- 7 weeks ago
Documentary, HyperNormalisation part 2
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00:00My full support and support of my country
00:04to your struggle for freedom, for emancipation.
00:09Gaddafi promised that he would supply weapons
00:12to create a black army in America of 400,000 men.
00:16If white America refuses to accept blacks as US citizens, he told them,
00:21it must therefore be destroyed.
00:23APPLAUSE
00:25Gaddafi also invited a group of German rocket scientists
00:32to come to Libya to build him a rocket.
00:35He insisted it had no military purpose.
00:38Libya was now going to explore outer space.
00:43I think it is peaceful and...
00:46..sifil...sifil...sifil...sifil...sifil activity.
00:50..for investigation of space and something like this.
00:55And it has nothing to do with any military things.
01:03But no-one believed him.
01:05Journalists warned that Gaddafi was really preparing to attack Europe,
01:10vividly dramatising the new danger.
01:12That is something like this which goes that way to put something into space.
01:16But the same device tilted, say, to an angle of 45 degrees
01:19could, of course, become something very different.
01:21A missile possibly carrying a warhead.
01:24That would put Libya within range of an enormous area.
01:27A chilling proposition with its range of 2,000 kilometres.
01:32The Americans and Gaddafi now became locked together
01:36in a cycle of mutual reinforcement.
01:39In the process, a powerful new image was created
01:43that was going to capture the imagination of the West.
01:47Gaddafi became a global super-villain.
01:50At the head of what was called a rogue state.
01:53A madman who threatened the stability of the world.
01:57And Gaddafi was loving every minute of it.
02:01Does he think in the past,
02:03his decisions sometimes have been taken too quickly?
02:06Maybe, maybe.
02:08On world affairs?
02:09Maybe.
02:12I think sometimes that is what has made people in the world nervous of you, perhaps.
02:17Maybe.
02:17Then there was another terrorist attack
02:40at a discotheque in West Berlin.
02:42A bomb killed an American soldier and injured hundreds.
02:50The Americans released what they said were intercepts
02:54by the National Security Agency
02:55that proved that Colonel Gaddafi was behind the bombing.
02:59And a dossier that they said proved
03:01that he was also the mastermind behind a whole range of other attacks.
03:07President Reagan ordered the Pentagon to prepare to bomb Libya.
03:12But again, there were doubts.
03:14This time, within the American government itself.
03:18There were concerns that analysts were being pressured
03:21to make a case that didn't really exist.
03:25And to do it,
03:27they were taking Gaddafi's rhetoric about himself
03:29as a global revolution,
03:31and his manic ravings,
03:33and then representing them as fact.
03:36And in the process, together,
03:38the Americans and Gaddafi were constructing a fictional world.
03:43The analyst was certainly, I'm convinced,
03:47pressured into developing a prima facie case
03:52against the Libyan government.
03:55From the somewhat incoherent ravings of a maniac,
03:59both interceptions of a clandestine nature
04:05and interceptions of an open radio broadcast or whatever,
04:12as well as other sources, quotations of his,
04:15that one can assemble a neatly put together package
04:19demonstrating that the man had violent interests
04:23against the United States and its European allies.
04:28The European intelligence agencies told the Americans
04:31that they were wrong,
04:32that it was Syria that was behind the bombing, not Libya.
04:36But the Americans had decided to attack Libya
04:38because they couldn't face the dangerous consequences
04:41of attacking Syria.
04:44Instead, they went for Gaddafi,
04:47a man without friends or allies.
04:49Libya had, there were less downside consequences, if you will.
04:56There's less Arab support for Gaddafi.
04:59We figured there would be less Soviet support for Gaddafi.
05:03There's no question but what Libya was more vulnerable
05:07than Syria and Iran.
05:10It was a self-target.
05:11And that is certainly an element, of course.
05:13In April 1986, the Americans attacked Libya.
05:21Their targets included Colonel Gaddafi's own house.
05:26Immediately after the attack,
05:27Gaddafi appeared in the ruins to describe what had happened.
05:31The family were asleep,
05:33and my wife was, that day, tied down to the bed
05:37because she had a slip disc.
05:38I tried to rescue the children,
05:41and the house started to collapse, as you can see,
05:44and the books started to burn.
05:47They concentrated on the children's room
05:49so that they would kill all the children.
05:53Our small adopted daughter was killed,
05:56and two of our children were injured.
05:58But yet again, Gaddafi might have been lying.
06:02Ever since then, there have been rumours
06:03that his adopted daughter actually survived.
06:06But many other children were killed in the raid
06:09because the American bombing was so inaccurate.
06:14Gaddafi realised that the attention of the whole world
06:17was now focused on him,
06:19and he grabbed the moment
06:20to promote his own revolutionary theory,
06:22the Third Way,
06:24as a global alternative to democracy.
