Showing posts with label conspiracy theories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conspiracy theories. Show all posts

July 30, 2012

Bandar is back! (And maybe gone, too)

In the Weekly Standard, Elliott Abrams -- who was convicted of lying to Congress in Iran-Contra, pardoned by George H.W. Bush, and then became the Go-To Guy on the Middle East in the GWB Administration, and remains an in-law of the Podhoretzes -- blogs enthusiastically:
For 22 years, Bandar bin Sultan was Saudi Arabia’s influential, irrepressible ambassador in Washington. After years in eclipse, he has just been named as head of the kingdom’s intelligence service. What does it all mean? 
Prince Bandar lived large: Not only did he have the official ambassador’s residence, but also his own 32-room mansion in Aspen

In 1992, I had meetings down the street from Bandar's Aspen place at my boss's 17,000 square foot house, which was the size of Bandar's guest house. The Saudi's main house was 55,000 square feet. I talked to a whitewater rafting guide who had once had a construction job installing the deadman security system in the Ambassador's driveway. If suicide terrorists driving a truck bomb shot their way past the guardhouse, so nobody could hold their hand on the safety switch, giant steel spikes would automatically shoot up from the pavement to stop the terrorists' vehicle.
and a 2,000 acre estate in England. He was a very visible figure from 1983 to 2005 as the Saudi envoy in Washington. This was partly due to the parties he gave, and the very wide network of connections he built, but also because he was an effective diplomat. Spanning the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and second Bush presidencies, he made sure Saudi views were known, dealt directly with officials at the top of the U.S. government (including presidents), and could get things done. ... Now they may return, with an energetic and experienced player who can match anyone in the Arab world for charm, a network of contacts, and the financial resources of a rich government. Bandar is a spinner of webs, a dealmaker, a man who—assuming he is healthy—can bring Saudi views and interests back to the center of Arab decision making as well as the inner circles in many other world capitals.

On the other hand, there's a rumor going about in the Israeli newspapers that Bandar has already been assassinated by the Syrians in retaliation for organizing, with American help, the July 18 bombing in Damascus that killed some of Assad's inner circle.

Obviously, anybody who wonders about Saudi-raised Hilary adviser Huma Abedin's contacts is some kind of lunatic conspiracy theorist. Everybody knows there are no such things as conspiracies, especially not in the Middle East. That Syria was once part of the Byzantine Empire doesn't mean there is anything Byzantine about affairs of state there.

Anyway, if this really is the end for Bandar (and who knows?), I hope there is a safe deposit box somewhere in Switzerland containing a final draft of The Autobiography of Prince Bandar bin Sultan. I bet even the thought that such a manuscript might conceivably exist makes numerous Important People sweaty.

July 18, 2012

Conspiracies and Connections

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
The flagrant stupidity of most conspiracy theories popular during my lifetime, as epitomized by Oliver Stone’s 1991 masterpiece/fiasco JFK (in which the entire military-industrial complex plots to murder John F. Kennedy by hiring some flaming French Quarter homosexuals), serves to inoculate the powerful against the suspicion that they have influence (or responsibility) regarding events. 
It wasn’t always like this. Until recently, it was widely understood that numerous turning points in history—such as the assassinations of Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand—were the results of conspiracies.

Read the whole thing there.

June 11, 2010

The 2010 Bilderberg Conference

The Bilderbergers are an invitation-only group of rich and powerful people who have been getting together secretly in expensive hotels since 1954 to discuss how to make the world a better place for rich and powerful people. Not surprisingly, the Bilderbergers are the subject of much conspiracy theorizing.

In recent years, they've been overshadowed by the Davos confab, which cleverly took the opposite tack: maximize publicity. Sure, it's fun to secretly hang out with your fellow Bilderbergers, but it can be more fun to boast about your invitation to Davos. The Davos strategy is to invite journalists to lecture rich and powerful guys. The rich and powerful guys treat the journalists like peers with fascinating insights, then the journalists go home and write articles about how today's crop of rich and powerful guys are so much more wonderful than you might think.

There is less conspiracy theorizing about Davos than Bilderberg because Davos hires platoons of PR flacks to tell everybody that, yes, the people who get invited to Davos do Run the World. So that takes all the fun out of it for the conspiracy theorists.

It appears the Bilderbergers may be slowly moving in the Davos direction. (Here's Charlie Skelton's BilderBlog at the Guardian.) This year, a website called BilderbergMeetings.org has appeared. It could be a hoax or it could be the real deal. (The Guardian says one delegate confirmed it's valid.) It's certainly sober and understated enough. 

