NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS- HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY. ........................................................................ PANORAMA A warning from HOLLYWOOD RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC-1 DATE: 24:03:02 ........................................................................ Port of Los Angeles 2002 STEVE BRADSHAW: America on alert. Cruise liners searched by armed sea martials, they fear ships could be used as battering rams to destroy the west's largest port. Before the terrorist attacks on September 11th, such fears would have seemed like Hollywood fantasy. ??: I think we just had that feeling that that sort of thing doesn't happen over here, and so the first thing you think about is just it's got to be some kind of TV show or a movie. BRADSHAW: The feeling that September 11th was like watching a movie was shared across the world, nowhere more strongly than in the hills above LA Harbor in Hollywood itself. STEVE DE SOUZA Screenwriter - Die Hard I & II Well it did look like a movie. It looked like a movie poster. It looked like one of my movie posters. LAWRENCE WRIGHT Screenwriter - The Siege It was about an hour after the first trade centre came down that I began to make the connection with the movie, this haunting feeling at the beginning this looks like a movie, and then I thought it looks like my movie. BRADSHAW: For years Hollywood had been showing America at risk from terrorism, religious extremism, and weapons of mass destruction. Even those in the front line in the fight against terrorism believed it was Hollywood, not Washington that saw the warning signs most clearly. Lt Col. RALPH PETERS US Army, 1976-98 When you look back at Hollywood's take on terrorism in the 90s, about the only thing they really got wrong was they didn't come out and name Osama bin Laden. The names are wrong but the overall vision was absolutely more acute than virtually any intelligence report I read when I was in the Pentagon. BRADSHAW: Hollywood producers didn't start making films about terrorist attacks to predict the future, they did it to make money. STEVE DE SOUZA Screenwriter - Die Hard I & II What happened was, just one day people realises there's new markets were opening up around the world and American films penetrated beyond western Europe and north America. The films that did well were invariably the adventure films. BRADSHAW: But with the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War, the writers of action movies had a problem. ??: The commies were over, in other words, all of a sudden we woke up and we couldn't use the commies for a villain, and peace and quiet is bad for.. you know.. action films. BRADSHAW: So Hollywood found a new villain - the terrorist. Die Hard BRADSHAW: The global success of the Die Hard movies showed that terrorism could replace Communism as Hollywood's enemy of choice. After the atrocities of September 11th, Hollywood's terrorism movies can seem like tasteless fantasies. But tasteless or not, many did reflect what was really going on in the world. LAWRENCE WRIGHT Screenwriter - The Siege When you make a movie, you get criticised for not being real, and the closer you can approach the archetype of reality the more satisfying it is for the audience because they know that's the way it is. You are always seeking that sense of response on the part of your audience member. I feel that's real. BRADSHAW: Thriller writer Tom Clancy had shown Hollywood just how profitable making it real can be. Clancy's trademark was digging into the shadowy world of national security and counter terrorism. TOM CLANCY Author One of the things you try to do if you're fixing for a living is to stay ahead of things that are happening out there and to alert people to things that might actually happen. I pay attention to the real world, I look at facts, I talk to people in that business and I'll say 'is this possible?' and they'll go well yeah. BRADSHAW: Tom Clancy's research led him to write books that can now seem uncannily prophetic. In Debt of Honour, a pilot hijacks a plane full of fuel and crashes it into Washington's Capital Building. One of the plane's hijacked on September 11th may have had the same target. CLANCY: I didn't write Debt of Honour without first discussing it with an air force officer. And so I ran this idea past him and all of a sudden this guy's eyeballing me rather closely and I said come on general, I know you must have looked at this before, you've got to have a plan for it. And the guy goes "Mr Clancy, to the best of my knowledge, if we had a plan to deal with this, it would be secret, I wouldn't be able to talk to you about it, but