06:28I feel that I'm really responsible
06:31for conveying the Third World Theory
06:33and the Green Book to the rising generation,
06:36to the young American and British people,
06:39so that we can rescue America and Britain
06:41and these generations of young people
06:44from this theory which,
06:46this electoral party theory,
06:48which enabled an imbecile like Reagan
06:50to rule the mightiest power on earth
06:53and use it to destroy other people's homes
06:55and enable the harlot like Thatcher
06:58to rule a great nation like Britain.
07:00Wow, look at that.
07:17What the heck is that?
07:20Oh my God.
07:22Look at that.
07:27Holy crap.
07:30It's just moving really slowly.
07:37Wow.
07:38Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, come here, come here, come here, come here.
07:40What is it doing?
07:41What the heck?
07:45Guys, it's a freaking time.
07:46Whoa.
07:47Oh my gosh.
07:48What is happening now?
07:50What the fuck is happening?
07:51Dude, what is happening?
07:52What is going on?
07:54Oh my God, it's pumped.
07:56Holy shit.
07:57Oh my God, guys.
07:58Guys, is that a freaking UFO?
08:00What the hell is this?
08:01What is it?
08:02Wait, wait, can you get a good video clip?
08:04What is it?
08:05What the hell?
08:09In the 1980s, more and more people in the United States
08:12reported seeing unexplained objects and lights in the sky.
08:17At the same time, investigators who believed in UFOs
08:21revealed that they had discovered top-secret government documents
08:24that stated that alien craft had visited Earth.
08:30The documents had been hidden for 20 years
08:33and they seemed to prove that there had been a giant cover-up.
08:38But actually, the reality was even stranger.
08:41The American government might have been making it all up,
08:46that they had created a fake conspiracy
08:48to deliberately mislead the population.
08:52The lights that people imagined were UFOs
08:55may in reality have been new, high-technology weapons
08:59that the US government were testing.
09:01The government had developed the weapons
09:09because they, in turn, imagined that the Soviet Union
09:12was far stronger than it was
09:14and still wanted to conquer the world.
09:18The government wanted to keep the weapons secret,
09:22but they couldn't always hide their appearance in the skies.
09:25So it is alleged that they chose a number of people to use
09:29to spread the rumour that these were really alien visitations.
09:34One of those chosen was called Paul Benevitz,
09:36who lived outside a giant airbase in New Mexico
09:39and had noticed strange things going on.
09:44Years later, I sat down with Paul at dinner
09:48and told Paul exactly that everything we did
09:52was a sanctioned counterintelligence operation
09:55to convince him that what he was seeing was UFOs
09:58and that what we didn't want him to know
10:01was that he tapped into something on the base
10:03and we didn't want him to ever disclose that.
10:07We kind of planted the seed in Paul
10:10that what he was seeing and what he was hearing
10:12and what he was collecting was, in fact, probably maybe UFOs.
10:16Benevitz and others chosen by the agency
10:19were, it is alleged, given a series of forged documents.
10:22Many of them were top-secret memos by the military
10:26describing sightings of unidentified aerial vehicles.
10:32The documents spread like wildfire
10:34and they formed the basis for the wave of belief in UFOs
10:38that would spread through America in the 1990s.
10:45What the fuck is that?
10:46And it also fuelled the wider, growing belief
11:05that governments lied to you,
11:06that conspiracies were real.
11:09What the Reagan administration were doing,
11:16both with Colonel Gaddafi and with the UFOs,
11:18was a blurring of fact and fiction.
11:22But it was part of an even broader programme.
11:25The president's advisers had given it a name.
11:29They called it Perception Management
11:31and it became a central part of the American government
11:34during the 1980s.
11:36The aim was to tell dramatic stories
11:41that grabbed the public imagination,
11:43not just about the Middle East,
11:45but about Central America and the Soviet Union.
11:49And it didn't matter if the stories were true or not,
11:53providing they distracted people,
11:56and you, the politician,
11:58from having to deal with the intractable complexities
12:00of the real world.
12:06Reality became less and less of an important factor
12:15in American politics.
12:16It wasn't what was real that was driving anything
12:19or the facts driving anything.
12:20It was how you could turn those facts
12:22or twist the facts or even make up the facts
12:24to make your opponent look bad.
12:26So Perception Management became a device
12:30and the facts could be twisted.
12:31Anything could be anything.
12:32It becomes how can you manipulate the American people.
12:36And in the process, reality becomes what?
12:38Reality becomes simply something to play with
12:41to achieve that end.
12:42Reality is not important in this context.
12:45Reality is simply something that you handle.
12:51But something was about to happen
12:53that would demonstrate dramatically
12:55just how far the American government
12:57had detached from reality.
12:59The Soviet Empire was about to implode.
13:06And no-one, none of the politicians,
13:09or the journalists,
13:11or the think-tank experts,
13:12or the economists,
13:14or the academics,
13:15saw it coming.
