[Published on Tuesday, December 7, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power

by Thom Hartmann


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." 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 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.

According to Curtis' BBC documentary, Wolfowitz's group, known as "Team B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology.

The BBC's documentarians asked Dr. Anne Cahn of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during that time, her thoughts on Rumsfeld's, Cheney's, and Wolfowitz's 1976 story of the secret Soviet WMDs. Here's a clip from a transcript of that BBC documentary:

" Dr ANNE CAHN, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-80: They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They’re saying, 'we can’t find evidence that they’re doing it the way that everyone thinks they’re doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don’t know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.'

"INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence.

"CAHN: Even though there was no evidence.

"INTERVIEWER: So they’re saying there, that the fact that the weapon doesn’t exist…

"CAHN: Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It just means that we haven’t found it."

The moderator of the BBC documentary then notes:

" What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn’t found, but they were wrong about many of those they could observe, such as the Soviet air defenses. The CIA were convinced that these were in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos in the Soviet Union. Team B said that this was actually a cunning deception by the Soviet régime. The air-defense system worked perfectly. But the only evidence they produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, which proudly asserted that their air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world."

Nonetheless, as Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs, 1976-87, noted in the BBC documentary,

" Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of that battle, Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA. And their mission was to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war."

Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.

But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs.

Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact, decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating.

As arms-control expert Cahn noted in the documentary of those 1970s claims by Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld:

"I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, 'This is a laser beam weapon,' when in fact it was nothing of the sort. ... And if you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."

"INTERVIEWER: All of them?

"CAHN: All of them.

"INTERVIEWER: Nothing true?

"CAHN: I don’t believe anything in [Wolfowitz's 1977] Team B was really true."

But the neocons said it was true, and organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom neocons would later become lobbyists.

And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the United States, and making themselves and their defense contractor friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world.

The Cold War was good for business, and good for the political power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Reagan.

Similarly, according to this documentary, the War On Terror is the same sort of scam, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq - we may well be bringing into reality terrors and forces that previously existed only on the margins and with very little power to harm us.

Curtis' documentary suggests that the War On Terror is just as much a fiction as were the super-WMDs this same group of neocons said the Soviets had in the 70s. He suggests we've done more to create terror than to fight it. That the risk was really quite minimal (at least until we invaded Iraq), and the terrorists are - like most terrorist groups - simply people on the fringes, rather easily dispatched by their own people. He even points out that Al Qaeda itself was a brand we invented, later adopted by bin Laden because we'd put so many millions into creating worldwide name recognition for it.

Watching "The Terror of Nightmares" is like taking the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix.

It's the story of idealism gone wrong, of ideologies promoted in the US by Leo Strauss and his followers (principally Wolfowitz, Feith, and Pearle), and in the Muslim world by bin Laden's mentor, Ayman Zawahiri. Both sought to create a utopian world through world domination; both believe that the ends justify the means; both are convinced that "the people" must be frightened into embracing religion and nationalism for the greater good of morality and a stable state. Each needs the other in order to hold power.

Whatever your plans are for tonight or tomorrow, clip three hours out of them and take the Red Pill. Get a pair of headphones (the audio is faint), plug them into your computer, and visit an unofficial archive of the Curtis' BBC documentary at the Information Clearing House website. (The first hour of the program, in a more viewable format, is also available here.)

For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete transcript is on this Belgian site.

But be forewarned: You'll never see political reality - and certainly never hear the words of the Bush or Blair administrations - the same again.

Link (http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1207-26.htm)


It is no mystery why Dirty Dick was kept on the ticket for '04, and that Rumsphuck will stay at on DoD, hmm?

Not wanting to jump off of a limb here, but the documentary seems flawed at its based. That being the concept, inception and workability of Detente.

For instance it was the West Germany that actually coined the phrase and began to force everyone's hand before the concept was brought to American shores.

Second, the Salt I treaty which I believe the article is referring to was again completely flawed because although it limited one aspect of weapons it did nothing to the "new" weapons known as MIRV (Multiple reentry- yada yada). Secondly, if you look at Nixon's defense budget after the treaty you will notice there was an increase in weaponry not a decrease. This was not an end in anyway.

