Reason Magazine - Topics > Conspiracy

You Don't Have to Watch Dynasty to Cop an Attitude

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:02:00 EDT

Last month I mentioned that the conspiracy theorist Carrington Steele, author of Don't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama, and the Occult, wasn't the first person to worry that a Church of Oprah was rising. But I didn't realize just how unoriginal Steele was. The Christian outfit Lighthouse Trails Research reports:

Upon reading Steele's work ourselves, our editors discovered that the 80-page book was filled with verbatim passages copied from other writers material, which was presented as Steele's own authorship....

While we regret to issue this finding because we do believe that Oprah Winfrey's efforts to convert the public to her New Age beliefs must be exposed, we fear that Steele's book could negatively reflect upon and misrepresent long-standing and reputable ministries. In addition, because the author also plagiarized some secular sources (such as CNN, Fox News, and Rolling Stone magazine), we believe this book may, in addition to being a poor Christian testimony, be legally problematic.

There's a political angle:

Because the chapter on Obama did not contain any documentation that he was involved in the occult or the New Age, Lighthouse Trails asked Steele if there was political motivation involved. What's more, the chapter on Obama did not seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Steele said she was not politically motivated.

Fuel for future conspiracy theories:

When Lighthouse Trails spoke with Carrington Steele, she stated she had done both the writing and the research on the book without help or support from others. However, it was pointed out to her that she often said "we" and "us" in her interviews, and we wondered to whom she was referring. At this point, Steele said she could not answer that question, saying she was not at liberty to say. We found this response to be curious and disturbing.

The Paranoid Style Is American Politics

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:30:00 EDT

On Tuesday the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster won Pennsylvania's presidential primary. In the larger contest for the Democratic nomination, though, she still lags behind a jihadist sleeper agent who is simultaneously a secret Muslim, a secret Communist, and a secret Republican. Whoever wins their race will go on to face a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong, and whoever wins that race will then get on with the modern president's central task: serving the interests of Mexico. It must be true, I read it in my email.

There's a persistant political myth that paranoia is only a feature of the fringe, something common among alienated radicals and reactionaries but rare in the great American center. In fact, paranoia has been ubiquitous across the political spectrum. You can find it in nearly every faction and movement at every point in American history, not least among those establishment figures who think they're immune to conspiracy theories. (The most lurid and destructive tales of Waco were not told by militiamen after the raid was over. They were told by the media and the government while the siege was underway.)

In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the historian Bernard Bailyn showed that the worldview of the patriots who would soon revolt against England included a strong belief, in the words of one colonist, that "a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty." At the same time, Bailyn notes, British administrators "were as convinced as were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement that they were themselves the victims of conspriatorial designs." Colonial governors such as Thomas Hutchinson—a man John Adams accused of "junto conspiracy"—believed, in Bailyn's words, that "the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority."

After independence was won, the victorious patriots quickly found plots in their own ranks. If you didn't think the Jeffersonians were Jacobin pawns of the Illuminati, you probably fretted that the Federalists were conspiring to establish a monarchy. Nor did the hunt for subversive cabals end with the death of the revolutionary generation. The historian David Brion Davis has pointed out that the lead-up to the Civil War can be viewed as a clash between two conspiracy theories, one featuring a fearsome network of abolitionists and the other a hungry Slave Power.

And no, these passions haven't limited themselves to periods as violent as the war for American independence and the war between the states. It's telling that the 1990s, a time of relative peace and prosperity, were also a golden age of both frankly fictional and purportedly true tales of conspiracy. There are many reasons for this, including the not-unsubstantial fact that even at its most peaceful, America is still riven with conflicts. But there is also the possibility that peace breeds nightmares just as surely as strife does. The anthropologist David Graeber has argued that "it's the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war." The Piaroa Indians of Venezuala, for example, "are famous for their peaceableness," but "they inhabit a cosmos of endless invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and have to be avenged by the magical massacre of whole (distant, unknown) communities." Many bloggers with comfortable lives spend their spare time in a similar subterranean world.

