Some of you might remember way back in late 2001 the widespread reports of Al-Qaeda’s vast and sophisticated cave complex in Afghanistan. We were led to believe bin Laden used his family’s construction enterprise to build a high-tech underground compound with “its own ventilation system and its own power, created by a hydro-electric generator. Its walls and floors are smooth and finished, and it extends about 315m beneath a solid mountain.” The article, written by Richard Lloyd Parry writing with the Independent (London) at the time, goes on to claim:
It is so well defended and concealed that – short of poison gas or a tactical nuclear weapon – it is completely immune to outside attack. And it is filled with heavily armed followers of Osama bin Laden, with a suicidal commitment to their cause, and with nothing left to lose.
Scary stuff indeed. Sounds like the lair of an evil genius from an Ian Fleming novel. The cave story was quickly picked up by other news outlets, though certain details changed – was the complex built by the bin Laden family or the US government in the 80s for the mujahideen fight against the Soviets? Journalist Edward Jay Epstein details how the story spread and finally reached its pinnacle in the US when the late Tim Russert unquestioningly accepted it as fact during an interview with Donald Rumsfeld on Meet the Press.
The following clip is from Adam Curtis’ excellent three-part documentary The Power of Nightmares, originally broadcast on the BBC in 2004. I highly recommend this film to anyone who hasn’t seen it. It’s (legally) available online for download or streaming at Archive.org. The clip begins with part of the interview with Rumsfeld on Meet the Press. Note how the former Secretary of Defense states matter-of-factly that there are many such complexes in the Afghan mountains, going beyond claims made in the original reports.
Curtis exposes how this was little more than blatant propaganda used to incite fear, to make the mostly British and American public think Al-Qaeda was indeed a grave threat that needed eradicating. This wasn’t some rag-tag bunch of terrorists with little support, these were advanced extremists that could only be handled with high tech weapons and massive military force. And it worked. This is at least in part how – with other similar stories – the US government justified increased military spending on advanced weaponry following 911, even though the perpetrators used box cutters and a little flight training to achieve the attack. The message and purpose was clear: we should simply cower in fear while allowing our leaders to protect us against such a tremendous threat, all the while expanding the military industrial complex.
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[...] 3: The late Tim Russert, supposedly one of the toughest interviewers in American media, once provided Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with a platform so that Rumsfeld could talk about the Tora Bora Complex, supposedly an impregnable fortress that [...]