BBC: THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: "The Shadows in the Caves" Part 3, first half
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The Power of Nightmares
Transcript of the first half of Episode 3, “The Shadows in the Cave”
full-length Bittorrent file
part 1 transcript
part 2 transcript
Originally aired on BBC 2, 3 November 2004, 9 pm
Written and produced by Adam Curtis
Transcribed by Mike Conley
NOTE by Mike Conley: Portions of the audio are difficult to understand; where possible, I provide my best guess at the actual words spoken, and precede them with a {?} indicator. Corrections from those with better hearing, audio equipment, or sensitivity to Arabic accents are welcome.
VO: 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 threat that needs to be fought by a war on terror. But much of this threat 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.
VO: 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 ‘90s with both groups marginalized and out of power. But with the attacks of September 11th, 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.
[ OPENING TITLES : THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES / THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR / THE SHADOWS IN THE CAVE ]
[ TITLE: AFGHANISTAN 1998 ]
VO: At the end of the 1990s, Osama bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan. He was accompanied by Ayman Zawahiri, the most influential ideologist of the Islamist movement. For 20 years, Zawahiri had struggled to create revolutions in the Arab world, but all attempt had ended in bloody failure.
[ EXCERPT , CNN EXCLUSIVE VIDEO ]
INTERVIEWER (in Arabic, English subtitles): We haven’t had any information about your whereabouts for some time. Where were you?
AYMAN ZAWAHIRI: {?} I was just home and clubs.
INTERVIEWER: Not in Afghanistan? Somewhere else?
ZAWAHIRI: Everywhere, everywhere.
INTERVIEWER : Everywhere?
ZAWAHIRI: 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.
INTERVIEWER: {?} Yes, but isn’t what you do not to do with arms?
ZAWAHIRI: {?} It?s aggressive but ask Allah, and he is greater than superpower.
VO: Zawahiri was a follower of the Egyptian revolutionary, Sayyed Qutb, who had been executed in 1966. 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 80s and 90s, Zawahiri had tried to persuade the masses to rise up and topple the rulers who had allowed this corruption to infect their countries.
[ EXCERPT , VIDEOTAPE OF SADAT ASSASSINATION ]
[ CUT TO AYMAN ZAWAHIRI IN EGYPTIAN COURTROOM CELL ]
ZAWAHIRI [haranguing courtroom]: We want to speak to the whole world. Who are we?
VO: But the revolutionaries became trapped in a horrific escalation of violence, 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.
GILLES KEPEL , HISTORIAN OF ISLAMIST MOVEMENT: 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 régimes—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.
[ TITLE : NAIROBI , AUGUST 1998 ]
VO: Zawahiri and bin Laden began implementing this new strategy in August, 1998. Two huge suicide bombs were detonated outside American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. The bombings had a dramatic effect on the West. For the first time, the name “bin Laden” entered the public consciousness as a terrorist mastermind.
[ CUT TO AFGHANISTAN ]
VO: The suicide 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 régimes in their own countries, such as Uzbekistan, Kashmir, and Chechnia. Their aim was to establish Islamist societies in the Western 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.
[ EXCERPT , CNN EXCLUSIVE VIDEO : BIN LADEN, SURROUNDED BY ARMED , MASKED SOLDIERS ]
VO: 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 him.
[ CUT TO MANHATTAN CITYSCAPE ]
[ TITLE : MANHATTAN , JANUARY 2001 ]
VO: In January, 2001, 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.
JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, “AL QAEDA” : During the investigation of the 1998 bombings, there is a walk-in source, Jamal al-Fadl, who is a Sudanese militant who was with bin Laden in the early 90s, 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—uh—the American government, effectively, as a key prosecution witness and is given a huge amount of American taxpayers’ money at the same time. And his account is used as raw material to build up a picture of Al Qaeda. The picture that the FBI want to 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, drugs 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.
VO: The picture al-Fadl drew for the Americans of bin Laden was of an all-powerful figure at the head of a large terrorist 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.
