The Bogeyman

Trey Smith

There is something disturbing in the nature of post 9/11 public discourse. Incessantly, on a daily basis, Al Qaeda is referred to by the Western media, government officials, members of the US Congress, Wall Street analysts, etc. as an underlying cause of numerous World events. Occurences of a significant political, social or strategic nature --including the US presidential elections campaign-- are routinely categorized by referring to Al Qaeda, the alleged architect of the September 11 2001 attacks.

What is striking is the extent of media coverage of "Al Qaeda related events", not to mention the mountains of op eds and authoritative "analysis" pertaining to "terror events" in different part of the World.

Routine mention of Al Qaeda "fanatics", "jihadists", etc. has become --from a news standpoint-- trendy and fashionable. A Worldwide ritual of authoritative media reporting has unfolded. At the time of writing (March 24, 2012), "Al Qaeda events" had 183 million entries on Google and 18,200 news entries.

A panoply of Al Qaeda related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.

In turn, Al Qaeda - War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council.

All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained --by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket "bad guys" heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as "the cause" of numerous terror events around the World.

How does the daily bombardment of Al Qaeda related concepts and images, funnelled into the Western news chain and on network TV, affect the human mindset?

Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the "real outside World" of war, politics and the economic crisis.

What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.

With Al Qaeda, however, there are no verifiable "facts" and "concepts", because Al Qaeda has evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of media disinformation and war propaganda.

Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.

Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally.

Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?

People's capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
~ from Al Qaeda and Human Consciousness: Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda.... An Incessant and Repetitive Public Discourse, Part I by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky ~

What's even worse is that we literally created this bogeyman. We brought them together and trained them to oppose Russia during their own Afghan misadventure.

What I find most interesting is how we are periodically told that we've crippled Al Qaeda, only to have it surface again as THE threat to world stability weeks later. Here we have this supposedly rag-tag group of revolutionaries and yet, despite the fact the US and her allies spends trillions of dollars each year trying to wipe it out, it has become a monster we can't kill. Supposedly, we shoot, bomb, poison and burn it, yet, like a monster in a B movie, it keeps rising back up to hunt down hapless humans who are powerless to stop it.