Why all the paranoia? In part, of course, it's because there really are conspiracies out there. Power does attract the power-hungry. No, Hillary Clinton did not murder Ron Brown—but her explanations for her good fortune trading cattle futures do not bear close scrutiny. John McCain is not a deep-cover Manchurian Candidate, but he was a charter member of the Keating Five. Barack Obama is not a closet Islamist, but there are legitimate questions about his ties to the corrupt developer Tony Rezko. If politics is the art of compromise, then politicians will inevitably be compromised.

It also is often in a movement's interest to paint the opposition in the darkest possible colors, even when the stakes are small and even when the allegations involved are not completely true or relevant. More importantly, it is natural for the members of a movement to find such suspicions believable and to conjure up such theories themselves. It's always easy to think the worst about people outside your group, especially if they're already consciously working against your goals. This tendency becomes even stronger when a hierarchy is involved. The lower orders are inevitably suspicious of the elite, and the elite are always worried about the proles.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that one poll showed 15 percent of voters believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim. It shouldn't be a surprise that the stories anti-McCain conservatives used to whisper, that perhaps he collaborated with his captors in Vietnam, are now surfacing on the left as well. If Hillary Clinton somehow manages to take the Democratic nomination—an outcome that would probably require a conspiracy itself—you shouldn't be surprised when all the stories you heard about her in the '90s come roaring back, be they plausible or nuts.

Above all, you shouldn't be surprised when you hear these tales not just from that creepy-looking fellow manning the LaRouche booth near the bus stop but from ordinary, middle-class relatives and neighbors with ordinary, middle-class views. Welcome to America. Paranoia is a part of the political process.

Al Qaeda vs. the Truthers

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:59:00 EDT

My brain hurts:

Al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has blamed Iran for spreading the theory that Israel was behind the 11 September 2001 attacks.

In an audio tape posted on the internet, Zawahiri insisted al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks on the US.

He accused Iran, and its Hezbollah allies, of trying to discredit Osama Bin Laden's network.

Via Thoreau, who notes that this is another case of satire as prophecy.

We Get Letters....

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:14:00 EDT

From an R.G. Bethany, subject line of "Peace":

The Movie "HAIR" is Psychological Anti-Warfare at its finest. Here's how it works. Two hours of very exciting music and dance. Nothing bad is said or implied. Everything is happy. You will notice alot of movement in every scene. Several things are always moving. You are being conditioned. Knowing this does not matter. Then the series of scenes at the end and...BAM. It hits you hard. Remember this is Psychological Anti-Warfare.

Me, I'm even more shocked that the movie came out in 1979. After, for example, the first season of Dallas....

Conspiracy Theory of the Day

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:26:00 EDT

From The Australian:

Sonny Bono, former husband and singing partner of superstar Cher, was clubbed to death by hitmen on the orders of drug and weapons dealers who feared he was going to expose them, a former FBI agent claims.
Ted Gunderson, now a private investigator, has told the US Globe tabloid that Bono, who served as mayor of Palm Springs for four years, did not die after hitting a tree on a Nevada ski slope in January 1998 as everyone believed.
"It's nonsense for anyone to now try to suggest that Bono died after crashing into a tree. There's zero evidence in this autopsy report... to show such an accident happened. Instead, there's powerful proof he was assassinated.
"This was an evil plot that was carried out to almost perfection by ruthless assassins," Mr Gunderson told the paper.
The former agent, who has been researching Bono's accident for the past decade, said top officials linked to an international drug and weapons ring feared the singer-turned-politician was about to expose their crimes -- so they had him killed on the slopes.

Link via our totally sane friends at the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, who add in their e-mail alert: "Rep. Sonny Bono was an outspoken American patriot who worked tirelessly to halt the illegal alien invasion of our nation AND focused his efforts on halting illegal aliens bringing drugs and weapons into the U.S."

Watch a stoned Sonny do a PSA against marijuana here. UPDATE: That link no longer works. Try this one.

The Politics of Projection

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:54:00 EDT

Virginia Postrel has sharp piece on Barack Obama in The Atlantic, arguing that the candidate's personality cult and the conspiracy theories that dog him ultimately emerge from the same source:

Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics--not the faux glamour-by-association of campaigning with movie stars or sailing with the Kennedys, but the real thing. The candidate himself is glamorous. Audiences project onto him the personal qualities and political positions they want in a president. They look at Obama and see their hopes and dreams.

