BBC Programme "Power of Nightmares". Update - you need to see this

[Pert_UK]

I posted about this programme last week and there was significant interest. Unfortunately the original post is now in the archives and I can't link to it because Advanced Search is disabled until after the elections.

Here's some further info and a response I got from the BBC UK about the email I sent them about getting this fantastic programme out on BBC America.

The programme included unbelievable footage of Rumsfeld in the mid-70s doing what he still does now - maintaining that the US faced an imminent deadly threat and had to act now, despite all available evidence and the opinion of the CIA pointed to the fact that Russia was falling apart and harmless. Essentially, the Republican government had set up a group (called Team B) which had the job of making scary shit up and then claiming it was true (OK, I'm exaggerating, but to all intents and purposes this is how it worked).

Info:

"In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives 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. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful. 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 two movements..set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neo-conservatives 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://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm

Email I got back from the BBC:

"Dear Pert_UK

Thank you for your e-mail regarding 'The Power of Nightmares'.

Firstly, I am delighted to read that you enjoy the programme. We are
always delighted to receive feedback about our programmes, especially
when it is of a positive nature. I have recorded your kind comments and have registered them for the attention of the programme makers. I am sure they will all appreciate your praise.

A video or DVD is not commercially available for this programme and for copyright, contractual reasons we are unable to provide a one-off copy. However, please be assured that I have also registered your interest in such a release. For future reference, you may wish to contact BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC to check the availability of any BBC programme on video or DVD:

BBC Worldwide Products and Sales
PO Box 326
Sittingbourne
Kent
ME9 8FA

Telephone: [phone]
E-mail: [e-mail]
Website: www.bbcworldwide.com

Also, if your friends would like this programme shown on BBC America,
they will need to contact BBC America for further information. They can find the 'Contact Us' section of their website at:

http://www.bbcamerica.com/about/contactus.jsp "

So go to it! Contact BBC America and see if you can persuade them to show this programme!

[Guy_Montag]

1. Kick

[Pert_UK]

2. Can I kick it?

Yes.....yes, I can....

:kick:

P.

[Dem2theMax]

3. Gonna kick now.

And after I go to bed and get back up, I'm going to write to the BBC.

:kick:

[LibLabUK]

4. Kick!

:kick:

Looking forward to the next part (2100 Wed BBC2) about the US and Afghanistan in '80s.

[RainDog]

5. Team B

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=140711

Yes, it's amazing how ignorant "our" media was about the previous TOTALLY WRONG and TOTALLY INSANE intelligence that Rumsfeld, Daniel Pipes and Wolfowitz, among others, fabricated about the threat of the Soviet Union.

But the defense industry made a shitload out of that overestimate, and they were able to cow the American people with their lies.

Sound familiar?

Funny thing is that the CIA, which Team B was contesting as being "too optimistic" about the Soviet threat, were also OVERESTIMATING the capabilities of the Soviet Union.

One reason for this is that the CIA had taken in the Nazi, Rudy Gehlen, after WW2 to use as an intelligence asset. Our govt coddled this Nazi as he fed disinformation to numerous administrations and intelligence heads over the years.

The guy was never held accountable for his crimes.

But then again, Bush Sr., North, Casey, Poindexter, etc. were never held accountable for their crimes during another horror, Iran/Contra, a moment when North, for instance, oversaw the importation of cocaine into the United States.

Salon has a good recap of this sorry moment in American govt and media today from one of the original investigators-

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/25/contra/index_np.html

[htuttle]

6. Thanks for the Team B link

Saves me doing it myself. I think it's very important for people to see who the current crop of administration goons have been engaging in the same pattern of lies and exaggerations for several decades.

[Pert_UK]

7. Indeed....I thought we had it bad enough with Mandelson....

reappearing every few years, but at least he hasn't been consistently misleading the entire nation for over 30 years, apparently without anyone noticing.

In any other area of business Rumsfeld would have been sacked for gross incompetance - unfortunately, it's not genuine incompetance, it's deliberately distorting and ignoring facts in order to steer an entire nation in the direction he wants (and making money all the time too)....

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Regrettably, BBCAmerica is an arm of the Discovery Channel, not the BBC

Most of its schedule is taken up with home improvement and gardening shows, with the occasional ancient comedy series ("Are You Being Served," for example.)

It's worth watching only on Monday nights, when they show contemporary mysteries, such as "Wakikng the Dead," on Thursday nights, when they show modern comedies like "The Office," or on Friday nights, when (and I'm showing my age here), they show reruns of the "The Avengers" and "The Prisoner."

I have never seen a BBC political documentary on that channel. One would have better luck with the Sundance Channel. It sounds perfect for their weekly Monday "Doc Day."

[Pert_UK]

9. I am unfamiliar with "Wakikng the Dead"....

Sounds controversial though!

:evilgrin:

Well, the BBC over here suggested contacting BBCAmerica, but I'm sure they'd sell that documentary to other channels.

Press here are already talking about it being the best Documentary of the year.

P.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. "Waking the Dead" (sorry about the spelling)

is about a cold case squad.

[LibLabUK]

13. Hmm..

"Press here are already talking about it being the best Documentary of the year."

