we're going to win or lose,
and when we will fight..

and under what circumstances,
but that we're gonna have to fight.

Tha? a*t*matic,
because they're gonna come after us.

One of the most evil of these tyrants,
the neoconservatives decided

was S*ddam Hussein.

In the s, S*ddam had been America's
close ally. But in , he invaded Kuwait.

The neoconservatives
now saw him as a key

to pursuing the next stage of
their transformation of the world.

An American-led coalition had been
created by President Bush senior

to liberate Kuwait.

But the neoconservatives,
like Paul Wolfowitz

who was Undersecretary of Dfense,
wanted to push on to Baghdad

and bring about a
transformation of the Middle East.

It would fulfill America's unique
role to defeat evil in the world.

You see already in '

the hopes of Wolfowitz and others,
that the battle

against S*ddam Hussein,
or other petty tyrants

could take the place of the
battle against the Soviet Union

and could bear this interpretation
of a battle between good and evil.

So, what you're seeing is
the attempt to keep alive

the idea that America is engaged in a
battle of pure good against pure evil

and to preserve that framework for a
world after the end of the Soviet Union.

But President Reagan
was no longer in charge.

The neoconservatives now had a
leader who did not share their vision.

Kuwait is liberated.

Iraq's army is defeated.

Our m*llitary objectives are met.

And I am pleased to announce all
United States and Coalition forces

will suspend combat operations.

Once Kuwait was freed,
Bush ordered the fighting to stop.

His view was that America's role
was to create stability in the world

not to try change it.

Like Henry Kissinger

who had been the enemy of the
neoconservatives in the s

Bush saw questions of
good and evil as irrelevant.

The higher aim was to achieve a stable
balance of power in the Middle East.

S*ddam Hussein is not a thr*at

to his neighbors. He's a nuisance,
he's an annoyance

but he's not a thr*at.

That we achieved.

It was never our objective
to get S*ddam Hussein.

Indeed, had we tried,
we still might be occupying Baghdad.

That would have turned a great success
into a very messy probable defeat.

In private, the neoconservatives
like Paul Wolfowitz were furious.

Not just because S*ddam
Hussein had been left in power

but because they saw
this as a clear expression

of the corrupt liberal values
that dominated America

a moral relativism that was
prepared to compromise

with the forces of evil in the world.

Wolfowitz' anger is fundamentally
an anger against

the weakness of American liberalism:

the compromising nature of
a man like George Bush senior.

His willingness to make concessions,
to negotiate, not to drive to the bitter end.

And his anger is motivated, interestingly

less by hatred of S*ddam Hussein,
than by hatred of American liberals

who are a source of weakness, and a
source of rot, and a source of relativism

that had been corroding
American society for decades.

Faced by this defeat, the neoconservative
movement now turned inwards

to try and defeat the forces of
liberalism that were holding it back.

And to do this, they turned again
to the theories of Leo Strauss.

Strauss believed that good
politicians should reassert

the absolute moral values
that would unite society

and this would overcome the moral
relativism that liberalism created.

One of the most influential Straussians

was the new assistant to the
Vice-President, William Kristol.

For Strauss,
liberalism produced a decent way of life

and one that he thought
was worth defending

but a dead end where nothing
could be said to be true

one had no guidance on how to live,
everything was relative.

Strauss suggests that maybe
we didn't just have to sit there

and accept that that was our fate.

That politics could help
shape the way people live

teach them some good lessons about
living decent and noble human lives.

And can we think about what cultures,
and what politics

what social orders produce
more admirable human beings?

I mean, that whole question was put
back on the table by Strauss, I think.

The neoconservatives set
out to reform America.

And at the heart of their project
was the political use of religion.

Together with their long-term allies,
the religious right

they began a campaign to
bring moral and religious issues

back into the center
of conservative politics.

It became known as the "culture wars."

Your tax dollars are being used to sponsor
obscene and p*rn displays.

I don't like Jesus Christ,
who is my Lord and Savior

being dumped in a vat of
urine by a h*m*

and then have my money to pay for
it! I think tha? obscene! : : ,
--] : : , Satan, be gone!
Out from this moment on! C'mon!

For the religious right,
this campaign was a genuine attempt

to renew the religious
basis of American society.

But for the neoconservatives,
religion was a myth

like the myth of America as a unique
nation they had promoted in the Cold w*r.

Strauss had taught that
these myths were necessary

to give ordinary people meaning and
purpose, and so ensure a stable society.

Do you ever worry that they're
playing too much Nintendo?

Oh, not anymore.
See, Matt has Bible Adventures.

They're actually learning Bible stories
while they're playing Nintendo.

For the neoconservatives, religion is
an instrument of promoting morality.

Religion becomes what
Plato called a "noble lie."

It is a myth which is told to
the majority of the society

by the philosophical elite in
order to ensure social order.

What better way to enjoy God's
creation than a Praise Walk?

In being a kind of secretive elitist approach

Straussianism does resemble Marxism.

These ex-Marxists,
or in some cases ex-liberal Straussians

could see themselves as a kind
of Leninist group, you know

who have this covert vision which they
want to use to effect change in history

while concealing parts of it from
people incapable of understanding it.

Out of this campaign,
a new and powerful moral agenda

began to take over the Republican Party.

It reached a dramatic climax at the
Republican Convention in

when the religious right seized control
of the party's policy-making machinery.

George Bush became
committed to run for President

with policies that would ban abortion,
gay rights, and multiculturalism.

Speakers who tried to promote the
traditional conservative values

of individual freedom
were booed off the stage.

I happen to think that individual freedom

should extend to a
woman's right to choose.

I want the government out of your
pocketbook and your bedroom!

For the neoconservatives, the aim of this
new morality was to unite the nation.

But in fact,
it had completely the opposite effect.

Mainstream Republican
voters were frightened away

by the harsh moralism that
had taken over their party.

They turned instead to Bill Clinton

a politician who connected with
their real concerns and needs

like tax and the state of the economy.

In the week after the
Republican Convention

Republican moderates, young people,
and particularly women

saying, "I've been sort of
torn between the two parties

but where do I sign up to help
Clinton get elected? I am

frightened by this ultraconservative
agenda I hear coming out of Houston."

I've been a lifelong Republican.
I'm a registered Republican.

I am voting for Bill Clinton this time.

Enough is enough.
It is time for a change.

At the end of ,
Bill Clinton won a dramatic victory.

But the neoconservatives were
determined to regain power.

And to do this,
they were going to do to Bill Clinton

what they had done to the Soviet Union.

They would transform the President of
the United States into a fantasy enemy

an image of evil that would
make people realize the truth

of the liberal corruption of America.

We realise that other
nations have surpassed us

In what?
In knowledge.

And Islam

In the early ' s, Algeria, Egypt,
and other Arab countries

were being torn apart by a
horrific wave of Islamist terror.

The jihadists who had
returned from Afghanistan

were trying to topple the regimes.

At the heart of their strategy

was the idea that Ayman Zawahiri
and others had taught them.

That those who were involved in
politics could legitimately be k*lled

because they had become corrupted
and thus were no longer Muslims.

