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Explosive BBC Doc Exposes Decades-Old Neocon Deceits

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Votingisanillusion

Senior member
Explosive BBC Doc Exposes
Decades-Old Neocon Deceits
Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power
By Thom Hartmann
12-28-4


For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete transcript is here: http://www.silt3.com/index.php?id=573


What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War?

What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?

What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life?

What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam?

What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?

And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today?

It happened.

The myth-shattering event took place in England the first three weeks of October, when the BBC aired a three-hour documentary written and produced by Adam Curtis, titled "The Power of Nightmares http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm

If the emails and phone calls many of us in the US received from friends in the UK - and debate in the pages of publications like The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/terr...,12780,1327904,00.html are any indicator, this was a seismic event, one that may have even provoked a hasty meeting between Blair and Bush a few weeks later. According to this carefully researched and well-vetted BBC documentary, Richard Nixon, following in the steps of his mentor and former boss Dwight D. Eisenhower, believed it was possible to end the Cold War and eliminate fear from the national psyche. The nation need no longer be afraid of communism or the Soviet Union.

Nixon worked out a truce with the Soviets, meeting their demands for safety as well as the US needs for security, and then announced to Americans that they need no longer be afraid. In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the beginning of a process Kissinger called "détente."

On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a speech in which he said, "Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. 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 Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear.

Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated? Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War. And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the Soviets had secret weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about. And, they said, because of those weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work.

"The Soviet Union has been busy," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld explained to America in 1976. "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."

The CIA strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction" and pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone. But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.

According to Curtis' BBC documentary, Wolfowitz's group, known as "Team B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology. The BBC's documentarians asked Dr. Anne Cahn of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during that time, her thoughts on Rumsfeld's, Cheney's, and Wolfowitz's 1976 story of the secret Soviet WMDs. Here's a clip from a transcript of that BBC documentary:

"Dr ANNE CAHN, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-80: 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.'

"INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence.

"CAHN: Even though there was no evidence.

"INTERVIEWER: So they're saying there, that the fact that the weapon doesn't exist.

"CAHN: Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we haven't found it."

The moderator of the BBC documentary then notes:

"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 régime. 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."

Nonetheless, as Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs, 1976-87, noted in the BBC documentary,

"Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. 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 war."

Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.

But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs.

Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact, decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating. As arms-control expert Cahn noted in the documentary of those 1970s claims by Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld:

"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 weapon,' when in fact it was nothing of the sort. ... 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."

"INTERVIEWER: All of them?

"CAHN: All of them.

"INTERVIEWER: Nothing true?

"CAHN: I don't believe anything in [Wolfowitz's 1977] Team B was really true."

But the neocons said it was true, and organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger http://www.fightingterror.org - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom neocons would later become lobbyists.

And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the United States, and making themselves and their defense contractor friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world.

The Cold War was good for business, and good for the political power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Reagan.

Similarly, according to this documentary, the War On Terror is the same sort of scam, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq - we may well be bringing into reality terrors and forces that previously existed only on the margins and with very little power to harm us.

Curtis' documentary suggests that the War On Terror is just as much a fiction as were the super-WMDs this same group of neocons said the Soviets had in the 70s. He suggests we've done more to create terror than to fight it. That the risk was really quite minimal (at least until we invaded Iraq), and the terrorists are - like most terrorist groups - simply people on the fringes, rather easily dispatched by their own people. He even points out that Al Qaeda itself was a brand we invented, later adopted by bin Laden because we'd put so many millions into creating worldwide name recognition for it.

Watching "The Terror of Nightmares" is like taking the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix.

It's the story of idealism gone wrong, of ideologies promoted in the US by Leo Strauss and his followers (principally Wolfowitz, Feith, and Pearle), and in the Muslim world by bin Laden's mentor, Ayman Zawahiri. Both sought to create a utopian world through world domination; both believe that the ends justify the means; both are convinced that "the people" must be frightened into embracing religion and nationalism for the greater good of morality and a stable state. Each needs the other in order to hold power.