[ EXCERPT, CNN EXCLUSIVE VIDEO : BIN LADEN AND SOLDIERS ]
VO: The reality was that bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had become the focus of a loose association of disillusioned Islamist militants who were attracted 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 11th, when he realized that this was the term the Americans have given it.
[ CUT TO MANHATTAN SKYLINE ]
VO: 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 terrorist organisation that they needed to prosecute bin Laden.
SAM SCHMIDT , DEFENCE LAWYER EMBASSY BOMBINGS TRIAL: 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.
BURKE : 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 terrorist network with an organised capability simply does not exist.
VO: 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.
[ CUT TO MANHATTAN SKYLINE : WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWERS . ONE TOWER HAS BEEN HIT , AND IS ON FIRE .]
MAN (off-camera) : What’s this other jet doing? What’s this other jet doing?
WOMAN (off-camera) : What the hell’s that?
[ AIRCRAFT ENTERS VIEW FROM LEFT , CRASHES INTO SECOND TOWER. FIREBALL ERUPTS .]
MAN : Holy—fuck!
WOMAN : Oh my God! Oh my God! Jesus fucking Christ!
[ ARM PASSES BEFORE CAMERA LENS ]
MAN #2 : Don’t touch it!
WOMAN [ SOBBING ]: Oh my God! Oh my God!
[ OTHER EXCLAMATIONS AND SOBBING IN BACKGROUND AS SMOKE BILLOWS FROM TOWERS ]
VO: The attack on America by 19 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 brainchild of an 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 attacks, 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 terrorist network which was called, “Al Qaeda.”
[ CUT TO INTERIOR, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, UNITED STATES CONGRESS ]
GEORGE W BUSH , PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES [ ON SPEAKER’S PODIUM ] : Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime. There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 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.
[ CUT TO PENTAGON BRIEFING ROOM ]
DONALD RUMSFELD , SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: This one network, Al Qaeda, that’s receiving so much discussion and publicity make have activities in 50 to 60 countries, including the United States.
[ CUT TO OTHER INTERIOR, PODIUM ]
BUSH: Our war is against networks and groups, people who coddle them, people who try to hide them, people who fund them. This is our calling.
VO: And the attacks 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 r?gime.
[ TITLE : SEPTEMBER 2000 ]
[ CUT TO PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE ]
BUSH : 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.”
[ TITLE: BUT NOW ]
BUSH : We’re going to find those who, uh, who, uh, uh, those evil-doers.
VO: But now, the neoconservatives became all-powerful, because this terror network proved that what they had been predicting through the 1990s 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 attacks. At its heart were Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, along with the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and Richard Perle, who was a senior advisor to the Pentagon. The last time these men had been in power together was 20 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 war on terror in the same epic terms.
RICHARD PERLE , CHAIRMAN PENTAGON DEFENSE POLICY BOARD 2001-2003: 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 war on terror. It isn’t a war on terror, it’s a war on terrorists 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.
VO: But, as previous episodes have shown, the neoconservatives distorted and exaggerated the Soviet threat. 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. They took a failing movement which had lost mass support 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.
VINCENT CANNISTRARO , HEAD OF COUNTER – TERRORISM , CIA , 1988-90: 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 wanted to take over our country, wanted to take over our people, our classrooms, our society. It was that kind of concept of evil that they took—an exaggerated one, to be sure—and then apply it to a new threat, 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 kill it, and that will make it go away.
[ CUT TO TANKS AND VEHICLES ROLLING DOWN A ROAD IN AFGHANISTAN ]
VO: And so the Americans set off to invade Afghanistan, to find and destroy the heart of this network.
[ TITLE: AFGHANISTAN, NOVEMBER 2001 ]
[ CUT TO DESOLATE TERRAIN , MOUNTAINS IN BACKGROUND , SHOOTING IN FOREGROUND ]
VO: To do this, the Americans allied themselves with a group called the Northern Alliance. They were a loose collection of warlords, fighting a war 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.