This v*olence, they believed,
would shock people into rising up

and the corrupt regimes
would then be overthrown.

"They must die!"
Not only "must die," they DID k*ll.

They did k*ll people.

Not just any
I? not just an idea from far

it became true.
People k*lled.

Many many rulers, many many holy men,
many many scholars

many many politicians in Islamic world
have been k*lled because of these idea.

Why? Because simply they are against
the Koran. They rejected the Koran.

Ayman Zawahiri was now based with
Bin Laden on this farm in the Sudan.

He used it as a base for his group,
Islamic Jihad

to launch att*cks on politicians in Egypt.

But as one of the leading
ideologues of the revolution

he also traveled throughout the Arab world,
advising other groups on their strategy.

But the revolutionaries soon found that the
masses did not rise up and follow them.

The regimes stayed in power,
and the radical Islamists were hunted down.

Faced by this,
the Islamists widened their terror.

Their logic was brutal:

it was not just those who were involved
with politics who should be k*lled

but the ordinary people who supported it.

Their refusal to rise up showed that
they too had become corrupted

and so had condemned
themselves to death.

There was definitely a logic.
The logic is that you as*ault the leaders

you as*ault those who are associated
with them, and eventually you as*ault

the people who have consented to the
presence of such a despotic leader

even if they are passively
supportive through their silence.

And then you start attacking
economic institutions

you start attacking the tourists, because
the tourists bring money to the country

and that money goes into
the pockets of the corrupt elite.

So, it is an endless process.

In Algeria,
this logic went completely out of control.

The Islamist revolutionary groups
k*lled thousands of civilians

because they believed that all
these people had become corrupted.

All these innocents,
what did they ever do?

Legs blown off!
Such horror!

Even the French extremists
never did things like this.

Why? What have we done?
What have out children done?

Leave me alone!
I want do die!

In turn, the generals running Algeria
inftitrated the revolutionary groups.

They told their agents to persuade the
Islamists to push the logic even further

to k*ll even more people.

This would create such horror that the
groups would lose any remaining support

and the generals could use the fear and
revulsion to increase their grip on power.

The generals inftitrated the jihad ideas,
the jihad groups

to put the society under fear.

By creating terror and v*olence

to stop everything in the society,
no politic, no economy, no everything

just to stay and saying to the West,
"We are facing terror."

Using fear?
Using fear to stay on the power.

Today the k*ll,
they k*ll everybody

innocent people, children,
old people.

They have een cut up their victims.

Who will trust them

if tomorrow they take power?

Down with fundamentalism!

By ,
the Islamist revolution was failing.

There were mass demonstrations
against the Islamist groups

by thousands of people
horrified by the v*olence.

And then, in June of that year,
a group of Egyptian Islamists

att*cked Western tourists
at the ruins of Luxor.

were k*lled in three
hours of random v*olence.

The m*ssacre shocked the Egyptian people

and the leaders of the revolutionary
groups agreed to call a cease-fire.

In Algeria, a few groups held out.
But they began to tear each other apart

as they followed the logic that
had driven their revolution

to its ultimate,
and logical, end:

they started to k*ll each other.

It led to their own destruction.

A group that believes in % pure Muslim

will not see that purity in
anybody else but themselves.

So whoever disagrees with
them becomes the enemy

becomes out of the House of Islam

and then if they happen to disagree
with each other themselves

then they will start liquidating each other.

And they keep fighting each other,
there will be infighting.

Eventually it ends in su1c1de.

The main Islamist group in Algeria,
the GIA

ended by being led by a Mr.
Zouabri, a chicken farmer

who k*lled everyone
who disagreed with him.

He issued a final communique

declaring that the whole of
Algerian society should be k*lled

with the exception of his tiny
remaining band of Islamists.

They were the only ones
who understood the truth.

By the mid-' s,
politics in Washington

was dominated by one issue:

the moral character of the
President of the United States.

If you believe you've been a victim of
sexual harassment by the President

we want to help.

Behind this were an extraordinary
barrage of allegations against Clinton

that were obsessing the media.

These included stories
of sexual harassment

stories that Clinton and his wife
were involved in Whitewater

a corrupt property deal

stories that they had m*rder*d
their close friend Vince Foster

and stories that Clinton was
involved in smuggling dr*gs

from a small airstrip in Arkansas.

But none of these stories were true.

All of them had been orchestrated by
a young group of neoconservatives

who were determined to destroy Clinton.

The campaign was centered on
a small right-wing magazine

called the American Spectator

which had set up what was
called the "Arkansas Project"

to investigate Clinton's past life.

The journalist at the center of this
project was called David Brock.

In the crossfire: David Brock,
of the American Spectator magazine.

She was dressed in a raincoat and a hat,
and came in at : in the morning

and had a liaison with
Clinton in the game room

in the bottom floor of the
Governor's mansion. David, David,
David, this is getting a little bizarre.

Next thing we gonna see

I? bizarre! But hey,
Bill Clinton is a bizarre guy.

Since then, Brock has turned against
the neoconservative movement.

He now believes that the
att*cks on Clinton went too far

and corrupted conservative politics.

Was Whitewater true?

No! There was no
I mean

there was no criminal wrongdoing
in Whitewater. Absolutely not.

It was a land deal that the
Clintons lost money on.

It was a coplete inversion of what happened.

Was Vince Foster k*lled?

No.
k*lled himself.

Did the Clintons smuggle dr*gs?

Absolutely not.

Did those promoting these stories
know that this was not true

that none of these stories were true?

They did not care.

Why not?

Because they were having
a devastating effect.

So why stop?

It was terrorism.
Political terrorism.

And you were one of the agents?
Absolutely. Absolutely.

The stories began to grip America,
and despite Clinton's denials

the Republicans in Congress
seized on the scandals

and began to press for investigations

into this immorality at
the heart of government.

Basically, the press

has editorialized and pressured
the politicians into saying

"Here's a guy that as far as we
know hasn't done anything wrong

nobody's accused him
of doing anything wrong

there's no evidence that
he's done anything wrong

but we think the presumption
of guilt almost should be on him.

He should somehow prove his innocence."

Out of this pressure,
Clinton was forced to agree

to an independent
investigation into Whitewater.

It was headed by a senior judge in
Washington called Kenneth Starr.

But what was not widely known

was that Starr was a member
of a right-wing group of lawyers

called the Federalist Society

that had financial and ideological
links to the neoconservatives.

And like the neoconservatives,
they saw Clinton as a danger to the country

and they were determined to
prove this to the American people.

In the Merck manual.

Merck is a pharmaceutical company,
they have a manual listing

various disorders,
and they listed "sociopath."

And if you look at "sociopath,"
it tracks Clinton exactly.

Somebody who's charming

who has no particular feeling at
all for the people he's charming

unable to resist instant gratification

and so on and so on.
Goes right down the list.

We had a very dysfunctional
man in the Presidency.

That was very dangerous,
both as a model and as

if crisis had arisen,
I had no confidence that he would meet it.

But despite all his efforts

Kenneth Starr could find no
incriminating evidence in Whitewater.