Whatever your plans are for tonight or tomorrow, clip three hours out of them and take the Red Pill. Get a pair of headphones (the audio is faint), plug them into your computer, and visit an unofficial archive of the Curtis' BBC documentary at the Information Clearing House website http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm (The first hour of the program, in a more viewable format, is also available here http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2004/ 121104powerofnightmares.htm

For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete transcript is on this Belgian site http://www.acutor.be/silt/index.php?id=573

But be forewarned: You'll never see political reality - and certainly never hear the words of the Bush or Blair administrations - the same again.

===

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. http://www.thomhartmann.com
 
The God of big party politicians is money, either from big business or cushy jobs between political appointments. Always has been and always will be.

The God of big business is big party politicians who sit on boards, commissions, or otherwise have influence to lobby for them. Always has been and always will be.

EDIT: Still waiting for an ounce of accountability to exist in big party politics in large nations. Last time I heard of accountability was during the Srebrenica massacre when the entire Dutch government resigned over failures in handling their UN troops to protect civilians. Now that's accountability. CNN Link
 
I can't speak to other Russian weapons systems, but I am pretty familiar with one. This system was developed in Russia and retained by some of the NIS where it was improved. It is a totally passive system that detects anything.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/...d/ukraine/kolchuga.htm

Besides the obvious point that the supposed deciet crossed several administrations, both Republican and Democrat to include Clinton without any great revelation, Russia just announced what? A new delivary vehicle! Russian technology is pretty rough stuff, but it works and does exist. Some of their aircraft are awesome. Who is attending the space station with old, but functional technology these days? Russia!

Did they have the will to attack? Don't know, they didn't. Why didn't they? Because we made it appear that they cost to them would be high, beyond what they wanted to pay? Maybe! Did they have the will to imprison and enslave a huge percentage of their own population? Yep! Remember the Gulag! History and fact is difficult to distort even by the British press. The Brits certainly aren't attending the space station with their superior technology, are they?
 
You want some sad reality?

Besides us here on the board and a few other people. I doubt anyone cares.

I explain stories like this to many people I know and the general reaction I get is "uh huh" *blank look*.

I think most people don't give a rats ass and don't feel its important to them. To most people their family is important, their job and maybe what they gona do for the weekend. Beyond that they don't care.

Is it any surprise that politicians can get away with anything? Not to me. Afteral if you can keep a family fed, employed and appeal to their family values then you can get away with virtually anything.

I may be wrong but that's the impression I get from a half decent cross section of various sorts of people I know and work with.
 
History will show U.S. lusted after oil

Linda McQuaig

Toronto Star

12/26/04 "Toronto Star" -- Decades from now, historians will likely calmly discuss the war currently raging in Iraq, and identify oil as one of the key factors that led to it.

They will point to the growing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, the importance of oil in the rising competition between the U.S. and China, and the huge untapped store of oil lying unprotected under the Iraqi sand. It will all probably seem fairly obvious.

Just don't expect to hear this sort of discussion now, however, when it might actually make a difference.

In fact, a year-and-a-half into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, with the carnage over there spiralling ever more out of control, don't expect media discussions of Iraq to stray much beyond the issue of "fighting terrorism."

Indeed, while ordinary people around the world apparently suspect Washington was motivated by oil, not terrorism, there continues to be a strange unwillingness in the mainstream media to probe such a possibility.

Perhaps it simply sounds too crass.

It implies that those at the very top of the U.S. government willingly sacrificed countless lives to further a cause that has nothing to do with liberty or democracy.

This sort of allegation certainly doesn't fit with the respectful, even deferential approach generally taken in the U.S. media towards George W. Bush, just chosen Time magazine's Man of the Year.

Raising the oil factor also perhaps sounds unsophisticated. Some commentators, like syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer, scoff at the notion of an oil motive, suggesting it's not necessary to invade countries to get their oil: "You just write them a cheque."

But buying oil isn't the goal; getting control of it is.

Dyer's cheque-book solution wouldn't have solved much back in 1973, when the Arab oil embargo temporarily left the U.S. unable to satisfy its voracious appetite for oil.

That created a deep sense of vulnerability ? a rare experience for the world's most powerful country. Preventing the U.S. from ever being vulnerable like that again has been a key objective of American strategic planners ever since.