13:16The Soviet Empire was about to the sake of origin.
13:31The Soviet Empire was about to develop
13:32the record version of the South.
13:33The Soviet Empire wanted to address
13:34a distinction between the two doctors
13:35and the speakers who move around
13:37and they're Xbox One.
13:37The Soviet Empire sú
13:40and the Soviet Empire were on to do
13:41the right место.
13:43Get ready to work out.
14:13Get ready to work out.
14:43Get ready to work out.
15:13Get ready to work out.
15:43Get ready to work out.
16:13Get ready to work out.
16:15Get ready to change things, but rather to manage a post-political world.
16:25One of the first people to describe this dramatic change was a left-wing German political thinker called Ulrich Beck.
16:33Beck said that any politician who believed that they could take control of society and drive it forward to build a better future was now seen as dangerous.
16:43In the past, politicians might have been able to do this, but now they were faced with what he called a runaway world.
16:51Where things were so complex and interconnected, and modern technologies so potentially dangerous, that it was impossible to predict the outcomes of anything you did.
17:03The catalogue of environmental disasters proved this.
17:07Politicians would have to give up any idea of trying to change the world.
17:13Instead, their new aim would be to try and predict the dangers in the future, and then find ways to avoid those risks.
17:25Although Beck came from the political left, the world he saw coming was deeply conservative.
17:32The picture he gave was of a political class reduced to trying to steer society into a dark and frightening future.
17:40Constantly peering forward and trying to see the risks coming towards them.
17:46Their only aim, to avoid those risks and keep society stable.
17:52It only lasted for a few seconds, so you're basically shocked you really didn't know what was going on at the time.
17:57Where were you in the building, and where was the explosion?
18:00Oh, my God!
18:04But a system that could anticipate the future, and keep society stable, was already being built.
18:10Pieced together from all kinds of different and sometimes surprising sources.
18:15All of them outside politics.
18:19One part of it was taking shape in a tiny town in the far northwest of the United States, called East Wenatchee.
18:27It was a giant computer whose job was to make the future predictable.
18:32The man building it was a banker called Larry Fink.
18:44Back in 1986, Mr Fink's career had collapsed.
18:50He lost $100 million in a deal and had been sacked.
18:57He became determined it wouldn't happen again.
19:02Fink started a company called Blackrock and built a computer he called Aladdin.
19:12It is housed in a series of large sheds in the apple orchards outside Wenatchee.
19:21Fink's aim was to use the computer to predict with certainty what the risk of any deal or investment was going to be.
19:27The computer constantly monitors the world, and it takes things that it sees happening and then compares them to events in the past.
19:39It can do this because it has in its memory a vast history of the past 50 years.
19:44Not just financial, but all kinds of events.
19:49Out of the millions and millions of correlations, the computer then spots possible disasters.
19:54Possible dangers lying in the future.
19:57And moves the investments to avoid any radical change and keep the system stable.
20:03Today, I'm going to deliver 1.8 million reports.
20:07Execute 25,000 trades.
20:09And avert 3,000 disasters.
20:11I'm going to monitor interest rates in Europe.
20:13Silver prices in Asia.
20:14Droughts in the Midwest.
20:15I'm going to witness 4 billion shares change hands on the New York Stock Exchange.
20:20And record the effects on 14 trillion in assets across 20,000 portfolios.
20:26I am Aladdin.
20:28I am Aladdin.
20:29And today, I'll find the numbers behind the numbers.
20:32I will see the trends the models don't.
20:35The connections.
20:36The risks.
20:37I am Aladdin.
20:38I am Aladdin.
20:39And I will get the data right.
20:41I am 25 million lines of code.
20:43Written by hundreds of people.
20:45Across two decades.
20:46I'm smarter than any algorithm.
20:48More powerful than any processor.
20:50Because I am Aladdin.
20:51Because I am Aladdin.
20:53I am Aladdin.
20:55I am Aladdin.
20:57I am Aladdin.
20:59Aladdin has proved to be incredibly successful.
21:04The assets it guides and controls now amount to 15 trillion dollars,
21:09which is 7% of the world's total wealth.
21:12But Wenatchee was also a dramatic example of another kind of craving for stability and reassurance.
21:24More of its citizens took Prozac than practically any other town in America.
21:30When a person's central nervous system is changed by an SSRI with that medicine, they will view things differently.
21:39And they will be strangers.
21:41They look at things differently.
21:43I have a chemical up here that changes me.
21:45I think differently.
21:46For me, it was like walking around like this for my whole life.
21:49And really not knowing that I was nearsighted.
21:51I mean, really.
21:52I mean, no one had ever offered me glasses.
21:54And then all of a sudden, here comes somebody that says,
21:56Okay, now try these on. Try this Prozac on.
21:59And I tried it on.
22:00And for the first time in my life, I went,
22:02Whoa!
22:03Is this the way reality really is?
22:06Your perception can be changed.
