Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (50 page)

This, then, was Farah’s Corsi. But what about Corsi’s Farah? It soon became clear to me that the agreeable Farah, with his outwardly professional organization, was something of a shark in guppy’s clothing. First there was his tendency toward exaggerated theses based on unreliable evidence. Take this exchange from an interview conducted in the summer of 2005 with Jamie Glazov for the Internet magazine FrontPage, titled “An American Hiroshima?” Farah is arguing that Al Qaeda not only has a nuclear weapon, but has already smuggled it into the United States.

FARAH:
Several reporters and top intelligence analysts, people including me . . . have been working quietly and independently for years on this issue of al-Qaida’s acquisition and plans for nuclear weapons . . . and, based on the evidence, I believe some of that arsenal has already been delivered to this country.

GLAZOV:
Could you expand a bit on the sources for this information? How do we know they are reliable?

FARAH:
About 90 percent of the information I have gathered on this plan is from publicly sourced documents available to you and anyone else who wants to spend the time looking for them. It’s only the analysis and interpretation that requires skilled—and sometimes unnamed—intelligence sources.

In other words, it’s all on the Internet, if you know where to look and you’re as clever as I am. But it begs the obvious question, which Glazov then asks.

GLAZOV:
Why wouldn’t the Bush administration secure our borders? What are the advantages of leaving them unsecured? Is it too politically incorrect to secure them?

FARAH:
No, I believe there is another more sinister reason. There is a master plan for global governance being plotted in meetings of groups like the Council on Foreign Relations. You can read its reports. And I believe this open-borders policy is a direct result of those plans, which have been secretly adopted by our highest leaders, including President Bush.
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To recapitulate: Farah argues that the Bush administration will not deal with an imminent threat of terrorist nuclear attack in the United States because of a secret scheme for global governance. And Joe Farah can be even madder than that. In a 2003 article for WND, he praises a woman, Clara Harris, who murdered her unfaithful orthodontist husband in front of his teenage daughter by running him over several times in her Mercedes. “If I were on that jury,” Farah concluded, “I would find Clara Harris not guilty. After she was sprung, I’d give her a medal. She did the world a favor. She may have acted emotionally. She may be sorry for what she has done. But, frankly, she did the right thing. That creep deserved what he got.”
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Perhaps more significant, though, was a story run by Farah in February 2008. Under the headline “Sleaze Charge: ‘I Took Drugs, Had Homo Sex with Obama,’ ” it detailed the claims of a Minnesota man, Larry Sinclair, who alleged that in 1999 he had met Obama “in an upscale Chicago lounge.” They supposedly got into Sinclair’s limousine, where Obama smoked crack cocaine and Sinclair snorted powdered cocaine given to him by the future president. It was also in the limousine, said Sinclair, that the sex took place. The photograph accompanying the story depicted a man of limited physical charms, suggesting either that the drugs were very powerful, or that Sinclair had gone into a decline in the intervening years.
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The real significance of the Sinclair story—consisting as it did of an utterly uncorroborated and unlikely series of accusations—was Farah’s readiness to run it, and to report it in such a way as to give it credibility. In this the report recalled a series of accusations leveled a decade and a half earlier at the last Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton, accusations in which a younger Joseph Farah had played a role.

I had heard Farah speak about this period on a far-right radio show, when he had mentioned in passing the toll that his part in the campaign against Clinton had taken on him. In our interview I asked him what he had meant. Back then, he told me, he was operating out of Sacramento, as head of an organization called the Western Journalism Center. The WJC had been active in publicizing a series of scandals purportedly involving Clinton, all of them far more serious than the Lewinsky affair. “The Clinton scandals got rolled up into the one—Lewinsky—that was least significant,” Farah maintained. “With the real issues, none were fully answered. Like Vince Foster [the Clinton aide who died of a gunshot wound in July 1993]—to conclude that he committed suicide, that takes faith!”

Having drawn attention to this and a number of other supposed Clinton crimes, Farah believed that he was targeted for harassment by authorities operating at the command of the White House. “Twice my offices were broken into in 1995 [and 1996]. Nothing was stolen. We were in a big complex, with various businesses and several suites, yet only our office was burglarized. Then the IRS came and announced an audit. I asked why. ‘It’s a political case, and it’s a national decision,’ I was told. It took nine months. We gave ’em a desk and in the end got a clean bill.” But the result was to make Farah feel threatened, and not just financially. “I went down [to Arkansas in the late nineties] to testify at the ‘boys on the tracks’ case [this case, described later, concerned two boys found dead on railway tracks] and”—he laughed—“I thought my life was at risk. I wrote about it beforehand, I wrote, ‘I’m going to Arkansas, and this might be my last article!’ ”

Going to Arkansas

Farah, the son of Christian Lebanese immigrants, started his political life in the center left. The way I heard him tell it, he was one of those who then swung to the right when Ronald Reagan was president—a “Reagan Democrat.” However, it is clear that Farah’s journey took him beyond the fiscal conservatism and sunny patriotism that characterized the former California governor to a position of intense hostility to those forces he saw as undermining the moral center of America. When he was editor of the
Sacramento Union
(now defunct, but then described as the “oldest newspaper in the West”; Mark Twain worked for the paper in the mid-1860s), Farah presided over an agenda that was avowedly antiabortion, antifeminist, anti-gay rights, and pro-faith. In 1991, after Farah’s stance failed to prevent a slide in circulation—despite his employment of a new front-page columnist, Rush Limbaugh—he left the paper.
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Farah’s next project, the Western Journalism Center—a hybrid of activist organization, news agency, and publisher, issuing a newsletter,
Dispatches
—was an almost perfect forerunner for the structures that would soon prosper on the nascent Internet. Among the board of advisors were such then mainstream conservative luminaries as Marvin Olasky and Arianna Huffington—whose capacity for political reincarnation has been kabbalistic. Money was raised from a number of right-wing sources, including James Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union and a coeditor of the
Strategic Investment
newsletter.

