United States military, and other forms of "preemption" against non-existent and unlikely threats made simply on the grounds that the parties involved had the potential to become a threat. Curtis specifically attempts to allay fears of a dirty bomb attack, and concludes by reassuring viewers that politicians will eventually have to concede that some threats are exaggerated and others have no foundation in reality. He says, "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." Contributors Content Adam Curtis originally intended to make a film about conflict within the conservative movement between the ideologies of neoconservative "elitism" and the more individualist libertarian factions. During his research into the conservative movement, Curtis discovered what he saw as similarities in the origins of the neoconservative and Islamist ideologies. The topic of the planned documentary shifted to these other two ideologies, with the libertarian element eventually being phased out. Curtis first pitched the idea of a documentary on conservative ideology in 2003 and spent half a year researching the film. Final recordings were made on 10 October, 19 October and 1 November 2004. As with many of Curtis's films, The Power of Nightmares uses a montage of stock footage taken from the BBC archives which Curtis narrates. Curtis has credited James Mossman as the inspiration for his montage technique, which he first employed for the 1992 series Pandora's Box, while his use of humour has been credited to his first work with television as a talent-scout for the magazine programme That's Life! Curtis has also compared the entertainment aspect of his films to the Fox News channel in America, claiming that the network is successful because of "[their viewers] really enjoying what they're doing." To help drive his points, Curtis uses interviews with various political and intellectual figures. In the first two parts, former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency member Anne Cahn and former American Spectator writer David Brock accuse the neoconservatives of knowingly using false evidence of wrongdoing in their campaigns against the Soviet Union and President Bill Clinton. Jason Burke, author of Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, comments in The Shadows in the Cave on the failure to expose a massive terrorist network in Afghanistan. Additional interviews with major figures are added to drive the film's narrative. Neoconservatives William and Irving Kristol, Richard