22:07And it's frightening and it's scary to people.
22:09It speaks of science fiction almost.
22:13Well, the medicine just kind of lets you be, you listen to what needs to go on.
22:24And then your doctor, you know, every time you come back, he says,
22:27You're looking so much better.
22:29And then he just, like Jim, every time I come in, he goes,
22:32You're so beautiful.
22:33You know?
22:34And he isn't even sucking up.
22:36I mean, he's being nice.
22:37You know?
22:38You're beautiful.
22:39You're nice.
22:40You're friendly.
22:41You're loving everything for you.
22:42And I think, yeah, I do.
22:43Yeah.
22:44So I go out and I tell my friends,
22:46Oh, I feel so much better about myself.
22:48You know, Mom goes out,
22:49Oh, I feel so much better about myself.
22:51So your friends start saying,
22:52You know, I've seen such improvement.
22:54I've seen such improvement.
22:56And everybody improves all the way around.
22:58They see improvement.
22:59You know, it's like everybody's kind of brainwashing each other into being happy.
23:05But there was a more effective way of reassuring people
23:08that was being developed that did not involve medication.
23:15It, too, came from computer systems.
23:18But this time, artificial intelligence.
23:22But the way to do it had been discovered by accident.
23:25Back in the 1960s, there had been optimistic dreams
23:36that it would be possible to develop computers
23:38that could think like human beings.
23:43Scientists then spent years trying to program the rules
23:46that governed human thought.
23:48But they never worked.
23:59One computer scientist at MIT became so disillusioned
24:03that he decided to build a computer program
24:05that would parody these hopeless attempts.
24:09He was called Joseph Weisenbaum,
24:11and he built what he claimed was a computer psychotherapist.
24:15Just like a therapist, people could come and talk to the machine
24:19by typing in their problems.
24:24Weisenbaum called the program Eliza.
24:27He modelled it on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers,
24:30who was famous for simply repeating back to the patient
24:33what they had just said.
24:36And that is what Eliza did.
24:38The patient sat in front of the screen
24:40and typed in what they were feeling.
24:42And the program repeated it back to them,
24:46often in the form of a question.
24:49Men are all alike.
24:51In what way?
24:54They're always bugging us about something or other.
24:57Can you think of a specific example?
25:00Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
25:03Your boyfriend made you come here?
25:05He says, um, I'm depressed much of the time.
25:08I'm sorry to hear that you're depressed.
25:11It's true.
25:12I am unhappy.
25:14Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
25:17Well, I need some help.
25:19That much seems certain.
25:21One of the first people to use Eliza was Weisenbaum's secretary,
25:25and her reaction was something that he had not predicted at all.
25:28And I asked her to my office and sat her down at the keyboard,
25:32and then she began to type.
25:34And, of course, I looked over her shoulder
25:35to make sure that everything was operating properly.
25:37After two or three interchanges with the machine,
25:40she turned to me and she said,
25:42would you mind leaving the room, please?
25:44And yet she knew, as Weisenbaum did,
25:47that Eliza didn't understand a single word
25:50that was being typed into it.
25:52You're like my father in some ways.
25:56You don't argue with me.
25:58Why do you think I don't argue with you?
26:00You're afraid of me.
26:02Does it please you to think I'm afraid of you?
26:05My father's afraid of everybody.
26:08My father's afraid of everybody.
26:12Weisenbaum was astonished.
26:14He discovered that everyone who tried Eliza became engrossed.
26:18They would sit for hours,
26:20telling the machine about their inner feelings
26:22and incredibly intimate details of their lives.
26:26They also liked it because it was free
26:28of any kind of patronising elitism.
26:31One person said,
26:33after all, the computer doesn't burn out,
26:36look down on you,
26:38or try to have sex with you.
26:44What Eliza showed was that in an age of individualism,
26:48what made people feel secure
26:50was having themselves reflected back to them,
26:54just like in a mirror.
27:07Artificial intelligence changed direction
27:09and started to create new systems that did just that,
27:13but on a giant scale.
27:17They were called intelligent agents.
27:19They worked by monitoring individuals,
27:21gathering vast amounts of data about their past behaviour,
27:25and then looked for patterns and correlations
27:28from which they could predict what they would want in the future.
27:32It was a system that ordered the world in a way that was centred around you.
27:39And in an age of anxious individualism,
27:42frightened of the future,
27:44that was reassuring,
27:46just like Eliza.
27:48A safe bubble that protected you
27:51from the complexities of the world outside.
27:54And the applications of this new direction prove fruitful and profitable.
28:04If you liked that, you'll love this.
28:14What was rising up in different ways
28:16was a new system that promised to keep the world stable.
28:19Its tentacles reached into every area of our lives.
28:25Finance promised that it could control
28:27the unpredictability of the free market.
28:31While individuals were more and more monitored
28:33to stabilise their physical and mental states.
