The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (8 page)

2) The SEAL raid was a fake op, bin Laden wasn’t there, and is alive and well and living in the Af-Pak borderland with his VCR and hookah pipe. The Bush administration never had any real intention of huntin’ the al-Qaeda leader down, because the Bush and bin Laden clans were friends, and commercial allies.

The special relationship between the Bushes and the bin Ladens
is
a matter of record; George H. W. Bush was actually meeting with bin Laden’s brother on the morning of 9/11.

In this murky conspiracy scenario, George Bush Jnr and Osama bin Laden are engaged in a pleasant series of quid pro quos: Bush leaves bin Laden untroubled in his cave, and the hirsute terrorist releases an inflammatory video statement days before the October 2004 US presidential election, which proves to be crucial in helping George secure a second term in office. Helping the conspiracy along is a Facebook campaign, “Osama bin Laden Is NOT DEAD”.

A minor riff in the bin Laden death conspiracy is that he tried to surrender but was killed anyway. The meat of this theory is that the US Government wanted to avoid a lengthy show trial so always intended the raid to be an assassination mission. One anonymous White House official did unhelpfully (from the PR point of view) let slip it was a “kill operation”. If so, it would explain the White House’s reluctance to release snaps of the al-Qaeda’s cadaver, since these presumably show the classic assassination technique of a bullet through the brains.

Further Reading

Brandon Franklin Hurst,
Osama Bin Laden: The Final Days,
2011

Howard Wasdin,
Seal Team Six
, 2011

BLACK DEATH

The Black Death was an outbreak of plague caused (possibly) by the bacterium
Yersinia pestis
which swept through Europe between 1348 and 1351, perhaps reducing the population of the continent by a third, from 54 million to 37 million. The chronicler Henry Knighton described the onset and aftermath of the disease in England:

The dreadful pestilence penetrated the sea coast by Southampton and came to Bristol, and there almost the whole population of the town perished, as if it had been seized by sudden death; for few kept their beds more than two or three days, or even half a day. Then this cruel death spread everywhere around, following the course of the sun … After the aforesaid pestilence, many buildings, great and small, fell into ruins in every city, borough, and village for lack of inhabitants, likewise many villages and hamlets became desolate, not a house being left in them, all having died who dwelt there, and it was probable that many such villages would never be inhabited.

As Knighton noted, ports were the point of the entry for the disease, because the responsible bacterium was carried by fleas of the black rat, of which medieval ships carried scores. While some contemporaries saw the Black Death as an act of God, a punishment for sins, others saw the pandemic as the handiwork of humans – in other words, the Black Death was an early exercise in germ warfare. The Indian princedoms were much suspected, because they had become discontented with the trade rules imposed by the European countries. Consequently the Indian princelings – or at least their hirelings – placed germ-laden rats on Europe-bound ships. When the Black Death had KOd the population of the white-skinned enemy, the Indian Army would march in and take over.

Biowarfare was not unknown in the fourteenth century; there are accounts of the Mongols catapulting disease-ridden corpses into the Genoese-held city of Kaffa, and it is true that the Black Death spread from the East. Furthermore, the pestilence may not have been bubonic plague. Medieval accounts of Black Death symptoms do not match precisely with the symptoms of
Yersinia pestis
-caused plague: the Black Death spread with extreme rapidity, whereas identified modern outbreaks of bubonic plague have been slow to expand; incidence of the Black Death peaked in summer, whereas a rat-borne disease should most likely peak in winter when people are indoors. All this said, there is no historical or forensic evidence to implicate the maharajahs. Besides, it was hardly smart business to practise genocide on your customers.

History’s scapegoats, the Jews, were also alleged by contemporaries to possibly be the agents behind the Black Death. A Jew, Agimet of Geneva, did confess to having poisoned wells across southern Europe on the instructions of Rabbi Peyret of Chambery (see Document, p.50), who was himself under the control of elders in the enclave of Toledo.

Agimet’s “confession”, extracted under torture, was enough to start a spate of pogroms; in Strasbourg alone 2,000 Jews were pre-emptively slaughtered to stop them poisoning the city’s wells. Records of similar “confessions” were sent from town to town in Switzerland and Germany, with the result that thousands of Jews in at least two hundred settlements were killed and burned in a precursor of Hitler’s holocaust.

There was no international Jewish conspiracy to wipe out Christendom behind the Black Death: It is hardly credible that the Jews of Strasbourg would poison the well they themselves used. Still, the rumour of Jewish involvement made a handy excuse for not paying loans to them. As the chronicler Frederick Closener observed about the burning of the Jews in Strasbourg:

everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled, and the Jews had to surrender all pledges and notes that they had taken for debts. The council, however, took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided it among the working-men proportionately. The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews. If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt.

Strasbourg, incidentally, did not escape the clutches of the plague, which killed sixteen thousand inhabitants.

