My all-time favorite movie is Galaxy Quest, a wonderful Star Trek satire.The reason I mention it is that a scene from the movie popped up in my mind as I was mulling over what I heard on the radio yesterday morning.
The scene is when Captain Taggert (Jason Nesmith) and his crew have just taken command of the bridge of the Star Ship NESA Protector, created by the Termites as an exact replica of what the ship they had seen in the "historical records", i.e. the TV sci-fi series in which he and the other actors had starred in years ago before the show was canceled.
In the scene in question, the tyrant-General Saris (Robin Sachs in the guise of a reptilian rogue) is on screen and Taggert is arguing with Lt. Madison (Sigourney Weaver). Taggert had wanted her to turn off the microphone and had drawn his finger across his throat.
"I gave you the 'cut' sign, that means 'turn off the mike'!"
"No, you gave me the sign that we were goners and I agreed!"
Tech Sgt. Chen (Fred Kwan) , sitting by the space radar screen, interrupts:
"Captain!"
"Yes?"
Pointing at the screen, Chen says, "Do you see that little red thingie heading for that little green thingie in the middle of the screen? Well, I think that little green thingie is us!"
When the little red dot reaches the little green dot an explosion rocks the Protector. The space torpedo Saris had launched had hit the Termian spaceship.
What was it that I had heard on the news that brought that scene up?
Nothing much, just a ratchet up of the "news" from the day before where Blair blathered that there were 200 terror cells in Britain. Today, the scare is that there are 30 terror plots! Al-Q is consciously concentrated on obtaining an atomic bomb or some other WOMAD* such as a bacteriological and/or chemical weapon which they will bring to explosion in Britain or maybe in Europe or somewhere else!
I was terrified, I tell you -- because I got the message: "Be afraid! Be Very Afraid!"
Jeeze, if we hadn't made all those bombs in the first place and still had them half a generation after the end of the First Cold War, how could terrorists get a hold of them now?
The thing is, dear hearts, all the bombs are in the hands of terrorists.
What our leaders fear is that the wrong kind of terrorist should get their bloody hands on some or even one...
I sure as hell don't like the idea of some mad bugger walking around with a Fat Man in a suitcase or a Little Boy in a backpack. Neither do I have any reliable way to judge the probability, so I'm not taking bets at the moment...
But my gut feeling is that the US is more likely to set off a device somewhere before Al-Q does.
However, all that is beside the point!
It has been common knowledge for the longest time that Al-Q screwballs have been having wet dreams about getting their claws on something really dirty for a long time -- that is not news!
In fact, if my memory serves me well, the idea that "terrorists" might get The Bomb is at least 30 years old.
I specifically recall a member of the German Bundestag (a conservative, of course...) speculating that if terrorists had an atomic device they were going to explode, it would be okay to torture them to make them fess up to where they had put it...
The nitty-gritty is not what you hear in the news. The thing to always ask is, "Why am I hearing this now? Why is this news today!"
Here, a possible answer is that it is a high priority for the Bush admin to get the lame duck Congress to pass the law making its illegal wiretapping legal. The "reason" is that if it is not passed they won't be able to catch the terrorists who, as we all know now, are trying to get their hands on The Bomb! Just by coincidence, we "know" this is true because Blair and the chief of MI5 in Britain have just coincidentally set off a meme.
Why the Brit gov't sucks up in this way to the Bush admin is a question in itself.
As a matter of fact, you might ask why the Danish PM kisses Bush's ass the way he does -- that is, if anybody outside of Denmark knows that the Happy Little Kingdom is a member of the "Coalition of the Willing".
It is a fact that the intelligence books were cooked in Denmark after the same recipe in order to get the Danish Parliament (Folketing) to agree to war in Iraq. We know this because a whistleblower did four months in the shade for blowing the whistle to the newspaper, Berlingske Tidene and know the two journalists who did the article are up on charges that can give two years in the shade!
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* WOMAD = Weapons of Obscenely Massive and Agonizing Death
3 comments:
Could it be that it's time for a false flag terrorist event in order to coalesce the masses into giving their "protectors" ever more power to spy and pry and control their lives? Those who base their policy on lies and false intelligence are not above staging such an attack. Surely they wouldn't use nukes......or would they?
But my gut feeling is that the US is more likely to set off a device somewhere before Al-Q does.
I'm with passenger on this one.
Glad to see youall got your cynicism up and running again -- I was, almost, starting to worry.
Ah, and your tinfoil hats sit just perfectly!
Actually, by somwhere I meant Iran, but deliberately fuzzed the meaning, glad you caught the ambiguity!
Would "they" do such a thing? I refuse to let myself activly entertain the thought -- but it pops up on its own now and then.
What I think Gates is to be used for is to cook the intelligence so that "all signs indicate that Iraq is ready to stand on its own" -- then we can leave and when the place turns into a pool of bubbling blood and shit a bit later they will say, "Who could have known?"
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