Sunday 17th of March 2002 – War on Terror
The Observer
‘We’re all dead Americans now’ T. Blair
‘Easy, Saladin’ The Pope
‘Yessssss!’ First reaction of many British people who subsequently claimed to be appalled
‘I have seen nothing to convince me that all these attacks were not the work of one lone American madman’ John Pilger
‘This wouldn’t have happened if I’d still been on BBC1’ Noel Edmonds
‘Operation Infinite Enemy is not a war against Islam, it’s a war against Muslims’ George Bush
‘If you run the twin towers footage backwards, the towers stand up again – we need to ask why has the footage only ever been run forwards?’ Noam Chomsky 😀
‘We are privileged to live in a time when even the world’s most TV-hating nation can make brilliant TV’ Peter Bazalgette
‘Hello Yasser’ Jack Straw greets Ariel Sharon
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Terror’s march backwards
An Absolute Atrocity Special by Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris
Sunday March 17, 2002
The Observer
September
11th: The attacks change forever the British convention for placing the day before the month in dates.
12th: Washington informs Tony Blair of attack on US.
13th: The immediate aftermath of the attacks generates fear and paranoia across America. Angry shoppers beat up a woman who’s put a towel on her head to dry her hair, while people whose faces look like aeroplanes are subject to 24-hour curfew. Citizens for whom this is ‘a bad time’ include Tiara Ryzst, Tray Njinkampps, Mo Jardine, Moss Lamb, the Twain-Towers family, and Will and Tray d’Senta.
14th: Airlines report no one willing to fly. Bush insists this is a sign of defiance and commissions Hollywood to make films in which being scared to go on an aeroplane is an act of bravery. Filming immediately commences on an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called Absolute Refusal about a businessman who cannot face boarding a plane but heroically makes a meeting in Cairo by crossing the Atlantic on a pedalo.
16th: Speculation about US retaliation grows. Expert opinion is divided over whether the ‘medievalist’ regime of Afghanistan should be bombed back to the Stone Age or forward into the twenty-first century. The prevailing Hawk argument runs: ‘There’s a big stone at the back of the Stone Age and we’ll bomb them so hard back into that, they’ll bounce all the way forward to 2002.’
19th: The pop singer Michael Jackson is refused permission to lie down and sing songs from his new album into the World Trade Centre rubble. Jackson is reported to have been a ‘nuisance presence’ at Ground Zero – foisting cheaply embroidered MJ handkerchiefs on to grieving relatives and incessantly moondancing into the paths of rescue workers.
21st: Tony Blair declares that Britain must share in America’s pain as Education Secretary Estelle Morris announces plans for children to drop French and instead spend two hours a day chewing gum. And as a mark of respect, all future Prom concerts will feature orchestras using baseball bats instead of bows.
26th: Bush cheers American nation by launching Operation Death Unto Allah. Concern from coalition partners that this might constitute some sort of gaffe.
27th: There are delays in sending American special forces to Afghanistan when the entire air force refuse to fly in a plane.
30th: Twelve days after the collapse of the World Trade Centre, amazed rescue workers uncover an entire office floor that is still doing business. Despite falling 890 feet and being buried under 12,000 tons of rubble, all workers at Leeman Sachs Trading Inc are unharmed. They have remained at their desks since the bank’s Tokyo HQ saw television pictures of the burning towers, called them up and ordered them to keep working. ‘We were still sitting at our desks when we landed in the rubble,’ said one dealer. ‘I actually completed three transactions on the way down.’ In fact trading at the buried floor has been so good since 11 September, the bank may sue the New York Fire Dept for digging them out.
October
3rd: While donations pour into New York, a suppressed report reveals that a huge benefit concert held last month for victims of the Pentagon attack raised just $21. The show, featuring REM, Bon Jovi, Beck and the Rolling Stones, took place in a purpose-built, 50,000-seat arena on the Pentagon lawn but despite saturation advertising only attracted 74 fans. Sources say that the Pentagon attack, already notorious as ‘a TV dud’, is now badly in need of a relaunch.
4th: The US public is still so sensitive to images of New York that Woody Allen is forced to remake Manhattan shot for shot but with all views of the city taken out. Furious that the new version, Quebec, will lack resonance, the director comforts himself by giving the part of Diane Keaton to eight 17-year-old girls.
6th: American Airlines launches a controversial emergency campaign to persuade Americans to fly again. Posters put up in every major American city show a fearful businessman reading a newspaper over the words ‘Get the hell out while you can! Australia from $120.’
7th: Bush announces the start of Operation Bomb Islamics. He tells the US that coalition members agree this title is not offensive to ‘good Muslims’. This is confirmed in a hastily written episode of The West Wing in which a good Muslim is played by Jeff Goldblum.
