Sleeper Cell

Have any of you watched this on showtime?  Last year I got a free weekend of Showtime and the first episode was on, and I was kind of put off by it when I saw the commercial.  I thought it would be some load of crap showing how “human” terrorist are.  While the show does go into the terrorist personal lives it is in no way a vehicle to show “the other side of the story”.  One of the things that put me off about it was that there was only one arabic terrorist in the cell.  Sorry, that doesn’t seem likely (possible yes, likely no).  That comes off as being “see, anyone can be a muslim nutcase terrorist” which is true, but again not as likely  But when I thought about it in the sense that it is a show made to make $ it would be pretty boring to have them all Arabic loons.  There would not be much charachter developement, so they took people from different parts of society.  So for the sake of entertainment, it was a good call.

The break down is:

The leader of the cell, arabic.  Very makavelian in how he conducts things.
A black ex-con turned muslim.  The hero of the story (he is an undercover agent)
A French thug ex-neo nazi (this was stretching it a bit).
A Muslim from the former Yugoslavia who saw some awful shit during “ethnic cleansing”.
A stupid ass spoiled white kid.  His mommy and daddy didn’t hold him enough or something (parents are Berkley profs).

The show really does kick ass.  When it came out on DVD I bought it and did a marathon 1 day watching.  I highly recommend it.

Some of the scenes were great.  There was this one scene where the white kid and the french guy are approached by a Christian at a university.  The Christian guy was kind of acting like flanders (from the simpsons) and they got into a small debate, and the 2 terrorist walked past.  It was hilarious, the white kid mutters to the french guy “fucking religious fanatics” and the french guy gave him this look like he is a complete dumb ass.

The second season was very good as well.  Part of it was about a terrorist die hard the US had captured but could not break.  The interogation we used was not nice to say the least.  The guy had valuable intel. that could stop another attack.  So we “extradited” him to saudi arabia where he faced a lot of criminal charges.  They tortured him to within an inch of his life.  During the torture the FBI guy there observing the entire thing said “Just tell us what we need to know!  We are Americans, we HATE this sh*t!”  The terrorist turned to him and said “that is why you will lose”.

At the end of his torture (as the torturer was going to put a hot wire up his urethra) the terrorist looks at the FBI agent and says (about his torturer) “I understand him, he does what he does and that is all there is to it.  But you Americans, you are so addicted to analizing your guilt instead of achieving victory” (rough quote).

Anyway, great series.  If any of you have seen it, do you know if there is going to be a 3rd season?

Maybe,

But in the liberal version terrorism is defeated by hugs, rainbows, and of course - puppies.