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Down The Middle - Jul 30, 2005 - Printable Version
- Say Cheeeese!
by Down The Middle
The Patriot Act would soon be coming up for a vote in Congress...and I began hearing the casual comment, "Time for another bombing" being tossed around, almost as if it were a given. With the waning of public support for the war in Iraq and Bush's general retreat below fifty percent in the polls, I too, had a strange feeling that the upcoming vote might need a little boost, if America were to retain this unfortunate, un-American, civil right sniping piece of parchment that was penned in the frightening days after 9/11. Of course, to my way of thinking, there never was any debate, as Ben Franklin had simply explained all that well over two hundred years ago when he said, "If you give up your freedom for security, you will have neither". I guess you could say, Chris Rock feels about the same way as ole Ben...but expressed himself more to the contemporary when he said, "Fuck Al Qaeda! I'm from Brooklyn!" The simple point being, if you give up your American freedoms, it's no longer "America"...now, is it?.
Yes, Americans.....or at least, half of them, still truly resent anyone messing around with their civil liberties. Unfortunately, the other "half" gets the bejeebers scared out of them, every time some old dark skinned hippie breaks wind in a crowd.....so, here comes the vote and here comes the bombs. Or maybe, it's just my imagination running away with me BOOM! No. there they go! It's all in the timing, you know.
Fortunately, there are nearly two thousand CCTV cameras throughout the London underground and multiple cameras on all of the individual train "carriages" and above ground buses. Unfortunately, British authorities claim the CCTV on that lone, mysteriously rerouted, double-decker bus wasn't functioning at the time....which strikes me a bit strange, considering the eye-witness reports of a "never seen before" CCTV maintenance contractor working on that very bus, throughout the preceding weekend....and they have also yet to offer us any "real" footage of the would be "suicide bombers" traveling together from Luton to King's Cross {in what should have been more than a twenty minute ride) or their subsequent, individual journeys to the respective points of bomb detonation. The British did, however, release a CCTV photo of the "suicide" bombers entering Luton Station on their way to London and martyrdom, providing "irrefutable" evidence as to the identity of these maniacal Jihadists. But is it true, as they say, that the camera doesn't lie....... or is there really more to the picture than meets the eye?
After the 1963 assassination of JFK, his would-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald was defined to America by the infamous "back yard photo", depicting him holding a rifle and a communist newspaper. This ominous Kodak moment became another important brick in the wall of "evidence" to convince the American public that indeed, Oswald was the lone "nut" gunman and that there was no conspiracy to kill the President. If a picture really is worth a thousand words...then, this is the one that started all the talk....but it didn't stop there. But photos are fickle and have no loyalty to either side, as we see in this picture of the second Carcano as well as the "tramp photos"....and who is that standing with a police officer in the doorway of the Dallas Police Station, right behind those tramps? Is that Lee? And is that him standing in the doorway of the Book Depository, six floors below the sniper's nest, as Kennedy's motorcade rolls by? Then, of course, there is the "badgeman", a tiny piece of the famous Mormon photo, snapped at the moment of the "head shot" and purportedly showing a "police uniformed shooter" in the shadows behind the fence on the grassy knoll. Of course, it didn't stop there. The Zapruder film...and even the Kennedy autopsy photos and x-rays are said to "faked".
So what do we make of all the photographic evidence? In todays world, accusations of image fakery abound, from the moon shot to Iraq...from UFOs to Britney Speers nude photos. By adding thousands of CCTV cameras throughout America, we would give up even more of our right to privacy than the Patriot Act has already taken away. It is true that these mechanical "eyes" can spot the bad man.......but it is also true that they can create a bad man, where none exists.
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