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Abused By Illusions

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Explosive BBC Doc Exposes Decades-Old Neocon Deceits

This documentary aired in October by the BBC shows how the very same people that today are using fear to control the American public did this once before. They extended the Cold War threat by 20 years by selling a horror song and dance using their machines of propaganda and are doing it again. The sad part is most Americans will never see this documentary and will thus remain uninformed about how we were then manipulated and how today were are manipulated by a new CREATED fear called the war on terrorism.

Our own country spent millions in marketing the brand Al-Qaeda worldwide before it was co-opted by Bin Laden. The present administration's idea of fighting terror is nothing more than a clever mind game of fighting terror by instilling terror. Thus, they gain more and more political power and at the same time enrich themselves utilizing this same fear.

C.I. Abramson
The Transcripts for "The Power of Nightmares" can be seen at Silt3.

Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power
By Thom Hartmann
12-28-4

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/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.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.

Read the full story at Rense!

Posted by CIAbramson at 1:48 PM