28:37And increasingly, the intelligent agents online
28:40predicted what people would want in the future,
28:43and how they would behave.
28:45But the biggest change was to politics.
28:50In a world where the overriding aim was now stability,
28:54politics became just part of a wider system of managing the world.
29:00The old idea of democratic politics,
29:03that it gave a voice to the weak against the powerful, was eroded.
29:08And a resentment began to quietly grow,
29:12out on the edges of society.
29:14what is the most important role,
29:15the environment of the world as a society.
29:17As we felt like a human being,
29:20as is this natural,
29:21in our society.
29:23But the next question of humanity,
29:24is it is the only one that will charm me
29:25on this point.
29:26The revelation of humanity,
29:27and the nature of humanity,
29:28is the most important thing to live alone.
29:29The universe is to live with us.
29:30But the new system did have a dangerous flaw.
29:51Because in the real world, not everything can be predicted
29:55by reading data from the past.
29:58And someone who was about to discover that, to his own cost,
30:05was Donald Trump.
30:10One day, a man called Jess Markham received a phone call.
30:15It was from Donald Trump, and Trump was desperate for help.
30:19Markham was a strange, mysterious figure.
30:24He had been a nuclear scientist in the 1950s
30:27and studied the effect of radiation from nuclear weapons
30:30on the human body.
30:33Then Markham had gone to Las Vegas and become obsessed by gambling.
30:39He had a photographic memory,
30:41and he used it to instantly process the data of the games
30:45as they were played.
30:47From that, he could predict the outcome.
30:50And he always won.
30:53The Las Vegas gangsters were fascinated by him.
30:56They called him the automat.
30:59Where are we going? Let's go.
31:02Donald Trump was one of the heroes of the age.
31:05But in reality, much of his success was a facade.
31:10The banks that had lent Trump millions
31:12had discovered that he could no longer pay the interest on the loans.
31:16You're right.
31:17Trump's empire was facing bankruptcy.
31:20His wife, Ivana, hated him
31:22because he was having an affair with Miss Hawaiian Tropic 1985.
31:27And then, a famous Japanese gambler called Akio Kashiwagi
31:34came to one of Trump's casinos
31:36and started to win millions of dollars
31:38in an extraordinary run of luck.
31:41Trump, who was desperate for money, panicked
31:44as day after day he watched millions being siphoned out of his casino.
31:52So he turned for help to Jess Markham.
31:55Markham came to Trump's casino in Atlantic City.
31:59He analysed all the data about the way that Kashiwagi had been playing.
32:04He then told Trump to suggest a particular high-stakes game
32:08that he knew the Japanese gambler could not resist.
32:13His model, Markham said, predicted that Kashiwagi had to lose.
32:20And after five agonising days, he did.
32:23Kashiwagi lost $10 million and he gave up.
32:27Donald Trump was elated.
32:29He thought he'd got his money back.
32:32Before Kashiwagi could pay his debt,
32:45he was hacked to death in his kitchen by Yakuza gangsters.
32:51Before Kashiwagi could pay his debt,
32:54he was hacked to death in his kitchen by Yakuza gangsters.
32:58And Donald Trump didn't get his money.
33:03Trump's business went bankrupt,
33:05and he was forced to sell most of his buildings to the banks.
33:10And he married Miss Hawaiian Tropic.
33:14In the future, he would sell his name to other people
33:17to put on their buildings,
33:19and he himself would become a celebrity tycoon.
33:32President Assad didn't want stability.
33:35He wanted revenge.
33:37In December 1988, a bomb exploded on a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland.
33:53Almost immediately, investigators and journalists pointed the finger at Syria.
33:58The bombing had been done, they said,
34:01in revenge for the Americans shooting down of an Iranian airliner in the Gulf a few months before.
34:06And for 18 months, everyone agreed that this was the truth.
34:12But then, a strange thing happened.
34:16The security agencies said that they had been wrong.
34:20It hadn't been Syria at all.
34:23It was Libya who had been behind the Lockerbie bombing.
34:27But many journalists and politicians did not believe it.
34:31They were convinced that the switch had happened for the most cynical of reasons.
34:36That America and Britain desperately needed Assad as an ally in the coming Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.
34:43So, once again, they blamed Colonel Gaddafi as the terrorist mastermind.
34:53Well, Syria, of course, was unfortunately accused of many terrorist outrage and of harbouring terrorist groups.
34:58It appears that we have now restored relations with them, as have the Americans.
35:02They are now our friends, although we get no real assurances on the past whatsoever.
35:06It strikes me as very strange indeed that many of the things we thought were previously the responsibility of Syria
35:12have now dramatically become the responsibility of Libya.
35:17But Assad was not really in control,
35:19because he had released forces that no-one would be able to control.
35:24The force that ten years before he had brought from Iran to attack the West,
35:29the human bomb, was now about to jump, like a virus, from Shia to Sunni Islam.
