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Pentagon seeking Bible Code?
Say it ain't so, Rantburg!
On the eve of war, military brass listened intently as Michael Drosnin expounded the Bible code
this is a bucket of salt, no?
| I'd call it an "Ohfergawdsake!" |
Among the hundreds of meetings and briefings that took place in the Pentagons bowels in the months leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, one earned the fleeting disdain of The New York Times, whose columnist, Bill Keller, sniffed that "several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time" had been "consumed [by a writer] who claims â I am not making this up â that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. "Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged," Keller said.
The gathering, which reportedly took place Feb. 21, was said to have been convened by Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defence, and attended by 10 top military intelligence officials, including Vice Admiral Lowell "Jake" Jacoby, director of the massive Defense Intelligence Agency, and Wolfowitz's deputy, Linton Wells, who is in charge of the Pentagon's nerve centre, known as 3CI (Command, Control, Communications).
"Hey, guys! Guess what I've lined up for our lunch hour today?"
"One of those card trick magicians? Ewww!"
"Another hootchy-cootchy dancer, Paul?"
"Nope! This one's even better!" |
On the eve of war, the military brass listened intently for a full hour as Michael Drosnin expounded on his two brisk-selling volumes on the Bible code. Drosnin argues the Hebrew Torah â the first five books of the Old Testament â were intentionally encrypted, by a higher power, with prophetic warnings that have accurately predicted the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Kennedy assassinations, the moon landing, Watergate, and 9/11 â and foretell the fall of Saddam Hussein and the precise location of bin Laden.
| Can it tell me how to get next to Patty Ann Brown? (Pant!) |
The Americans "took it very seriously," Drosnin says. "They're practical people and I wanted to give them something of practical use." | "Yeah. Well. Okay. Thanks fer the info, Mr Drosnin. We'll get back to you..." |
As a result of the meeting, Drosnin says U.S. and Israeli intelligence forces are hot on bin Laden's trail in that very place the Bible mentions, "right as we speak." Of course, he would not divulge where that place is.
| Damn. And neither Gog nor Magog has returned my call yet... |
As for Saddam Hussein, the Bible's embedded code ponders, "Who is destroyed?" and then, in the same matrix, answers, "Hussein," with the following number crossing his name: 5763, the Jewish year that corresponds to 2003. "That foretells the outcome of this conflict," Drosnin says confidently. "It might be obvious now, but it wasn't when I told them."
It could be that the U.S. defence establishment is grasping at straws, or that more and more people in Washington are motivated by a White House that frequently invokes God and religious imagery. Drosnin discounts the religious angle. "This is not based on faith. This is based on experience. The code keeps coming true."
| Yeah. I lost my car keys the other day. Looked all day, until I decided to have a look in Leviticus... |
Drosnin is a nut secular Jew, a former police reporter for the Washington Post and former writer for The Wall Street Journal. To be sure, his books, The Bible Code (1997) and last year's sequel, Bible Code II: The Countdown have been used by various fundamentalists, prophets of doom and supermarket tabloids as sure signs the Good Book knows all and that the end is nigh. Detractors point out the code violates the Bible's own ban on soothsaying.
| Does he get checks from Weekly World News when they use that stuff? I mean, I've got a few prophecies tucked away in my underwear drawer, but I'm not letting them out until I've got cash in hand... |
Drosnin himself says he did not fully believe the code's power until Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered in November, 1995. Having learned Hebrew and the computer program that searches for hidden words, he found "Yitzhak Rabin" intersected with the letters that formed "assassin that will assassinate." Drosnin says he warned the doomed leader in a letter in September, 1994, that the Bible predicted he would be assassinated during that Jewish calendar year.
Say it isn't so, please... I have horrible thoughts of Reagan's astrologer...
Posted by: Anon1 2003-04-15 |
