Aljazeera reports on a new British documentary film now showing at Cannes which portrays George Bush, the neocons, and Tony Blair as having exaggerated the threat from Al Qaeda.
"The Power of Nightmares" aired in Britain as a three part series months ago, and won a British film and television industry award (Bafta).
The 2 1/2 hour film by filmmaker and senior BBC producer Adam Curtis
kept an audience of journalists and film buyers glued to their seats and taking notes...
More "Nightmares" below the jump
The film... argues that the fear of terrorism has come to pervade politics ...even though much of that angst is based on carefully nurtured illusions... similar to the way earlier generations of leaders inflated the danger of communism and the Soviet Union...
Curtis's film portrays neo-cons Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld as counterparts to Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in the two respective movements.
...In Bush's government, those underlings who put forth the darkest scenarios of the phantom threat have the most influence, says Curtis, who also devotes segments of his film to criticize unquestioning media and zealous security agencies...According to Curtis, Osama bin Laden has a far less powerful organization than feared....
"It was an attempt at historical explanation for September 11," Curtis said...
"Moore is a political agitprop filmmaker," he said. "I am not. You'd be hard pushed to tell my politics from watching it."
The BBC calls "The Power of Nightmares" a
"powerful film...organisers approached Curtis and asked him to make the three-part documentary into a single film to be shown Out of Competition at the festival...he considers himself to be a journalist and not a film-maker."
Well, the timing couldn't better, but it will be hard to get American audiences to pay money to see this (I fell asleep in Moore's film, I must admit, and there were only about 30 other people in the theater here in Dallas). It makes me wonder if we couldn't get the original television series spiffed up and get that shown somewhere.
Curtis apparently is convinced that the whole Al Qaeda thing is overblown...maybe that explains the chimps "I don't think about it any more" comment. Somebody told him it was just a ruse.
Any Brits out there on the miracle that is the internet? did you see this on the telly? tell us it wasn't bloody boring....