Nor could he find any evidence to
support any of the sexual scandals

that had come from the Arkansas Project.

Until finally,
his committee

stumbled upon Clinton's affair with
Monica Lewinsky, which Clinton denied.

And in that lie,
the neoconservative movement

believed they had found what
they had been looking for:

a way to make the American
people see the truth

about the liberal corruption of their country.

A campaign now began
to impeach the President.

And in the hysteria,
the whole conservative movement

portrayed Clinton as a depraved monster
who had to be removed from office.

But yet again, the neoconservatives
had created a fantasy enemy

by exaggerating and distorting reality.

They were trapped by a mythological

person that they had constructed,
or persons, the Clintons, these

scheming, terrible people who they,
the noble pursuers, were going to vanquish.

I think,
in the leadership of conservatism

during the Clinton era there
was an element of corruption.

There was an element of a
willingness to do anything

to achieve the goal of
bringing Clinton down.

There was a way in which the people
who perceived Clinton as immoral

behaved immorally themselves.

They ended up behaving worse than
the people who they were attacking.

All the moral fury,
and the deception, came to nothing.

The impeachment failed because
the polls consistently showed

that Americans still did not
care about these moral issues.

One leading neoconservative,
William Bennett

wrote a book called The Death of Outrage,
which blamed the people.

He accused the public of
making a deal with the devil.

Their failure, he said,
to support the impeachment

was evidence of their moral corruption.

By , Bin Laden and Ayman
Zawahiri had returned to Afghanistan

where they had first met ten years before.

Back then,
it had seemed as if Islamism

might succeed as a popular
revolutionary movement.

But now,
they were facing failure.

All attempts to topple regimes in
the Arab world had not succeeded.

The people had turned against them
because of the horrific v*olence

and Afghanistan was the
only place they had left to go.

Well, was their failure.
Egypt, Algeria, it worked nowhere.

It went wrong because
populations would not back them.

Because people, even people who were
sympathetic of them in the beginning

were frightened away by their v*olence,
by their incapacity to communicate

and to have access to the people,
and this was very clear

in Zawahiri's book "Knights
under the Prophe? Banner,"

where he sort of goes back from
this experiment, and laments

over their incapacity to raise the
consciousness of the masses

and feels that, you know, as a vanguard
they did not manage to communicate.

They remained isolated,
and this is why they failed.

And this is when they
started this new strategy.

In May ,
Bin Laden and Zawahiri

invited a group of journalists
to this press conference

where they announced a new jihad.

Zawahiri was convinced

that it was not their theories
that were to blame for the failure

it was the fault of the Muslim masses.

Their minds had been corrupted
by the liberal ideas from the West.

But rather than give up

he believed that the solution was to
att*ck the source of the corruption directly.

The new jihad would be
against America itself.

As I mentioned before

we focus our efforts

to fight against Jews and
Christians or Americans.

We have no objection against
any party or any person

who fights Americans all over the world.

And we want to tell you that we
will win the w*r against Americans.

America will be defeated.
Americans know our power, and

This was a strategy of desperation

born out of failure by a small
group whose revolution had failed.

And the anger that came from that failure

was about to be directed
at the United States.

What Zawahiri and Bin
Laden were about to do

would dramatically affect the future
of the neoconservative movement.

By ,
all their attempts to transform America

by creating a moral revolution had failed.

Faced with the indifference of the people

the neoconservatives had
become marginalized

in both domestic and foreign policy.

But with the att*cks that
were about to hit America

the neoconservatives would
at last find the evil enemy

that they had been searching for ever
since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And in their reaction to the att*cks

the neoconservatives would transform
the failing Islamist movement

into what would appear to be
the grand revolutionary force

that Zawahiri had always dreamed of.

But much of it would exist
only in people's imaginations.

It would be the next phantom enemy.

[bunniefuu]

Part 3:



In the past,
politicians promised to create a better world.

They had different ways of achieving this.

But their power and authority
came from the optimistic visions

they offered to their people.

Those dreams failed.

And today,
people have lost faith in ideologies.

Increasingly, politicians are seen
simply as managers of public life.

But now, they have discovered a new role
that restores their power and authority.

Instead of delivering dreams,
politicians now promise to protect us

from nightmares.

They say that they will rescue
us from dreadful dangers

that we cannot see and do not understand.

And the greatest danger of
all is international terrorism.

A powerful and sinister network

with sleeper cells in
countries across the world.

A thr*at that needs to be
fought by a w*r on terror.

But much of this thr*at is a fantasy

which has been exaggerated
and distorted by politicians.

It's a dark illusion

that has spread unquestioned through
governments around the world

the security services,
and the international media.

This is a series of films about how and why
that fantasy was created : : ,
--] : : , and who it benefits.

At the heart of the story are two groups:

the American neoconservatives,
and the radical Islamists.

Last week's episode ended in
the late' s with both groups
marginalized and out of power.

But with the att*cks of September th,
the fates of both dramatically changed.

The Islamists,
after their moment of triumph

were virtually destroyed within months

while the neoconservatives
took power in Washington.

But then, the neoconservatives
began to reconstruct the Islamists.

They created a phantom enemy.

And as this nightmare
fantasy began to spread

.politicians realized the newfound power

it gave them in a deeply disillusioned age.

Those with the darkest nightmares
became the most powerful.

The Power of Nightmares

The Rise of the Politics of Fear

Part The Shadows in the cave

At the end of the s

O*ama b*n L*den had
returned to Afghanistan.

He was accompanied by Ayman Zawahiri

the most influential ideologist
of the Islamist movement.

For years

Zawahiri had struggled to create
revolutions in the Arab world

but all attempt had ended in bloody failure.

We haven't had any infomation about your
whereabouts for sometime, where were you?

I was just home and clubs.

Not in Afghanistan?
Somewhere else?

Everywhere, everywhere.
Everywhere?

I am a Muslim.
Being a Muslim

you are wanted everywhere.

Because if you
- just if you say no to the superpowers

this immediately in itself is
a crime you are wanted for.

Yes, but isn't what you
do not to do with arms?

It's aggressive but ask Allah,
and he is greater than superpower.

Zawahiri was a follower of the
Egyptian revolutionary, Sayyed Qutb

who had been ex*cuted in .

Qutb's vision had been of
a new type of modern state.

It would contain all of the benefits of
Western science and technology

but it would use Islam as a moral
framework to protect people

from the culture of Western liberalism.

Qutb believed that this culture
infected the minds of Muslims

turning them into selfish creatures

who threatened to destroy the shared
values that held society together.

Throughout the s and s

Zawahiri had tried to persuade the masses

to rise up and topple the rulers

who had allowed this corruption to
infect their countries. : : ,
--] : : , We want to speak
to the whole world. Who are we?

But the revolutionaries became trapped
in a horrific escalation of v*olence

because the masses
refused to follow them.

Islamism failed as a mass movement

and Zawahiri now came to the conclusion
that a new strategy was needed.

They had no revolution at all.
I mean

they had failed in their takeover

they had failed to topple
the powers that be

and, you know,
they became more and more interested

in this idea that only a small vanguard

could be successful.