The 1973 embargo sparked a new hawkishness in Washington. An article in the March, 1975, issue of Harper's, titled "Seizing Arab Oil," unabashedly outlined plans for a U.S. invasion to seize key Middle East oilfields and prevent Arab countries from having such control over the modern world's most vital commodity.

The author, writing under a pseudonym, wasn't just any old right-wing blowhard; it turned out to be Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

But seizing Arab oilfields was too risky as long as the Soviet Union existed. The Soviet collapse in 1991 opened up new possibilities.

Kissinger's old idea was taken up with new interest by a small group of right-wing Republicans who, in the late 1990s, formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In a 1998 letter, the PNAC urged President Bill Clinton to overthrow Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, whose potential control over "a significant portion of the world's oil" was considered a "hazard."

One could dismiss the PNAC as just another group of right-wing blowhards ? except that the group included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who became key figures in the Bush administration and principal architects of the Iraq war.

Is it really such a stretch to imagine that, only a few years after forming the PNAC, oil was still on their minds?

"The plan to take over Iraq is a revival of an old plan that first appeared in 1975. It was the Kissinger plan," James Akins, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Kissinger, told me in an interview in Washington in 2003.

Dyer insists that the Iraq invasion wasn't about oil, but about extending U.S. power. But these goals go hand in glove.

Gaining control over oil is crucial to extending U.S. power, and will be even more so in the coming years as the world's easily-accessible oil reserves are depleted, creating ever fiercer competition for what remains.

All this will make controlling the Middle East that much more crucial. Or, as Cheney put it in a speech to the London Institute of Petroleum in 1999, when he was CEO of oil giant Halliburton: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

Now that he's vice-president, Cheney no longer talks about the Middle East as "the prize." He talks about it as the place terrorism must be confronted.

Call me unsophisticated, but it seems to me that politicians often try to disguise what they're really up to, and we have to wait decades for historians to point out the obvious.
 
What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War?

What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?

What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life?

What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam?
Click to expand...

What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War?
There was no need, either side had an entirely different ideals that conflicted with the others. Neither trusted the other. Look at Eastern Europe for proof.

What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?
Both sides had WMDs. Both sides were scared of the others percieved global ambitions. Both sides had proxies that had WMDS stationed there.
What is phony abount WMDs.

What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life?
How many times within the last 30+ years have there been terror attacks; all over the world. Unless you do not count killing people for no political gain but to generate fear in the population and publicity.

What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam?
No one is attacking Islam. What is being attack are those groups (no matter what their alignment is) that choose to associate themselves with terror to accompl,ish political means rather than work within the goverment system that they profess to be trying to change.
the situation with iIsalm is that the beliefs are being spouited and twisted by fanatics. The mainstream seems to be willing to accept these fanatics rather than denounce them. The mainstream government treats the fanatics and the leaders with kid gloves. Why? Only when pressure is brought in from outside, do the governments respond by "attempting to control" the fanatics.
 
Both sides had WMDs. Both sides were scared of the others percieved global ambitions. Both sides had proxies that had WMDS stationed there.
Click to expand...

It's true that the USSR had WMDs - however, the "Power of Nightmares" documentary specifically talks about the exaggeration of the threat that the USSR posed later on in the Cold War. The Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars") is a definitive example of this. Billions of dollars, if not trillions, were spent on technology that never really panned out, because people in the Reagan administration made it sound like the USSR a) was just about to have its own anti-missile technology and b) willing to use nukes in warfare once these anti-missile defenses were in place. Some conservatives tout SDI as a key factor in the collapse of Soviet-style communism.

The truth was that the USSR was already in a financial crisis, and wasn't nearly as advanced in anti-nuke defenses as they were made out to be. They simply couldn't afford to devote money to research in the same way the US did. It's true that this crisis was at least partly fueled by military build-up, but a lot of it was tied up in building up the nuke stockpiles themselves - not the countermeasures. There were also just general economic problems.

Much as with Iraq in 2003, though, the neocons weren't especially interested in the truth - they wanted a black-and-white, us-versus-them fight where the nation could be "strengthened" by fighting for a common cause, even if that cause wasn't nearly as noble as the PR made it seem.