35:35In December 1992, the militant group Hamas kidnapped an Israeli border guard
35:47and stabbed him to death.
35:50The Israeli response was overwhelming.
35:53They arrested 415 members of Hamas, put them on buses
35:57and took them to the top of a bleak mountain in southern Lebanon.
36:02They left them there and refused to allow any humanitarian aid through.
36:16But the Israelis had dumped the Hamas militants in an area controlled by Hezbollah.
36:27They left six months there, and during that time, they learnt from Hezbollah
36:31how powerful suicide bombing could be.
36:35Hezbollah told them how they had used it to force the Israelis out of Beirut
36:39and back to the border.
36:41The first sign that the idea had spread to Hamas was when a group of the deportees
36:48marched in protest towards the Israeli border, dressed as martyrs,
36:53as the Israelis shelled them.
36:55But it soon became more than just theatre.
36:59Hamas began a wave of suicide attacks in Israel.
37:03Just before nine, at the height of Tel Aviv's rush hour, the bomb ripped apart a commuter bus.
37:11An amateur cameraman recorded the scene in the moments afterwards,
37:15as a dazed woman was helped out of the smouldering wreckage.
37:18I didn't want to believe that under my house there is a bomb.
37:25And when I realised it's a bomb, I...
37:29I started to cry because it was the first time I saw it in Tel Aviv.
37:35Hamas sent the bombers into the heart of Israeli cities to blow themselves up
37:39and kill as many around them as possible.
37:42In doing this, Hamas were going much further than Hezbollah ever had.
37:47They were targeting civilians, something Hezbollah had never done.
37:52The tactic shocked the Sunni world.
37:55This was something completely alien to its history.
37:59Not only did the Koran forbid suicide,
38:02but Sunni Islam did not have any rituals of self-sacrifice, unlike the Shias.
38:08The most senior religious leader in Saudi Arabia insisted it was wrong.
38:14But a mainstream theologian from Egypt, called Sheikh Karadawi, seized the moment.
38:20He issued a fatwa that justified the attacks.
38:23And, he added, it was also justified to kill civilians.
38:28Because in Israel, everyone, including women, serve as reservists.
38:33So really, they are all part of the enemy army.
38:38It's not suicide.
38:42It is martyrdom in the name of God.
38:45Islamic theologians and jurisprudents have debated this issue.
38:49Israeli women are not like women in our society,
38:52because Israeli women are militarized.
38:55Secondly, I consider this type of martyrdom operation
38:59as an indication of justice of Allah Almighty.
39:03Allah is just.
39:05Through his infinite wisdom, he has given the weak what the strong do not possess.
39:10And that is the ability to turn their bodies into bombs like the Palestinians do.
39:16Hamas kept sending the bombers into Israel, sometimes day after day.
39:22The horror overwhelmed Israeli society.
39:25And it completely destroyed the ability of politics to solve the Palestinian crisis.
39:31Instead, in the Israeli election of 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu took power.
39:38He turned against the peace process, which was exactly what Hamas wanted.
39:43And from then on, the two sides became locked together in ever more horrific cycles of violence.
39:50The human bomb had destroyed the very thing that President Assad had first wanted.
39:57A real political solution to the Palestinian question.
40:02It was just after one o'clock and the market was full of shoppers.
40:07Streams of ambulances came to carry away the dead and the injured.
40:13It was a place of appalling suffering.
40:18But even with the first grief came the immediate political impact on the peace process.
40:22It is impossible.
40:24This moment, it will be the end.
40:27It must be the end of this bloody peace process.
40:30And in America, all optimistic visions of the future had also disappeared.
40:48Instead, everyone in society, not just the politicians, but the scientists, the journalists and all kinds of experts,
40:55had begun to focus on the dangers that might be hidden in the future.
40:59This, in turn, created a pessimistic mood that then began to spread out from the rational technocratic world
41:07and infect the whole of the culture.
41:13And everyone became possessed by dark forebodings, imagining the very worst that might happen.
41:20The truth is the political and dangerous.
41:30The truth is that it is to the people who've been in society and the really turns.
41:32The truth is the people who've been in society.
41:34For men, the truth, no one or one of the others, and the police.
41:37The truth is the people who have been in society and the only three hours that they've been in society.
41:42Dream, baby, dream forever
41:46Oh, dream, baby, dream
42:06Dream, baby, dream
42:09Oh, dream, baby, dream
42:13Dream, baby, dream forever
42:18Oh, dream, baby, dream
42:39Oh, baby, gotta keep that dream come
42:43Keep that dream come forever
42:46Oh, dream, baby, dream
42:52Dream, baby, dream
42:54Dream, baby, dream
42:57Oh, dream, baby, dream, baby
43:00Oh, dream, baby, dream, baby
43:06Oh, dream, baby
43:06Oh, dream, baby
43:09I'll see you next time.
