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The
other day, I did something I don't do much anymore: I actually
bought a magazine, feeling a twinge of nostalgia as I paid
the clerk. With nearly everything important online, my natural
stinginess impels me to foreswear periodicals printed on dead
trees, for the most part, although certain exceptions are
made. I buy The American
Conservative wherever and whenever I encounter it
on the newstands, as part of my own personal guerrilla operations
staged on behalf of the Old Right Liberation
Front. More rarely, I buy because there's something of special
interest that is unavailable online, and, given my penurious
nature, it has to be something really unusual, especially
when we're talking about Vanity Fair magazine, which
costs nearly five bucks.
That's
a lot for a magazine, no matter how glossy, but I imagine
dipping the thing in scent is an expensive procedure. I strongly
suspect the lightheadedness induced by proximity to the fumes
is an essential part of Vanity Fair's editorial strategy.
The idea is to create a perfume-induced coma in the reader,
who will be rendered too intoxicated to notice lapses in logic,
grammar, and good taste. Added to this is the gimmick of soft
porn disguised as advertisements interspersed between feature
articles: it gets the blood moving, the heart pounding –
and puts the reader in a state apt to make him more appreciative
of Christopher Hitchens' clumsy glamorization of American
viceroy Paul Bremer as Clint Eastwood playing Lawrence of
Arabia.
I
wouldn't have bought it for the Hitchens piece, however: the
CPA's official press releases are readily available
online. What caught my eye and my interest
were two other articles: an investigative piece on the anthrax
scare that coincided with the 9/11 attacks, and an editorial
by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, which made me
wonder if perhaps I had mistakenly picked up a copy of Conspiracy
Digest. Carter writes:
"Imagine
if, instead of invading Poland in 1939, Adolf Hitler had staged
a surprise attack on the U.S. In a dawn raid, Nazi forces
destroy the Empire State and Chrysler buildings in New York
and cause serious damage to the War Department in Washington,
D.C. Three thousand people die. The nation's airports are
frozen. But because of a long-standing relationship between
the Roosevelts and the German ambassador to the U.S., two
dozen members of Hitler's direct family, along with more than
a hundred wealthy Germans, are escorted to private planes
and flown out of the country. They have not been interrogated
by the FBI, or even interviewed. Indeed, the White House denies
the existence of the flights entirely."
Okay.
I've imagined it. Now what? "This," avers Carter, "in all
its far-fetched lunacy, is not totally unlike what happened
here in the days immediately following September 11."
Far-fetched
doesn't even begin to describe the conspiracy theory Vanity
Fair is pushing, nor does mere lunacy, because there is
a particular method to this madness. According to Carter,
the President of these United States, because of his family's
longstanding connection to the Saudis – the "Nazis" in this
equation – authorized the departure of "influential Saudis"
out of the country at a time when all flights were grounded.
He accusingly writes:
"In
all, some 140 Saudis, including around two dozen bin Laden
family members, made it out of the U.S. by the third week
in September."
But
so what? Normal flights had resumed by then. As Snopes.com,
the website devoted to debunking urban myths put it:
"The
key point is that the Saudis mentioned in these accounts were
not flown out of the country – they were assembled at locations
from which they could be conveniently flown out of
the country once regular airline travel resumed. "
Should
they have been kept in the U.S. as hostages – jailed or even
killed in retaliation for their blood kinship with OBL? We
don't do that in this country – yet. Carter's more serious
allegations – that the flights were "secret" in the sense
of a guilty secret kept until now, and that the Bin Laden
clan wasn't questioned by the authorities before their departure
– are effectively debunked by Snopes, and I'll just refer the reader there to circumnavigate
the shoals of myth and half-truth on which this conspiracy
theory runs aground. Suffice to quote their conclusion:
"Clearly
bin Laden family members were allowed to leave the U.S. shortly
after the September 11 attacks, and this was effected with
the approval and assistance of the American government. Yet
the Saudis didn't fly out during the ban, nor was the FBI
denied access to them while they were here or prevented from
knowing who was going to be on those flights. In preparation
for the exodus, a number of Saudis were ferried to central
locations where those outbound jets would eventually leave
from, which means they were allowed to violate the ban on
air travel within the U.S. Was it right that fear for their
safety and/or favors owed abroad should have prompted their
being treated as special circumstance exceptions to the ban?