It even features a purported list of this week's participants: Niall Ferguson, Bill Gates, Donald Graham (Washington Post publisher), Richard Holbrooke, James Johnson (ex-Fannie Mae), Henry Kissinger, Henry Kravis, John Micklethwait (editor of The Economist), Peter Orszag (OMB), Richard Perle, Charlie Rose, Robert Rubin, Erich Schmidt of Google, Larry Summers, Paul Volcker, Jose Zapatero (PM of Spain), Bob Zoellick (World Bank), and a whole bunch of CEOs. Last year's guests included Max Boot, Vernon Jordan, David Rockefeller, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Sounds kind of dull.

The two years' worth of attendees would be a useful source for a study of the characteristics of the Trans-Atlantic elite.

That the Bilderbergers feel they need the insights of Max Boot and Charlie Rose reminds me of Greg Cochran's insight: There is no Inner Party. There's no Mustapha Mond who understands how it all works. At the end of 1984 [spoiler alert!] O'Brien of the evil Inner Party gives poor Winston Smith of the Outer Party a lecture explaining how the whole system works, just as at the end of Brave New World, Mond explains to the main characters how and why he and his fellow World Controllers control the world.

On a fashion note, the Guardian's series of 19 photos of big shots arriving suggests that the Obama Look -- a suit or a sports jacket and a dress shirt, but without a necktie -- has become the Bilderberg standard, unless you are an old coot like Volcker.

January 18, 2010

A Triumph of "Cognitive Infiltration" in Action!

Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and a long-time mentor to the President, suggested in his 2008 paper Conspiracy Theories that the government engage in "cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories."

I guess that finally explains why in 2005-2007 Sunstein's protege, U.S. Senator Barack Obama, made tax-deductible contributions totaling $53,770 to the church of Rev. Jeremiah "the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color" Wright. Obama must have been, obviously, Sunstein's undercover agent infiltrating Wright's conspiracy theory-promoting organization for two decades.

What other possible explanation could there be?

Sunstein's success having Obama infiltrate Wright's church was the perfect test case proving his theory in Conspiracy Theories: look how moderate Wright became!

It will all make sense, you see, once Cass Sunstein explains the hidden pattern to you. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs sees all, knows all, understands all. You have nothing to worry about. Nothing, I tell you, nothing!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 31, 2008

Suicide in 2001 anthrax case

David Willman of the LA Times breaks a big story on the post-9/11 terrorism wave that is one reason why we're in Iraq:

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI. ...

The anthrax mailings killed five people, crippled national mail service, shut down a Senate office building and spread fear of further terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government's payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI's chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

Early in the year, I took a look at a third Ft. Detrick scientist (since moved on to other jobs) -- i.e., neither Ivins nor Hatfill -- whose name has been fairly widely tossed around as the possible anthrax assassin. The more I Googled, the more the pieces seemed to fit together. I was about ready to post my conspiracy theory when I took one more look at it and -- poof -- I realized that I didn't have any real evidence at all. So, thankfully, I didn't post his name, and instead wrote:
"I'm not going to mention his name, but if you know who I'm talking about and think he did it, try to force yourself into a gestalt where you assume he didn't do it and see if you can think of less sinister explanations for the facts known about him."

As far as I can recall, Ivins's name, in contrast, didn't come up much in the conspiracy theorizing. Here's a Google search that shows relatively little in the way of theorizing about his involvement -- even though his name was published in USA Today in 2004 in regard to some dodgy doings at Detrick.

His name was featured suspiciously in the book Vaccine A by investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto about the anthrax vaccine that Ivins helped develop. But I don't see anything on Google suggesting Matsumoto linked Ivins to involvement with the 2001 terror attacks.

In general, it appears that almost nobody -- whether government investigators, professional journalists, or lone obsessives in their bathrobes -- suspected Ivins, at least not enough to leave much of a trace on Google. (Indeed, most of the Google searches on "Ivins anthrax" turn up references to the late pundit Molly Ivins.)

For example, here's the part of Ed Lake's website where he collects all the published facts on the anthrax attacks where he speculates on traits of the supplier and who the mailer might be. He doesn't sound too far off, but neither set of traits seems to fit Ivins terribly well. Lake's profile is in bold:

1. The supplier probably took the Ames anthrax from a government facility.

Yes.