to the best of my knowledge we've never looked at this possibility before. BRADSHAW: How do you come up with this scenario, a plane flying into a government building full of fuel? CLANCY: Well first you identify the point of vulnerability and then you try to see how you can address that particular problem. You know.. if the chain of command is all in one spot, that's where you want to put your weapon, and so then the next question is do we have a weapon to use. BRADSHAW: And you came up with? CLANCY: Well obviously, it's an aeroplane. I mean it's obvious. What else would it be? New York, 1993 [News footage] Since we've come on the air we've been getting details of an explosion at the World Trade Centre in New York. A hundred people are believed to have been injured and some people are said to be buried underneath the rubble. BRADSHAW: As Clancy's book came out, it was becoming clear America faced a new kind of terrorist threat. [News footage] They're still in the process of evacuating one of the towers, one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, but they said it was a huge explosion, it sounded like a plane hitting the building. BRADSHAW: In 1993 Islamic extremists had tried to blow up the World Trade Centre. JESSICA STERN National Security Council, 1994-95 What we saw was the emergence of terrorists who really are zealots who don't want to influence the political process but are really seeking revenge. This is an important change and represents an important change in the threat that requires a different kind of response. BRADSHAW: But Hollywood was to respond faster than Washington. For movie makers religious fanatics were ideal villains for the new action movies. DE SOUZA: Arab terrorists became popular because.. you know.. in the news around the world you'd see them doing things and they seemed to be very loosely associated, and they required no explanation. Arab terrorists, okay, the movie proceeds, whereas if you have a worked out story simply about a murder or a love triangle or revenge, well you've got to know something about the people and invest some time in knowing what makes them tick. This is easy. They've got a turban, we don't have to know what's going on under that turban, just proceed with the story. BRADSHAW: Often Hollywood's Arab villains were crude cartoon characters. But some of the better researched films were disturbingly accurate in their portrayal of the new religious terrorists and their tactics. In Executive Decision, Islamic extremists hijack a plane. The plan? To dive bomb Washington. The film showed flaws in airline security remarkably like those of September 11th. Die Hard BRADSHAW: To help make characters authentic the producer sought the advice of Syed Badreya billed in the credits as 'Arabic Technical Advisor'. SAYED BADREYA Arabic Technical Advisor Executive Decision We talked about custom, we talked about casting, we talked about behaviour, we talked about the storyline and I will meet with writer, and they will give me a situation and I will tell them what the situation if that's accurate in Arabic way or not. BRADSHAW: Badreya had made a career of helping Hollywood portray Muslims and Arabs. To research religious extremism he went underground. He'd even met the alleged mastermind behind the first World Trade Centre conspiracy - Omar Abdul Rahman at a mosque in Los Angeles. BADREYA: I needed to know everything about his operation, so when he came to the mosque, I stick with him and went underground. He give a speech underground. I record all the speech. I record how he prepare people to do operation. I record everything so I was there. BRADSHAW: Badreya helped write dialogue and coached David Suchet who played the hijacker's leader. [Film Clip - Die Hard] We are the true soldiers of Islam. Our destiny is to deliver the vengeance of Allah into the belly of the infidel. BRADSHAW: Suchet's character represented the new religious terrorist, a suicide bomber bent not on political concessions but on killing as many infidels as possible. While a story hungry Hollywood kept it's eyes on the changing world, Washington was not unaware of the threat but was still looking over its shoulder to the comforting certainties of the past. Lt Col. RALPH PETERS US Army, 1976-98 The Pentagon was looking intensely around the world for another Soviet Union. It was a horrible disappointment to see the Soviet Union disappear. We won! And the penalty was that our forces didn't make sense as currently structured anymore. The generals and admirals loved their military, but emotionally they had a tremendous hurdle to overcome in accepting that the world had changed and the military they built lovingly and cherished was now