I reckon it would be a death-blow to Bush's campaign if it was shown this week on a major US network.

The video of Rumsfeld lying his arse off is remarkable.

[Gruenemann]

12. Another candidate

World Link TV would show something like this.

[Oilwellian]

11. Much has been written about "Team B"

Such as:

Many of the very same people who deliberately created the misimpression about Iraq to goad the American people into supporting a war had already executed a run-through of the same strategy in the 1970s. Back then, establishment hardliners associated with the now defunct “Committee on the Present Danger” heaped scorn upon the professional intelligence services for their alleged underestimation of Soviet military capabilities. They succeeded in convincing then-CIA Director, George H.W. Bush, to appoint a now infamous "Team B" to go through the same material and come up with an answer that would justify a vast increase in U.S. defense spending. With the powerful political patronage of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, its members, including Paul Wolfowitz, came up with astronomical numbers for alleged Soviet military spending and capabilities. As Newsweek’s Farred Zakaria, a moderately conservative war supporter, has observed, “In retrospect, Team B’s conclusions were wildly off the mark.” It argued, for instance, that back in 1976, the Soviets enjoyed "a large and expanding Gross National Product." It credited them with double the number Backfire bombers the nation could actually produce. It turns out that even the CIA’s much pilloried estimates for Soviet military capabilities were far too generous. Sounding very much as if he were talking about Iraqi WMD capabilities 30 years later, Rumsfeld claimed, “No doubt exists about the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces.”

In fact, in 1989 the agency admitted that, contrary to the Team B analysis, it had "substantially overestimated" the Soviet threat in almost every aspect. And these same Neoconservatives proved extremely critical of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush’s efforts to join with Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War and frequently advised the president and public that both "glasnost" and "perestroika" were "just a trick" to lull the West into subservience. For instance, as late as November 1987, when the rest of the world was extremely eager to take advantage of the chances Gorbachev offered, the United States was hobbled in its efforts to recognize the new reality by neoconservative commentators who, like Charles Krauthammer, complained, "We don't know if Gorbachev is sincere. If he is, we don't know whether he will succeed in winning over his bureaucracy. If he does, we don't know if he will last."

Zakaria also notes that, having been made to look foolish by Gorbachev and losing the Soviet Union as an enemy, neoconservatives tried the same trick with China in the 1990s. Alas, it did not work very well, because China was still a third-world nation with little potential to threaten the United States in any meaningful (i.e. non-suicidal) way. Nevertheless a neocon-dominated document entitled “the Cox Commission Report,” published in 1999, attempted to argue that the Chinese military spending was really double the CIA’s estimate. A generally shoddy job, some of the facts to disprove its wild claims can be found in the report’s own footnotes. But it does help explain the pre-9/11 hysteria on the part of the hardliners like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, when, during the brief China crisis of 2001, they accused President Bush of heaping on the heads of the American people, a “profound national humiliation” in which he “revealed weakness… revealed fear capitulation will also embolden others around the world who have watched this crisis carefully to see the new administration's mettle tested.”

9/11 changed all that, of course, and gave these hardliners just the opportunity they had truly coveted for more than a decade: a chance to “finish” the 1991 Gulf War, in which Saddam Hussein had been expelled from Kuwait, but allowed to remain in power.

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=11003

If you Google "Team B, CIA" there are over 200,000 hits on the subject. Happy reading.

[LibLabUK]

14. There's a copy of the programme floating around...

on the Peer-to-Peer filesharing networks.

It's about 350MB in size though.

[Pert_UK]

15. Gotta kick THAT!...whilst simultaneously condemning any

breach of copyright law....

P.

[jadedcherub]

16. Oh hey. Yeah that's a good show. Here's a link...

Can I post this?

BitTorrent file... 350 megs or so, good seeders ( about 150 )

http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2842/The_Power_Of_Nightmares_pt1-avi.torrent

.jc.

[Pert_UK]

17. Thanks for that - KICK! n/t

:kick:

[RainDog]

18. More Nightmares..."Team SS?"

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/051503a.html

Secret documents declassified by the Clinton administration show that the CIA's collaboration with the ex-Nazis was not merely a marriage of convenience. It was more like a deal with the devil.

The documents reveal that Gehlen had hired and protected hundreds of Nazi war criminals. The more notorious of these Hitler henchmen included Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man in orchestrating the Final Solution, and Emil Augsburg, who directed the Wansee Institute where the Final Solution was formulated and who served in a unit that specialized in the extermination of Jews. Another was the former Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller, Adolf Eichmann's immediate superior whose signature appears on orders written in 1943 for the deportation of 45,000 Jews to Auschwitz for killing.

Furthermore, the Gehlen Org was so thoroughly penetrated by Soviet spies that CIA operations in Eastern Europe often ended in the murder of its agents. To top it off, the Org fed the CIA a steady diet of misinformation that fanned the flames of East-West hostility – and thus assured the Org the continued patronage of Washington.

Many historians of the CIA's early days have concluded that letting the ex-Nazis in was the CIA's original sin, a moral failure that also resulted in the distortion of the intelligence given U.S. policymakers during the crucial early years of the Cold War.

[Guy_Montag]

19. One more kick for luck?

why not?

[jadedcherub]

20. Kickinator strikes again.