CONSPIRACY... Conspiracy... conspiracy... cons...

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next man, woman or child and this is one that I love.

Did the Americans manufacture the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon?

The file clocks in at almost an hour and a half so if you want to watch it I would suggest downloading it from Google Video rather than streaming it (just click on the film box below).



Many of the details you have probably heard before. Does the argument have any merit? It does seem hard to deny that something untoward is going on given the mountain of circumstances that the filmmaker documents. While that is all interesting and thought provoking in itself (these tangled and convoluted conspiracy plots make for good pub banter), something in this text sparked my interest beyond the outlandishness of the claims.

Early in the film there is a brief mention of a neoconservative think tank attended by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz where they state that "...the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalizing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." This immediately put me in mind of the BBC documentary "The Power Of Nightmares", which argues that the American neo-consevatives (spearheaded by Rumsfeld, Cheney adn Wolfowitz) deliberately blew the terrorist threat out of proportion in order to manipulate the American psyche.

"The Power of Nightmares" places the rise of the neoconservatives and radical Islamists into a compelling historical context. Both "movements" grew out of a reaction to what they saw as the failure of American liberalism in the late 1950s. The neoconservatives saw the state disintergrating into anarchy and theorised that the only way to stem this degradation was to manufacture an enemy, an ideological counterpoint, for America to rally against. And so, the film theorises, the embers of the "Cold War" were fanned.

The documentary tracks the influence of the neoconservatives in American politics through to the present day and how they managed to creat and nurture their enemies (including the radical Islamists) for their own political and ideological ends. It makes for compelling viewing though it can be a little heavy handed and repetitive over its three one-hour episodes. After watching ask yourself the question again:

Did the Americans manufacture the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon?

You can download all the overblown "goodness" of "The Power of Nightmares here.

Tags: conspiracy theory, Pentagon, Twin Towers, World Trade Center, neoconservative, documentary