obsolescent. BRADSHAW: Ralph Peters was an army intelligence officer who'd become a leading writer on the future of warfare. He'd written reports from inside the Pentagon warning that terrorists, not foreign states, now posed the most likely threat to America. But too few paid attention. PETERS: The most difficult thing for me personally was convincing the Pentagon that religion mattered. There was this clear sense among those of us who were actually travelling to the wretched places of the earth that belief was incredibly powerful. It was obvious that the real dynamic of violence was belief, either religious or ethnic passions and beliefs. It wasn't hard to see if you went out and looked at the world. But if you just hugged the capital city, if you just read your books, well you weren't going to get that vision. BRADSHAW: Jessica Stern was a White House insider working for President Clinton's National Security Council. She too was worried the threat of terrorism was being underplayed, partly because it didn't justify the expensive weapon systems needed for conventional warfare. JESSICA STERN National Security Council, 1994-95 People make money off weapons and there are commercial interests at stake and people have pet projects, either that they expect to make money off of or they think their constituencies will benefit from, or they may just be emotionally attached, they may have a way of looking at the world and it's hard to give up that way of looking at the world. PETERS: Bureaucracies seek stability, they don't like imagination and bureaucracies, above all, fear the future. Hollywood is about the visceral human experience, even in its most fantastic forms, and they just intuitively sensed how the world was changing in a way that government could not do. BRADSHAW: Of course people in the Pentagon watched Hollywood terror movies. Surprisingly some even helped make them. The Pentagon's Film Liaison Office lends films like Executive Decision weapons, planes and soldiers. In return they ask for script approval to make sure the military come out looking good. Executive Decision has 16 lines of Pentagon credits including Film Liaison Officer Phil Strub. Did you ever think when working on Executive Decision - 'hey, this could actually happen'? PHILIP STRUB Pentagon Film Liaison Well we felt that there was the possibility.. a remote possibility that something like that could happen. I mean we had to accept that you had to have a degree of plausibility or else the film wouldn't have succeeded on any level. But we didn't look at that picture with any kind of grand security concerns, nor did we believe that it in any way encouraged or gave any kind of encouragement to somebody who might in fact want to perpetrate an act of terrorism of that nature. BRADSHAW: But a film about a jumbo dive bombing in the hands of Muslim extremist in Washington, I mean did you ever feel hey, this could happen, I ought to go and tell the generals? STRUB: Well, no, no not really. I mean I... we approached that script with a pretty high degree of confidence that our senior leadership is looking at all types of possibilities in the area of terrorism and doing a far better job of it than we could, which is why we're not doing it. Saudi Arabia 1996 BRADSHAW: In 1996 nineteen American soldiers were killed in an attack on a US army barracks in Saudi Arabia. But while Islamic extremists continued to target Americans abroad, Hollywood was a step ahead. Some film makers had begun to wonder what would happen if the terrorists ever struck America again. ED ZWICK Director - The Siege I'd read a lot about militant Islam. I knew how very threatened and pushed various governments felt, and it wasn't as if I was making this up but I was trying to keep my antenna open to what might exist in the political universe outside of this place so as to then try to imagine a cautionary tale. BRADSHAW: Zwick and his team went to Washington and spent weeks interviewing sources in the intelligence world, not generals and politicians but agents on the ground. They had a disturbing message for the film makers, a message the public weren't aware of. LAWRENCE WRIGHT Screenwriter - The Siege I was surprised by their anticipation that something would happen here. Honestly when I began this, I had not been as apprised of how dangerous a world we were living in, and yet the people I was talking to were expecting that it was only a matter of time, it would happen here. ZWICK: I knew a number of people who were preoccupied with terrorism and its inevitability in this country, who would speak about it in a way that was so different than how it was being perceived in the more general public. I remember one agent at the FBI