Then you have the various dalliances both superpowers had opposing eachother in their own various spheres of influence. The coup in Chile where Kissinger "set the limits on diversity" or the nearly open war in 1975 in Angola against the Russian backed Cubans both show that detente was a name and not anything of value.

Remember this would not be the first time the U.S. were led to believe in missile gaps or technological inferiority. (See Kennedy in 1960) What the Ford administration did was nothing different than any Kennan disciple would have done if they had been indoctrinated in decades of "Sources of Soviet Conduct." Nixon's attempt to turn to the semi-counter point of Walter Lippman proved poste haste with the continued build-up that negotiations were not really ready to be "real."

Finally, the CIA was and has been wrong many times based on one reality--the CIA gets it wrong sometimes. Kennedy really thought that ICBM's were better than Minute Men batteries. How could he know that ICBM's couldn't fly. No one did except for Khrushchev and he wasn't telling. The only reason we know now is because of the opening of the East German archives after the fall of the wall. Finally, why wouldn't the Soviets embark on a massive propaganda scheme... they had read NSC-68 and knew what we were developing, why not try something along the same lines.

Sorry but I generally don't see the conspiracy here.

Link (http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1207-26.htm)


It is no mystery why Dirty Dick was kept on the ticket for '04, and that Rumsphuck will stay at on DoD, hmm?

http://forums.roadbikereview.com/showthread.php?t=19265&highlight=Phantom+Menace

it's excellent and will make you crazy - even if you don't buy it all it's thought provoking and also difficult to ignore a number of points

Well, as conspiracry theories go I'd say that's a pretty good one. It's hilarious that it makes Nixon and Kissinger look like good guys when compared to the shady @ssholes we're dealing with now. :p

Well, as conspiracry theories go I'd say that's a pretty good one. It's hilarious that it makes Nixon and Kissinger look like good guys when compared to the shady @ssholes we're dealing with now. :p
Who was it that said Rummy is more ruthless than Kissinger? To be more ruthless than Kissinger takes some doing.

Sorry but I generally don't see the conspiracy here.

I don't know if the article is stating a specific "conspiracy" per se, but the fact that the Strauss disciples were on the bandwagon to hype a need for an aggressive foreign policy (and preferably war) from the day they were in any position in gov't to do so.

I have yet to see the documentary, but hope to soon. But without having seen it, I can tell you I already think, from having seen information from many other sources, that the whole idea of "Al Qaeda" was largely manufactured by the Neo's, that 9/11 was allowed to happen by the Bush Admin. if not some active level of involvement on their part, which of course leads to the Iraq conflict and a ready excuse for perpetual war and the basis for their power.

The thing is, the Neo's haven't been as covert as some people think. They've done this largely out in the open, basically saying, "Here we are. We're going to do what we want. Try to stop us."

Tell you what tmb: you, or anyone else on this forum come back in a couple of year's time and show me how I'm wrong about nearly anything I've ever stated or suggested about the Bush Admin on this board. They're already moving things into place at a pretty rapid clip.

Tell you what tmb: you, or anyone else on this forum come back in a couple of year's time and show me how I'm wrong about nearly anything I've ever stated or suggested about the Bush Admin on this board. They're already moving things into place at a pretty rapid clip.
What are your general predictions for five years out?

What are your general predictions for five years out?

Unless these policies are changed or severely hindered in some way, I will say that we'd be well on the way toward global fascism, and in the U.S., more of a tilt toward the fundamentalist dominionism displayed (or implied) by Bush and his majority in Congress thus far, but still arrived at through their fascist tactics that have already been quite successful.

Who was it that said Rummy is more ruthless than Kissinger? To be more ruthless than Kissinger takes some doing.

Might have been been Thompson. He provides some comparisons between the two administrations here.

"Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs."

After WWII, the Russians met the Americans and British in Berlin, and by chance of political and military luck, the Soviets occupied most of Eastern Europe. The US, flush with victory, it's war industry going full blast, gave lots of money and assistance to Britain, France, Germany and Italy under the Marshall Plan. West Germany set up a parliamentary government, and re-built with the blessings of American money. The Russians, on the other hand, were devastated by the war, and all their communist ideology could not make up for the lack of capital and resources they needed to rebuild the Eastern European countries they took from Hitler.

