DOES AL QAEDA EVEN EXIST?

Why hasn't Osama Bin Laden, the alleged leader of Al Qaeda network, been captured up till now?

Does Al-Qaeda really exist? Or is it just a media abstraction used as an umbrella term to label all resistance to corporate and government hegemony? Is there really this vast, organized group of terrorists with financing and resources spread around the world ready to attack America with a moments notice? Do they have a website? Do their operatives have Blackberrys? Do they travel around on their frequent flier miles? We know they were lying about the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection and the existence of WMD's. How do we know they are not lying again now? When a bomb goes off in Iraq, how do we know it's who CNN and Fox News says it is? Instead of "Sunni vs. Shia", instead of an "Al Qaeda cell" how do we know it is not an Israeli Black Ops designed to further push Iraq into turmoil?

Interesting editorial that tackles some of those questions:

The Power of Nightmares
Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist?

To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical, especially in the context of the US media's supine acceptance of Administration claims relating to national security. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this and many other accepted articles of faith in the so-called war on terror.

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, a three-hour historical film by Adam Curtis recently aired by the British Broadcasting Corp., argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media."

Stern stuff, indeed. But consider just a few of the many questions the program poses along the way:

1 If Osama bin Laden does, in fact, head a vast international terrorist organization with trained operatives in more than forty countries, as claimed by Bush, why, despite torture of prisoners, has this Administration failed to produce hard evidence of it?

2 How can it be that in Britain since 9/11, 664 people have been detained on suspicion of terrorism but only seventeen have been found guilty, most of them with no connection to Islamist groups and none who were proven members of Al Qaeda?

3 Why have we heard so much frightening talk about "dirty bombs" when experts say it is panic rather than radioactivity that would kill people?

4 Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on Meet the Press in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, when British and US military forces later found no such thing?

The fact is, despite the efforts of several government commissions and a vast army of investigators, we still do not have a credible narrative of a "war on terror" that is being fought in the shadows.

Consider, for example, that neither the 9/11 commission nor any court of law has been able to directly take evidence from the key post-9/11 terror detainees held by the United States. Everything we know comes from two sides that both have a great stake in exaggerating the threat posed by Al Qaeda: the terrorists themselves and the military and intelligence agencies that have a vested interest in maintaining the facade of an overwhelmingly dangerous enemy.

Such a state of national ignorance about an endless war is, as The Power of Nightmares makes clear, simply unacceptable in a functioning democracy.