One of the most popular themes of the paranoid conspiracy theorist (as opposed, one might ask, to what other kind?) is the question of who benefits when something or other happens.
Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Wackyland) looked at the political capital that gushed into President Bush’s account after Sept. 11, and at the supposed bonanza of cleanup and reconstruction contracts that, she assumed, would go to Bush’s father and their mutual fat-cat friends, and decided that the answer to who benefits was patently obvious: the Bush Family Evil Empire.
Of course, the who benefits line of thought overlooks the fact that most people just aren’t interested enough in benefiting from horrible things to actually try to bring them about. Nor do people have sufficiently reliable foresight, if they did want to benefit from something like Sept. 11, to come up with a plan that would cover all the bases, bribe all the potential whistleblowers who can be bribed, and silence all those who can’t. Hatching and carrying out a Grand Conspiracy has to be much harder work than getting a real job and saving your pennies. But that’s too logical for the likes of Ms. McKinney.
Other paranoid conspiracy theorists engage in similar intellectual exercises to identify the “real” bad guys behind tragedies and atrocities, usually on the assumption that these same “real” bad guys are so good at covering up the evidence of their complicity that there’s no point in looking for it. In the seven years that I’ve had access to the Internet I’ve encountered some of these theorists myself, and the mere act of expecting evidence, and of questioning their assertions when evidence is not forthcoming, tends to serve as evidence to them that the questioner is in on the plot.
It’s an ego-stroking kind of mindset, one must admit—the certainty that your ability to sniff out conspiracy makes you enough of a threat to the Cabal that they have to send their agents out to try to debunk you. No doubt it suffuses a pointless and futile existence with a sense of purpose, which is something almost everyone needs. People with that kind of troubled character can be expected, in the event they ever achieve any kind of power, to do their best to provoke a negative reaction so as to generate proof.
Hence the Clintonistas’ favorite bogeyman, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
After September 11, though, circumstances have changed, and we may need to re-evaluate our normal response to allegations of conspiracy. The actions of 19 Middle Eastern men acting on the orders of Osama bin Laden—not to mention bin Laden’s own words—have demonstrated that, paranoid or not, there is somebody out to get us. And notwithstanding Jonah Goldberg’s droll assessment of what the jihadists can expect should they get their wish of a general holy war on America and the West, the fact remains that we have investigative agencies undergoing reorganization, and we have an ever more burdensome set of restrictions on commercial air travel, and we have a color-coded threat warning system, all because (as Goldberg admits) these guys not only are out to get us, but to a certain limited extent they can get us.
And so we find ourselves faced with such questions that might have seemed absurd to us a year ago, such as that of FBI lawyer Colleen Rowley: is it possible there are enemy moles in the FBI?
Rowley herself raises the question only by mentioning a joke that was made in her Minneapolis field office about the supervisor at FBI HQ who insistently blocked efforts to fully investigate Zacarias Moussaoui’s possible connections to Osama bin Laden—and then walks away, preferring instead the argument that the supervisor’s primary interest was neither national security nor national betrayal, but the advancement of his own career at whatever cost.
As Peggy Noonan notes in her column on this subject, it says something about the situation when a 21-year FBI veteran, someone who “demonstrates a seriousness about words, a carefulness as to meaning”, would raise this question even as a joke.
Incompetence, careerism, whatever the name, it’s certainly the simplest explanation for what happened. But we are at war, and it’s not prudent to rule out less simple explanations before they’ve at least been looked into. There have always been efforts by adversary powers to undermine their rivals in a number of ways, during peacetime as well as wartime. Nations that don’t have the best interests of America at heart (face it, no country but America does) have gained the loyalty and co-operation of native-born American citizens against us. Do the names Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansson ring any bells? It’s worth noting that, at the time those jokes were being made in Minneapolis, their subject might reasonably have been dismissed as paranoia. By the time Rowley wrote her memo, that had changed.
Undermining a rival power may be a legitimate aim even in nominal peacetime, but when it’s open war, the aim is to destroy. And when the means of conducting war involves secret cells of operatives plotting to carry out murderous acts on civilians, a secondary aim of a spy or mole in a U.S. investigative agency would certainly include running interference to protect members of such cells.
Was the HQ supervisor in the Moussaoui case a jihadist mole? Apparently not. Could such a mole have reached a supervisory position in the FBI? Do you have to ask? He wouldn’t have to be Middle Eastern—Jihad Johnny Walker Lindh is a WASP—but with the FBI so paranoid (there’s that word again) about being accused of racial profiling, he could be. In fact, given the needs of our national security agencies for people who speak Arabic…
Ironically, we are at war in large part due to the paranoia of a certain segment of the Middle Eastern population—their willingness to believe that anything that makes their culture look like less than the absolute be-all and end-all of human perfection, must be the result of an evil Zionist conspiracy. Even former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the descendant of Italian immigrants, is believed by some Arab jihadists to be Jewish. Undoubtedly there are some who think I’m Jewish, if they’ve even heard of me. Well, my father does have a cousin whose late husband was named Birnbaum. I’m sure that would be enough for the jihadists, if they needed any evidence.
Then again, the Cold War was begun in no small part due to the paranoia of Josef Stalin. Adolf Hitler believed in an evil Zionist conspiracy. The ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire blamed Russian-allied governments for the terrorist assassination of his heir to the imperial throne in 1914.
Maybe there does need to be some kind of conspiracy, aimed at keeping paranoid conspiracy theorists from achieving power. It’s not like they don’t already think there is one.
