The premiere Sunday night of the second season of Showtime's week-long mini-series, Sleeper Cell: American Terror, gave time to two characters espousing how President Bush and the CIA were behind the 9/11 attacks. The eight-part series, airing for an hour at 9pm EST/PST (with an 11pm EST/PST) repeat every night through this Sunday on the CBS-owned network, picks up after last season which ended with an undercover Muslim FBI agent at the last-minute thwarting a plot to explode a nuclear device at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
In the newest episode, a woman who appears to be the girlfriend of one of the plotters who escaped capture (and she may not even be aware that he's a terrorist), arrives at his safe house and after the two have sex, as they sit on the kitchen floor eating from one plate, she propounds that “every time we have sex, it's like the ultimate f*** you to Bush, Cheney and the whole 9/11 plot. I just keep picturing Giuliani and the rest of those assholes supervising the whole thing from that $15 million bunker on the 23rd floor of Building 7. You know that's where they broadcast the homing signal from, make sure the planes would hit the towers." The terrorist man, a Bosnian, adds: "I know, and the Pentagon was actually hit by a CIA Global Hawk drone so the administration could start an endless war and turn America into a police state."
I'm unclear as to what character the woman is playing and how much knowledge she has of the terrorist cell, but she does not appear to be one of the two women on the show's page with a list of characters. The man is definitely "Ilija Korjenic," played by Henry Lubatti, the “right-hand man” to cell leader “Farik.” Much of the opening episode of the second season centered around the captured “Farik,” played by Oded Fehr, and torture techniques applied to him.
From what I saw of the first season, the series will make the terrorists the bad guys and provide an admiring portrait of the undercover FBI agent. And since the anti-U.S. conspiracy theory was advocated by a known terrorist and his girlfriend, it's not as if Showtime had positive characters deliver it, but I thought it worth mentioning the inclusion. Washington Post television reviewer Tom Shales, however, on Saturday condemned as “reckless” the dialog about how the U.S. government orchestrated 9/11:
“It is even suggested by one character -- admittedly someone who's supposed to be an imbecile -- that the atrocity of 9/11 was perpetrated by American forces to make Islamic extremists look bad. 'Uncle Sam was behind the whole thing,' it is recklessly alleged.”
The exchange from the December 10 Sleeper Cell as the two characters sit on a kitchen floor and eat from one plate:
Girlfriend: “You know, every time we have sex, it's like the ultimate fuck you to Bush, Cheney and the whole 9/11 plot. I just keep picturing Giuliani and the rest of those assholes supervising the whole thing from that $15 million bunker on the 23rd floor of Building 7. You know that's where they broadcast the homing signal from, make sure the planes would hit the towers.”
“Ilija Korjenic,” played by Henry Lubatti: “I know, and the Pentagon was actually hit by a CIA Global Hawk drone so the administration could start an endless war and turn America into a police state.”
Girlfriend: “And what idiot could believe that Osama bin Laden and his cave-dwelling Muslim militia managed to out-smart the CIA, the NSA and the Pentagon -- unless Uncle Sam was behind the whole thing.”
Ilija: “Not me.”