saying you've got to understand, terrorism is a very big shop, and we don't have the resources here to appropriately handle what we're being asked to do. WRIGHT: It was so easy to come into America. It was so easy to operate inside it. And there was.. you know.. Arab extremists all over the country, thousands and thousands of people in mosques and so on, some of who were very extreme, and they were being watched by the FBI but not very closely, and this was a very closed off community and it was a little discouraging when I was doing my research to find out how little expertise any of our intelligence agencies had with regard to Arabs or Muslims. ZWICK: Typically we in America existed in this kind of radical innocence, uncomfortably so, but according to all those to whom I spoke, there was some sense of inevitable drumbeat toward the moment when we would have to in fact.. you know.. deal with it. BRADSHAW: One of those they spoke to was counter terrorism expert Jeff Beatty who'd worked for the army's elite Delta Force, the FBI and the CIA. JEFF BEATTY Military Advisor - The Siege At the very beginning, the very first meeting I had with Ed I believe I told Ed that there would be a 5,000 casualty incident on US soil, and before 2001 or something like that, and that Ed was very judicious in the type of incident he wanted to portray in the film to make it acceptable, to not make it sensational but nonetheless to try to show the talking points. BRADSHAW: The film Ed Zwick made was called The Siege, it was to be the most chillingly prescient terrorism film of them all. The Siege tells the story of a group of Islamic terrorists, some in the United States on student visas, like some of the terrorists on September 11th. It begins with the kidnapping by the US army of an Islamic terrorist leader who looks not dissimilar to Osama bin Laden. [Film Clip - The Siege] He is alive and well and will be delivered intact by 0.800 tomorrow. ZWICK: Bin Laden in fact at that moment I think to the general public was not a particularly important figure, and yet to those people to whom I was speaking, they were already describing his import so that's how he found his way into the film. BRADSHAW: So that was Bin Laden? ZWICK: Well, a version thereof. BRADSHAW: But you got the idea because people were telling you about this guy. ZWICK: Yes, yes. BRADSHAW: The Muslim extremists hijack a bus in New York. FBI agent Denzel Washington thinks these are old style terrorists who'll want to use the hostages as bargaining counters. But Annette Bening plays a CIA agent who's realised New York is confronted by a new kind of threat. [Film Clip] Oh God! They're not here to negotiate. Meaning? They were waiting for the cameras. They want everybody watching. You've got the shooters in place? Yeah, some. Use them. Kill them now. Look - it's lose, lose any way you play it. You want to lose little or lose big? WRIGHT: Terror really is theatre and the idea is to shock people out of their normal sensibilities and cause them to focus on the terrorist and what their grievances are. That's why terrorists are always waiting for the cameras to catch them, and the World Trade Centre was a classic example of that. There's the striking of the World Trade Centre and then by the time all the cameras in the world are trained on it, here comes a second airliner. BRADSHAW: Back in the film with the cameras turning, Denzel Washington tries to negotiate. [Film Clip] I'll tell you what, why don't you just let the elderly people go eh? You know these old people, they've been standing up there for a long time. Why don't we just let them go. Thank you very much. Now we just..... (explosion) BEATTY: Denzel Washington, the FBI agent, was still in a bit of denial that in fact this was happening, that he couldn't talk his way, or negotiate his way, out of it. I think the scene was, from a Hollywood point of view, a pretty accurate portrayal of where our consciousness was about the reality of the threat. I think that law enforcement would react very close to that way in the late 90s. They just weren't there. BRADSHAW: But if the film was intended as a cautionary tale, that's not how it was seen on its release. ZWICK: When the movie came out it encountered a great deal of controversy and I believe was prey to a certain degree of political correctness. [News] Outside cinemas where the film is being shown there is anger and dismay. Arab Americans and Muslim groups say The Seige is racist. ZWICK: Many questioned whether it was legitimate or even inflammatory to talk about these things, because was I in fact vilifying Arab Americans by suggesting that there might be such a thing as militant Islam that might be radical enough