I mean, they had lost confidence
in the spontaneous capacity of
the masses to be mobilised.

Then they decided to change
strategy completely

and instead of striking at what
they called the "near enemy"

I.e., the local regimes

they decided that they could
strike at the "far away enemy"

I.e., at the West,
at America

and that would impress the masses,
and the masses would be mobilised.

Zawahiri and Bin Laden began implementing
this new strategy in August, .

Two huge su1c1de bombs were detonated

outside American embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania

k*lling more than people.

The bombings had a
dramatic effect on the West.

For the first time,
the name "Bin Laden"

entered the public consciousness
as a t*rror1st mastermind.

The su1c1de bombers

had been recruited by Bin Laden from
the Islamist training camps in Afghanistan.

But his and Zawahiri's operation

was very much on the fringes
of the Islamist movement.

The overwhelming majority of
the fighters in these camps

had nothing at all to do with Bin
Laden or international terrorism.

They were training to fight
regimes in their own countries

such as Uzbekistan, Kashmir,
and Chechnia.

Their aim wa to establish Islamist
societies in the Muslim world

and they had no interest
in attacking America.

Bin Laden helped fund some of the camps

and in return was allowed to look
for volunteers for his operations.

But a number of senior Islamists
were against his new strategy

including members of Zawahiri's
own group, Islamic Jihad.

Even Bin Laden's displays of strength
to the Western media were faked.

The fighters in this video
had been hired for the day

and told to bring their own weapons.

For beyond this small group

Bin Laden had no formal organisation.
Until the Americans invented one for h.

In January,

a trial began in a Manhattan courtroom

of four men accused of the
embassy bombings in east Africa.

But the Americans had also decided
to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence.

But to do this under American law

the prosecutors needed evidence
of a criminal organisation

because, as with the Mafia

that would allow them to prosecute
the head of the organisation

even if he could not be
linked directly to the crime.

And the evidence for that
organisation was provided for them

by an ex-associate of Bin
Laden's called Jamal Al-Fadl.

During the investigation of
the bombings, there is a
walk-in source, Jamal Al-Fadl

who is a Sudanese militant who
was with Bin Laden in the early s

who has been passed around a whole
series of Middle East secret services.

None of whom want much to do with him

and who ends up in
America and is taken on by

the American government, effectively

as a key prosecution witness.

And is given a huge amount of American
taxpayers' money at the same time.

His account is used as raw material

to build up a picture of Al Qaeda.

The picture that the FBI want o build
up is one that will fit the existing laws

that they will have to use to prosecute
those responsible for the bombing.

Now, those laws were drawn up
to counteract organised crime:

the Mafia, dr*gs crime, crimes
where people being a member of an
organisation is extremely important.

You have to have an organisation
to get a prosecution.

And you have Al-Fadl and a
number of other witness

a number of other sources,
who are happy to feed into this.

You've got material that,
looked at in a certain way

can be seen to show this
organisation's existence.

You put the two together and you get what
is the first Bin Laden myth : ,
--] : : , the first Al Qaeda myth.

And because it's one of the first,
it's extremely influential.

The picture Al-Fadl drew for
the Americans of Bin Laden

was of an all-powerful figure at the
head of a large t*rror1st network

that had an organised network of control.

He also said that Bin Laden had given
this network a name: "Al Qaeda".

It was a dramatic and powerful
picture of Bin Laden

but it bore little relationship to the truth.

The reality was that Bin
Laden and Ayman Zawahiri

had become the focus
of a loose association of
disillusioned Islamist militants

who were attracd by the new strategy.

But there was no organisation.

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 th

when he realized that this was the
term the Americans have given it.

In reality, Jamal Al-Fadl was
on the run from Bin Laden

having stolen money from him.
In return for his evidence

the Americans gave him
witness protection in America and
hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Many lawyers at the trial believed

that Al-Fadl exaggerated and lied
to give the Americans the picture

of a t*rror1st organisation that
they needed to prosecute Bin Laden.

And there were selective portions
of Al-Fadl's testimony
that I believe was false

to help support the picture that he
helped the Americans join together.

I think he lied in a number
of specific testimony

about a unified image of
what this organisation was.

It made Al Qaeda the new
Mafia or the new Communists.

It made them identifiable as a group

and therefore made
it easier to prosecute

any person associated with Al Qaeda for
any acts or statements made by Bin Laden

who talked a lot.

The idea - which is critical to
the FBI's prosecution

that Bin Laden ran a coherent
organisation with operatives and cells

all around the world of which you
could be a member is a myth.

There is no Al Qaeda organisation. 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.

That idea of a coherent, structured t*rror1st
network with an organised capability

simply does not exist. : : , -]
: : , What did exist was a powerful
idea that was about to inspire a single

devastating act that would lead the
whole world into believing the myth

that had begun to be constructed
in the Manhattan courtroom.

What's this other jet doing? What's
this other jet doing? What the hell's that?

Holy f*ck! Oh my God!
Oh my God! Jesus f*cking Christ!

Don't touch it!
Oh my God! Oh my God!

The att*ck on America by
hijackers shocked the world.

It was Ayman Zawahiri's new strategy,
implemented in a brutal and spectacular way.

But neither he nor Bin Laden
were the originators of what was
called the "Planes Operation".

It was the brainchilan Islamist militant
called Khalid Sheik Mohammed

who came to Bin Laden for funding
and help in finding volunteers.

But in the wake of panic created
by the att*cks, the politicians
reached for the model

which had been created by the trial earlier
that year: The hijackers were just the tip

of a vast, international t*rror1st
network which was called, "Al Qaeda".

Al Qaeda is to terror what
the Mafia is to crime.

There are thousands of these
t*rrorists in more than countries.

They are recruited from their own nations
and neighborhoods, and brought to camps

in places like Afghanistan,
where they are trained in the tactics of terror.

This one network, Al Qaeda, that's
receiving so much discussion and publicity

make have activities in to countries,
including the United States.

Our w*r is against networks and groups,
people who coddle them

people who try to hide them,
people who fund them. This is our calling.

And the att*cks had another dramatic effect:

they brought the neoconservatives
back to power in America

When George Bush first became president

he had appointed neoconservatives
like Paul Wolfowitz

and their allies like Donald Rumsfeld,
to his administration.

But their grand vision of
America's role in the world was
largely ignored by this new regi.

I just don't think it's the
role of the United States to walk
into another country and say

"We do it this way,
so should you."

But now

We're going to find those who,
uh, who, uh, uh, those evil doers.

But now,
the neoconservatives became all-powerful

because this terror network proved
that what they had been predicting
through the s was correct:

that America was at risk from
terrifying new forces in a hostile world.

A small group formed that began to shape
America's response to the att*cks.

At its heart were Donald Rumsfeld
and Paul Wolfowitz, along with
the vice-president, d*ck Cheney

and Ric Perle,
who was a senior advisor to the Pentagon.

The last time these men had been
in power together was years
before, under President Reagan.

Back then, they had taken on and,
as they saw it

defeated a source of evil that wanted
to take over America: the Soviet Union.