2. The supplier was probably fired from that facility.

Not when Lake wrote this a few years ago.

3. The supplier is probably considered an unstable personality, perhaps even a "drunk".

Sounds more like delusions of grandeur, according to Ivins's brother.

4. The supplier is almost certainly unmarried.

No, Ivins was married.

5. The supplier is a loner with few friends - if any.
6. The supplier is disgruntled and uncomfortable working with others.
7. The supplier probably uses phrases like "I keep telling them, but they don't listen."
8. The supplier doesn't care much about "rules".
9. The supplier believes that a free exchange of information is key to advancements in science.
10. The supplier may have had knowledge needed by the refiner/mailer.

I don't know about 5-10.

11. The supplier is probably in his late 40s or early 50s.

A little older.

12. The supplier probably lost his security clearance as a result of his actions.

No, Ivins got off scot-free despite admitting to breaking rules regarding handling of anthrax.

It's striking that here's one of the big historical mysteries of recent years, and yet nobody, official or unofficial, seemed to have had a clue for at least five years. I thought the Internet was supposed to make this kind of thing untenable.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 28, 2008

UPDATED: Conspiracy Theories Nobody Is Interested In

Anthrax 2001: A reader in the Comments points out one of the key events in recent history -- the anthrax poisonings right after 2001 that helped stampede the national elite into the Iraq War -- remain unsolved and nobody much cares.

Huey Long - He was a controversial governor and senator with plans for running for President against FDR on a populist platform before being gunned down in 1935 by a doctor (or perhaps by one of his own security guards trying to shoot the doctor who was brandishing a gun at Long) for reasons that still remain murky. Nobody cares.

Martin Luther King - After being arrested in London for the murder of MLK, career criminal James Earl Ray plea-bargained his way out of trial, accepting life in prison, where he eventually died. He eventually tried to recant his plea, spinning various theories about a man named Raoul (Duke?), although admitting to have at least some involvement. Ray certainly shot King, but did Ray act completely alone? Was there any offer of money from someone? Who knows? I would imagine there remains active interest in the black community in this case, but the mainstream media is totally apathetic after a flurry of stories in the 1990s.

Watergate - All along, it looked like the FBI and/or CIA was more heavily involved in the end of the Nixon presidency than in the end of the Kennedy presidency, but nobody cared. J. Edgar Hoover's left hand man, Mark Felt, eventually came forward as Deep Throat, but nobody bought Bob Woodward's book about it.

Pym Fortuyn - The Dutch immigration restrictionist politician was murdered by environmental lawyer Volkert van der Graaf in 2002, the day after Chirac defeated Le Pen in the runoff for the French presidency, the climax of a "two-week hate" in which all right-thinking people in Europe virulently denounced anti-immigrationism. The initial general opinion of Europe's great and good was that Fortuyn had it coming. The consensus later changed to blaming it all on the gunman being one of those animal rights crazies, and that it didn't actually have anything to do with immigration, a position that was debunked by the killer himself in court testimony. Outside of Holland, Fortuyn has largely been forgotten, with Americans more familiar with the subsequent murder of a less important figure, Theo van Gogh by a radical Muslim. Did anybody encourage Fortuyn's killer -- I mean, besides the entire political elite of Europe?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 27, 2008

Assassination attempts

Here's a top of the head list of the most important assassinations of political leaders in America since WWII, plus attempts on the life of Presidents and Presidential candidates, with a rough grouping of the assassins in terms of left, right, or apolitical crazy.

Harry Truman - Left -- Puerto Rican terrorists - Left
John F. Kennedy - Left -- Lee Harvey Oswald - Left
Malcolm X - Left -- Nation of Islam hitmen - Left
Martin Luther King - Left -- Conspiracy of white racists and criminals - Right
Robert F. Kennedy - Left -- Sirhan Sirhan - Left
George Wallace - Right -- Arthur Bremer - Apolitical Crazy
Gerald Ford - Right -- Squeaky Fromme -- Left or Crazy?
John Lennon - Left -- What's His Name - Apolitical Crazy
Ronald Reagan - Right -- John Hinckley - Apolitical Crazy

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 4, 2008

What's not a conspiracy?

To call an observation a "conspiracy theory" is widely treated as an argument-winning move. Yet, which of the major historical events of the 20th Century did not have at least some aspect of conspiracy about them?

