January 10, 2005

Is there really an "al-Qaeda"? An article in the latest New York Review of Books, "The Truth About Terrorism" By Jonathan Raban.
posted by Big Davey 19 years ago
  • Track the movement of containers around the world with GPS (global positioning system) transponders, and install intrusion sensors within the containers. Establish red and green lanes for cargo, as for passengers. Monitor the food supply chain with electronic tags. Such unexciting-sounding proposals (Flynn makes dozens of them) would go a long way toward making visible and open to inspection the vast circulatory system that is now largely hidden from view, and whose obscurity offers limitless possibilities to be exploited by terrorists. Makes sense to me.
  • ...millions of letters, all addressed to Osama bin Laden! So you see, Virginia, yes, there really is an al Qaeda.
  • GPS for everybody! As seen on MTV! Get your k3wl implants today!
  • You already have one. It's called a cell phone.
  • If you can I would try to obtain an excellent series called, The Power of Nightmares. Full transcript here. A Guardian review of the series here. Excerpt from the Guardian: The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence. My brain is too mushy atm to get into it but defintely check out the series or the transcript.
  • No one fuckin' knows.
  • ...al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. This is not news. Al-qaeda is loosely organized, that is why they are so hard to track down. Everyone who has paid any attention already knows this. Whether or not it "has members or a leader" is a matter of semantics and not terribly interesting to me- as if proving through some weird linguistic arguments that people who commit acts of terror are "not members of al-qaeda" somehow changes everything...
  • drjimmy11 - Parallel it loosely to the Cold War and the propaganda machine generated by government, media and intelligence agencies and you would get warmish on the issue. I can't do the series justice hence the links to search out more information. It's not a matter of it 'not being al-qaeda' more to the point it is a form of propaganda that allows domestic and foreign policies to flourish, it is a means to an end and it goes back to the late 1940's. If you watch the series you'll find both 'sides' do it to serve their self interests. There is waaaaaay more to it than just trying to point the finger at who's responsible for 9/11 and other terrorist acts.
  • What beeza said. It's a matter of how you create the image of your enemy, which has everything to do with how this gear is sold to your political constituency. If the polis isn't buying, you are the detritus of history, and in Realpolitik terms, your view counts for nothing. The lens through which you interpret the actions of your enemy may be flawed, but provided enough voters share it, it becomes enshrined as prevailing wisdom. It takes a very great deal of countervailing factual info to shake this perception.
  • as it is said in the bbc documentary "The Power of Nightmares" the term "al-Qaeda" was created by a "witness" during a federal trial wherein the u.s. government wanted to prosecute bin laden without having him in custody... such prosecution can only occur under laws that were created to prosecute mafia-style crime organizations... so there wasn't an "al-Qaeda", not one that was called by that name at least... bin laden has refered to his organization as "al-Qaeda" since he got word of the u.s. using the term to refer to his organization as such... though the actual power behind the organization is hard to determine... the bbc documentary suggests that it is on some level a fantasy created by the neoconservatives in order to keep them in power... just like during the latter years of the cold war... when they were last in power... the main neoconservatives in our government can be found on their website new american century...
  • al qaeda is just a very common term for 'the base' or 'the fundament'. It's a broad term that can mean any of dozens of different things depending on how it's used. Some have suggested that it *is* a term bin Laden used, lifting it from the translation of the title of an Asimov novel he was into: 'Foundation'. Be that as it may, it would be a likely term for a person like bin Laden, seeking to draw together the disparate groups of fundamentalist Islamic 'jihadis' under one cause: The Foundation. In any case, nobody fuckin' knows.
  • Drjimmy ... I think you miss the point ... the semantics are VITAL. most people out there believe that Al-Qaida are an organised force with a structure etc. During the search for Bin Laden in Afghanistan The Times printed a fantastic (in the true sense of the word) cutaway diagramme of Bin Laden's cave complex at Tora Bora which had multiple levels, bomb-proof doors, generators, food to withstand a siege for weeks etc etc etc, sort of a cross between a Bond movie and a level in Quake. All rubbish. When the troops eventually got there they found a cave ... nothing more than that. However the object of the exercise was to convince Blair voters that there was a tangible enemy out there ... there isn't really ... there's a few nutcases who Bin Laden finances who are now a lot more pissed off that they were before ... And Lo! Bush won the election, Blair's likely to follow suit ...
  • "It's not a matter of it 'not being al-qaeda' more to the point it is a form of propaganda that allows domestic and foreign policies to flourish, it is a means to an end...." and "It's a matter of how you create the image of your enemy, which has everything to do with how this gear is sold to your political constituency." The same point could be made about the image created of Iraq and of North Korea.
  • Me: "GPS for everybody! As seen on MTV! Get your k3wl implants today!" Argh: "You already have one. It's called a cell phone." I don't have a cell phone. Even if I wanted one, even if you gave me one for free (and disabled the GPS chip), I'd be too deaf to get much use out of it. "Txting" I can do from a computer, i.e. from stuff I already have. And the space aliens that run the Illuminati already know where I live.
  • I have yet to convince my parents that Saddam wasn't "responsible" for 9/11. This al-Qaeda thing is going to be a good deal more tricky to get across.
  • Saddam was responsible for 9-11 in the same way that that old crazy woman was responsible for the actions of Al DelVecchio's right arm on that episode of "Happy Days."
  • just as an aside, there's a loverly urban legend (well, maybe it's true - snopes hasn't debunked it) that Al Qaeda means 'Foundation' and was inspired by Isaac Asimov's novels. This was first noted in Dave Langford's marvellous SF fanzine Ansible (archives here) number 172, November 2001, quoting China Mieville (sorry for all the wikipedia in there - China Mieville's site is down atm and the unofficial site hasn't been updated since 2003)
  • To paraphrase a much-used expression, if there were no al qaeda, it would have been necessary to invent one. Itching to start a war? Want to convince a populace to back your folly? Have obvious vested interest in invading and disrupting the Middle East? It's all so easy if you proffer a nebulous boogeyman to people who really should know better.