But not until after the defeat of George H. W. Bush by Bill Clinton in November 1992, and the miasma of rumors and alleged scandals that rose to surround the new administration, did the WJC begin to achieve significance. Farah’s organization funded research, journalism, and advertisements in mainstream newspapers championing work that appeared to accuse President Clinton of involvement not just in minor acts of corruption but in murder as well.

Farah joined a group of media lobbyists agitating for public acceptance that in Bill Clinton, the former governor of Arkansas, the nation had opted for one of the most morally flawed, if not criminal, politicians in the history of the republic. It was in Clinton’s Arkansas past, this group believed, that the evidence of the president’s unique character defects was to be found—an assertion given wider credibility by the tortuous, complex, and sapping process of the public inquiry into the so-called Whitewater Affair, the supposed cash-and-land scandal whose origins dated back to the late 1970s. It was the investigation of the Whitewater Affair that led, bizarrely, to the celebrated Starr Report on President Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky nearly twenty years later. In journalistic terms Whitewater was conjured into life on the pages of the
New York Times
, but once there it mutated into an extraordinary series of books, website postings, radio shows, and videos, most of them containing one or more conspiracy theories concerning the Clintons and Arkansas. What eventually took Farah to the southern state was a libel action at the tail end of one of these theories.

The Apotheosis of Conspiracism

Anyone seeking to relive the strangeness of the Clinton-era controversies should begin with a book written by a Cambridge- and Sorbonneeducated Englishman.
The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories
, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, was published in 1997, at the end of Evans-Pritchard’s stint as Washington bureau chief for the venerable and respected British broadsheet the
Sunday Telegraph
. Despite the subtitle, most of the stories in the book had already been reported (if that’s the right word), by Evans-Pritchard himself and by others, including Joe Farah, over the previous three or four years. But
The Secret Life
stands out as an almost perfect encapsulation of the most extreme of the theories about the man from Hope, its four-hundred-plus pages documenting a complex series of accusations that together suggested that in November 1992 the American people had placed in the White House a family more devious and more versatile than even the Borgias.

In essence, Evans-Pritchard, who had reported for
The Economist
from Central America, and was later to report from Brussels, had gone to Arkansas in pursuit of a series of rumors about Bill Clinton’s past as governor, and discovered there—or so he thought—not just that they were all true, but that there were other, worse things so far only partly disclosed. “Arkansas,” he told readers, “was a mini-Colombia within the United States, infested by narco-corruption.”
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With Bill in power, this sickness had infiltrated national government, so that “malfeasance [had] become systemic over the last five years.”
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The consequence had been a sundering of the ties of respect that held together citizen and state. It was Clinton, rather than the McVeighs and the Idaho militias, who was responsible for the nineties phenomenon of armed far-right groups wandering the American hinterland preparing for the final battle. “It is under Clinton that an armed militia movement involving tens of thousands of people has mushroomed out of the plain, an expression of dissent that is unparalleled since the Southern gun clubs before the Civil War.” “The actions and the character of the president,” proclaimed Evans-Pritchard, “have engendered the most deadly terrorist movement in the industrialized world.” This was an interesting judgment, coming as it did toward the end of the thirty-year-long “troubles” in Northern Ireland—familiar to most British journalists—in which some 3,500 people had died. “To a foreign eye,” Evans-Pritchard continued, in one of those unfortunate prophecies that are almost always destined to be betrayed by time, “America looks like a country that is flying out of control.”
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The book represented an overwrought final testimony to Clintonian corruption, bequeathed by the departing Englishman to those he was leaving behind. “To put it with brutal honesty,” he told them, “you can sniff the pungent odors of decay in the American body politic.”
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An acquaintanceship with Evans-Pritchard’s writings would convince most people that he was sincere, that he believed in what he wrote. Even so, from the beginning of
The Secret Life
there is a willingness to bend the truth to meet the thesis. This is evident when the famous public Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus is quoted as commenting on Clinton’s mores: “Has it reached the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime?”
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What the ungiven context makes clear is that Neuhaus is attacking not Clinton’s personal qualities or villainies, but his and his fellow liberals’ political beliefs and in particular their support for abortion rights. Such an analysis was, and is, a very different matter.

And just as the rather slippery praying-in-aid of the clergyman suggested an agenda, so too did Evans-Pritchard’s attitude toward research. For several years before writing
The Secret Lif
e, he had been part of a loose group of like-minded writers and researchers who had grown ever more convinced of Clinton’s master-criminality. One of those who met Evans-Pritchard at the time was David Brock, the conservative writer who later recanted his role in pursuing the Clintons. Brock’s later confessions must, of course, be seen in the light of his admission to earlier journalistic wrongdoings, yet they seem plausible when it comes to the
Sunday Telegraph
man.

“Of all the ‘Clinton crazies’ I would meet—the term was one that Ambrose [Evans-Pritchard] and many others openly embraced—Ambrose was the least cynical of the bunch, and perhaps the craziest. He seemed to truly credit the seamy gossip that I now knew anyone could hear if they poked around Arkansas for a few days. Ambrose had no capacity to judge the credibility of sources; to him, the word of a drug-addled ex-con was as good as anybody else’s, or perhaps better.”
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