A step-by-step catalog of all the major terrorist attacks since (and including) 9/11. The documentary mixes its time-line-style account with personal interviews with state officials and commentators. A decade has passed since the Twin Tower and Pentagon attacks, and P. Taylor brings us up to date through recounts of each significant event, its purpose, the perpetrators, and its implications.
P. Taylor poses some fairly challenging questions to the British government (the former MI5 director in particular), but he goes no further than others have before on the matters of torture, state-sponsored assassinations and targeting non-battlefield targets in non-combatant territories. Did the British government allow Pakistan to a license to torture, were the London bombings preventable, was the government responsive enough? These are some of the challenges the journalist poses.
The primary comment made is that the response of governments is often just as criminal or hypocritical as the forces they try to oppose - thus breeding more of the same ad infinitum. This particular argument is not as compelling to me as it seems to some of the interviewees - if the reactions are equally criminal, at least they're not instigative initially, and there are no alternate propositions provided to counter that notion either.
Overall the film is the best up-to-date recount of the terrorist threat (in its most mainstream set) that I've yet to see, and for that I think it is an excellent place to start an examination of the jihadist or bin Ladinist extremist threat.
P. Taylor poses some fairly challenging questions to the British government (the former MI5 director in particular), but he goes no further than others have before on the matters of torture, state-sponsored assassinations and targeting non-battlefield targets in non-combatant territories. Did the British government allow Pakistan to a license to torture, were the London bombings preventable, was the government responsive enough? These are some of the challenges the journalist poses.
The primary comment made is that the response of governments is often just as criminal or hypocritical as the forces they try to oppose - thus breeding more of the same ad infinitum. This particular argument is not as compelling to me as it seems to some of the interviewees - if the reactions are equally criminal, at least they're not instigative initially, and there are no alternate propositions provided to counter that notion either.
Overall the film is the best up-to-date recount of the terrorist threat (in its most mainstream set) that I've yet to see, and for that I think it is an excellent place to start an examination of the jihadist or bin Ladinist extremist threat.