to perpetuate terrorism here? BRADSHAW: Many say Arabs and Muslims are Hollywood's favourite scapegoat and that Islam is being depicted as a decease spreading throughout the West. WRIGHT: When the movie came out, I'm not sure people were ready to see America be so vulnerable. That's probably what The Siege was really remarkable for, it did not show this invincible country, it showed a country that was very vulnerable and a big target rich environment is what we call it now, and that's the sense of those investigators I was talking to had back then. BRADSHAW: It wasn't just agents inside America who were complaining that they have no sources inside Islamic terrorist organisations, because one of the CIA's top agents in the 90s, Robert Baer, was tasked with spying on the camps and towns that nourish the new generation of Islamic extremists. ROBERT BAER Case Officer, CIA, 1976-97 My job was to recruit and run spies in terrorist organisations, and our instructions were to penetrate every terrorist organisation which was a threat to the United States. We knew where the terrorist groups were, the problem was getting to them and getting a source inside. BRADSHAW: But Baer's attempts to infiltrate Islamic terror groups in Central Asia were constantly turned down by his CIA bosses. He asked Washington for Pushtu speakers to send into camps in Afghanistan . BAER: He said there are none, we have no speakers and we don't care about Afghanistan. The answer was that blunt. That's the kind of culture you're dealing with. Afghanistan is a basket case, we don't care about it, it's not coming here, it's not a problem, we're not going to spend any resources or put any time into it. BRADSHAW: You were dealing with Central Asia where there were many Muslim extremists. How many spies did you have in the their ranks? BAER: I was head of Central Asia when I left, in the Caucuses we had none. BRADSHAW: No spies? BAER: No spies. BRADSHAW: For Baer, the movies of the 90s had captured the threat from terrorism more accurately than his bosses in Washington. BAER: The way I look at Hollywood is it has more imagination than the government. The government is made out of bureaucrats. Hollywood takes the facts as they see them in life and turn them into these scenarios that are very close to reality in a certain sense. The only difference between Hollywood and reality is Hollywood has a happy ending, and there's a hero. BRADSHAW: Hollywood scenarios were becoming evermore disturbing. Its terrorist villains began to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that now so worry Washington. Once again Hollywood sought inspiration in reality. It found a heroine in Jessica Stern at the White House's National Security Council. Stern had long warned how easily terrorists could obtain nuclear weapons, but she found it hard to get a hearing. JESSICA STERN National Security Council, 1994-95 There was a group of us who felt that this was an urgent threat, that people weren't paying enough attention to you. Indeed we were determined to get the President to pay more attention to this issue. BRADSHAW: Stern was approached by producers making a film called The Peacemaker about terrorists stealing an atomic bomb from Russia's ill guarded stock pile, it's so-called 'loose nukes.' They wanted to turn Miss Stern into the lead character. Stern agreed believing a movie might have more impact on the White House than another memo. STERN: I do think that Hollywood can have an impact. People in my profession always think well.. you know.. we'll have an impact by writing papers, but I think that movies may in fact have more impact. The message we hoped would get across through The Peacemaker was that there was this new kind of threat out there. First of all there was the problem of loose nukes, and in addition to that we hoped to get across the message that weapons of mass destruction, chemical, nuclear and biological agents could get into the hands of non-state actors or terrorists. That in fact it wasn't just state that posed a threat regarding nuclear chemical and biological agents, but also groups or even individuals. BRADSHAW: And so Jessica Stern found herself being played by Nicole Kidman. STERN: I think she played the role really, really well. I loved it. I mean yes, she was very beautiful but she was really... she was a tough girl. The Peacemaker [Film Clip] A secure line to NMCC. This is Dr Julia Kelly, I am issuing a presidential directive for a federal nuclear emergency plan. We have a possible weapon of mass destruction coming into the United States by unknown terrorist or terrorists. STERN: One thing that Nicole Kidman really got right, was a sense of urgency about the threat, and she