I believe in conspiracies

John Laughland says the real nutters are those who believe in al-Qaeda and
weapons of mass destruction

Believing in conspiracy theories is rather like having been to a grammar school:
both are rather socially awkward to admit. Although I once sat next to a
sister-in-law of the Duke of Norfolk who agreed that you cant believe everything
you read in the newspapers, conspiracy theories are generally considered a
rather repellent form of intellectual low-life, and their theorists rightfully
the object of scorn and snobbery. Writing in the Daily Mail last week, the
columnist Melanie Phillips even attacked conspiracy theories as the consequence
of a special pathology, of the collapse in religious belief, and of a descent
into the irrational. The implication is that those who oppose the West, or who
think that governments are secretive and dishonest, might need psychiatric
treatment.

In fact, it is the other way round. British and American foreign policy is
itself based on a series of highly improbable conspiracy theories, the biggest
of which is that an evil Saudi millionaire genius in a cave in the Hindu Kush
controls a secret worldwide network of tens of thousands of terrorists in more
than 60 countries (George Bush). News reports frequently tell us that terrorist
organisations, such as those which have attacked Bali or Istanbul, have links to
al-Qaeda, but we never learn quite what those links are. According to two
terrorism experts in California, Adam Dolnik and Kimberly McCloud, this is
because they do not exist. In the quest to define the enemy, the US and its
allies have helped to blow al-Qaeda out of proportion, they write. They argue
that the name al-Qaeda was invented in the West to designate what is, in
reality, a highly disparate collection of otherwise independent groups with no
central command structure and not even a logo. They claim that some terrorist
organisations say they are affiliated to bin Laden simply to gain kudos and
name-recognition for their entirely local grievances.

By the same token, the US-led invasion of Iraq was based on a fantasy that
Saddam Hussein was in, or might one day enter into, a conspiracy with Osama bin
Laden. This is as verifiable as the claim that MI6 used mind control to make
Henri Paul crash Princess Diana�s car into the 13th pillar of the tunnel under
the Place de lAlma. With similar mystic gnosis, Donald Rumsfeld has alleged that
the failure to find weapons of mass distraction, as Tony Blair likes to call
them, shows that they once existed but were destroyed. Indeed, London and
Washington have shamelessly exploited peoples fear of the unknown to get public
opinion to believe their claim that Iraq had masses of anthrax and botulism.
This played on a deep and ancient seam of fear about poison conspiracies which,
in the Middle Ages, led to pogroms against Jews. And yet it is the anti-war
people who continue to be branded paranoid, even though the British Prime
Minister himself, his eyes staring wildly, said in September 2002, Saddam has
got all these weapons ...and they�re pointing at us!

In contrast to such imaginings, it is perfectly reasonable to raise questions
about the power of the secret services and armed forces of the worlds most
powerful states, especially those of the USA. These are not theories at all;
they are based on fact. The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security
Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office,
the Defense Intelligence Agency and other US secret services spend more than
$30,000,000,000 a year on espionage and covert operations. Do opponents of
conspiracy theories think that this money is given to the Langley, Virginia Cats
Home? It would also be churlish to deny that the American military industry
plays a very major role in the economics and politics of the US. Every day at 5
p.m., the Pentagon announces hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to
arms manufacturers all over America click on the Department of Defenses website
for details  who in turn peddle influence through donations to politicians and
opinion-formers.

It is also odd that opponents of conspiracy theories often allow that
conspiracies have occurred in the past, but refuse to contemplate their
existence in the present. For some reason, you are bordering on the bonkers if
you wonder about the truth behind events like 9/11, when it is established as
fact that in 1962 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer,
tried to convince President Kennedy to authorise an attack on John Glenns
rocket, or on a US navy vessel, to provide a pretext for invading Cuba. Two
years later, a similar strategy was deployed in the faked Gulf of Tonkin
incident, when US engagement in Vietnam was justified in the light of the false
allegation that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on a US
destroyer. 

Are such tactics confined to history? Paul ONeill, George Bushs former Treasury
Secretary, has just revealed that the White House decided to get rid of Saddam
eight months before 9/11.

Indeed, one ought to speak of a conspir-acy of silence about the role of secret
services in politics. This is especially true of the events in Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union. It is the height of irresponsibility to discuss the
post-communist transition without extensive reference to the role of the spooks,
yet our media stick doggedly to the myth that their role is irrelevant. During
the overthrow of the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, on 22 November
2003, the worlds news outlets peddled a wonderful fairy-tale about a spontaneous
uprising  the revolution of roses, CNN shlockily dubbed it  even though all the
key actors have subsequently bragged that they were covertly funded and
organised by the US.

Similarly, it is a matter of public record that the Americans pumped at least
$100 million into Serbia in order to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and
huge sums in the years before. (An election in Britain, whose population is
eight times bigger than Yugoslavias, costs about two thirds of this.) 

This money was used to fund and equip the Kosovo Liberation Army; to stuff
international observer missions in Kosovo with hundreds of military intelligence
officers; to pay off the opposition and the so-called independent media; and to
buy heavily-armed Mafia gangsters to come and smash up central Belgrade, so that
the worlds cameras could show a peoples revolution.

At every stage, the covert aid and organisation provided by the US and British
intelligence agencies were decisive, as they had been on many occasions before
and since, all over the world. Yet for some reason, it is acceptable to say, The
CIA organised the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, but not
that it did it again in Belgrade in 2000 or Tbilisi in 2003. And in spite of the
well-known subterfuge and deception practised, for instance, in the Iran-Contra
scandal in the mid-1980s, people experience an enormous psychological reluctance
to accept that the British and American governments knowingly lied us into war
in 2002 and 2003. To be sure, some conspiracy theories may be outlandish or
wrong. But it seems to me that anyone who refuses to make simple empirical
deductions ought to have his head examined.

2004 The Spectator (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk/

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2004
"ought to have his head examined" Got that LEO?