43:39The attacks in September 2001 were suicide bombs, but now on a huge scale.
44:08They demonstrated the terrifying power of this new force to penetrate all defences.
44:14They had come to kill thousands of Americans on their own soul.
44:1820 years before, President Reagan had been confronted by the first suicide bombers.
44:30They had been unleashed by President Assad of Syria to force America out of the Middle East.
44:35But rather than confront the complexity of Syria and Israel and the Palestinian problem,
44:42America had retreated and left Syria and suicide bombing to fester and mutate.
44:49They had gone instead for Colonel Gaddafi and turned him into an evil global terrorist.
44:57But in the process, this changed the way people saw and understood terrorism.
45:03Instead of a violence born out of political struggles for power,
45:08it became replaced by a much simpler image of an evil tyrant at the head of a rogue state,
45:14who became more like an arch criminal who wanted to terrorise the world.
45:19All the politics and power dropped away.
45:26The problem was just them and their evil personalities.
45:31And after 9-11, this led to a new and equally simple idea.
45:43That if only you could remove these tyrannical figures,
45:46then the grateful people of their country would transform naturally into a democracy,
45:51because they would be free of the evil.
45:54We owe it to the future of civilisation not to allow the world's worst leaders
46:02to develop and deploy and therefore blackmail free-loving countries with the world's worst weapons.
46:10We know they've already got chemical and biological weapons there.
46:13We know that they're certainly doing their best to acquire nuclear weapons technology.
46:17If we allow them to do that and do nothing about it,
46:20then I think later generations will consider us deeply irresponsible.
46:25Both Tony Blair and George Bush became possessed by the idea of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.
46:32So possessed that they believed any story that proved his evil intentions.
46:37And the line between reality and fiction became ever more blurred.
46:42In September 2002, the head of MI6 rushed to Downing Street
46:47to tell Blair excitedly that they had finally found the source that confirmed everything.
46:54The source, he said, had direct access to Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons programme,
46:59which was making vast quantities of VX and sarin nerve agents.
47:04The nerve agents were being loaded into linked hollow glass spheres.
47:08But then someone in MI6 noticed that the detail the source was describing
47:13was identical to scenes in the 1996 movie The Rock,
47:17starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
47:28A really elegant string of pearls configuration.
47:30Unfortunately incredibly unstable.
47:32What exactly does this stuff do?
47:34If the rocket renders it aerosol, it can take out the entire city of people.
47:38How?
47:39It's a cholinesterase inhibitor.
47:41It stops the brain from sending nerve messages down the spinal cord...
47:44A later report into the Iraq war pointed out glass containers
47:48were not typically used in chemical munitions.
47:51Seizes your nervous system. Do not move that!
47:53And the informant had obviously seen a popular movie, known as The Rock,
47:57that had inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried in glass beads or spheres.
48:03It's after your skin melts off.
48:05My God.
48:06That there is a threat from Saddam Hussein,
48:09and the weapons of mass destruction that he has acquired,
48:12is not in doubt at all.
48:14Hafez al-Assad had died in 2000.
48:30His son Bashar became the new president of Syria.
48:34But he couldn't escape the inexorable logic of what his father had started.
48:4020 years before, his father had sent Shiite suicide bombers
48:44to attack the Americans in Lebanon.
48:47Now, as America and Britain invaded Iraq,
48:51Bashar decided that he would copy his father.
48:55But what he was about to let loose would tear the Arab world apart,
49:00and then come back to try to destroy him.
49:10Bashar Assad was never supposed to have been president.
49:16It was always going to have been his elder brother, Basil.
49:20But then Basil had died in a car crash.
49:23So now, Bashar took over the giant palace
49:26that his father had built above Damascus.
49:29Up to this point, Bashar had not been interested in politics.
49:41He was fascinated by computers.
49:43He founded the Syrian Computer Society
49:46and brought the internet to the country.
49:48His favourite band was the Electric Light Orchestra.
49:52But now, he was president.
49:56And he set out to attack America.
50:08Bashar Assad was convinced that the invasion of Iraq
50:11was just the first step of a plot by the Western powers
50:15to take over the whole of the Middle East.
50:18He knew that the invasion had outraged
50:20many of the radical Islamists in Syria.
50:23And what they most wanted to do was to go to Iraq and kill Americans.
50:28So Bashar instructed the Syrian intelligence services
50:31to help them do this.
50:33Syrian agents set up a pipeline
50:36that began to feed thousands of militants across the border
50:39and into the heart of the insurgency.
50:42And it grew.
50:44Within a year, almost all the foreign fighters from across the world
50:48were coming through Syria.
50:51And they brought suicide bombing with them.
50:55The Americans estimated that 90% of the suicide bombers in Iraq
50:59were foreign fighters.
51:09But it began to run out of control.
51:11Most of the jihadists had joined the group Al-Qaeda in Iraq
51:14that then turned to killing Shiites
51:17in an attempt to create a civil war.