However the Cold War started, it soon amounted to an intense rivalry between east and west, solidified to terrorized capitalists with Mao Tse Tung's revolution in China. Then North Korea fell, and that was the last straw. By 1950 or 51, it seemed to the US and Europe that large areas of the world were about to fall under the yoke of god-less communism, a fate worse than fascist imperialism. And so an irrational mindset akin to panic took place in western thought, quickly adopted by communist leaders, that led to a state of fear between the two camps. Every move one side made, the other tried to match it, in a struggle for balance of power. The war-that-never-was kept the Industrial-military complex busy matching nuclear armaments for decades, eventually bankrupting Russia. It tested wills in small skirmishes in former colonies of the west, bent on populist revolutions. The closest the US and USSR came to war was the Cuban missle crisis. Otherwise it was a 50 year stand-off of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. The war that never was, the phantom war.

Why did it take 40 years for detente? As ThatsmyBush pointed out, it started with a German idea, after it had already been underway for some years. What if, after the Korean War, the US didn't point nuclear missiles at Russia, fight popular revolutions in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America, and patrol the world? The communist world was never a unified threat. By 1960 it had fragmented into a collection of anti-colonial nationalist revolutions who helped each other only when faced with neo-colonial powers, championed by the US.

Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz, not to mention George Bush and Condoleeza Rice, are products of that time, so it isn't too difficult to find the thread between "god-less communism" and "Al Qaida," a transfer of cold war paranoia to the war on terrorism, both paper tigers when the evidence is examined, made dangerous mainly when a US action brings disparate enemies together, as now in Iraq.

Why did it take 40 years for detente? As ThatsmyBush pointed out, it started with a German idea, after it had already been underway for some years. What if, after the Korean War, the US didn't point nuclear missiles at Russia, fight popular revolutions in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America, and patrol the world? The communist world was never a unified threat. By 1960 it had fragmented into a collection of anti-colonial nationalist revolutions who helped each other only when faced with neo-colonial powers, championed by the US.
Because those in power in the US at the end of WWII were drunk on that power. They had not only recently increased the size of the government by several orders of magnitude, they had won a world war and ended the Great Depression. Rather than do the right thing, which would have been to return the government back to the size and scope it was prior to the war and depression, the opted to use the paper tigers to sustain and further create an end for their means. In the process most of them got very, very rich but we'll never be able to track the money because of the black budgets. It is precisely those means that drove our economy for 40+ years. Looking at where we are now, I ask if it was worth it. IMO, no, it wasn't.

Because those in power in the US at the end of WWII were drunk on that power. They had not only recently increased the size of the government by several orders of magnitude, they had won a world war and ended the Great Depression. Rather than do the right thing, which would have been to return the government back to the size and scope it was prior to the war and depression, the opted to use the paper tigers to sustain and further create an end for their means. In the process most of them got very, very rich but we'll never be able to track the money because of the black budgets. It is precisely those means that drove our economy for 40+ years. Looking at where we are now, I ask if it was worth it. IMO, no, it wasn't.


OR....OR....OR

If you look at the foreign policy advisors and those producing the positions for the politicians you had two prevailing camps the Kennen vs Lippman camp. Lippman called for a detente almost immediately after the war calling for a pull back of the armored divisions out of western and eastern Europe so that bargaining could begin. His theory--lost. Kennon in his famous X policy statement believed that the Soviets could not be bargained with because they could not be trusted. This position solidified when it was found out that they had detonated their first atomic weapon years before they were supposed to (the scares that our government was rife with double agents etc helped foment this belief as well.) When this happened Truman was faced with National Security directive - 68, in it; it called for the building of stronger and a more powerful atomic weaponry. So it began.

The fear was real, it was pervasive and caused staunch dogmatism, but at the time it may have been the only way. We just did not know what was going on in the Soviet State. Even after Krushchev ascending to power (surprisingly by the by) they took him as the chaotic erratic person that he really was. He would joke about the number of times he could bomb New York on his trip to America. It was a very strange time. Little did we know (again until the opening of the Archives) that they really didn't have what they say they did. (As an aside how many people knew that they had a second Kremlin in Kazaan, Tartistan, just in case of nuclear attack, so the gov't could continue!)

