Status and Power -- Terrorism

¶ … Status and Power -- Terrorism Issues

The Evolution of the Western Image of al-Qaeda

Prior to the infamous terrorist attacks against the United States in September 2001, the group called al-Qaeda was hardly known to the public (BBC/Curtis, 2004). Even within government counterterrorism agencies, the organization was not referred to as a sophisticated global terrorism network by any stretch of the imagination. Similarly, Osama bin Laden was known to U.S. counterterrorism agencies but primarily as a financier of disconnected terrorist acts rather than the supreme leader of a global anti-Western terrorist network dedicated to the destruction of the American nation and way of life.

The al-Qaeda organization was known in connection with its previous involvement in various terrorist activities prior to the post-9/11 era of the "war on terror," but was not regarded as a sophisticated or widely influential organization by U.S. counterterrorism agencies (BBC/Curtis, 2004). In fact, the group was mentioned by name only once in a 1998 CIA President's Daily Briefing -- "Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack U.S. Aircraft and other Attacks" to President Bill Clinton. Subsequent to September 2001, the Bush administration seems to have merely taken the conservative Right-Wing political methodology of the Reagan-Bush Era and made the same use of al-Qaeda and bin Laden that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had made of the "Soviet menace" in the last stage of the Cold War (BBC/Curtis, 2004).

To a large degree, it seems, at least in retrospect, that the image of both al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden himself are almost completely a fictional creation of entities within the U.S. administration in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the U.S. (BBC/Curtis, 2004). Generally, the U.S. presidential administration of George W. Bush purposely misrepresented the nature of al-Qaeda and deliberately misused the September 11th attacks to justify an unnecessary and unjustified focus of funding and policies designed to further the interests of the neoconservative political agenda. In that regard, one of the most dramatic uses of this tactic enabled the Bush administration to obtain congressional authority to initiate a war against Iraq based on what were later proven to be deliberate falsehoods (BBC/Curtis, 2004).

Ironically, the fictional and manipulative elevation of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to such levels of importance in the ideological war against the West may have actually played a substantial role in increasing the importance, the influence, and the ability of each to attract more followers (BBC/Curtis, 2004). The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan also seems to have undermined the effort against al-Qaeda by helping to transform what had been an isolated civil war in that country into a region supporting bin Laden today (BBC/Curtis, 2004).