Start with the event that set in motion the main currents of the century, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. This was the result of a conspiracy right out of an Oliver Stone movie: Elements high up in the Serbian government and military, organized in a secret paramilitary society with the comic book name Black Hand, infiltrated nine assassins and their weapons into Sarajevo and had them sit around for a month waiting for the Archduke to show up so they could ambush him. (They proved incompetent and all missed, but then the Austrians proved incompetent too and made a wrong turn and then stalled the Archduke's car right in front of the despondent Princip.)

Next, the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the rest of the Bolshie boys were classic cafe conspirators who got lucky. Lenin's deal with the German high command to be transported from Switzerland to the Finland Station in order to undermine Germany's Russian enemy is straight out of the conspiracy nut's textbook.

The Depression, however, is the most striking exception to this tendency of major 20th Century events to in some way partake of the conspiratorial. It just sort of happened.

What about the rise of Hitler? You might call the political maneuverings by the conservative Weimar powerbrokers who gave Hitler the Chancellorship in January 1933 a conspiracy, although that's stretching the term. Hitler's manner of government -- midnight meetings to plan great crimes with a few henchmen where no notes were taken (a particularly un-German way of running a government) -- was that of a conspirator rather than a national leader.

Japan's path to Pearl Harbor was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s by conspiracies of Army officers who assassinated all the moderates in the Japanese government.

On a strategic level, the Cold War was not particularly conspiratorial -- it naturally grew out of the radically different interests of the two major victors of WWII. But -- probably fortunately -- both sides preferred to wage it largely by conspiratorial means rather than by tank battle in the Fulda Gap.

According to Paul Johnson's Modern Times,

"Eisenhower's chief fear, in the tense atmosphere engendered by the Cold War, was that the government would fall into the grip of a combination of bellicose senators, over-eager brass-hats and greedy arms-suppliers -- what he termed the 'military-industrial complex.'" [p. 464]

Eisenhower preferred to fight the Cold War using cheaper means -- building a nuclear deterrent and using CIA covert operations, as in Guatemala and Iran.

Finally, the fall of the Soviet Empire doesn't seem terribly conspiratorial at this point, but the history hasn't all been written. I'd be particularly interested in what promises, if any, were made by the American government to Saudi Arabia in 1985 to persuade the Saudis to pump so much oil that the world price plummeted and the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, went broke.

Of course, this doesn't mean that most (or any) of the popular conspiracy theories are true. Most are obviously pretty stupid.

What it does show is that, like with predictions, people are easily bored and depressed by true conspiracy theories. For example, the fact that WWI, the catastrophe of catastrophes, was set in motion by a classic large-scale conspiracy is of almost no interest to anybody -- I was only vaguely aware of that fact myself until I looked up the history tonight.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 2, 2008

Theories about conspiracies theories

[Links fixed]
The Man Who Is Thursday offers "The Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies:"

Over the past couple years, Steve Sailer's writings on conspiracy theories (see below) have intrigued me. Like most educated Westerners I don't think much of conspiracy theorizing, but the examples Steve has given got me thinking. ...

More interesting though are some of Steve's other examples: the Mafia, the 90s Russian oligarchs, the Donmeh, the diamond business. What these all have in common is that they all involve closely knit ethnic groups or people with close family ties. To be precise, actual conspiracies tend to be found only among family members or, what amounts to the same thing, closely knit, endogamous ethnic groups. Therefore, in honour of Steve's abiding interest in family, I give your the Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies. So far as I know, Steve hasn't spelled this out explicitly, but I'll do it for him:

Click here to find out what Thursday proposes.

When you get back, I want to raise a related issue: the declining value of covert conspiracies relative to overt conspiracies.

Say we were sitting around in a dorm room in 1978 and I told you that each winter the world's richest men gather in an obscure village high in the Alps to discuss how to impose economic policies in their self-interest on the nations of the world.

You'd say I had seen too many paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, Parallax View, and Winter Kills. Surely, if this conspiracy existed, enterprising journalists like Woodward and Bernstein would expose it.

Then, I'd say, no, you don't understand: the rich guys invite Woodward and Bernstein to the meetings (well, maybe not Bernstein, he's not really important enough anymore). Journalists all compete with each other to be big enough celebrities to get invited to this meeting, where they and the rich guys can all bask under the TV lights in their mutually-reinforcing celebrityhood.

The secret is that there is no secret. In fact, everybody invited immediately notifies his publicist to spread the word that he's going.

