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As Americans prepare to celebrate a rare Thursday holiday, high-ranking officials in the Bush administration announced their discovery of a major new terrorism threat.
This rates at least a bright orange, and it could
turn red in an instant,
according to George Hanover, an
official in the Propaganda Ministry of the Third
Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security.
Hanover explained that the alert was based on the FBI's discovery of a document that had been circulating on the Internet, and perhaps in other places.
The document is quite specific,
he said, and
it could be construed to call for violent action on this
continent, and it might also involve suicide bombers backed
by a well-financed organization with international
connections.
Pressed for details, Hanover said that the originators
of the document had pledged their lives,
which
indicated a self-destructive willingness to die for their
cause, as well as their fortunes,
which FBI analysts
interpret as signifying that they are people of some
means, or else they would be talking about something other
than their fortunes.
Hanover said he would not reveal other specific wording
from the document, at the request of Vice-President Dick
Cheney. Cheney's request, which was also passed on to
press associations and the broadcast and cable news
channels, came about because he feared that terrorists
might use some of the precise phrases in the document as
triggers to activate some of their sleeper
cells.
However, the Attorney General's Office of Counter-Terrorism Investigation did release some details when Attorney General John Ashcroft held a news conference yesterday.
These people are a threat to our way of life,
Ashcroft said, since it obvious that they do not believe
in God, at least not in the way that patriotic Americans
believe.
Displaying portions of the document on a screen,
Ashcroft pointed out that In this place, where a good
American would say 'endowed by God,' the author or authors
of this terrorist manifesto says 'endowed by their
Creator.' And toward the end, they say they have a
'Reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence,' rather
than following the official American motto of 'In God We
trust.'
Ashcroft said that his experts had parsed and analyzed the document, and felt confident that they could identify some of its authors and supporters.
For instance, he said, we know that some of them have
grown hemp -- that's just a code word for marijuana, and it
is currently used only by the advocates of legalization who
would doom future generations of American children -- which
means that these criminals are very likely using illegal
drug money to finance their terrorism campaign.
Another drug connection, Ashcroft said, lay in an
unusual phrase in the document: the pursuit of
happiness.
Some names associated with the document, the attorney general said, were suspected of involvement in smuggling, as well as of participation in an attack by terrorists in disguise on a ship in Boston harbor which resulted in the destruction of much of its cargo.
The similarities with the U.S.S. Cole attack are too
significant to ignore,
Ashcroft said, and we all
know what other terrible things started beneath the lax
security system operated by the Port Authority of
Boston.
The attorney general said there were other Boston
connections. I don't want to give out this party's
name, because we could be closing in on him,
he said,
but he is an attorney from the Boston area who has
defended unpopular clients in the past, and his name is
associated with the document.
In fact,
Ashcroft continued, he may have
assisted in writing it, and with our new Patriot Act
Domestic Communications Surveillance System, we have found
several other messages which he either sent to his fellow
conspirators or attempted to present to the general public.
In one, he wrote that 'the government of the United States
is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,' and
in another, he wrote that 'this would be the best of all
possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.'
While most media representatives were content to take notes or prepare their hair for their soon-to-come standup shots outside the Justice Department offices, one unkempt print reporter asked the attorney general if the terrorist suspect was John Adams, second president of the United States, and whether the terrorist manifesto was the Declaration of Independence, issued on July 4, 1776.
Ashcroft said he could not dignify such an impudent question with an answer, and ordered security personnel to remove the troublemaker to a special counter-terrorism prison where he would be held incommunicado before appearing at a closed military tribunal.
The attorney general closed by reminding patriotic Americans that, to stand up against the security threats posed by terrorists, they should go shopping on July 4, rather than attend any public celebrations.
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