That question lies outside the scope of this page, but rest
assured it will be hotly debated around many a dinner table."
But
it isn't just a case of special treatment: Vanity Fair
is alleging that the Bin Laden family – an entity comprised
of hundreds if not thousands of Saudis – along with
prominent members of the Saudi royal family (an even more
numerous lot) are involved in financing and otherwise giving
aid and comfort to the 9/11 terrorists. So, where's the proof?
The
campaign of half-baked hysterical propaganda ratcheted up
against the Saudis doesn't require any proof: all that's required
is the demonization of an entire nation. We've been down that
road before. Oh, author Craig Unger goes through the motions:
he cites the infamous 28 blank pages
redacted from the congressional report on 9/11. That's about
the best these conspiracy theorists can do: cite the absence
of evidence as "proof" that they're right. Unger cites anonymous
"terrorism experts." He recounts the Bush family ties with
the Saudi royal family. But none of it amounts to a hill of
beans.
The
same goes for Gerald Posner's new book, Why
America Slept, which claims that information given
by Abu Zubaydah, a
top Al Qaeda operative, points to three Saudi princes and
a high Pakistani official who had foreknowledge of 9/11 and
were involved in the plot: unfortunately, all four are dead,
and so they cannot defend themselves – or confirm Posner's
"theory." In one news account, Posner
says:
"'My
gut tells me that if Zubaydah's information was accurate,
our error was telling the Saudis what we had,' he said in
an interview. 'People did not want them to talk, and took
them out. Can I prove it? No.'"
The
anti-Saudi lobby wants people to rely on their guts, and leave
their brains behind. The "evidence" against the Saudis – everything
from the Vanity Fair school of "investigative" journalism
to the anti-Wahhabi jeremiads of Daniel
Pipes and Stephen
Schwartz – is so fantastical, and downright sloppy, that
one wonders how anyone could fall for it. I guess we're supposed
to be so overwhelmed by hatred of all things Saudi that we
can't think straight. That's why they continually note that
15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis, which at least
one knowledgeable source claims was a
deliberate ruse by Bin Laden to force a split between
Washington and Riyadh.
The
neoconservative project to "transform"
the Middle East involves much more
than merely conquering and occupying Iraq. Toppling nearly
all of the regimes in the region, with the exceptions of Turkey
and the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan, has always been their
goal, and they
have certainly not been shy about proclaiming it. As militant
partisans of Israel, the neocons have the Kingdom in their
sights because it is Israel's chief military and diplomatic
rival in the region. Israel's partisans in the U.S. have taken
full advantage of 9/11 as a means of wresting the role of
Washington's chief regional deputy from Riyadh, where it had
heretofore been assigned, to Tel Aviv. That is what all this
huffing and puffing about a Saudi-Bush family "conspiracy"
to shield the 9/11 terrorists is all about – now there's
a conspiracy theory for you!
I
long
ago predicted this sort of conspiracism would become endemic if and when the President
showed any sign of backing down from implementing the neocon
vision of a Middle East entirely subjugated by the U.S., and
made properly safe for Israel. If Colin
Powell and all those senior military officers who opposed the war make
any more headway, and Bush makes a deal with the UN, then
you'll be seeing a lot more from the purveyors of the latest
in conspiracy chic.
NOTES
IN THE MARGIN
In
my last column, I promised readers they would be getting the
introduction to my book, The Terror Enigma, in today's
edition of "Behind the Headlines," and the book itself on
September 11, but, as they used to say back when paper and
the dissemination of information were inextricably linked:
Stop the presses! The good news is that the book has
found a publisher: the bad news is that you won't get to read
it for about a month or so. We'll let you know just as soon
as the book is available.
Speaking
of that book, I note that the Anti-Defamation League has issued
a
report on the "rumor" that Israeli agents were on the
trail of the hijackers in the U.S., and had some degree of
foreknowledge. Whoever wrote this report, however, ought to
be fired forthwith, because, if the idea was to debunk this
theory as an "urban myth," the authors didn't do a very good
job. It is not enough to cite David Duke, and even more obscure
bigots, as agreeing with this thesis – it is either true,
or false, regardless of who says what.
