The Pentagon will today announce a series of national security measures resulting from emergency summit meetings with Hollywood scriptwriters. After September the 11th, the best brains in Hollywood were called into the Pentagon (or as it is now known, The Quad) to predict what tactics the terrorists will take next and to envisage possible terrorist scenarios.
The Pentagon announcement is expected to echo the Hollywood strategists' suggestion that, following their attack on the World Trade Centre, Al Q'ida may, in an effort to gain funds for their terror campaign, turn their sights onto other major sources of US capital. In particular the Pentagon communique warns of a daring, carefully-orchestrated night-time heist of not one but three Las Vegas casinos. This attack, it is thought, would involve short-circuiting the city's electricity supply and getting a Chinese acrobat to somersault past the infra-red detectors in the safe-deposit vaults.
Sources close to the Pentagon claim that particular attention was also given to another possibility: that of bombs being placed on buses and triggered to go off if the speed falls below fifty miles per hour. Citizens are advised that in these situations all newly-qualified female drivers should give the wheel to any cute-looking young slacker male who happens to be onboard. The briefing also urges US public works departments to signpost more clearly those bits of uncompleted motorway flyover which stop in mid-air half-way.
There have already been successes as a result of film-industry assistance in security matters. Following a tip-off from leading Hollywood producers, Camp X-ray guards in Guantanemo Bay immediately took down one Al Qaida prisoner's Britney Spears poster and discovered it to conceal a long tunnel which had been scooped out by a spoon (hidden inside a Koran). The tunnel led to a boat being repaired by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman.
The meeting has, however, left Defence staff with a sense of the full magnitude of the task they now face. Of single greatest concern following the brainstorming conference is that Saudi-trained scientists, loyal to Al Qaida but resident in the United States, may develop the capability of using a Delorean car or old steam-train (powered by lightning hitting the a small-town church steeple) to go back in time. This would enable Al Qaida to replace Thomas Jefferson with Mullah Mohammed Omar. The terrorists plan is then to re-write the US Declaration 0f Independence to read "Death to the infidels, Allah achbar." Most chillingly of all is that, were this plan to succeed, the first that most US citizens will know about it, will be when they find themselves surrounded by religious fundamentalists in a terrorist rogue state led by the unelected son of an oil billionaire..... yet think this state of affairs COMPLETELY NORMAL.