8th: World shown new US weaponry including the XMB0181 foaming missile designed to flush out enemy hiding in caves. The device, known as the ‘Condeleezza Cappuccino’, is designed to deliver a sarcastic sprinkling of cocoa powder on the routed enemy.
9th: US bombs hit a Red Cross emergency centre on the outskirts of Kabul, but the Pentagon refuses to apologise, blaming the Red Cross logo for ‘looking like the crosshairs on a viewfinder’. Spokesman Paul Wolfowitz says: ‘I’d ask this clearly self-loathing organisation to change its suicidal insignia before they kill us all.’ The Red Cross complies immediately and changes its logo to a blue baseball hat.
16th: Less than two weeks into the bombing campaign, the US admits its new range of smart weapons may be too intelligent. Sources say the $7m Supersophic missiles have a range of only 50 metres because less than a second after launch the onboard computer has worked out that violence only leads to more violence and that all war is futile. Realising there’s no point any more, the weapon either deliberately crashes itself into a beautiful woman or flies back home to America to spend the rest of its days buzzing round a farm. The Pentagon orders that, from now on, missiles must be ‘no more intelligent than a steelworker’.
18th: Rising concern over humanitarian crisis in Afganistan. Henry Belt, renowned as the most mordant scurgist in Fleet Street, produces a cartoon which is said to have made Alistair Campbell ‘weep like a bereaved child’.
19th: Blair announces support for the US intention to bomb during Ramadan but confirms that out of respect for Islam, all food parcels dropped during this period will be empty.
20th: The Pentagon denies reports of civilian casualties and adds that even if there were some, they couldn’t be shown in case they ‘died in shapes that could be code’.
24th: Bush announces: ‘It may take another 98 years to find bin Laden unless we’ve got him already.’ In a TV address, standing next to a large veiled object, the President continues: ‘For security reasons I cannot reveal whether this titanium steel canister does or does not contain the terror atrocity, Mr bin Laden. But I give the American people my word: bin Laden has definitely been or will be captured. I have ordered that this box be placed, with its contents either full or empty, at the foot of the Lincoln memorial, and opened in 2099. In the meantime, I would ask you to remember that any future video statements by Mr bin Laden could well have been recorded before we put him in this containment. Unless he isn’t in there.’
26th: Anthrax scare in Britain – BBC advises staff
TO: ALL USERS SUBJECT: SECURITY
This email is being issued to all staff.
Be alert about your handling your mail, particularly if it:
• is mailed from a foreign country
• has protruding wires
• is lopsided or uneven
• has a strange odour
• has discolourations, oily stains or crystallisation on the wrapper • is unexpected
• appears to contain powder or other unusual contents
• is covered in bin Laden’s piss or something that smells like it
• has a couple of miniature AK47’s sticking out of it and the muffled sound of jibbering muslim midgets
• the envelope keeps spinning and pointing to Mecca when you put it on a table • the envelope bears a stamp advising you not to read the letter so much as lick it all over and eat it
• the letter inside claims that the white matter in the envelope is ‘the first instalment of some free salt you’ve won’ or ‘some sugar for your morning coffee’.
NB: If you are unsure about your regular postal consignment of cocaine (or speed if you are black and a cleaner) the BBC will for a limited period only, check the powder for anthrobacillus. We regret we cannot be legally responsible for any errors in this analysis and staff will be required to sign a waiver. In the event of a long queue for this service, priority will be given to those whose drugs are supplied by Cocaine Direct or similar who ensure the coca harvesters are part of a profit sharing initiative based on end user purchase receipts.
November
3rd: US on maximum alert as the FBI announces ‘credible’ intelligence suggesting al-Qaeda are planning to trample thousands of Americans to death under rampaging hippos. Bureau chiefs believe a build-up of four million mother hippos could be hidden north of the Canadian border and say a mother hippopotamus will charge at anything that comes between it and its calf. The alert follows the recent discovery of a baby hippo in a White House cupboard. Meanwhile, seven young hippos are said to have walked into a Chicago department store yesterday while an eighth was mysteriously presented as a gift to the actor Ben Affleck. Hardware shops in most states report they’ve now run out of anti-hippo suits.
7th: Described as ‘ill-conceived’, a Broadway production in which New
York firemen perform The Vagina Monologues loses after just three days.
12th: New figures reveal that the number of people who perished in the attacks on 11 September may be as low as three. Counsellors are on standby to help New Yorkers deal with the trauma of being more upset than they needed to be. Pressure mounts on Mayor Giuliani – already criticised for his insistence that Ground Zero be kept shrouded in smoke – after the dust cleared briefly last week to reveal that the South Tower was still standing. Psychologists say original estimates of 6,000 were probably much larger due to ‘all kinds of shit’.