Glamour is more than beauty or stage presence. You can't generate it just by having a wife who dresses like Jackie Kennedy. Glamour is a beautiful illusion--the word glamour originally meant a literal magic spell--that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell. So does obvious effort....

Like any candidate, Obama of course has position papers on specific issues. But even well-informed observers disagree about whether he represents the extreme left wing of the Democratic party or something more market-oriented and centrist. As the NAFTA flap demonstrates, his supporters can't even decide what the candidate really thinks about free trade. His glamour makes it easy to imagine that a President Obama would dissolve differences, abolish hard choices, and achieve political consensus--or that he's a stealth candidate who will translate his vague platform into a mandate for whatever policies you the voter happen to support.

Where optimists fill in mystery with their hopes, however, pessimists project their fears. The flip side of glamour is horror: the vampire, the con man, the femme fatale, the double agent. These glamorous archetypes remind us of how easy it is to succumb to desire and manipulation. What, ask his opponents, is Obama hiding?

Government Puzzled by Iraq Situation, Seeks Conspiracy Theories

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:07:00 EDT

From a Washington Post report today on the surging violence in Iraq:

As President Bush told an Ohio audience that Iraq was returning to "normalcy," administration officials in Washington held meetings to assess what appeared to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country.

Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can't quite decipher" what is going on. It's a question, he said, of "who's got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now.

Send Jesse Ventura!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:26:00 EDT

The former Minnesota governor is reportedly pondering an independent run at the White House, and releasing a new book with the rather desperate title of Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! In which he asks: "As I begin to write this book, I'm facing probably the most monumental decision of my 56 years on this planet. Will I run for president of the United States, as an independent, in 2008? Or will I stay as far away from the fray as possible, in a place with no electricity, on a remote beach in Mexico?"

In either case, here's hoping he rocks this 'do:

A more haggard-looking Governor Body cross-examined by Truthers here. Lots of great past reason coverage of Ventura here.

Can't Sleep -- Building Will Eat Me

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:50:00 EDT

Geoff Manaugh explores the intersection between architecture and debilitating fear:

I'm also curious if these sorts of paranoias are ever directed at landscapes and the built environment. In Stasi-era East Germany, for instance, was there ever a kind of architectural paranoia, when you realized that your neighbor's house was not, in fact, a house... but a listening post for the government.

In fact, I'm reminded of an old post on BLDGBLOG in which we saw photographs by Robin Collyer documenting houses that aren't houses at all: they're disguised electrical substations built to look like detached single-family bungalows....

This makes me think of Judge Schreber, the famously schizoid target of one of Sigmund Freud's later analyses, who, upon being institutionalized, made sure to diagram the spatial layout of the hospital for fear that the rooms and layouts might change or betray him. His legendarily bizarre autobiography thus includes hospital floorplans. Was the architecture itself part of some vast conspiracy? his illness seemed to ask.

There's more, much more, including some cyborg spies disguised as insects. Read the whole thing.

[Via Infocult.]

Stuff I've Been Meaning to Blog

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:26:00 EST

From Nicholson Baker, one of the best essays I've read about Wikipedia.

Wired on the autistic pride movement.

A sequel to Stop Snitching.

Plagiarism in the world of online dating.

"Kremlin hawks feed conspiracy theories with 3,200 white mice."

Myths of Domestic Terror

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:45:00 EST

Good piece from Rolling Stone reporting on the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF), and its tenacious battle against something that may or may not exist.

Reporter Guy Lawson finds a history of minor criminal agents provacateur ginning up feckless plans for impossible terror feats, misleading statistics, secrecy behind a veil of "if you knew what we know you'd understand, but we can't tell you" and some truly scary excrement setting off a radiological attack monitor in Chicago.