And now they saw this new w*r
on terror in the same epic terms.

The struggle against Soviet totalitarianism

was a struggle between
fundamental value questions.

"Good" and "evil" is about as effective a
shorthand as I can imagine in this regard

and there's something rather
similar going on in the w*r on terror.

It isn't a w*r on terror,
it's a w*r on t*rrorists who want.

to impose an intolerant
tyranny on all mankind

an Islamic universe in which we
are all compelled to accept their
beliefs and live by their lights

and in that sense this is a
battle between good and evil.

But, as previous episodes have shown

the neoconservatives distorted
and exaggerated the Soviet thr*at.

They created the image of a hidden,
international web of evil run from Moscow

that planned to dominate the world, when,
in reality

the Soviet Union was on its last legs,
collapsing from within.

Now, they did the same with the Islamists.

Now, they did the same with the Islamists.
Can Soviet imperialism be halted?

Can Soviet imperialism be halted?

They took a failing movement
which had lost mass support
Can Soviet imperialism be halted?

and began to reconstruct it into the
image of a powerful network of evil

controlled from the center by Bin
Laden from his lair in Afghanistan.

They did this because it fitted with their
vision of America's unique destiny

to fight an epic battle against the
forces of evil throughout the world.

What the neoconservatives
are doing is taking a concept

that they developed during the
competition with the Soviet Union

I.e., Soviet Communism was evil

It was that kind of concept of evil that
they took - an exaggerated one, to be
sure - and then apply it to a new thr*at

where it didn't apply at all,
and yet it was layered with the
same kind of cultural baggage.

The policy says there's a network,
the policy says that network is evil

they want to infiltrate our classrooms,
they want to take our society

they want all our women to wear,
you know, veils

and this is what we have to deal
with and therefore since we know
it's evil let's just k*ll it

and that will make it go away.

And so the Americans set
off to invafghanistan

to find and destroy the
heart of this network.

To do this, the Americans allied themselves
with a group called the Northern Alliance.

They were a loose collection
of warlords, fighting a w*r of
resistance against the Taliban

the Islamists who controlled Afghanistan.

The Taliban's best troops
were the thousands of foreign
fighters from the training camps,
who the Northern Alliance hated.

And now, they took their
revenge on the foreign fighters.

The Americans believed that these
men were Al Qaeda t*rrorists,
and the Northern Alliance did
nothing to disabuse them of this

because they were paid by the
Americans for each prisoner they delivered.

Both they and the Taliban were radical
nationalists who wanted to create
Islamist societies in their own countries.

But now, they were either k*lled or
taken off to Guant嫕amo Bay

and Islamism, as an organised
movement for changing the Muslim
world, was obliterated in Afghanistan.

But as it disappeared, it was replaced by
ever more extravagant fantasies about the
power and reach of the Al Qaeda network.

In December, the Northern Alliance
told the Americans that Bin Laden was
hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora.

They were convinced they had
found the heart of his organisation.

The search for O*ama b*n L*den:
There was constant discussion
about him hiding out in caves

and I think many times the American
people have a perception that it's a
little hole dug out of the side of a mountain.

Oh, no.

This is it.
This is a fortress.

Yes.

A complex. Multi-tiered. "Bedrooms and
Offices" on the top, as you can see.

"Secret Exits" on the side,
and on the bottom. "Cut Deep
to Avoid Thermal Detection."

A ventilation system, to allow people to
breathe and to carry on. The entrances,
large enough to drive trucks and even tanks.

Even computer systems and
telephone systems. It's a
very sophisticated operation.

Oh, you bet. This is serious business.
And there's not one of se;
there are many of those.

For days, the Americans bombed
the mountains of Tora Bora with the
most powerful weapons they had.

The Northern Alliance had been
paid more than a million dollars
for their help and information

and now their fighters set
off up the mountains to storm
Bin Laden's fortress

..and bring back the Al Qaeda
t*rrorists and their leader.

But all they found were a few small
caves, which were either empty or
had been used to store amm*nit*on.

There was no underground
bunker system, no secret tunnels:
the fortress didn't exist

The Northern Alliance did
produce some prisoners they
claimed were Al Qaeda fighters

but there was no proof of this, and
one rumor was at the Northern Alliance
was simply kidnapping anyone

who looked remotely like an
Arab and selling them to the
Americans for yet more money.

The Americans now began to search all
the caves in all the mountains in eastern
Afghanistan for the hidden Al Qaeda network.

We found a cave.
The rest of it is open. Break.

If nobody went up to look into that cave,
people could've been hiding up there for
days and watching everything that we did.

But wherever they looked, there was
nothing there. Al Qaeda seemed
to have completely disappeared.

But then, the British arrived to
help. They were convinced they
could hunt down Al Qaeda

because of what they said was
their unique experience in fighting
terrorism in Northern Ireland.

They could succeed where others had failed.

The hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban goes on.

And we stand shoulder to
shoulder with the United States

and our other coalition allies
in the global w*r on terrorism.

Five weeks later.

But how many Al Qaeda have you captured?

We haven't, uh,
captured any Al Qaeda, but

And how many have you actually managed
to k*ll here in south-east Afghanistan?

We haven't k*lled any.

Ten thousand pieced of gold for
the body of Ali Baba and the
destruction of the band of thieves.

The terrible truth was that there was
nothing there because Al Qaeda
as an ornisation did not exist.

The att*cks on America had been
planned by a small group that had come
together around Bin Laden in the late s.

What united them was an idea. An
extreme interpretation of Islamism
developed by Ayman Zawahiri.

With the American invasion, that group
had been destroyed, k*lled or scattered.

What was left was the idea

and the real danger was the
way this idea could inspire groups
and individuals around the world

who had no relationship to each other.

In looking for an organisation,
the Americans and the British
were chasing a phantom enemy

and missing the real thr*at.

I was with the Royal Marines as they
trooped around eastern Afghanistan

and every time they got a
location for a supposed Al Qaeda
or Taliban element or base

they'd turn up and there
was no one there, or there'd
be a few startled shepherds

and that struck me then as being a
wonderful image for the w*r on terror

because people looking for
something that isn't there.

There is no organisation with
its t*rror1st operatives, cells,
sleeper cells, so on and so forth.

What there is is an idea, prevalent
among young, angry Muslim males

throughout the Islamic world.

That idea is what poses a thr*at.

But the neoconservatives were now
increasingly locked into this fantasy

This is a network that has
penetrated into some countries,
including very definitely our own

and it's got to be rooted out.

Our intelligence priority, in many
ways, is getting after the network
here in the United States first.

We will do whatever we need to do to go
after these networks and dismantle them.

The American government set
out to search for the Al Qaeda
organisation inside its own country.

Thousands were detained as all
branches of the law and the m*llitary
were told to look for t*rrorists.

You don't really know what a
t*rror1st looks like, what kind of car
they drive, or anything else

And, bit by bit,
the government found the network:

a series of hidden cells in cities across
the country from Buffalo to Portland.

We've thwarted t*rrorists in Buffalo

and Seattle, Portland, Detroit

North Carolina,
and Tampa, Florida.