Finally, we were unable to see the "differences" in Communist states, what we should have seen was Tito in Yugoslavia as an independant Communist country and saw that a position of inclusiveness was possible. Hell, China and the Soviets were lobbing shells at one another, yet we only saw ONE COMMUNISM a single state without differences.

If anything what we could have learned in today's situation we continue to REFUSE to understand...NATIONALISM. Because the U.S. is one of the few countries that rose without a sense of nationalism, we seem to have a void in that part of our brain to recognize it somewhere else.

OR....OR....OR

If you look at the foreign policy advisors and those producing the positions for the politicians you had two prevailing camps the Kennen vs Lippman camp. Lippman called for a detente almost immediately after the war calling for a pull back of the armored divisions out of western and eastern Europe so that bargaining could begin. His theory--lost. Kennon in his famous X policy statement believed that the Soviets could not be bargained with because they could not be trusted. This position solidified when it was found out that they had detonated their first atomic weapon years before they were supposed to (the scares that our government was rife with double agents etc helped foment this belief as well.) When this happened Truman was faced with National Security directive - 68, in it; it called for the building of stronger and a more powerful atomic weaponry. So it began.

The fear was real, it was pervasive and caused staunch dogmatism, but at the time it may have been the only way. We just did not know what was going on in the Soviet State. Even after Krushchev ascending to power (surprisingly by the by) they took him as the chaotic erratic person that he really was. He would joke about the number of times he could bomb New York on his trip to America. It was a very strange time. Little did we know (again until the opening of the Archives) that they really didn't have what they say they did. (As an aside how many people knew that they had a second Kremlin in Kazaan, Tartistan, just in case of nuclear attack, so the gov't could continue!)

Finally, we were unable to see the "differences" in Communist states, what we should have seen was Tito in Yugoslavia as an independant Communist country and saw that a position of inclusiveness was possible. Hell, China and the Soviets were lobbing shells at one another, yet we only saw ONE COMMUNISM a single state without differences.

If anything what we could have learned in today's situation we continue to REFUSE to understand...NATIONALISM. Because the U.S. is one of the few countries that rose without a sense of nationalism, we seem to have a void in that part of our brain to recognize it somewhere else.

Russia had defeated Hitler in one of the bloodiest campaigns of WWII, took most of Eastern Europe, and a few of the choice German nuclear scientists, who went right to work developing the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

George F. Kennan was the architect of the containment policy with respect to communism, so I guess he can take the intellectual credit for starting the Cold War mentality on the US side. He gave a talk at my college in 1962, in which he disavowed that policy, realizing the communist world never congealed as a unified force. As the US was frantically developing ballistic missiles, the threat was already falling apart by about 1955. By 1958, when Russia shocked the US by launching a missile into space, the arms race was tit for tat, as Bob McNamara used to put it. Both sides were in a defensive posture by then, and that was the insanity of what followed, M.A.D. A trigger happy madman could destroy the world.

Your observation that the US didn't understand nationalism remains to this day. We always thought back in the 60s, that the US was merely insensitive to it, and grossly underestimated its effects, just like Johnson did with Vietnam and Bush has done with Iraq. But the US is a big country of immigrants, unlike any other place in the world. Americans haven't been through enough history to congeal and bond as a nationalistic people. America is still in the process of becoming, the land of opportunity. Maybe it'll take a great tragedy to pull Americans together, something worse than 9/11, which worked for awhile. I'd be interested in an historian's thoughts about America's peculiar brand of collective identity.

My feeling about the Cold War is much the same as those filmmakers' view of the Iraq war. Its interesting that Khruschev and Saddam Hussein both exaggerated their weapons caches, as puffed up shows of strength. I guess history will prove Saddam's lying about his WMDs backfired on him, although Bush probably would have acted anyway.

I long for old fashioned wars with fronts, and leaders who can surrender and work out a peace. Wasn't Kazaan, Tartistan, in a plot of an early James Bond movie? The name rolls off Sean Connery's lips like a fine vodka martini. Spys, terrorists, intenational intrigue: that's the future. The wars of the next century will be fought below governments and territorial radars. The US continues to deploy high tech military force over the world, in stark contrast to the enemies engaged, themselves using box cutters and gasoline, striking once then retreating for months, years. There's no way to fight that kind of enemy with mechanized armies--and make friends. The pictures of the desolation in Iraqi cities are heartbreaking.