This
story was run by dozens of news organizations,
none of them neo-Nazi in orientation, yet the only non-kook
source cited by the ADL is Fox News (yes, I know many of my
readers would disagree with this designation): investigative
reporter Carl Cameron's four-part
series, broadcast in December 2001, exposing a gigantic
Israeli spy operation in the U.S. It was Cameron who told
a traumatized nation:
"There
is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11
attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have
gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not
shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are –
quote – 'tie-ins.' But when asked for details, he flatly refused
to describe them, saying, – quote – 'evidence linking these
Israelis to 9-11 is classified.'"
Instead
of refuting Cameron's charges – that the Israelis were on
to the 9/11 hijackers, in addition to running an extensive
attempt to penetrate U.S. government facilities – the ADL
report simply reiterates what Cameron said. Apparently we
are supposed to believe that the Fox News report must be classified
as "hate speech," and therefore immediately dismissed without
further discussion, whether or not it's true.
As
I relate in The Terror Enigma, the evolution of this
story is a story in itself. How and why did it come to be
so pointedly ignored, in spite of the abundant evidence, while
other "conspiracy" theories, such as the "Bush knew" school
of thought and the Bush-Bin Laden thesis, are given all sorts
of publicity – in spite of the paucity of supporting
facts? If that's not enough to make us lose faith in the American
news media, then it is at least enough to make us throw away
our copies of Vanity Fair with a snort of disgust,
and not just due to the over-perfuming.
But
wait! There's hope after all! The same issue of Vanity
Fair also features "The Message in the Anthrax," a riveting
account by literary detective and Vassar professor Don
Foster on the hunt for the anthrax killer. Our memories
of the post-9/11 period are inevitably colored by the prolonged
mass terror that accompanied the attacks on the World Center
and the Pentagon, and Professor Foster does a great service
in giving publicity to the case of Dr. Ayaad
Assaad, an Egyptian-born scientist who formerly worked
for the USAMRIID
biowar facility at Ft. Detrick, New Jersey.
Foster
explains that Dr. Assaad was the victim of a virulently anti-Arab
clique at Ft. Detrick, who called themselves "the Camel Club."
Making use of the top-notch
investigative reporting done by the Hartford Courant
– which uncovered a weird series of events at Ft. Detrick,
detailing how Assaad was effectively driven out of his job
– Foster points to a key piece of evidence that has been completely
overlooked in the "mainstream" media. In the period after
the anthrax letters were mailed, but before they were discovered
to contain anthrax, the Quantico military police headquarters
received an anonymous letter accusing Dr. Assaad of plotting
a campaign of biological warfare against the U.S. He was questioned
by the FBI, and then released after the letter was determined
to be a hoax.
The
idea that this hoax letter may be a key piece of evidence
– which is being totally ignored by the so-called "Amerithrax"
task force – has been the theme
of a series of past columns, written by me in the last year, but Foster puts
the extent of the cover-up in a new light when he reveals:
"Hoping
that the Quantico letter might lead, if not to the killer,
at least to a suspect, I offered to examine the document.
My photocopy arrived by FedEx not from the task force but
from FBI headquarters. Searching through documents by some
40 USAMRIID employees, I found writings by a female officer
that looked like a perfect match. I wrote a detailed report
on the evidence, but the anthrax task force declined to follow
through."
Readers
of the Courant articles will recognize this female
as likely to be the one female member of "the Camel club,"
whose members took such delight in harassing their colleagues
of Arabic descent. They will also recall the following paragraph
from a January 20,
2002 piece in the Courant, describing the results
of an investigation into loose security practices at Ft. Detrick:
"Documents
from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was
observed entering the lab building at night was Langford's
predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer
worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack
being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by
Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack's,
according to a report filed by a security guard."
Why
won't the "Amerithrax" clowns
investigate the Quantico letter, and the implications surrounding
it? Why are certain folks exempt, while others, such as the long-suffering
Dr. Steven Hatfill, are subjected to relentless harassment
and demonization by law enforcement officials who haven't
got enough evidence to fill a thimble?
–
Justin Raimondo
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