18th: US confidently announces the ‘further complete death’ of Osama bin Laden. Defence chiefs credit the new Fairhunter talking missile which pays local Afghan shepherds to report the location of enemy forces. If leads turn out to be false, Fairhunter returns to the shepherd and blows him up.
21st Success of 9/11 attacks giving al-Qaeda acute ‘second album’ difficulty. FBI sources say the poor quality of follow-up activities reveals al-Qaeda’s dreadful fear that they will never top the impact of the 11 September atrocities. In a recent attack described as ‘a shoddy and lame retread’, one man attempted to crash 100,000 paper darts into Chicago’s Sears Tower. He was arrested without a struggle after throwing just seven darts through the fire escape window of a nearby office block. Similar plots in Washington and Los Angeles were also foiled although a visiting Egyptian did successfully hurl a lobster at Jimmy Connors.
23rd: Western capitals are disrupted by a wave of hoaxers claiming to have sent anthrax through the post. The police report particular difficulties with people claiming to be hoaxers who turn out not to be hoaxers at all. Says an angry NYPD spokesman: ‘False hoaxers are blocking the lines so the real hoaxers can’t get through… How can we catch genuine hoaxers if false hoaxers prevent them from making their hoax in the first place?’
26th: Tony Blair triumphantly announces his UK delegation has persuaded the UN Afghan Conference that the broadcaster John Peel should be the new leader of Afghanistan. Says the Foreign Office: ‘John will appeal both to the conservative Pashtun south – who prefer men to wear beards – as well as to the northern tribes who like music.’ Blair says The Americans give their approval after he told them Peel is ‘the British Tom Hanks’. Peel will be required to repair Afghanistan’s shattered infrastructure, restore relations with Iran and Uzbekistan, unify the volatile stand-off between rival factions in the south-west, and continue with his Radio 4 series Home Truths on Saturday mornings, against his will if necessary. On the BBC’s Newsnight, the US ambassador allows Jack Straw to confirm the news and then announces that Hamid Karzai has been installed in Kabul.
December
1st: An email print-out dated 10 September and signed by Jo Moore is discovered in a house in Kandahar. It reads: ‘Need to bury story about local councillors’ expenses… Fly two airliners into World Trade Centre?’
2nd: Media sources suggest the number of Afghan civilians killed in US bombing raids is 1,800. The Pentagon protests that, with the correct counting methods, the figure is actually 29. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says: ‘If you just find a head, that’s not a whole person. To increase the death toll by one, you’re talking seven or eight heads at least.’ Experts on US network Fox news explain that Islamic numbers are smaller than they look and agree that ‘in their tradition, 120 usually means five’.
4th: Defence Department announces that a bearded US missile has been captured and imprisoned near the Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The missile, which disappeared last March, told CIA interrogators it wanted to ‘blow up women and gays and kites’.
5th: Bin Laden seen ‘dead on a dead horse on top of a dead hill that had been absolutely blown up with bombs’, confirms Afghan villager pleased to see he has given the right answer.
6th: Sheaves of terrorist plans found in Kabul reveal that al-Qaeda terrorists were behind a string of atrocities including the Heisel stadium disaster in 1986. A Biro drawing of a squashed football with a brick on top of it shows how the Muslim extremists planned every detail of the horrifying crush of spectators – believed at the time to be the work of hooligans. The documents are just part of a huge cache of terror tools shown to blindfolded Western reporters. One describes how he also ‘felt a system of levers which control all major volcanoes and tectonic faultlines on earth’. A White House spokesman said: ‘We have no reason to doubt that these apocalyptic savages conceived their children to recordings of passengers screaming in the Lockerbie air crash.’ The discoveries come just days after looters offered a Wall St Journal reporter ‘a tidal wave in a suitcase’ big enough to destroy the entire US eastern seaboard.
8th: Blair triumphantly announces that the soothing voice of Fergal Keane is now being broadcast 24 hours a day from refugee camp loudspeakers.
9th: An outcry in Harpenden when a branch of the al-Qaeda network opens a shop in the town’s high street. The store sells dirty nuclear devices and videos of clerics demonstrating how to make soup out of women. Home Secretary David Blunkett confesses: ‘Our draconian anti-terrorism legislation doesn’t cover actual shops.’
22nd: Man arrested with network of caves in shoe. Taken to the Nevada desert and told to stand still while his shoes are attacked with thermobaric bombs.
23rd: US strategists now admit bin Laden is still at large claiming he is ‘probably a lot smaller than we thought… and may be only six inches tall’.