We're determined to stop the
enemy before he can strike our people.

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 t*rror1st plots.

From Portland to the suburb of Buffalo
called Lackawa, yet again the Americans
were chasing a phantom enemy.

They say "t*rror1st sleeper cell."
That's what they call the Lackawanna
people a t*rror1st sleeper cell

the Detroit people a t*rror1st cell,
the Portland people a t*rror1st cell.

But when you look at the details,
the facts just don't support that

and they have not proved that any
group within the United States has
plotted to engage in any t*rror1st

activity within the United States in all of the
cases that they've brought since / .

The evidence behind all of the sleeper
cell cases is flimsy and often bizarre.

This tape was one of the central pieces
of evidence in the first of the cases. It
was found in a raid on this house in
Detroit. : : , ] : : ,
Four Arab men were arrested on suspicion
of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell.

They had been accused by another
immigrant called Mr. Hmimssa.

But Mr. Hmimssa was, in reality, an
international con man with aliases
and wanted for fraud across America.

Despite this, the FBI offered to
reduce his sentence for fraud
if he testified against the men.

And to back up Mr. Hmimssa's
allegations, the FBI turned to the videotape.

On the surface it was the innocent record of
a trip to Disneyland by a group of teenagers
who had nothing to do with the accused

but the government had discovered a
hidden and sinister purpose to the tape.

The government expert who has
looked into surveillance tapes - "casing
tapes," as he referrd to them -

said that one of the objectives
of making these kinds of tapes

is to disguise the nature,
the real purpose, of the tape

and he explained it that the
tape is made to look benign

made to look like a tourist
tape to obscure its real purpose
as a tape to case Disneyland

and that the very appearance of it
as being just a tourist tape is actually
evidence that it's not a tourist tape.

Al-Jazeera, Hollywood,
Los Angeles, California. Hello?

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 ccasionally pans to look
at the rocks on the wall, made to
look like an Indiana Jones movie

and after several minutes the camera 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 t*rror1st operations

they would understand what
this is all about: how to locate a
b*mb in Disneyland in California.

Hello!

All the talking and bantering were
intended to disguise the hidden
message contained within the tape.

The government was convinced that
the tape was full of hidden messages.

A brief sh*t of a tree outside the group's
hotel room was there, they said

to show where to place a sn*per
to att*ck the cars on the freeway.

And what looked like a camera which
had accidentally been left running

was in reality a t*rror1st secretly
counting out distances to show
others where to place a b*mb.

And the government also said that
the Detroit cell was planning to att*ck
US m*llitary bases around the world.

Yet again, they found hidden evidence
of this in a day planner they discovered
under the sofa in the house in Detroit.

What looked like doodles were in reality, they
said, a plan to att*ck a US base in Turkey.

The government brought in its
security officer from the base to
testify that he interpreted this

as being the main runways.

She identified these

as being AWACS airplanes
and these as being fighter jets.

She said that these solid lines were
lines of fire and she also said that this
down here was a hardened bunker.

But the drawings in the day planner
were discovered to have actually
been the work of a madman.

They were the fantasies of a Yemeni

who believed that he was the minister of
defence for the whole of the Middle East.

He had committed su1c1de a year before
any of the accused had arrived in Detroit

leaving the day planner lying
under the sofa in the house.

Despite this,
two of the accused were found guilty.

But then, the government's only witness,
Mr. Hmimssa

told two of his cellmates that
he had made the whole thing up
to get his fraud charges reduced.

The terrorism convictions have now been
overturned by the judge in the case

but it was acclaimed by the
President as the first success
in the w*r on terror at home.

We have the t*rrorists on the run.
We're keeping them on the run.

One by one the t*rrorists are learning
the meaning of American justice.

Another case, in the city of
Buffalo, New York, seemed on the
surface to be more substantial.

Six young Yemeni-Americans had gone
to an Islamist training camp in Afghanistan.
: : , - : : ,
They travelled there in early

and spent between and
weeks training and being taught
Islamist revolutionary theory.

Two of them even met Bin Laden
on one of his tours of the camp.

They then returned to the Buffalo
suburb of Lackawanna, where
they lived, but they did nothing.

The FBI heard about their trip
and they watched the six men
around the clock for nearly a year

but there was no suspicious behavior.

But then, one of the men, Mr. Al-Bakri, went
to Bahrain and sent his friends an E-mail.

It said he was going to get married and that
he wouldn't be seeing them for awhile.

The CIA, who had been monitoring
their E-mails, understood
this to be a coded message.

The cell was about to launch a
su1c1de att*ck on the US Fifth Fleet.

The FBI, the government,
took that phrase to mean something sinister.

They believed that the
word "wedding" was a code.

They believed that the phrase "not
seeing you anymore" indicated that
Muktar Al-Bakri was a su1c1de bomber.

The reality is that Mr.
Al-Bakri was in Bahrain

to get married and the reality
of him getting married was

that he wouldn't be
around his friends anymore.

Good afternoon.
In the past hours

United States law enforcement has
identified and disrupted an Al Qaeda
trained t*rror1st cell on American soil.

The arrests wer announced
proudly by Washington as another
sleeper cell plotting an att*ck.

But it soon became clear that there was no
evidence for this at all, other than the E-mail.

And the best the government can point
to as a sleeper cell are these, you know,
young men in Lackawanna, in New York

who, yes, went to Afghanistan,
trained in an Al Qaeda training camp

but to all appearances had no intention
to ever take any action on the basis of that.

One of them faked an injury to try to get out
early. They came back to the United States.

We had them under intensive
surveillance and we found no
evidence - not one shred of evidence -

that they ever planned or
intended to engage in any kind of
criminal, much less t*rror1st, act.

That's the best they
can show for a sleeper cell.

Faced with the fact that there was no
evidence, the government quietly dropped
any charges of their being a t*rror1st cell.

Instead, they were prosecuted simply
for having gone to the training camp,
and for having bought uniforms there.

And all the other cases were even flimsier:

A group of students who supported
the liberation of Kashmir were found
paint-balling in the woods of Virginia.

They were convicted of
training to att*ck America.

A group of African-Americans from
Oregon tried to go to Afghanistan to
support the Taliban but got lost in China.

All these groups, the government said,
were part of a hidden and terrifying Al
Qaeda network. : : , --]
: : , The government had a
legitimate concern at the beginning

but they let that concern,
and they took it, and they made it a panic.

They had reasonable questions
and took them and made a
complete fantasy out of them.

They started out with a conclusion and
then filled in all the blanks to the questions.

So this was totally driven by the need
- or the desire - to have t*rrorists.

You build this conclusion based
on this assumption, and this
assumption, and this assumption

and, sure, if you go - if
you build assumptions upon
assumptions, you can go anywhere!

It's a work of imagination.

It is. It's a fantasy, and it's a fantasy
that it was politically expedieno sell.

And make no mistake about it: we got a
w*r here just like we got a w*r abroad.

In Britain, too, the government and
most of the media have created
the overwhelming impression that

there is a hidden network of Al
Qaeda sleeper cells waiting to att*ck.

