Choices: Iraq: A Conspiracy Theory Held Together by Duct Tape

A Conspiracy Theory Held Together by Duct Tape

Published on Saturday, February 15, 2003 by the Globe and Mail
"A conspiracy theory held together by duct tape"
by Ken Wiwa

By and large, I'm agnostic on conspiracy theories. While there's plenty of evidence to support any theory that the world is run by a handful of Freemasons, I believe conspiracy theories mostly prove that hypocrisy is the mother of all power politics.

Take this whole duct-tape farce, for example -- the Department of Homeland Security's advice that citizens defend themselves from bioterror attacks with plastic sheeting and duct tape.

How many terror alerts does it take until someone says, "Stop crying wolf"? It's getting hard to figure out what we should fear more, a U.S. Technicolor alert or a grainy bin Laden broadcast. We know Osama bin Laden was a member of a U.S. intelligence-funded Islamic group battling the Soviets. But I maintain that, if you interrogate the Bush administration's policies, duct tape is the last thing you worry about.

If, like me, you're trying hard not to believe that this whole showdown in the Persian Gulf is a conspiracy by Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush, then the evidence is stacked against you. Even a casual glance at that evidence will send you on a conspiracy trail of chemical and biological weapons that leads back to Washington.

Things are so bad that, if someone suggested that this week's "code orange" alert was a ruse by Saddam bin Bush to manipulate the shares of companies that make duct tape, you might give it a second thought. Why not? If the British government can try to pass off an old graduate thesis as evidence of an Iraqi threat, then anything is possible.

As this is evidently the age of DIY intelligence reports, you can probably crack code orange yourself. Sept. 11 spawned a lot of crackpot ideas, but the way the Bush administration has prosecuted the war on terror, it's as if it is trying to lend credibility to the conspiracy theorists.

One of the ironies of the weapons inspections farce is that Hans Blix should probably be looking for biological weapons in Washington, not Baghdad. As the Federation of American Scientists Web site has chronicled, the U.S. is the rogue state when it comes to ridding the world of biological and chemical weapons. Although the Biolgical Weapons Convention was designed to "exclude completely the possibility of biological agents and toxins being used as weapons by abolishing the weapons themselves," the Bush administration has gone out of its way to obstruct the 1972 treaty.

In the current edition of Disarmament Diplomacy, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chair of the FAS Working Group on Biological Weapons, blames the proliferation of biological weapons on the Bush administration's "implacable opposition . . . to any legally binding instrument."

Now there's the foundation of every good conspiracy theory: how the Bush family systematically obstructs or dismantles every global agreement that goes against its interests. We've already seen the impact of the big pharmaceutical giants' links with the Bush administration on social medicine. Their lobbying was instrumental in Dick Cheney's direct intervention to block a global deal to provide cheap drugs to poor countries last year.

You can find the same Bush-pharma link in the recent terror alerts. It runs like this: The pharmaceutical companies get fat on contracts to manufacture anthrax and other biological weapons for the U.S. bio-defence program. So every terror alert is justification for the U.S. government to spend more cash on manufacturing biological and chemical weapons.

What's more, most people seem to have forgotten that the anthrax mail scares after Sept. 11 were not some foreign plot; they came from within the U.S. biological weapons program itself.

The long and short of it is, we should be more afraid of the Americans' own biological and chemical weapons program than anything Saddam Hussein may or may not be hiding. If he has chemical or biological weapons, he has only used them in his own neighbourhood.

And just when we are all starting to develop what Hemingway described as a built-in, shock-proof B.S. detector, up pops the old bogeyman, Osama bin Laden himself, to underline the terror alert.

His timing was impeccable. If I really believed in conspiracy theories, I'd think I'd died and gone to heaven this week. What worries me in all of this is not that there is or isn't a conspiracy. It's just the barefaced hypocrisy of it all.

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