There is a line at the end of 1975’s Three Days of the Condor where Robert Redford (Turner, the “Condor”) asks Cliff Robertson (playing a CIA Deputy Director named Higgins) why the agency is so busy with plans for the Middle East.
Higgins: It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In 10 or 15 years, food. Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Turner: Ask them.
Higgins: Not now. Then. Ask them when they’re running out. Ask them when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who’ve never known hunger start going hungry. Do you want to know something? They won’t want us to ask them. They’ll just want us to get it for them.
After 9/11, many Americans didn’t want to be asked. It wasn’t about oil, it was about revenge. In 2003, with Iraq, many Americans still didn’t want to be asked.
Things have not gotten really bad, yet. We may come to a time, soon, when there is no heat in our homes, when we are cold, and our engines have stopped. When we start going hungry. How will we act then? Will we look the other way, as our government goes to war to secure the oil we are addicted to?
Now, in 2008, Americans need to ask ourselves whether we just want them to get it for us in Iraq, or Georgia, or Iran. We may still be a democracy, but we have ceded control, are acting like children, and should be disgusted with how this country has been led over the past few years.
After 9/11, many of us were afraid, and needed to feel safe. We have looked the other way and allowed things to get out of control. The Patriot Act. Homeland Security. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This is not America, this is Oceania. This is Big Brother.
Death Sentence
Hiu Lui Ng died on August 6 in the care of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Here is how Keith Olbermann reported what happened:
A NY computer engineer who had lived in this country for sixteen years, dead at the age of 34. He had gone to immigration headquarters for a final interview on his green card last summer. That’s when somebody noticed he had overstayed a visa years earlier. Instead of an interview he waas immediately arrested and had been in jail since. In April he complained of excruciating back pain. By last month he could neither walk nor stand. Now, he is dead. Cancer, concludes the coronor. Cancer that was never diagnosed by prison doctors. And when, Mr. Ng’s lawyers say, when he told officials how sick he was, they denied him an independent medical evaluation. They accused him of faking his condition, and last month they shackled him — his body broken by the cancer — they shackled him to a chair while an ICE official demanded that he withdraw his appeal and accept deportation. They murdered him. We the people in George Bush’s America — we murdered him.
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