[ NORTHERN ALLIANCE TROOPS RETRIEVE IDENTITY PAPERS FROM DEAD TALIBAN FIGHTERS . ONE HOLDS AN IDENTITY CARD UP TO THE CAMERA ]
NORTHERN ALLIANCE SOLDIER : Pakistan, eh! Pakistan! Pakistan!
VO: And now, they took their revenge on the foreign fighters. The Americans believed that these men were Al Qaeda terrorists, and the Northern Alliance did nothing to disabuse them of this, because they were paid by the Americans for each prisoner they delivered. But the majority of these fighters had never had anything to do with bin Laden or international terrorism. Both they and the Taliban were radical nationalists who wanted to create Islamist societies in their own countries. But now, they were either killed or taken off to Guantánamo 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.
[ TITLE : TORA BORA ]
VO: 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.
[ EXCERPT , “MEET THE PRESS ,” NBC TV ]
TIM RUSSERT : The search for Osama bin Laden: 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.
DONALD RUMSFELD [ OFF CAMERA ]: Oh, no.
[ CUT TO DIAGRAM OF HIDDEN CAVE HEADQUARTERS MARKED “SOURCE: THE TIMES OF LONDON”, DEPICTING A MULTI-STORY UNDERGROUND COMMAND POST ]
RUSSERT : This is it. This is a fortress.
RUMSFELD: Yes.
RUSSERT : A complex. Multi-tiered. [ READING , AS LABELS ARE DISPLAYED ON DIAGRAM ] “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.
[ CUT TO STUDIO ]
RUMSFELD : Oh, you bet. This—this is serious business. And—and there’s not one of those; there are many of those.
[ CUT TO TORA BORA , AFGHANISTAN : B-52S BOMBING MOUNTAINS ]
VO: 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 terrorists and their leader.
[ NORTHERN ALLIANCE SOLDIERS SEARCHING CAVE OPENINGS ]
VO: But all they found were a few small caves, which were either empty or had been used to store ammunition. 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 that the Northern Alliance was simply kidnapping anyone who looked remotely like an Arab and selling them to the Americans for yet more money.
[ FADE TO AMERICAN FORCES IN TORA BORA ]
VO: The Americans now began to search all the caves in all the mountains in eastern Afghanistan for the hidden Al Qaeda network.
AMERICAN SOLDIER , SPEAKING INTO RADIO : We found a cave. The rest of it is open. Break.
[ CUT TO INTERIOR , COMMAND POST ]
AMERICAN ARMY SERGEANT : If nobody went up to look into that cave, people could’ve been hiding up there for days and watching everything that we did.
[ CUT TO VIEW OF MISSILE STRIKING CAVE OPENING , SOLDIERS INSPECT DAMAGE ]
VO: But wherever they looked, there was nothing there. Al Qaeda seemed to have completely disappeared.
[ FADE TO VIEW OF HELICOPTERS FLYING OVER AFGHANISTAN MOUNTAIN RANGE ]
VO: 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.
[ CLOSE UP ON BRIGADIER ROGER LANE , COMMANDER , BRITISH FORCES , ADDRESSING AN OFF-CAMERA AUDIENCE ]
BRIGADIER LANE : The hunt for Al Qaeda Taliban goes on, and we stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States and our other coalition allies in the global war on terrorism.
[ TITLE : FIVE WEEKS LATER ]
INTERVIEWER : But how many Al Qaeda have you captured?
LANE : We haven’t, uh, captured any Al Qaeda, but…
INTERVIEWER : And how many have you actually managed to kill here in south-east Afghanistan?
LANE : We haven’t killed any.
[ EXCERPT , THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD : MARKETPLACE SCENE , SCROLL IS UNROLLED READING :
Ten thousand pieces of gold for the body of Ali Baba and the destruction of the band of thieves.
by order of
Hulagu, Khan of the Mongols
and Ruler of Baghdad ]
[ SCENES OF MEN ON HORSEBACK JUMPING CHASMS AND ESCAPING ]
[ CUT TO CNN EXCLUSIVE VIDEO OF BIN LADEN , WAVING .]
[ FADE TO BLACK ]
<Continues below.........> |