No one is attacking Islam. What is being attack are those groups (no matter what their alignment is) that choose to associate themselves with terror to accompl,ish political means rather than work within the goverment system that they profess to be trying to change.
the situation with iIsalm is that the beliefs are being spouited and twisted by fanatics. The mainstream seems to be willing to accept these fanatics rather than denounce them. The mainstream government treats the fanatics and the leaders with kid gloves. Why? Only when pressure is brought in from outside, do the governments respond by "attempting to control" the fanatics.
Click to expand...

What the documentary mainly attacks is the almost mythical structure of al-Qaeda; they even suggest in "Power of Nightmares" that al-Qaeda is more a conservative's construction of another boogeyman than a real entity. It's not that bin Laden, Zawahiri, et. al. aren't real threats, but that the US imagines that there are legions of 'sleeper cells' when, in fact, the group is considerably smaller. The BBC talks about something I remember fairly vividly: the paranoiac fear that al-Qaeda was going to attack anything and anyone in the states at any moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The neocons played up that fear and exploited it to further their aims, just as bin Laden and company exploit radical Islam for their own ends.

And for what it's worth, I reject the notion that outside pressure is needed to control fanaticism in the Middle East - that's a wishful US fantasy, where only the guiding light of the US can bring wisdom to foreign nations. A number of countries keep tabs on fanatics of their own accord. Egypt, for example, has managed to prevent radical Muslims from taking significant control of Egyptian politics. I don't support the corruption in the Egyptian government, but they haven't really needed outside help to at least keep overt attempts at bay.
 
Originally posted by: Votingisanillusion
Why was this aired by the BBC and not by ABC, CBS, NBC?
Are some shares of ABC, CBS, NBC owned by some weapons corps?
Should you throw away your TV?
Click to expand...

I'll take "Dumbfvckistan" for $500 Alex.
 
Originally posted by: BarneyFife
Originally posted by: NightCrawler
Sure cause there are no radical Islamic terrorist.....sigh.
Click to expand...



Well I'm beginning to think that Osama Bin Laden is a fictional character.
Click to expand...

Exacly, there are like 10 guys and they are all cripples:

the main guy in iraq has a fake leg.
osama got bad kidneys and is on dialisys machine
the hamas guythey killed was a wheelchair bound and deaf and blind
the other guy in iraq is blind in one eye.
sadam is mentally insane and had prostate cancer or something
and the palestinian leader .......we dont know what he had he just "died from the plague."

 
Too many Americans revel in their self-indulgent ignorance, and the rest of us pay the price. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
 
Originally posted by: Votingisanillusion
Why was this aired by the BBC and not by ABC, CBS, NBC?
Are some shares of ABC, CBS, NBC owned by some weapons corps?
Should you throw away your TV?
Click to expand...
Probably the same reason that people like Greg Palast and Seymour Hersh get little or no coverage by our mainstream "liberal" media.

Anyone who thinks that our mainstream media is controlled by liberals or has a decided liberal slant is simply delusional.
 
Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: Votingisanillusion
Why was this aired by the BBC and not by ABC, CBS, NBC?
Are some shares of ABC, CBS, NBC owned by some weapons corps?
Should you throw away your TV?
Click to expand...
Probably the same reason that people like Greg Palast and Seymour Hersh get little or no coverage by our mainstream "liberal" media.

Anyone who thinks that our mainstream media is controlled by liberals or has a decided liberal slant is simply delusional.
Click to expand...

/em piles the straight-jackets for many an ATP&N'er...
 
Originally posted by: conjur

Anyone who thinks that our mainstream media is controlled by liberals or has a decided liberal slant is simply delusional.
Click to expand...

I guess using this logic that virtually all of my college professors should be placed in rubber rooms or be wearing helmets while tethered to jungle gyms...just to note it was a highly liberal college in western mass and virtually all of my professors were self proclaimed uber liberals as well making said allegations...

controlled by liberals most certainly not but those who do the actual reporting are self proclaimed liberals and their bias often times shows in their reporting.
 
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