Some summational excerpts:

The expenditure of such massive resources to find would-be terrorists inevitably requires results. Plots must be uncovered. Sleeper cells must be infiltrated. Another attack must be prevented —or, at least, be seen to be prevented. But in backwaters like Rockford [Illinois], the JTTFs don't have much to do. To find threats to thwart, the task forces have increasingly taken to using paid informants to cajole and inveigle targets like [convicted domestic terrorist Derrick] Shareef into pursuing their harebrained schemes.
..........a closer inspection of the cases brought by JTTFs reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything. According to a study by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, only ten percent of the 619 "terrorist" cases brought by the federal government have resulted in convictions on "terrorism-related" charges —a category so broad as to be meaningless. In the past year, none of the convictions involved jihadist terror plots targeting America.
....In most cases, because no trial is ever held, few details emerge beyond the spare and slanted descriptions in the indictments. When facts do come to light during a trial, they cast doubt on the seriousness of the underlying case.

Of course, when there's no threat, that means that the people responsible for keeping us from the threat must be doing something right. Right?

When I ask what kinds of cases his CT squad has made, [Special Agent Robert] Holley cites the example of a local cab driver who came up on the JTTF's radar some time back —he won't say how or why. The man was East African, Holley says, a suspected Islamic extremist "connected to known bad guys overseas." After being interviewed by the JTTF, the cabbie decided to leave the country. Nothing criminal had occurred, and no charges were laid. The cab driver had simply come to the attention of the JTTF, and that in itself was enough to dispose of the matter.
"Can we consider that a success because we didn't put him in jail?" Holley asks. "Absolutely. This guy is no longer here. He is not a threat to one person in the United States."
..........
"Have you ever found a terrorist cell?" I ask.

"That's kind of a vague question," [Master Sgt. Carl] Gutierrez [of the Illinois State Police] says. "There are certain things we can't talk about, because it leads to more."

"Do I believe there's a cell in Chicago?" [Sgt. Paul] DeRosa [of the Chicago Police Department] asks. "I bet you there is. Do I have any direct physical knowledge? No. But I think there is one, and that's why we're here."

The story has more detailed discussions of such supposed terror plots as the JFK jet fuel conspiracy, the "Albany pizza" case, and the "Liberty City Seven" case. Read the whole thing.

I wondered where's the terror? here on 9/11/06.

Who Cut the Cables? An ABC Investigation

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:40:00 EST

Via Drudge, a story from Australian public broadcaster ABC on those mass Internet outages in the Middle East and India. According to the crack reporting of ABC correspondent Simon Lauder, some online sleuths see a conspiracy so immense, so sophisticated, that it could only have emanated from Langley:

Is information warfare to blame for the damage to underwater internet cables that has interrupted internet service to millions of people in India and Egypt, or is it just a series of accidents? When two cables in the Mediterranean were severed last week, it was put down to a mishap with a stray anchor. Now a third cable has been cut, this time near Dubai. That, along with new evidence that ships' anchors are not to blame, has sparked theories about more sinister forces that could be at work.
Online columnist Ian Brockwell says the cables may have been cut deliberately in an attempt by the US and Israel to deprive Iran of internet access. Others back up that theory, saying the Pentagon has a secret strategy called 'information warfare'.

Who these "others" are is left unsaid, though one could argue that "information warfare" hardly counts as a "secret strategy." And while it is at least conceivable that the CIA would be stupid enough to cut off Iran's lifeline to an independent media (it is the CIA, after all), ABC's source for this claim, an "Internet columnist" called Ian Brockwell, is of dubious reliability. According to his online bio, Mr. Brockwell's interests include UFOs and climate change, the latter of which he attributes to the perfidy of the former. But here's some free advice for the kids at ABC: Be slightly more skeptical of claims by online columnists whose work can be found on Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel's website, such as Brockwell's crie du coeur against "people fear those who debate the 'Holocaust'?" (Scare quotes around Holocaust in original, naturally).

So why bother criticizing the journalistic standards of Australian public media? To make the point that state-funded media is insulated from market forces and, therefore, produces ridiculous news stories like the one quoted above? Well, no. It's simply an excuse to post the exquisite cover of Brockwell's self-published book, Global Warming: The Final Solution. Eat your heart out, Chip Kidd:

You Can't Handle the 9/11 Truth!

