DIRTY BOMB, DIRTY LIE?

According to an article at Guardian.co.uk, there is a new documentary series called The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fearthat quotes experts saying that dirty bombs would not be the threat both British and US media sources have made out. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:

"I don't think it would kill anybody," says Dr Theodore Rockwell, an authority on radiation, in an interview for the series. "You'll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise." The American department of energy, Rockwell continues, has simulated a dirty bomb explosion, "and they calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life-threatening." And even this minor threat is open to question. The test assumed that no one fled the explosion for one year.

In other words, the test pretended that victims of such a bomb wouldn't seek treatment immediately--which they certainly would. Odds are, they'd be fine. There's more:

During the three years in which the "war on terror" has been waged, high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

Hm, sounds like something George Orwell once wrote--something about how the war was not meant to be won but to be perpetuated in order to keep the powers that be right where they are--in power.