I recently watched the film Rendition starred by Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Alan Arkin and Meryl Streep. While I’m not much of a film critic, I would say that this movie entertained me. That is, if you call being afraid, entertainment.

The film is about an Egyptian working in the U.S. as a chemical engineer wrongfully accused as a terrorist. This poor fellow travels to South Africa and maybe to some other countries as part of his job. One day, arriving from South Africa, this Egyptian was abducted by the CIA and his record in the flight manifest deleted. The story goes on to disclose that after 9/11 (the famous terrorist attack on the twin towers at New York), the U.S. government drafted a law(?) that allows them to immediately detain a suspected terrorist and/or deport them to a country that practices torture as a way of retrieving useful information. I’m sure all of us know that the U.S. don’t use torture to interrogate suspected terrorists. Yeah, right.

Anyway, what I wanted to tell you is how downright scary this movie can be. Years ago, I have been dreaming of working in the U.S. However, when the Gulf War “series” started, I have been having second thoughts of dreaming such. I’m thinking (or guessing) that a lot of terrorists would want to make news bombing America, someday they might just get lucky and detonate an old nuclear bomb on one of its popular cities (think The Sum of All Fears movie). Now, after watching “Rendition”, I have a second reason not to dream about working in the U.S. - the government might just abduct me anytime they feel I’m a terrorist.

I know this is just a movie but remember “20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” was just a movie too and now we have submarines. OK, the parallelism isn’t as accurate but I’m sure you get my point.

In all fairness, the movie shows that the U.S. government acted on evidence - the good ol’ telephone bill. Only, it is suggested that the phone call made to this suspected terrorist is an erroneous one. Wrong number? Phone company fuck up? Hey, if you live in the Philippines, mysterious phone calls in the bill happen a lot.

By the way, rendition means “handing over prisoners to countries where torture is allowed”.  What a mean word.  I had to look it up.