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:16:00 EST

Hit and Run comment heroine Jennifer Abel (just plain Jennifer to us) does what few do: without pre-deciding one way or the other who has to be right and who has to be wrong, she dips into the world of moderate 9/11 Truthers for the Hartford Advocate.

She starts by noting why it might be valuable to take a dispassionate look at the topic:

According to a 2006 Scripps-Howard poll, over a third of Americans believe high-ranking officials either helped commit the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or at least allowed them to happen.

The whole thing is worth reading, but an interesting excerpt that sheds some light on why competent adult professionals get involved in thinking about this stuff:

Michael Neuman is the unfortunate bureaucrat whose name and number grace the contact information of that NIST report [a National Institute of Standards and Technology 2005 report on the metallurgical realities of steel as related to what happened to the buildings on 9/11].
We called and (somewhat apologetically) explained we were doing a story on 9/11 conspiracies.
“We don’t want to get into a debate,” Neuman said. “Certainly people are entitled to their opinion … [but] we’re staying away from debates with these groups.”
We assured him we didn’t belong to “these groups,” though we admitted some of the groups’ members made points we could not refute. We hoped Neuman could. The first thing we mentioned was [former Brigham Young University physicist Steven] Jones’s claims of finding explosive residue in the debris.
“We examined over 200 pieces of steel and found no evidence of explosives,” Neuman said.
We know, we said (even more apologetically), but what about that letter where NIST said it didn’t look for evidence of explosives?
“Right, because there was no evidence of that.”
But how can you know there’s no evidence if you don’t look for it first?
“If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time … and the taxpayers’ money.”
Neuman really didn’t want to talk to us. Depending on your preference, you could interpret that as further proof of a government cover-up, or as a legitimate time-management technique from a bureaucrat who can’t be expected to persuade every single doubter who finds his phone number on the NIST report.

My linking to this story, I will spell out for the evidence-based community, does not say anything about what I know, think, or think I know about controlled demolition or how steel melts or collapses when doused in airplane fuel. Neither have I ever tried to shoot a Mannlicher-Carcano three times in eight seconds nor detonated 4800 pounds of ammonium nitrate.

U.S. Nuke Secrets for Sale? And What Was the Deal With that B-52 Stratofortress Again?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:15:00 EST

Interesting (and quite alarming, if true) piece from the London Sunday Times that has gotten very little U.S. play, about accusations by a former FBI translator. The basic deal:

[Sibel Edmonds] approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
...............
She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.
“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.
Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.

Dave Lindorff at CounterPunch does a spinoff of the Sunday Times piece and ties it into one of those "oh yeah, what was that all about?" moment that provide so much fun fodder for conspiracy theorizing:

If Edmonds' story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
That incident only came to public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.
An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an "accident," but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.
Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.

Accidents can happen.

A $2.5 Million Misdiagnosis

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:31:00 EST

A woman misdiagnosed with AIDS and made ill by the medicines prescribed to her for 9 years wins $2.5 million in court. Some details from AP:

[Audrey] Serrano's attorney, David Angueira, said Dr. Kwan Lai, who treated his client at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester's HIV clinic, repeatedly failed to order definitive tests even after monitoring of Serrano's treatment did not show the presence of HIV in her blood.
"It is one of the clearest cases of misdiagnosis that I have ever seen and it's based in part on a presumption that people who engage in certain types of conduct are more likely to have HIV and AIDS than other people without really listening to the patient," Angueira said after the verdict.
Lai testified last week that Serrano told her she had worked as a prostitute, her partner had AIDS, and that she had suffered three bouts of a type of pneumonia typically associated with those infected by the virus.
Serrano has denied she had ever been a prostitute. She confirmed that her former boyfriend tested positive for HIV/AIDS, but disputed the claim that she told the doctor that she had suffered bouts of Pneumocystis pneumonia.

Michael Moynihan blogged last month on millions of other people (mostly theoretical, still...) who were said to have AIDS but don't really.