51:20And the force that had originally been invented by the Shiites,
51:24suicide bombing,
51:26now returned and started to kill them.
51:32Then this.
51:33A moment of silence before people realised what was happening.
51:41A few seconds ago,
51:42we just had repeated explosions in the street below me.
51:45People are now fleeing in terror
51:47from the central square around the mosque.
51:50This is what everybody feared.
51:52We just heard another explosion in the distance.
51:54That somebody would try to target this religious festival
51:57to try to bring about a sectarian conflict in Iraq.
52:00There was panic, a terrified stampede.
52:11But some of these people were running into the next bombs.
52:18We counted at least six separate explosions.
52:21Tony Blair and George Bush were faced by disaster.
52:39Iraq was imploding.
52:41While at home, they were being accused of lying to their own people
52:44to justify the invasion.
52:46What they desperately needed was something that would show
52:49that the invasion was having a good effect in the Arab world.
52:56So they made an extraordinary decision.
52:59They turned for help to the man who they had always insisted
53:02was one of the world's most dangerous tyrants.
53:07Colonel Gaddafi.
53:08And instead, they set out to make him their new best friend.
53:15It was going to be the highest achievement of perception management.
53:20A man who had been created by the West as a fake global supervillain
53:25was now going to be turned into a fake hero of democracy.
53:29And everyone, not just politicians, would become involved.
53:35Public relations, academics, television presenters, spies
53:39and even musicians were all going to help reinvent Colonel Gaddafi.
53:45It would show just how many people in the Western establishment
53:49had by now become the engineers of this fake world.
53:53Ever since he had been accused of the Lockerbie bombing,
54:02Colonel Gaddafi had been a complete outcast.
54:06The West had imposed sanctions on Libya
54:08and the economy was falling apart.
54:12But then suddenly, Tony Blair broke live into the BBC Evening News.
54:18The Prime Minister Tony Blair is about to make a statement
54:21the BBC understands from Downing Street.
54:23It's of international significance.
54:25He'll be making his statement at any moment.
54:27Now we can see pictures of him in Durham, Durham City.
54:30Here he is.
54:31Colonel Gaddafi has confirmed that Libya
54:34has in the past sought to develop
54:35weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
54:38Libya has now declared its intention
54:41to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction completely.
54:46This decision by Colonel Gaddafi
54:47is an historic one and a courageous one and I applaud it.
54:52Today in Tripoli, the leader of Libya, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi,
54:59publicly confirmed his commitment to disclose and dismantle
55:05all weapons of mass destruction programs in his country.
55:09Colonel Gaddafi now became for Western politicians a heroic figure.
55:13His decision to give up his weapons of mass destruction
55:17seemed to prove that the invasion of Iraq
55:19could transform the Middle East.
55:24And Tony Blair travelled to meet Gaddafi in his desert tent.
55:30To welcome him back into what one journalist called
55:32the community of civilised nations.
55:44But as in the past, nothing was what it seemed with Colonel Gaddafi.
55:50In reality, Gaddafi did not really have
55:53the terrifying weapons of mass destruction
55:55that he was promising to destroy.
55:56His nuclear program had stuttered to a halt long ago
56:00and never produced anything dangerous.
56:03He had managed to buy some equipment on the black market,
56:07but his technicians had been unable to assemble it.
56:10His biological weapons were non-existent.
56:13All he had was some old mustard gas in leaking barrels.
56:16But now, he had to pretend to have a terrifying arsenal of weapons.
56:24And the West had to pretend that they had avoided another global threat.
56:32And then the made-up stories became even more complicated.
56:36As part of the deal, the West said that if Gaddafi admitted
56:40that Libya had done the Lockerbie bombing,
56:42that they would lift the sanctions.
56:43But many of those who had investigated Lockerbie
56:47were still convinced that Libya hadn't done it.
56:50But really, it had been Syria.
56:54But Colonel Gaddafi confessed.
56:56His son Saif was interviewed about this confession.
57:00He said that his father was simply pretending
57:03that he had been behind the Lockerbie bombing
57:06to get the sanctions lifted.
57:08That new lies were being built on top of old lies
57:11to construct a completely make-believe world.
57:15You have to accept, or you had to accept at that time,
57:19the responsibility because you have to accept responsibilities,
57:24you have to pay compensation in order to get rid of the sanctions.
57:28It means we did that not because we are convinced that we did it,
57:31but because to find an exit out of this nightmare.
57:34So what you're saying is that you accept responsibility,
57:38but you're not admitting that you did it?
57:40Yes.
57:42And this is all a sham, you're saying,
57:46just to get sanctions over with so that you can start
57:49normal diplomatic relations with the West?
57:52OK. What's wrong with that?
57:54It's a very cynical way to behave as a country, isn't it?
57:58the American people as a country, isn't it?
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