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ehnyah
08-18-2005, 05:10 PM
Panic along government-suggested lines is impossible

AL Kennedy
Thursday August 18, 2005
The Guardian


Always wanted to live in a country people flee for fear of religious persecution? Then congratulations, we finally made it. Great news for me, of course - writers get hit just after the minorities, so I can look forward to massively increased sales, especially if they're posthumous, and a whole bunch of cheery postcards from Amnesty International. Yes, it's here, the beginning of the end. Panic now while there's still time. Obviously, you wouldn't want to run in the street for fear of getting seven in the head but barely-suppressed fight or flight should suffuse your limbs as often as possible.

Having an IQ above six, you'll find panicking along government-suggested lines impossible, but even the media spin is cause for helpless concern. How can we be safe, for example, when our police plainly don't possess a mass spectrometer? Which would be a vaguely plausible excuse for the same explosives being described as home-made and military and professional - and never mind that whole "possible explosive" problem. Who exactly is in charge here - Them or Us?

Them or Us being a problem in itself. As our press quotes special services sources redefining UK terrorism as "insurgency", please consider that all those ingenious boys with no more black ops to run in Northern Ireland may want to play over here. And they're being trained by the Israelis - so it's entirely logical our mainland war on terror's first victim was an innocent Catholic who looked Muslim.

Now Tony Blair has declared his global change of rules, he's taking his tips from US Republicans who specialise in vote-rigging. The same people who bypassed the Senate to inflict John Bolton on the world, have spent more than $722,000 on high-class lawyers for James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, and currently charged with jamming Democrat phone banks in November 2002. Meanwhile, irregularities have surfaced in the recent Ohio vote that defeated disgruntled Iraq veteran and Democrat congressional hopeful Paul Hackett.

Or why not panic about Iran. The US national security council says Iran's a decade away from making The Bomb, but Dick Cheney et al are really keen to bomb it, anyway. Dick has STRATCOM putting the plans in place for a response to any act of terror on US soil - the response being to bomb Iran. And given that some of the Iranian targets are hardened and/or underground, nukes are being considered.

So our greatest ally is war-gaming the entirely unprovoked use of nuclear weapons - think Nagasaki/ Hiroshima anniversary, think toasted babies and lots of outrage and revenge. That's got to get you scared - especially when you remember the vice-president's old company, Halliburton, happily did oil business in Iran with Cyrus Nasseri of Oriental Oil Kish - and also of the Iranian nuclear development team.

Scariest of all? The thought that in Crawford, Texas, Cindy Sheehan is waiting to speak to President Bush. She wants to know why her son died in Iraq. Every day, more and more citizens are arriving to wait with her, to exercise their democratic rights. People are starting to talk about a focus of resistance.

Forget the token prosecutions circling Rove, Rumsfeld, Hastert, Abramov and the rest, when ordinary citizens begin resisting en masse with any success we all become the enemy. And we know we show our enemies no mercy.

comment@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1551337,00.html