I'm Not Sure Where It Fits, But I Think This Post Is Part of the Plan

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 13:48:00 EST

Matt Labash profiles the notorious Republican operative Roger Stone, recently in the news for (allegedly!) leaving an opponent an intimidating phone message. Labash paints Stone as a postmodern performance artist cum trickster figure, part Donald Segretti and part Br'er Rabbit -- a fellow who carefully cultivates an image as both a bullshit artist and a man of intrigue, confident that it will work to his advantage if no one is ever sure which mode he happens to be in. Stone's current target: New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer:

When I called Stone for this story, he asked if I'd gotten all the anti-Spitzer emails. I told him I wasn't sure, it seemed like I'd been receiving five a day for months from all sorts of mysteriously named accounts. "Good," he said. "It's working."

Hat tip: Roger Stone, I think. I've been getting those emails too. This was in one of them.

Another Ozymandias Moment, Take 683

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:36:00 EDT

Baylen Linnekin sends word of the latest conspiracy theory emanating from the 51st state: That the U.S. has dumped sharks in the Euphrates River. From a Reuters account:

Karim Hasan Thamir said he was fishing with his sons last week when they spotted a large fish thrashing about in his net. "I recognised the fish as a shark because I have seen one on a television programme," he told Reuters.
The shark was pulled from the mouth of an irrigation canal that joins the Euphrates River. The Euphrates joins the Tigris River further east to form the Shatt al-Arab waterway which flows south past Basra into the Gulf.
Dr Mohamed Ajah, assistant dean of the college of science at Thi Qar University in Nassiriya, said barriers in river estuaries usually prevented sharks swimming upstream.
"In this case, I think this animal was there for a long time but no one had managed to see it," he said.
Locals blamed the US military for the shark's presence.
Tahseen Ali, a teacher, said there was a "75 per cent chance" Americans had put the shark in the water.
"This is very frightening for us. Our children always swim in the river and I believe that there are more sharks. I believe that America is behind this matter," said fisherman Hatim Karim.

Whole tale here.

I really doubt that the U.S. is responsible for the shark (and if it is, why don't the goddamn sharks have frickin' laser beams on their heads?). Then again, after that totally frickin' weird fake FEMA press conference, in which agency employees impersonated reporters (what, Jeff Gannon was unavailable?) and after a massive invasion in which there were no contingency plans for an occupation gone awry, who the hell knows?

Though I'm a seafood lover, I think that fishermen rank right down there with taxicab drivers as crappy journalistic sources, and Hatim Karim's comments are best understood as illustrating a conspiracist mindset that is widespread in the Middle East and Muslim world more generally. Chief among that mindset is an overly generous willingness to blame America (tool of Zionists) for everything bad in the region, from the poverty to the weather to, well, sharks showing up in the Euphrates. Which, given our recent history there, isn't all that much of a stretch.

Headline allusion background here.

Friday Fun Links: Geek Culture Edition

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:00:00 EDT

1. The Batman version of Crime and Punishment. Weird and hilarious. It originally appeared in the art-comics anthology Drawn and Quarterly 3, which also includes some lovely reprints of Frank King's Gasoline Alley Sunday strips of the '20s and '30s.

2. Prisoner-era Doctor Who. Or, strictly speaking, some Doctor Who that came out a year before The Prisoner but obviously was part of the same ~~acid trip~~ cultural gestalt. It's pretty awful, and I say that as a Prisoner fan with a high tolerance for '60s sci-fi camp. But if you enjoy pop surrealism you should check it out anyway.

3. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. You'll find no sunken cities, talking gorillas, or anarchist submarines here. Just the classic account of the Illuminati panic of the late eighteenth century, when prominent Federalists accused the Jeffersonians of being pawns of the secret order. Originally published in 1918, the book is now in the public domain and can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive.

A Dollar is a Dollar, Metal or Paper

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:08:00 EDT

A Nevada jury acquits or hangs in a multi-defendant trial pivoting largely around whether you owe taxes based on the market value or merely face value of gold and silver money actually coined by the U.S. of A.

See details at this Las Vegas Review Journal article or this We the People Foundation press release. An excerpt from the article:

The Internal Revenue Service had never before provided guidance on how to handle gold and silver coins that circulate, only on noncirculating collectible coins, according to [defense attorney Michael] Kennedy, who is a federal public defender. "If that's the case, we're not going to take someone's liberty from them, on something that a (certified public accountant) with a master's degree doesn't even know. That's a scary country, and I don't live in that country."