And, you'd say, that's crazy! A conspiracy in plain view? Who ever heard of such a thing?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 15, 2008

The Anthrax Case

The wave of bioterrorism that killed five people shortly after 9/11 is unsolved and largely forgotten, but it played a role in sending us off to war in Iraq, so it is of considerable historical importance in understanding how we got to where we are.

Feeling cocky after my recent run of investigative successes, I sat down last week to solve the anthrax case. A quick scan identified a character who many on the Internet had wondered why he, rather than the hapless Stephen Hatfill, hadn't been put through the ringer. He's a microbiologist, retired Army officer, worked at the Army base where they keep lots of anthrax, had been mean to an Arab colleague, was involved in lots of unseemly stuff, etc etc. The more I Googled, the more the pieces fell into place ... until, pffft, I looked at the evidence again from a different angle and it all blew away.

Sure, I could make the bits and pieces fit into the notion that he was the anthrax mailer, but then a simpler explanation occurred to me: He was just a jerk who had done some jerky things over the last 15 years. I'm not going to mention his name, but if you know who I'm talking about and think he did it, try to force yourself into a gestalt where you assume he didn't do it and see if you can think of less sinister explanations for the facts known about him.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 9, 2007

Salonika

The port city at the north end of the Aegean Sea, spelled Thessaloniki since Greece seized it from the Ottoman Empire before WWI, would be a fine setting for an Umberto Eco novel or a Dan Brown knock-off of an Eco novel.

Salonika
had an appropriately Byzantine social history a century ago. It was the home of both Mustafa Kemal, founder of modern Turkey, and of the Donme, the crypto-Jewish followers of the 17th Century false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, who comprise much of the secular elite of Istanbul today. (In Turkey today, "Salonikan" is a synonym for Sabbatean.) Also, Masonic Lodges in Salonika played a role in the emergence of both the Young Turks who deposed the Sultan and, more indirectly, of the modern yogurt industry. I haven't found any links between Salonika and the Knights Templar yet, but I'm sure I just haven't burrowed deep enough into the fever swamps.

Salonika is back in the news as the birthplace of new French president Nicolas Sarkozy's beloved maternal grandfather Benedict Mallah, who was the scion of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family in that remarkable city. Salonika was about half Jewish early in the 20th Century, before the great fire of 1917 scattered much of the Jewish community, and then the rest were murdered by the Nazis. (The Donme, as nominal Muslims, were shipped to Turkey in the population exchanges of 1923 that, at great cost, brought peace between Turkey and Greece, so they escaped the fate of the Salonikan Jews.)

Sarkozy's father, an anti-Communist Hungarian refugee of castle-owning minor aristocratic stock, abandoned his family, so little Sarkozy grew up in the small mansion of his maternal grandfather, who had converted to Catholicism upon marrying a French war widow in 1917 and then became a respected Parisian clap doctor.

"To this day many Mallahs are still active Zionists around the world," says the Australian Jewish News:


Sarkozy’s grandfather, Aron Mallah, nicknamed Beniko, was born in 1890.

Beniko’s uncle Moshe was a well-known Rabbi and a devoted Zionist who, in 1898 published and edited “El Avenir”, the leading paper of the Zionist national movement in Greece at the time.

His cousin, Asher, was a Senator in the Greek Senate and in 1912 he helped guarantee the establishment of the Technion – the elite technological university in Haifa, Israel.

In 1919 he was elected as the first President of the Zionist Federation of Greece and he headed the Zionist Council for several years. In the 1930’s he helped Jews flee to Israel, to which he himself immigrated in 1934.

Another of Beniko’s cousins, Peppo Mallah, was a philanthropist for Jewish causes who served in the Greek Parliament, and in 1920 he was offered, but declined, the position of Greece’s Minister of Finance. After the establishment of the State of Israel he became the country’s first diplomatic envoy to Greece.


During the Holocaust, 57 members of the Mallah family were murdered by the Nazis. Sarkozy's grandfather, who had changed his name to Benedict upon his conversion, had to lie low during WWII to keep from being caught by the Nazis in France.


Nicolas was especially close to Benedict, who was like a father to him. In his biography Sarkozy tells he admired his grandfather, and through hours spent of listening to his stories of the Nazi occupation, the “Maquis” (French resistance), De Gaulle and the D-day, Benedict bequeathed to Nicolas his political convictions.


During a visit to Greece in 2006, a visibly moved Sarkozy received a family tree album from a delegation of Thessalonikian Jews, saying "My roots are here."

By the way, each time I've tried to post something about Salonika, my computer acts up and tries to swallow my entry. I blame albino monks.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer