To protect Sarah's identity and to preserve her
safety, The Popcorn Reel has decided to reveal just one of her two eyes.
Part Three: Sarah's Safety?
Sarah has now been held in a camp for at least three
months. She has been told that the nuclear disaster is still ongoing,
although she wants to know why she has been labeled an enemy combatant.
She still doesn't know why. For heaven's sake, she thought, "I am an
American. You can't do this to me," instantly fighting to suppress a
desire to cry, just as George Lucas's "THX 1138" had a story set in a universe
where emotional impulse was outlawed. Instead, she sat back and remembered a movie called
"Eagle Eye" that she saw
back
in September 2008, about a man, played by Shia LaBeouf, who was being spied on by
the FBI, apparently set up. The man suddenly finds lots of cash in his
bank account. He finds weapons and explosives in his house. Sarah
also remembers the many reports of identity theft, with computers with lots of
social security numbers being stolen from college campus laptops, desktops and
at other places of
education, work and business. She was allowed a walk outside -- the 30
minutes of fresh air that she used to take for granted. Sarah saw nothing
but
military personnel
all over the place. She read the lips of a fellow
detainee -- which is what these 3,000 were being called now -- "martial law",
the disheveled man mouthed.
Sarah searched her mind. She had remembered that
Jose Padilla, an American
citizen, had been detained for more than three years,
maybe five, and was
charged with
conspiring to make a dirty bomb. She remembered that
thousands of Muslims had been detained in the U.S. in detention centers, plucked
from their homes following September 11, 2001. Many had been held in Guantanamo Bay for as many as six years without being told what they were being
charged with. She took note of the abuses of innocent people and noted
that Americans largely stayed silent while they occurred. Perhaps that was
because they had Muslim names, unlike her. Perhaps because they were
Muslim, unlike this writer. Perhaps because many Americans are racist (and
sexist). Perhaps because many Americans automatically view Muslims as
terrorists. Sarah was never a policy wonk like
Al Franken but she decided to
vote for the first time
in 2008. She wasn't happy about Barack Obama's campaign volunteer
telling
two Muslim women that they couldn't be in the front row of an Obama rally with
Al Gore in June 2008 in Detroit.
It seemed that the Obama campaign, whose candidate spent
the better part of 2008
attacking the lie that he was a Muslim,
had a fear of its own. Sarah was repulsed by statements made by McCain
campaign official Charlie Black (a lobbyist on
behalf of some of the world's most notorious dictators) that a
terrorist attack
in the U.S. would benefit the senator in November 2008 and the
ominous fear
warning by McCain-ite Joseph Lieberman (wasn't he Al Gore's vice presidential
nominee in 2000?, thought Sarah) who had said on television that the next
president should be prepared for a terrorist attack in his first term, since
Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush had terrorist attacks occur on American
soil in the first few months of the first terms of their presidencies.
Earlier in the month of June 2008, Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of
Texas for the 10th District in Austin, said on the floor of the House on Capitol
Hill in Washington, D.C. that "the threat of nuclear devices coming into this
country is very real."
Sarah contemplated escaping from this camp especially as she heard whispers that
Abu Ghraib-like
torture was happening
here -- and thought about Oliver North, a
man whom she loved and revered. She wanted to marry him so badly.
She changed her tune though, when she learned that he supposedly had something
to do with creating and authorizing camps like the one she now found herself in
all over the country, according to one of those
nutty wack-wack websites that called itself not another conspiracy, or something
like that. Camps that rounded up innocent people for no reason.
Shoot, it was easy to round up the Blacks and Hispanics -- after all, they were
American citizens arguably the most patriotic Americans given their history in
America -- and no one said much about detained Muslims from other countries whom
were being held by the U.S. government in its War on Terror, which probably made
it easier for silence to happen when the B's and H's were rounded up in 2008 and
2009 and sent to camps. Another George, George Orwell, had written about
something like this, did he not, in 1984, or
something, Sarah recalled in her very tired mind. She used to be a
magazine model and was kicked out of the Dixie Chicks band for some unknown
reason but was considered too old to work anymore.
Sarah was white and she saw herself as disadvantaged. She had her own
school of hard knocks to deal with. At this troubled time in America, all
she was concerned about was staying alive. She had heard of the Capitol
Hill senate testimony in late June 2008 of two Bush government officials (John
Yoo, who
wrote torture
memos, and David Addington, VP Dick Cheney's
former attorney) and
what they said about whether they supported torture.
C-SPAN's website has the
shocking and amazing responses from their
three hour testimony
on June 26, 2008 -- all on video.
Watch and listen to the way Mr. Addington responds to Representative Jerrold
Nadler's questions during the hearing (especially at the 36:00 mark and
onwards.) Why didn't the mainstream media talk about this instead of about
trivia about who's going to be who's vice presidential pick? Someone had even said that it wasn't torture unless someone died from it.
Errol Morris, Sarah
thought, wouldn't agree. He'd call it
Standard Operating Procedure. And Michael Moore,
she learned was contemplating a film called "While America Slept".
"What month is it?"
The reply was April, Sarah remembered, April 3, 2009.
George W. Bush was
still president beyond his eight-year term limit -- she was told, and had heard
his voice over the loud speaker. She had trouble however, believing that
it wasn't May 1 -- May Day, or the day after that or the day after that or the
day after that one. Her watch had stopped cold. Cold as ice.
She felt used to the uncomfortable surroundings, but the food was awful.
She used to listen to Rush Limbaugh more than she changed the color of her hair.
He had said something about unrest at the
Democratic National Convention in
Colorado in August 2008, or if not, she had heard about people monitoring the
convention in the hopes of encouraging violence. Her friends, whom she
constantly debated on politics, had told her that the Supreme Court in June 2008
had
upheld the rights of gun owners to have guns in their homes in Washington,
D.C.
"What if there was a national emergency and all hell broke lose?
Would it be "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral?", Sarah's friend A.B. once asked.
Lying at Sarah's feet was an old newspaper clipping about a white man who in June 2008
shot two Hispanic immigrants dead with his gun in Texas, even though they were
running from his neighbor's front yard. The man faced no criminal
charges. Few cared about it. Pass the Grey Poupon.
Next:
The historical context that Sarah ignored