The DOJ's press release on the original indictment. Some of the defendants may be tried again.

The case does not represent any major long-term victory for those who argue that we don't owe no income tax nohow, though some in that movement think so, even though some of the charges relate to failure to collect or pay income taxes on the part of employers and employees. It's just a particular decision a particular jury came to. See my 2004 reason feature on such income-tax theorists and activists.

Don't Be Stupid, Be a Smarty, Come and Join the American Institute of Architects

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:41:00 EDT

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Navy plans "to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications" at a base in Coronado, California. Seems people had started to notice what four buildings looked like when viewed from the air:

Apparently, "the shape of the buildings, designed by local architect John Mock, was not noted until after the groundbreaking in 1967 -- and since it was not visible from the ground, a decision was made not to make any changes." Then Google Earth came along, and word started to slip out.

I love the name "John Mock," by the way. His website reveals that in 1974 he was named "Mr. Masonry" by the Masonry Contractors Association of San Diego and Imperial Counties -- obviously a sign of a Masonic-Nazi connection.

The Banality of Truth

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 16:15:00 EDT

On Tuesday Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee things that, had a government official said them in the days, weeks, or months following 9/11, would have sparked public outrage—and may have significantly blunted the push for greater police and surveillance powers like the PATRIOT Act.

McConnell told lawmakers that "9/11 should have and could have been prevented."

Specifically, McConnell cited the pilot training sought by hijackers Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi and convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui in the United States as an obvious warning sign that was ignored by Washington after feds on the ground flagged the activity.

"For whatever reason, we didn't connect the dots," McConnell said, not quite coming clean on the reasons.

Nevertheless, this position moved McConnell beyond previous remarks in June in which he held that "in his view" the terror attack was preventable, but that law adopted for a Cold War world prevented swift action to stop terrorists.

What happened to change the shading? For one, a widely overlooked story first published on September 10 by McClatchy Newspapers Washington reporter Greg Gordon happened.

In his dispatch, obviously timed to coincide with the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Gordon returns to the Moussaoui case. As the case unfolded in the spring of 2006 it became increasingly clear that top FBI officials likely missed an opportunity to stop the attack in late August 2001.

While the dogged investigation of Moussaoui by Minneapolis FBI agent Harry Samit and Samit's repeated attempts to get a warrant from FBI HQ in Washington to search Moussaoui's laptop and belongings has been well documented, Gordon's reporting uncovers new information that the FBI absolutely had information in its hands to roll up a large chunk of al Qaida's financing network in the days before 9/11 and stop the hijackings.

Moussaoui had long been regarding by his fellow jihadis as something of a loose cannon and security risk. Turns out they were right. Moussaoui's notebooks included Western Union routing numbers, routing numbers used by al Qaida operative Ramzi Binalshibh to send $14,000 to Moussaoui in August 2001.

But authorities never looked at those notebooks. Instead, FBI brass repeatedly blunted Agent Samit's attempts to search them, citing lack of information that Moussaoui was a known terrorist or foreign agent.

Gordon writes:

Instead, Moussaoui's tattered, blue spiral notebook sat in a sealed bag at an immigration office—unopened until after four hijacked jets slammed into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, killing 2,972 people.

Gordon also notes that, leaping from the Binalshibh transactions, investigators pre-9/11 almost certainly could have traced his money back to an al Qaida moneyman in Dubai. The Dubai contact, in information developed after 9/11, turns out to have used one of his Western Union receipts to jot down a phone number in the United Arab Emirates. That UAE number received calls from 9/11 hijackers while they were living in Florida prior to their attack.

Given these connections, merely getting German authorities to nab Binalshibh may have been enough to derail the 9/11 mission in the United States. Teasing out the other contacts would have taken more effort, but would have delivered exponentially greater rewards. At the extreme, it is by no means stretch to think the authorities had the chance to quietly round-up 9/11 hijackers in the country prior to the attack. As Gordon notes, FBI agents at Moussaoui's trial testified that had he confessed—thus giving them access to his notebooks pre-9/11—they could have moved on 11 of the 19 hijackers.