29th: Shock scientific survey proves that America really did have it coming. The results of a new study show that at the time of the 11 September attacks, America was unequivocally asking for it. American researchers at the highly respected Massachusetts Institute of Technology who collated the DNA profiles, conversational attitudes and facial disposition of more than 8,000 Americans are said to be ‘devastated’ by the results. Test supervisor Bill Porman said: ‘I’m sorry to say but spend any time with these people and you start to think, sure, I’d do it, they’re absolutely fucking insufferable.’ Security Chief John Ashcroft is said to be demanding that, from now on, objective scientific research be classified as an act of terrorism.
January
3rd: There are calls for immediate review of UK airport security after two journalists from the Daily Mail board a British Airways 737 jet at Manchester airport with two knives and a fork concealed in their hand luggage. The reporters force their way into the cockpit, overpower the pilot, take control of the plane, and crash it into a tall building, killing over 2,000 people and injuring hundreds more. An incandescent editorial by Mail editor Paul Dacre describes airport security standards as ‘inexcusably laxative’. This latest exposure recalls events last September, when Mohamed Atta of the Daily Express, along with a colleague from the Evening Standard, crashed two jets into the World Trade Centre in New York, greatly embarrassing security officers in the US.
4th: A chaotic war of recrimination breaks out between the CIA and MI5 when it is disclosed that Osama bin Laden attended a waxwork sitting at London’s Madame Tussaud’s on 1 September. A Tussaud’s spokesman says: ‘He was extremely polite and bought all the ladies tea. We just assumed someone would pop in and arrest him when we’d finished.’ It is believed that bin Laden returned for follow-up sittings on 4 December and shortly after Christmas.
17th: State of the Nation address: Bush declares that countries with which America has ‘unfinished business’ constitute a ‘spindle of atrocity’. These include Libya, Vietnam, Japan, Colin Powell, Germany and the northern anti-slavery states of the US.
24th: There is worldwide outrage that prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are regularly being dropped out of aircraft over 5,000 feet above the ground. Tony Blair is later reassured by Donald Rumsfeld’s guarantee that jettisoned British prisoners will be allowed to fight over a parachute. Downing Street remains tight-lipped over the restriction of parachute diameter to two inches but sources say Geoff Hoon is persuaded that larger chutes would allow prisoners to strangle themselves. The US practice of nailing detainees to their seats during transportation from Afghanistan is justified as a precaution ‘against them building a terrorist training camp in the aircraft toilet’ although they are criticised for classifying prisoners as ‘hazardous invertebrate vermin’, a term not recognised under the Geneva Convention. The Red Cross will monitor conditions at Camp X-ray for three months and then publish a report ‘under no circumstances whatsoever’.
February
9th: WTC legal fall-out. A New York banker whose car was hit by a man jumping out of the burning north tower is suing the dead man’s estate because he failed to curl up into a neat ball to minimise the damage. The city of New York is to sue firms occupying the upper 38 storeys of both towers because as they crashed earthwards, they added hugely to the numbers of people on the lower floors, thus ‘momentarily breaking fire regulations’.
20th: US is criticised over ‘manipulative’ Olympics opening ceremony in which the entire American team form a human twin towers which is then smashed into by a flying snowboarder dressed as an Arab and carrying the ribcage of a genuine New York fireman. As chained al-Qaeda suspects sing ‘God Bless America’ at gunpoint, 100,000 doves with weights tied to their ankles are released to recreate an engulfing mass of white dust and the crowd tearfully applaud for five hours.
24th: Hosting the film Baftas, Stephen Fry delivers an unspeakably trite and fucked-up heap of shit urging film makers to ‘keep telling stories’ in the face of world events – as if films make any fucking difference to anything, least of all the advancement of peace, as if in fact they don’t more often promote, through piss like Black Hawk Down, the very surfeit of self-regarding superiority that makes the American West so unpopular in the first place. Naturally the audience of actors and industry luvvies spontaneously applaud like the blinkered, solipsistic, self-congratulating cunts they are.
March
2nd: The World Trade Centre owners announce plans to rebuild the skyscrapers on exactly the same floorplan as before – but due to the disputed insurance settlement, the towers will only be three storeys high.
24th: As as tribute to America’s pain, President Bush commissions a new book of the Bible, called The Acts of the Folks. The book comes after Revelations and describes how Manhattan street vendors gained the kingdom of heaven by giving firemen free doughnuts. The new scripture also praises the ‘ordinary folks’ who turned their babies into flags, made bonfires of beards or stood on hills and stared angrily eastwards. Speaking at an Easter ceremony in Wisconsin in which a shaved rabbit is nailed upside down to a cross, the President said: ‘Every Christian on earth will agree this book improves the Bible. Amen.’ With these words the President offered the rabbit a sponge soaked in vinegar, then shot it in the stomach and called on the local necromancer to ‘make it rise on the third day like the shining rabbit in heaven’.