An
Ebola
-like haemorrhagic virus is considered by some modern disease experts to be the most plausible cause of the Black Death. If so, it would have been even more uncontrollable as a germ warfare “weapon” in the fourteenth century than
Yersinia pestis.

Further Reading

John Kelly,
The Great Mortality
, 2005

Philip Ziegler,
The Black Death
, 1969

DOCUMENT: THE CONFESSION OF AGIMET OF GENEVA, CHÂTEL, 20 OCTOBER 1348

The year of our Lord 1348.

On Friday, the 10th of the month of October, at Châtel, in the castle thereof, there occurred the judicial inquiry which was made by order of the court of the illustrious Prince, our lord, Amadeus, Count of Savoy, and his subjects against the Jews of both sexes who were there imprisoned, each one separately. This was done after public rumour had become current and a strong clamour had arisen because of the poison put by them into the wells, springs, and other things which the Christians use – demanding that they die, that they are able to be found guilty and, therefore, that they should be punished. Hence this their confession made in the presence of a great many trustworthy persons.

Agimet the Jew, who lived at Geneva and was arrested at Châtel, was there put to the torture a little and then he was released from it. And after a long time, having been subjected again to torture a little, he confessed in the presence of a great many trustworthy persons, who are later mentioned. To begin with it is clear that at the Lent just passed Pultus Clesis de Ranz had sent this very Jew to Venice to buy silks and other things for him. When this came to the notice of Rabbi Peyret, a Jew of Chambery who was a teacher of their law, he sent for this Agimet, for whom he had searched, and when he had come before him he said: “We have been informed that you are going to Venice to buy silk and other wares. Here I am giving you a little package of half a span in size which contains some prepared poison and venom in a thin, sewed leather-bag. Distribute it among the wells, cisterns, and springs about Venice and the other places to which you go, in order to poison the people who use the water of the aforesaid wells that will have been poisoned by you, namely, the wells in which the poison will have been placed.”

Agimet took this package full of poison and carried it with him to Venice, and when he came there he threw and scattered a portion of it into the well or cistern of fresh water which was there near the German House, in order to poison the people who use the water of that cistern. And he says that this is the only cistern of sweet water in the city. He also says that the mentioned Rabbi Peyret promised to give him whatever he wanted for his troubles in this business. Of his own accord Agimet confessed further that after this had been done he left at once in order that he should not be captured by the citizens or others, and that he went personally to Calabria and Apulia and threw the above mentioned poison into many wells. He confesses also that he put some of this same poison in the well of the streets of the city of Ballet.

He confesses further that he put some of this poison into the public fountain of the city of Toulouse and in the wells that are near the [Mediterranean] sea. Asked if at the time that he scattered the venom and poisoned the wells, above mentioned, any people had died, he said that he did not know inasmuch as he had left everyone of the above mentioned places in a hurry. Asked if any of the Jews of those places were guilty in the above mentioned matter, he answered that he did not know. And now by all that which is contained in the five books of Moses and the scroll of the Jews, he declared that this was true, and that he was in no wise lying, no matter what might happen to him.

CAGOULE

“La Cagoule” was the press nickname for
Organisation Secrete de l’Action Revolutionnaire Nationale
(Secret Organization of National Revolutionary Action), a French fascist organization active in the thirties. Under its leader Eugene Deloncle, La Cagoule sought to overthrow the Third Republic with a campaign of assassination and terror. Some Cagoulards borrowed the Ku Klux Klan habit of wearing a “cagoule” or hood to conceal their identity, though the leadership were well known in French society, and included Eugène Schueller, founder of the French cosmetics company L’Oréal, whose HQ proved handy for Cagoule meetings. (The firm’s connection with French fascism did not end with Schueller; Cagoulards Jacques Correze and Jean Filliol, among others, enjoyed prestigious posts as L’Oréal executives post-war.) From its foundation in 1935, Cagoule recruited heavily from other French far-right groups, and its membership, which topped 150,000, was organized into a military structure of armed cells, with guns and explosives being shipped in from the fascist regimes of Spain and Italy, or stolen by Cagoulards in the French military. Politically, La Cagoule shared common ground with the
Synarchy
movement. In September 1937, La Cagoule blew up industrial employers’ buildings in Paris with the intention of pinning the blame on the Communists, and two months later prepared for the overthrow of the Third Republic, intending to place Marshal Petain as chief of state. When Petain refused to participate in the plot, they chose instead Louis Franchet d’Esperay. By now, however, La Cagoule had been heavily infiltrated by the police, and the Interior Ministry ordered the arrest of seventy leading Cagoulards, among them Deloncle. A search of La Cagoule’s arms dumps revealed 2 tons of explosives, 500 machine guns and several anti-tank guns. Stripped of leadership and arms, La Cagoule fell apart, though numerous Cagoulards later collaborated with the Nazi regime in Occupied France and its puppet state in Vichy. A minority of Cagoulards took the opposite path and joined the Resistance or De Gaulle’s Free French Army.