OmegaZine! October editorial

I thought I had seen it all when, as The Konformist reported after the September 11 attacks that the whole plot was cooked up by some nefarious "pro-Bush" faction, not bin Laden, not Al-Qeada, not Saddam, not the Russians, not the Chinese (of course, the motive is plausible--to turn the US into a fascist police state, which is supposedly what the power elites want. I am not questioning that their motive is such, as toward a police state we are certainly moving, what with all the phalanx denouncing anything that smacks of moderation and logic here, anyone that looks Arabic, and any thought except groupthink!). Though I am not willing yet to totally dismiss their screed, I have to admit that this obscure Web site is probably either a set up by the infiltrators themselves, or is completely without verifiable proof. Even the owner of the site couldn't verify it.

The other night--October 9 or 10, I can't remember which night and on which "terrorism news special" (God they have almost been endless) I heard this--an FBI official, a rather high up one at that, relayed that one of the reasons Qatar's Al-Jazeera TV was being targeted for censorship (by the US, not the Emir of Qatar, who owns the station) was because when it broadcast televised bin Laden speeches or interviews, folks like Colin Powell, the FBI, the CIA, etc. were concerned that any particular bin Laden gesture or phrase might be a special "code" to "sleeper" operatives in the US to "wake up" and, say, poison the water supply of Los Angeles!

Just imagine--even you humorless flag-wavers can tell I am joking, right?--what if Osama picks his nose for Al-Jazeera, and the next thing you know, the White House blows up?

I mean, how can these "intelligence" folks know for what reason "bin boy" scratches his nose while saying "death to every American man, woman, and child"? Certainly not to wake up anyone; more likely--since, after all, he's a CIA creation--he's doing it because he knows that as soon as the US is a police state he has won. Maybe he is "faking out" the "intelligence" community that (by design or not) has already failed miserably to do their stated job--protect the US.

Humorless flag-wavers? I may be wrong but I suspect folks are losing not only their ability to utter free speech, but are also losing their sense of humor. Comedians, radio DJs and others are being fired, being censured or being jailed for such things as doing Taliban skits, wearing Osama masks (just what are they going to do about Halloween?), and they're still talking about that Bill Maher business. Now "they"--the new neo-con politically correct and the legislate-morality-types--want to come down hard on the guy who invented that "Sesame Street" Bert/Bin laden poster as anti-US demonstrators in BanglaDesh used the graphic on their posters (see this article.)

I could take waiting on longer lines at airports. I could take a few more checkpoints on highways. I could take more TV time being taken up by smarmy "patriotic" entertainment specials by Hollywood, the same Hollywood hypocrites that prior to this couldn't have cared less about America. I could even take a shunning or two because I don't wear those little flag pins. But I could not take a national loss of humor, which would make us worse than those ultra-self-righteous moral pricks, the Taliban.

Deborah Lagarde