But, yet again,
there is very little evidence for this.

Of the people arrested under the
Terrorism Act since September the th

none of them have been
convicted of belonging to Al Qaeda.

Only people have so far been
convicted of having any association

with any Islamist groups, and
none of those convictions were
for being involved in a terror plot;

they were for fundraising,
or posessing Islamist literature.

The majority of people convicted under the
Terrorism Act since September the th

have actually been members of Irish
t*rror1st groups like the UVF or the Real IRA.

And many of the arrests that were
dramatically announced as being
part of a hidden Al Qaeda network

were, in reality,
as absurd as the cases in America.

For example, the London police
swooped on a Mr. Zain Ul-Abedin

who they said was running an
international network for t*rror1st training.

It turned out to be a self-defence
course for bodyguards.

He called it "Ultimate Jihad
Challenge". His only client was a
security guard from a supermarket

who wanted to learn how to
defend himself against shoplifters.

Mr.
Zain Ul-Abedin was cleared of all charges.

Then there was the Hogmanay
terror cell who, it was alleged,
were planning to att*ck Edinburgh.

All charges against them were
quietly dropped when it was revealed
that a key part of the evidence

a map that showed the targets they were
going to att*ck, turned out to have been left
in their flat by an Australian backpacker

who had ringed the tourist
sites he wanted to see.

And even the most frightening and
high profile of the plots uncovered
turned out to be without foundation.

No one was ever arrested for planning
gas att*cks on the London tubes

it was a fantasy that
swept through the media.

Just as in America, there is no evidence
yet of the terrifying and sinister network

lurking under the surface of our society

which both government and the
media continually tell us is there.

So there was no network.

No.

Never?

Probably not.

We invented it.

"Invention" is too string a term.
I think we projected it,
we projected our own worst fears

and that what we see is a
fantasy that's been created.

Al Qaeda is a global
network with global reach.

The target, a deadly web of terror.

What I am saying is that we have an
exaggerated perception of the possibility
of terrorism that is quite disabling

and we only need to look at the
evidence to understand that the
figures simply don't bear out

the way that we have
responded as a society.

What the British and American
governments have done is both distort and
exaggerate the real nature of the thr*at.

There are dangerous and fanatical groups
around the world who've been inspired
by the extreme Islamist theories

and they are prepared to use
the techniques of mass terror on
civilians. The bombings in Madrid
showed this only too clearly.

But this is not a new phenomeno

What is new is the way the American and
other governments have transformed
this complex and disparate thr*at

into a simplistic fantasy of an organised
web of uniquely powerful t*rrorists who
may strike anywhere and at any moment.

But no one questioned this fantasy
because, increasingly, it was serving
the interests of so many people.

For the press, television, and
hundreds of terrorism experts, the
fact that it seemed so like fiction
made it irresistible to their audiences.

And the Islamists, too, began to realise
that by feeding this media fantasy

they could become a powerful organisation
- if only in people's imaginations.

The prime mover in this was one
of Bin Laden's associates, who
had been captured by the Americs.

He was called Abu Zubaydah. He began
to tell his interrogators of terrifying
plots that Al Qaeda was preparing

some of which, he said, they had copied
from Hollywood movies like Godzilla,
which they had watched in Afghanistan.

Zubaydah told the interrogators

a set of stories based on what
he thought would alarm us.

He told us,
for example

coming out of a movie that had
been recent at that time, Godzilla,
in which the Brooklyn Bridge
was destroyed by the monster

he told us that Al Qaeda was interested
in destroying the Brooklyn Bridge.

He told us of att*cks on mass
transit sources like subway trains.

He told us there were intentions of attacking
apartment buildings and shopping centers

the Statue of Liberty,
all manner of things.

Recent intelligence reports suggest that Al
Qaeda leaders have emphasised planning
for att*cks on apartment buildings

hotels, and other soft or lightly
secured targets in the United States.

t*rrorists are considering physical
att*cks against US financial institutions.

And Abu Zubaydah also told his
interrogators of a terrifying new
w*apon the Islamists intended to use:

an expl*sive device that could spray
radiation through cities, the "dirty b*mb".

First, a CBS News exclusive about
a captured Al Qaeda leader

who says his fellow t*rrorists have
the know-how to build a very dangerous
w*apon and get it to the United States.

And the media took the bait. They portrayed
the dirty b*mb as an extraordinary w*apon
that would k*ll thousands of people

and, in the process, they made the
hidden enemy even more terrifying.

But, in reality, the thr*at of a
dirty b*mb is yet another illusion.

Its aim is to spread radioactive material
through a conventional expl*si*n.

But almost all studies of such a
possible w*apon have concluded

that the radiation spread in this way
would not k*ll anybody because the
radioactive material would be so dispersed

and, providing the area was
cleaned promptly, the long-term
effects would be negligible.

In the past, both the American army and
the Iraqi m*llitary tested such devices

and both concluded that they
were completely ineffectual
weapons for this very reason.

How dangerous would a dirty b*mb be?

The deaths would be few, if any,
and the answer is, probably none.

Really?

Yes. And that's been said
over and over again, but then
people immediately say after that:

"But, you know, people won't believe that,
and they'll panic."

And then all the people working on this
project, you know, the defence and
so forth, breathe a big sigh of relief
because they got their problem back.

You know,
we're gonna all panic.

I don't think it would k*ll anybody
and I think you'll have troubling a
serious report that would claim otherwise.

The Department of Energy
actually set up such a test

and they actually measured
what happened. And they the
measurements were extremely low.

They calculated that the most exposed
individual would get a fairly high dose
- not life-threatening, but fairly high -

and I checked into how the calculation
was done, and they assume that after
the att*ck, no one moves for one year.

One year.
Now, that's ridiculous.

The dirty b*mb - the danger from
radioactivity is basically next to nothing.

The danger from panic, however,
is horrendous.

That's where the irony comes. This
- instead of the government saying,
"Look, this is not a serious w*apon

the serious danger of this is the
panic that would ensue, and there is
no reason for panic. Don't panic."

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not the end
of our show; however, something very much
like this could happen at any moment.

We just thought we ought to prepare you
and more or less put you in the mood.

Thank you.

And now,
back to our story.

The scale of this fantasy just kept
growing as more and more groups
realised the power it gave them.

Above all, the group that had been
instrumental in first spreading the idea:

the neoconservatives. Because
they now found that they could use
it to help them realise their vision:

that America had a special desiny
to overcome evil in the world

and this epic mission would give meaning
and purpose to the American people.

To do this,
they were going to start with Iraq

and, just as they had discovered
a hidden reality of terror beneath
the surface in America

they now found hidden links that
previously no one had suspected

between the Al Qaeda
network and S*ddam Hussein.

Evidence from intelligence sources,
secret communications, and
statements by people now in custody

reveal that S*ddam Hussein
aids and protects t*rrorists

including members of Al Qaeda.

Imagine those hijackers with
other weapons and other plans, this
time armed by S*ddam Hussein.

I continue to be amazed at the people who
say there are no links. It simply isn't true.

