This is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. I have to say that I didn't realise that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz (sp?) had been active for so long in providing complete misinformation to the American people and the world.
"In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams weren't true, neither are these nightmares.
This series shows dramatically how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media. 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. These two groups have changed the world but not in the way either intended. Together they created today's nightmare vision of an organised terror network. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.
The rise of the Politics of Fear begins in 1949 with two men whose radical ideas would inspire the attack of 9/11 and influence the neoconservative movement that dominates Washington. Both these men believed that modern liberal freedoms were eroding the bonds that held society together. The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neoconservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision. They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see. The Islamists were faced by the refusal of the masses to follow their dream and began to turn to terror to force the people to 'see the truth'."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/listings/programme.shtml?day=yesterday&service_id=4224&filename=20041020/20041020_2100_4224_40078_60According to this programme, in the mid 70s the CIA had done a huge study and said that there was no evidence whatsover to suggest that the Russians were rebuilding military capabilities, and in addition their air defenses were in complete disarray.
Of course, this didn't stop Rumsfeld appearing at press conferences and proclaiming, with NO EVIDENCE WHATSOVER, that the Russians were re-arming (contrary to signed agreements) and they were only pretending their air defenses were a shambles to lure the US into a false sense of security.
Rumsfeld also claimed, again with no evidence, that the Russians had developed a non-acoustic method for tracking US submarines and that therefore the entire US fleet was under threat. His reasoning for this? Well, usually subs are tracked by acoustic methods, which can be detected by the Navy. Since the Navy couldn't find any evidence of Russia tracking US subs with acoustic means, clearly the Russians must have developed some undetectable new tracking technology.....In actual fact, the Russian Navy was so rundown that they had NO method for tracking US subs, but Rumsfeld considered it more likely that they had an unheard of, unknown, hugely technologically advanced but undetectable means of doing so....
Basically, Rumsfeld and his neoCon buddies were 100% convinced that the Russians were up to something. Any evidence produced to the contrary merely meant the the Russians were doing it "in secret" with technology we couldn't track, and the apparent shambles in the Russian military was just them trying to throw us off guard.
Really, really scary stuff, including the CIA helping to set up Egyptian secret services and how Islamic terrorists were tortured until, ironically, they ended up becoming even more fundamental...
Watch it if you can.
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