Overview
In October 2004 the BBC broadcast three films by Adam Curtis under the title The Power of Nightmares. Their argument was that the threat described to Western publics after 2001 — a disciplined international network with cells, cadres and a chain of command running back to Osama bin Laden — did not correspond to anything that existed, and that politicians who had lost the ability to promise a better world had settled for protecting people from a nightmare instead.
The claim has been compressed since into the slogan that al-Qaeda does not exist. That is a cruder proposition than the films made, and the gap between the two has driven most of the argument.
What the films argued
Curtis's case was comparative. He set the rise of the neoconservatives in the United States against the rise of Islamist radicalism, arguing that both were movements of intellectuals who believed that societies needed unifying myths, and that each had come to need the other.
On the specifics, he argued that the name itself was largely a legal artefact — that American prosecutors needed a named organisation to bring charges under conspiracy statutes, and that a loose milieu of people who had fought in Afghanistan was written up as a corporate structure because the law required one. Sleeper cells were searched for and rarely found. The organisation chart, on this account, described the prosecution's needs rather than the enemy's arrangements.
The strongest version of the critique
Curtis's most cited authority was Jason Burke, then of The Observer, who told him that the notion of bin Laden running a coherent organisation with operatives and cells around the world was a myth.
Burke's own book, published a year before the films, is more careful than that quotation. It describes a hardcore of relatively few people around bin Laden, but argues that by late 2001 they commanded substantial resources, both material and symbolic, which they could and did project internationally. That is not the same as saying there was nothing there. It is an argument about the shape of the thing rather than its existence — a movement with a centre of gravity rather than a corporation with a headquarters.
Several writers who accept the general thrust of Curtis's media criticism part company with him precisely here.
The counter-evidence
Peter Bergen, who had interviewed bin Laden and written extensively on the group, made the concrete objection: the films left out the cases where central direction is documented.
His example was the plot uncovered in Singapore in December 2001, where operatives of Jemaah Islamiyah were arrested planning attacks including one on the US embassy. Surveillance video of the target had been sent to Mohammed Atef, described as al-Qaeda's military commander, for approval — and the man running the operation locally also sat on al-Qaeda's consultative council. That is not a loose affinity of like-minded people; it is a request for authorisation travelling up a structure and coming back down.
Critics also pointed to the training camps, the recorded oath of allegiance sworn by members, and the financial arrangements, all of which imply something more organised than a mood.
Where the argument has settled
The positions have converged more than the slogan suggests. Few serious analysts now describe al-Qaeda as the centrally commanded global network of the early briefings, and few argue it was a fiction. The common ground is a small directing core, a wider set of affiliates with varying degrees of independence, and a still wider penumbra of people who adopted the name without ever being told to.
What remains genuinely contested is the political question the films were actually about: whether the threat was described accurately at the time, or inflated in ways that suited the people describing it. That question is not settled by the organisational evidence either way, which is why the films are still argued over two decades later while their central factual claim has been substantially qualified.