Tag: 2012

More Marginal Notes on Benghazi

Tom Avitabile - More Marginal Notes on BenghaziOn November 1st, 2012, I posted Marginal Notes on Benghazi.

Essentially it was a look back at an early, denoted manuscript of my book The Hammer Of God, in which – around the margins – I made notes about alternate plot lines.

The one which I wrote about saw the “bad guys” orchestrating the kidnapping of our ambassador in order to use him as a bargaining chip. Their goal was to free the blind sheikh (the first world trade center terrorist who tried to bring the towers down in 1993). The sheikh was supposed to be the prize in a high-level diplomatic exchange for the life of the ambassador.

In that instance, it was a case of “It’s an alternate fiction until it happens.” Well it’s happening.

On March 14th, though we just heard of it yesterday, “An al Qaeda terrorist stated…that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed by lethal injection after plans to kidnap him during the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack in Benghazi went bad.”

So, suddenly, that wild-ass, out-of-the box dose of fiction, that even I rejected as a little “out there,” is now coming a little closer to “in here.”

If you read the previous blog then you know the triangulation of my supporting thesis, (purely a supposition and creative exercise), summarized here:

  • The dubiously elected President of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, made a promise to free the blind sheikh from American custody at his inauguration – and set it as a primary goal of his (American-backed) administration.
  • Getting this erstwhile national hero of Egypt returned to his home sands in the Maghreb would surely help Morsi score political points with his people. So the US decided to help him by staging a little theatrical play titled  – “Kidnap ours and we’ll trade ya for yours!”
  • Somewhere along the way, two ex-navy seals who either never heard, or disobeyed, the orders to stand down, went into this kabuki dance shooting real bullets, according to some accounts killing up to 60 of the enemy (sorry to all the men cast as ENEMY).

Those darn snipers ruined the whole performance. But the cover stories were set and the word went out that it was a YouTube video that caused the murderous attack.

Of course, even then I called the script above a fantasy oozing dramatic embellishments of actual events. Today, after the boastful “confession” of the al Qaeda guy, maybe not so much.

Iterations of the Apocalypse

Tom Avitabile | Iterations of the ApocalypseThroughout the evolution of mankind the Chicken Little gene has survived intact. Every 50 years or so, mankind decides things are too boring and we collectively embrace end of the world scenarios. Halley’s Comet was thought to bring poison gas that would wipe out all life on earth on May 18th, 1910. In the mid 50’s a group called The Seekers, I guess after OD’ing on films like ‘Earth vs. the Flying Saucers’ and ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’, were convinced that aliens had told them of a massive flood that would destroy the planet.

Last week, we escaped another cosmic billiard ball as those incredible prognosticators of science, technology and human sacrifice, the Mayans, got it wrong again. You remember Mayan Airlines, the Mayan cell phone and the ever popular Mayan Ginsu knife for human sacrifice. (Pay separate shipping and handling and get two.) Those chocolate coveting geniuses, who didn’t see Columbus coming, by the way, threw a dart at a calendar and it came up last week. Now December 22, 2012 is added to the pantheon of apocalyptic prognostications.

But who am I to talk! I now throw my Mayan headpiece into the ring announcing, for your nightmare pleasure: a little ditty called, ‘The God Particle’, my soon to be released third novel which continues the Bill Hiccock ‘Thrillogy’.

Now even though scientists are still searching for the God Particle and have spent billions on the largest machine in the world to find it, not unlike Jodi Foster in Contact.  I step ahead and use the really scary notion that it won’t be cosmic forces or the shifting of the magnetic poles or collisions with NEOs (Near Earth Objects) that will end the world – though NEOs make good reading if you don’t want to sleep for the next 30 years.

No, it won’t be anything so glorious, just one part of mankind embracing technology to destroy all of mankind. At this point we re-read the name of this blog: It’s only fiction til it happens, and hope I’m dead wrong.

But as laid out in The God Particle, historically there was a plausible, logical threat matrix that had been ballyhooed for years beginning with the fears that the atomic programs of the ‘40’s would get out of hand and all the world would be consumed in the dreaded ‘chain reaction’. The very same argument echoes today, with ‘Chain Reaction’ being replaced by ‘Black Hole’ as all the world’s geniuses gather near Geneva to recreate the Big Bang. What could possibly go wrong?

Big Bang: The unimaginable explosion that created everything and was so powerful that the most distant stars and galaxies were flung from the bang’s epicenter to the furthest reaches, trillions of light years away. Don’t even try to think about it.

But hey, that’s what Bill Hiccock and the White House’s Quarterback Operations Group was put on earth for, and boy do they earn their pay in this one. Oh, and by the way, get to know the name ISON, because around Halloween of this year some crazies somewhere on the planet will be screaming about ISON. The comet ISON, will be a dazzling omen in the night sky. I can just hear the tales of the apocalypse getting re-racked and reloaded for next year.

BS (BlogScript): Keep those letters to ABC going about not canceling “The Last Resort!”