Why didn't this happen anyway? For one there was Washington's steadfast refusal to move on information developed from the field offices without additional supporting intelligence. And here all the intelligence suggested that the United States had already degraded and "mapped out" al Qaida's financial network. For several years the National Security Agency was quite confident it had "broken" al Qaida security and had access to bank accounts and other communications points of contact for the global network. It does not appear, however, that anyone seriously considered the 150-year-old Western Union system as a viable method to fund a terror network. They were wrong.

Like the pointless search for a "bamboo Pentagon" in the jungles of Vietnam, American anti-terrorism efforts in the 1990s and pre-9/11 months assumed al Qaida was a terrorist CIA. It had a clear command structure to be infiltrated and advanced technology to be hacked into. We now know that it not true.

Or do we?

McConnell's admission of pre-9/11 mistakes came in service of defending greater surveillance powers for the federal government.

The Skull and Bones Conspiracy Zaps My Alma Mater

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:14:00 EDT

UF student tasered for asking John Kerry about Skull and Bones. (And not going quietly when cops tried to escort him out.) Kerry was trying to answer the "very important" question as cops dragged than tasered Andrew Meyer.

While anyone who has had to deal with monomaniacal blowhards at public question sessions feels a forbidden tug of sympathy for the cops, I hope all of us who aren't pawns of the Skull and Bones conspiracy can agree the tasering was an overreaction.

Previous bits by me on the scintillating topic of tasers here and here.

UPDATE: Here's the video, to save you all a few seconds of searching. Man, it's like all of life is a TV show....

Dis-Mythed

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:06:00 EDT

Eliot Morgan and Casey Lartigue, Jr. (the latter a friend and former colleague of mine) explain in the Washington Post how they were fired from their XM Radio talk show for attempting to debunk some of the conspiracy theories prevalent in the black community, including the notorious "Memorandum 46."

Loose Brains: Former Reaganite Edition

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:54:00 EDT

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and National Review Contributing Editor Paul Craig Roberts writes in his latest Counterpunch column—yes, that Counterpunch—that the Bush administration will likely stage "false-flag" terror operations to justify an attack on Iran:

Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.
...
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' (sic) Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.

Roberts, who also contributes to VDare and Antiwar.com—and, once upon a time, contributed to this magazine—is no stranger to wacky false-flag theories. In a 2006 Counterpunch article, he showed considerable interest in the 9/11 conspiracy theories, wondering if the Oneonta Truth Squad was on to something after all:

Other readers write that 9/11 shields Bush from accountability, They challenge me to explain why three World Trade Center buildings on one day collapsed into their own footprints at free fall speed, an event outside the laws of physics except under conditions of controlled demolition. They insist that there is no stopping war and a police state as long as the government's story on 9/11 remains unchallenged.
They could be right.

Except that they are wrong.

It Can't Happen Here, Again, or: You See, I Ain't Kidding

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 12:23:00 EDT

Not really new news to CIA watchers, but it's always good to have an excuse to be reminded. From USA Today:

Little-known documents made public Thursday detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago — wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more.
The documents provide a glimpse of nearly 700 pages of materials that the agency has declassified and plans to release next week.
A six-page summary memo declassified in 2000 and released by The National Security Archive at George Washington University outlines 18 activities by the CIA that "presented legal questions" and were discussed with President Ford in 1975.
Among them:
•The "two-year physical confinement" in the mid-1960s of a Soviet defector.
•CIA wiretapping in 1963 of two columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, following a newspaper column in which national security information was disclosed. The wiretapping revealed calls from 12 senators and six congressmen but did not indicate the source of the leak.
•The "personal surveillances" in 1972 of Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking columnist Jack Anderson and staff members including Les Whitten and Britt Hume. The surveillance involved watching the targets but no wiretapping.....
•The personal surveillance of Washington Post reporter Mike Getler over three months beginning in late 1971. No specific stories are mentioned in the memo.
...........
CIA Director Michael Hayden called the documents being released next week unflattering, but he added that "it is CIA's history."

Jesse Walker on why it shouldn't be against the law to reveal a CIA agent's identity.