The Power of Nightmares

The third and final (and easily the best) part of The Power of Nightmares documentary was broadcast last night on BBC2. Fascinating stuff about how the terrorist threat has been exaggerated by politicians, this was put together in a collage style that will, in future years, be stored in some multimedia encyclopedia under the entry 'Information Overload'. My brain is now seared with images of a 30-foot genie materialising out of smoke on a beach, 'mad eyes' and a slo-mo shot of a swooping owl.

Anyway, aside from the style, there were some very useful facts for those debates I've been having recently with people via online scrabble. These include

• 'dirty bombs' being ineffective and unlikely to kill anyone (Iraq and US tested them years ago but found them to be useless), and
  
• despite hundreds of arrests in the UK and US, not one person has been convicted of plotting a terrorist act in connection with Islam.

Kuro5hin has a nice page about it, which has some discussion and links to more at Crooked Timber and a summary of the main points at iconoplex. Isn't the web just lovely.