wasn't worried about authority and I must say that I had a group of colleagues who really were real zealots and really didn't want to pay attention to the normal rules, who really did feel this was an urgent threat and sometimes got themselves in trouble as a result of this sense of urgency. [Film Clip] I need your gun. Give me the gun. I need the gun.] BRADSHAW: Kidman and colleague George Clooney must deactivate the atomic part of the bomb. [Film Clip] Easy, easy. 14, 13, 12, 11, let's go 10, 9, 8, come on 7 come on 6, 5.... Go, go, go, (explosion) BRADSHAW: The bomb's detonator goes off but with the atomic element successfully deactivated the world is safe. Did The Peacemaker ring any bells with you as a spy? ROBERT BAER Case Officer, CIA, 1976-97 Yes, it's plausible that this could happen, but what wasn't plausible is the way they solved it of course but that's Hollywood, you know.. it's nonsense that we would know about this and be able to defeat it. It's just not the way the bureaucracy of this government works, the FBI or the CIA. BRADSHAW: What would really have happened? BAER: It would go off. My feeling is, knowing these groups like I do, having seen 'em, talked to them, seen just how capable they are, that if they decide and do have the means to bring a dirty nuclear bomb into New York, or even a man pack, it will go off. There's not going to be George Clooney who's going to.. you know, to stop this thing, that's not the way it works. BRADSHAW: Hollywood did anticipate many of the details of September 11th. Some of the terrorists had trained as pilots, lived in Germany, been on terrorist watch lists and turned planes into weapons against American cities, all details were seen in different Hollywood movies. But in the Hollywood community there was a sense of unease. STEVE DE SOUZA Screenwriter - Die Hard I & II The fact that it was experienced through the media, that it was mediagenic if you could say that about something so harmful, and it resembled all these Hollywood productions, I think struck people in Hollywood in a... not harder but maybe twice, you had the initial shock and then you have some reflection, and a lot of people I think got a queasy feeling of association with it. I went to a fundraiser within a week or so of this, where we raised money for the victims. Almost everyone I ever met in my entire life in Hollywood was jammed into somebody's house and everybody was writing cheques. And as I was leaving, I encountered a producer and he said "You know after this event of 9/11 I just don't think I could ever make another violent movie." So there was everybody sort of like trying to take some kind of responsibility. LAWRENCE WRIGHT Screenwriter, The Siege The scenes of destruction were eerily similar to some of the things that we'd seen in The Siege. It was a horrible feeling to think that I had anticipated this and that the things that I had most dreaded had come true far worse than I had ever imagined in the movie. BRADSHAW: The makers of The Siege remembered the abuse heaped on them for showing Muslims as terrorists. ED ZWICK Director - The Siege If I were being deeply honest about my response to these events, there was a kind of perverse and horrible bloody minded corroboration or even validation of some of the things that I had wanted to talk about, and that's because I had been affected by the response to the film when first it came out. And I think the response to the film when first it came out partook of much of the denial that this country was in about terrorism which we are in no longer. BRADSHAW: Across America in the Pentagon's Film Liaison Office thoughts also turn to some of the films they'd help make, especially Executive Decision with its plot of the hijacked plane targeted at Washington. Did nobody ever think even after 11th September - hey, that movie was prophetic? PHILIP STRUB Pentagon Film Liaison Oh well after 9/11 of course. Not necessarily prophetic but eerily reminiscent. We just thought what a tragic coincidence it was that this film had been made that was eerily reminiscent of what had happened here in Washington and New York. But again we didn't make anything of it. We didn't feel that that was.. that there was any linkage. It was simply a tragic coincidence. BRADSHAW: But some inside the Pentagon felt that if Hollywood had seen the future coming once, maybe it could do so again. Pentagon officials were dispatched to California to consult screenwriters, directors and producers. The suits of the Pentagon finally enlisting the lateral thinkers of Hollywood. STEVE DE SOUZA Screenwriter - Die Hard I & II It was basically three days and there were screenwriters, producers and directors who'd done a very