The conspiracy theories surrounding September 11 are annoying, not least because they distract from bigger, more disturbing facts, like, say, the failure of national intelligence agencies to prevent the events of that morning. Or the convenient fabulizing of politicians and terrorists.In The Power of Nightmares, produced for the BBC in 2004, the documentarian Adam Curtis traces out of the disillusionment of the post-Vietnam era the curiously parallel rise and demise of Islamic extremism and neoconservatism. In the last episode, “Shadows of the Cave,” Curtis presents the convincing argument that al-Qaeda was ostensibly a projection of American and other Western governments, an exaggeration on par with Reagan’s “Evil Empire” Soviet rhetoric that painted a weak militant movement as a wide network of terrorists controlled by one man. The roots of this fiction include the government prosecutors who sought to label al-Qaeda as a group analogous to the Mafia during the trial over the first World Trade Center bombing, and the media savvy of bin Laden himself, who knew the fearsome power of symbolism (he once hired an entourage of gun-carrying goons for a video). The convenience of pin-pointing a unified threat dove-tailed with the precautionary principle approach to policy, that favors scary “what ifs” in the absence of evidence.In the context of fear, this approach makes sense: rather than wait for terrible events to react to, government begins to work proactively, and with very active imaginations. Civil rights aren’t the only price of security: facts and science become disposable too. By this story line, the phantom enemy of al-Qaeda and bin Laden provided the U.S. with a coherent enemy for an epic political and military mission, gave militants across the world a fantasy flag they could rally behind, and fed the media with a steady stream of material for 24-hour television schedules. Some bin Laden scholars like Peter Bergen call the “al Qaeda is a myth” meme “nonsense,” pointing to evidence that the group was formed by bin Laden in 1988. But the mythos and hype around the organization, Curtis argues, distracted America from a more complex threat, and likely helped foster it too. The biggest loss isn’t bin Laden’s, but ours. And our biggest enemy is us.The idea being, we don’t need conspiracy theorists, or even definitive proof that Osama is dead. We have politicians and we have beliefs.