This just came through on :

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist?

To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical, especially in the context of the U.S. media’s supine acceptance of administration claims relating to national security. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain’s leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this and many other accepted articles of faith in the so-called war on terror.

The article, at least, poses some interesting questions (I haven’t seen the film yet). At a glance, I might offer a brief counter-theory, just for the sake of argument. Maybe the fact that we can’t prove anything has less to do with the existence of al Qaeda than it does the ineptitude of the Bush administration and an intel community that has not yet figured out how to deal with an enemy that’s built on a distributed network model.

In fact, even the assumption voiced in the story makes clear that we’re trying to play 21st Century War by 20th Century rules:

Terrorism is deeply threatening, but it appears to be a much more fragmented and complex phenomenon than the octopus-network image of Al Qaeda, with Bin Laden as its head, would suggest.

While the BBC documentary acknowledges that the threat of terrorism is both real and growing, it disagrees that the threat is centralized…

Well, wait a second, where does this notion of centralization come from? Sure, Bush presents it that way, which is a big chunk of the apparent thesis, but past that we know, and have known, that al Qaeda is by design decentralized. It’s a network of semi-autonomous franschises by now, is the thinking among folks who actually think a bit.

So maybe I should stop arguing with the news story about the film and just see the film, huh?