interesting range, going from romantic comedies to police dramas and everything in between, so it wasn't just people who do escapist adventure films. On the one hand I was flattered they asked me, on the other hand I was very nervous saying God, if they're asking me, maybe we have to.. like start knitting white flags. I think they just knew that if we go into a meeting with people from this creative community, we're going to hear things thrown at us that we would never hear in our own internal discussions. JEFF BEATTY Military Advisor - The Siege It would be wrong not to take advantage of all the talent that's out there and to say 'how do you guys see this?' And there have also been plenty of historical examples where films like The Siege and other films have foretold things that eventually became unfortunately a reality. BRADSHAW: Hollywood and the Pentagon tried to brainstorm what the terrorists of Al-Qaeda might do next. At last the Pentagon seemed to be admitting it had to think more like Hollywood, and so the so-called 9-11 or September 11th Group was set up. DE SOUZA: One it was explained that.. you know.. we've got all our people thinking in the channels that we're trained to think in. We want some left field, off the wall, ideas. Say the craziest thing that comes into your mind. And like I said, some very crazy wacky things were discussed. But everything that was discussed that was like.. you know.. off the wall, led to a conversation of well okay, that's amusing but what might really happen in that arena and what would be the counter chess move? One of the things that we had to educate ourselves to was looking from the Al-Qaeda end of the telescope, what is a juicy target in America? So if we got.. you know.. one knew idea, or one new vulnerability that we thought of that the Pentagon would not think of then we know we accomplished something. BRADSHAW: What's your reaction to the Pentagon looking to Hollywood for future terrorist scenarios? ROBER BAER Case Officer, CIA, 1976-97 It's idiotic. The Pentagon should be finding out ways to penetrate these groups. You can't ask Hollywood to do that. I mean they should be having people with imagination in the government saying this is what we've got to do. BRADSHAW: America is now fighting its war against terror. Suspects from the war in Afghanistan interned in Guantanamo Bay. Inside America over 1100 suspects mainly of Arab descent were arrested and many are still held without trial. Once again some had that eerie feeling that Hollywood had seen it coming. DE SOUZA: My biggest fear after 9-11 was not that the building I was in was going to be the target of the next airplane but was that The Siege would come true, that we would become a country under martial law, that people of Middle Eastern origin would be put into internment camps. [Film Clip] Do not be alarmed. The perimeter is for your own security. WRIGHT: The conclusion that I came to in that movie is that we're going to be really tested, and that's what's happening to us right now. We're not seeing the barbed wire, but that doesn't mean that 1100 people haven't been rounded up and contained without, in many cases, access to lawyers or their families. It's a real trial for American civil liberties right now. BRADSHAW: By studying the real world, Hollywood warned us of the dangers of terrorist attacks, and a new kind of warfare. Amid the glamour of the Oscars, tinsel town, like the rest of us, is watching carefully for what happens next. WRIGHT: We don't know how it's going to shake out. It could really change us, especially if we continue to feel the threat then we could become a different kind of country. Already our own liberties, we all know, have been immensely constrained, and we think it's temporary but it could not be. It could be a permanent condition. _________ www.bbc.co.uk/panorama CREDITS Reporter Steve Bradshaw Film Camera Johann Perry Sound Recordist Tim Watts VT Editor Boyd Nagle Dubbing Mixer Steve Cookman Colourist Colin Peters Graphic Design Kaye Huddy Julie Tritton Film Research Kate Redman Production Team Karen Sadler Bessie Wedgwood Susan Marimo Production Manager Martha Estcourt Unit Manager Maria Ellis Acknowledgements to 20th Century Fox Film Corp. for excerpts from Die Hard, Die Hard II and The Siege Dreamworks for excerpts from The Peacemaker Warner Bros for excerpts from Executive Decision Film Editor William Grayburn Assistant Producer Sarah Waldron Producer Ricardo Pollack Deputy Editor Andrew Bell Editor Mike Robinson 13 ________________________________________________________________________________ ______________________ Transcribed by 1-Stop Express Services, London W2 1JG Tel: 0171 724 7953 E-mail 1-stop@msn.com