What hasn't been established is
a direct link between S*ddam's
intelligence and the / plotters

although even there there is
evidence that suggests, very possibly

facilitation and assistance
to the / hijackers.

There really is evidence?

There really is evidence.

So, when people say there is no
association between Al Qaeda and
S*ddam Hussein, they're wrong.

They're flatly wrong.

Really?

Absolutely wrong.

The bombing has started. : : ,
--] : : Okay, okay, start buying

The driving force behind these new
global policies in the w*r on terror
was the power of a dark fantasy:

a sinister web of hidden and interlinked
threats that stretched around the world.

And such was the power of that fantasy
that it also began to transform the
very nature of politics because

increasingly, politicians were discovering
that their ability to imagine the future
and the terrible dangers it held

gave them a new and
heroic role in the world.

In the post-w*r years,
politicians had also used their imaginations

but to project optimistic visions
of a better future that they
could create for their people

and it was these visions that
gave them power and authority.

But those dreams collapsed, and
politicians like Tony Blair became
more like managers of public life

their policies determined
often by focus groups.

But now, the w*r on terror allowed
politicians like Blair to portray a
new, grand vision of the future.

But this vision was a dark
one of imagined threats

and a new force began to drive politics:
the fear of an imagined future.

Not a conventional fear
about a conventional thr*at.

But the fear that one day these new
threats of weapons of mass destruction

rogue states, and international
terrorism combine to deliver
a catastrophe to our world.

And then the shame of knowing
that I saw that thr*at, day after
day, and did nothing to stop it.

It may not erupt and engulf
us this month or next

perhaps not even this year or next

I just think these dangers are there, I
think that it's difficult sometimes for
people to see how they all come together

I think that it's my duty to tell it to you
if I really believe it, and I do really believe it.

I may be wrong in believing it,
but I do believe it.

What Blair argued was that faced by the
new thr*at of a global terror network

the politician's role was
now to look into the future

and imagine the worst that might happen
and then act ahead of time to prevent it.

It was called the "precautionary principle".

Back in the s, thinkers within the
ecology movement believed the world
was being threatened by global warming.

But at the time there was little
scientific evidence to prove this.

So they put forward the radical idea
that governments had a higher duty:
They couldn't wait for the evidence

because by then it would be too late.

They had to act imaginatively,
on intuition, in order to save the
world from a looming catastrophe.

In essence, the precautionary principle
says that not having the evidence

that something might be a
problem : : , --]
: : , is not a reason for not
taking action as if it were a problem.

That's a very famous triple-negative
phrase that effectively says that
action without evidence is justified.

It requires imagining what
the worst might be and

applying that imagination upon the
worst evidence that currently exists.

Would Al Qaeda buy weapons of mass
destruction if they could? Certainly.

Does it have the financial
resources? Probably. Would it
use such weapons? Definitely.

But once you start imagining what
could happen, then there's no limit.

What if they had access to it?
What if they could effectively deploy it?
What if we weren't prepared?

What it is is a shift from the sciific,
"What is" evidence-based decision making

to this speculative

imaginary, "What if"
- based, worst case scenario.

And it was this principle that now began to
shape government policy in the w*r on terror.

In both America and Britain, individuals
were detained in high-security prisons,
not for any crimes they had committed

but because the politicians believed
- or imagined - that they might
commit an atrocity in the future

even though there was no
evidence they intended to do this.

The American attorney general
explained this shift to what he
called the "paradigm of prevention."

We had to make a shift in the way we
thought about things. So being reactive

waiting for a crime to be committed,
or waiting for there to be evidence
of the commission of a crime

didn't seem to us to be an appropriate
way to protect the American people.

Under the preventive paradigm,
instead of

holding people accountable for what you
can prove that they have done in the past..

you lock them up based on what you think
or speculate they might do in the future.

And how-how can a person who's
locked up based on what you
think they might do in the future

disprove your speculation?

It's impossible, and so what ends
up happening is the government
short-circuits all the processes
that are designed to distinguish

the innot from the guilty
because they simply don't fit

this mode of locking people up for
what they might do in the future.

The supporters of the
precautionary principle

argue that this loss of rights is the price
that society has to pay when faced by

the unique and terrifying
thr*at of the Al Qaeda network.

But, as this series has shown,
the idea of a hidden, organised
web of terror is largely a fantasy

and by embracing the precautionary
principle, the politicians have
become trapped in a vicious circle:

they imagine the worst about an
organisation that doesn't even exist.

But no one questions this because the very
basis of the precautionary principle

And, instead, those with the darkest
imaginations become the most influential.

You'll hear about meetings where
t*rror1st matters are discussed
in the intelligence community

and always the person with the most
dire assessment, the person with the

who has the kind of, the strongest
sense that something should be done

will frequently carry the day at meetings.

We thus believe the most dire
estimate of what could happen here.

The sense of disbelief has vanished.

So the person with the most vivid
imagination becomes the most powerful.

In a sense, that's correct.

There will be an att*ck. It is "when" within the
United Kingdom. I think the "if" is academic.

It is only a matter of time,
and its potential is huge.

How will we ever know when it's over? How
will we ever know when the thr*at is gone?

In the mindset we are now in

once we declare it to be over
- will be exactly the time that
we believe that they will strike.

You know, uh, it's just-it's the way we
live today. We're living on a Kn*fe edge.

This story began over years ago as
the dream that politics could create
a better world began to fall apart.

Out of that collapse came two groupse
Islamists and the neoconservatives.

Looking back, we can now see that these
groups were the last political idealists

who in an age of growing disillusion

tried to reassert the inspirational
power of political visions

that would give meaning to
people's lives. We will fight for
an Islamic State, we will die for it!

We will fight for an Islamic State,
we will die for it!

But both have failed in their attempts to
transform the world and We will fight
for an Islamic State, we will die for it!

But both have failed in their
attempts to transform the world

and instead, together they have created
today's strange fantasy of fear which
politicians have seized on. : ,
--] : : , Because 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.

And we have seen Americans in
uniform storming mountain strongholds
and charging through sandstorms.

We have fought the
t*rrorists across the earth

because the lives of our citizens are at
stake. And America and the world are safer.

The stakes are high.

We are a nation at w*r, a global
w*r on terror against the enemy
unlike we've ever known before.

Faced with that choice I will
defend America every time.

In a society that believes in nothing,
fear becomes the only agenda.

Whist the th century was
dominated between a conflict

between a free-market
Right and a socialist Left

even though both of those outlooks
had their limitations and their problems

at least they believed in something,
whereas what we are seeing now is
a society that believes in nothing.

And a society that believes in
nothing is particularly frightened
by people who believe in anything.

And, therefore, we label those people
as fundamentalists or fanatics

and they have much greater purchase
in terms of the fear that they instill
in society than they truly deserve.

But that's a measure of how much
we have become isolated and atomised
rather than of their inherent strength

Butthe fear will not last

and just as the dreams that politicians
once promised turned out to be
illusions, so, too, will the nightmares

and then our politicians
will have to face the fact

that they have no visions,
either good or bad, to offer us any longer.