The Null Device

Dispatch from Davos

A candid email from the World Economic Forum in Davos; interesting to note that the Illuminati are becoming even more anti-American than the dreadlocked anarchists who were kept well away from proceedings (partly out of concern about Bush's warmongering threatening their wealth and partly out of a personal dislike of the fundamentalist zealots running the Bush administration) fnord. And apparently al-Qaeda is all but a spent force. (via MeFi)

There are 26 comments on "Dispatch from Davos":

Posted by: mitch http:// Wed Feb 12 08:14:46 2003

I have been wondering whether anyone will try to reframe current investment in biodefense efforts as a springboard towards a new biotech economy, making a virtue out of necessity. What I mean by that: Regardless of what happens with USA vs Iraq, the bioterror genie is out of its bottle. Anyone can now head out to a paddock, dig up some anthrax spores, take them home and try to weaponize them. Civil biodefense programs are now a public health necessity, and might even dovetail with global efforts to control infectious disease in general.

While this is happening, the global economy, formerly bubbling along on a dotcom high, is now sunk in a depressive funk. The only immediate return on investment in counterterrorism is the non-economic one of continuing to live. But hey, creative destruction is what capitalism's all about, right? So it seems almost inevitable that there will be some new macroeconomic strategy which takes the workings of the antiterror society as a given, and tries to work *with* them.

Posted by: kstop Wed Feb 12 10:29:09 2003

Yeah, just like war stimulates economies. That one's working out well lately.

The only way economies improve is if people feel comfortable spending money. Fear of uncontrollable threats like nuclear war or bioterrorism makes people less likely to spend money. The odd gas mask or sensor here or there isn't going to make up for that.

Posted by: alex http://microsoft.com Wed Feb 12 11:46:11 2003

I still think they should give Saddam more time.

He's probably looking for the receipts.

The US Administration probably destroyed the evidence back in December when Iraq's 13000 page dossier suddenly became an 8000 page one...

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Wed Feb 12 12:15:22 2003

We could be looking at a spoils-of-war-led recovery, as the US under Bush shifts from selling movies/burgers/software to the world to harvesting the ungrateful bastards' natural resources and cheap labour, at gunpoint if need be. After all, America's God-given manifest destiny is the stewardship of the world.

Wonder if we'll see French people queueing up for the Chunnel to buy cheap petrol in Britain once the rewards are meted out.

Posted by: richard http://mechanicalcat.net/cgi-bin/log Thu Feb 13 01:31:48 2003

On a related note: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html

In short, the war is about the US dollar, oil and the Euro.

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 02:29:43 2003

That's right! No-one in Washington really fears getting anthraxed or nuked by terrorists! All those Geiger counters and biosensors are just an elaborate con, as is the new US national security doctrine!

"...why is there virtually no international support to topple Saddam?" Because everyone else is afraid of getting on his (and Al Qaeda's) enemies list.

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com Thu Feb 13 02:33:44 2003

Interesting spin.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Thu Feb 13 08:49:57 2003

Nice sleight of hand, Mitch. That argument follows only if you accept as an article of faith that Iraq is tied to al-Qaeda and anti-US terrorism. Given that the case for the linkage so far has been based on hearsay, argument-from-authority and outright fraud, and that credible analysts have said that Saddam is unlikely to use WMDs unless backed into a corner, I'd doubt that the real goal of invading Iraq has much to do with anything resembling self-defence.

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 13:16:05 2003

That wasn't "sleight of hand", that was an earnest expression of amazement that at this late date, anyone could really think that the material threat to North America plays no part in the focus on Iraq. But apparently you think that too.

The USA is Iraq's #1 enemy. The USA is Al Qaeda's #1 enemy. Iraq spent the whole of the 1990s enduring sanctions and playing hide-and-seek with UN weapons inspectors rather than abandon its WMD programs. Iraq has sponsored terrorism (PLO, Abu Nidal, Hamas). Iraq has a history of making surprise attacks (Iran, Kuwait) and of going to extremes (using chemical weapons, torching the oilwells). I can understand skepticism about all things covert, but those are all public facts.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Thu Feb 13 13:39:48 2003

There is no evidence that Iraq has sponsored terrorism against the US. The only attacks on US interests in recent times (not counting anarchists trashing McDonalds, &c.) have been al-Qaeda-linked (USS Cole, 9/11, &c.) Your statement implied that Iraq is a credible threat to the United States (and not just its oil interests and/or geopolitical stability either). I understand that you have a theory that Iraq is behind an anti-US terrorist campaign that even Bush and the CIA can't talk about, but the publically available facts don't bear this out without major leaps of faith.

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 13:45:00 2003

Just to add the latest epicycle to my own theories, I now tentatively favor the idea, not just that the post-9/11 anthrax came from Al Qaeda by way of Iraq, but that the USA had directly supplied Iraq with that anthrax, to use against Iran. (The USA is known to have shipped anthrax to Iraq in the 1980s, just not Ames-strain anthrax; and Iraq is known to have sought Ames from Porton Down in the UK in 1988. Supposedly they didn't get it; but maybe they did. In that same year, after all, the US Army College was trying to pretend that the Kurds at Halabja were gassed by the Iranians, not by Iraq.)

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Thu Feb 13 13:50:02 2003

Is it more economical than the lone-nutter theory?

When the Oklahoma federal building was bombed, all eyes were on Saddam Hussein until McVeigh and friends were caught. Could the anthrax thing not be one of America's many home-grown nutcases and extremists, perhaps unhinged further by the emotional impact of 9/11?

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 14:05:53 2003

Linking Iraq to WTC93 (and Al Qaeda to OKC95) is not exactly a leap of faith. It's more a matter of joining the dots - the relevant facts are on record, but they need to be considered in conjunction. But let's come to the present day. What do you make of Powell's statements to the Security Council, about the Al Qaeda commander Zarqawi operating out of Iraq? Or this week's report from the Philippines, that an Iraqi diplomat was taking phone calls from the Abu Sayyaf immediately after a bombing last October?

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Thu Feb 13 14:11:45 2003

I haven't looked in detail into the Zarqawi thing. Was he operating from Saddam-controlled Iraq, or the northern Kurdish area controlled by that Islamic revolutionary group (where most of the Iraqi-based terrorist training camps are)?

Was he the one who went to Iraq for surgery? Given that, we should bomb London forthwith, given all the Islamic militants Britain has been sheltering for years.

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 14:16:37 2003

There are too many links between the hijackers and the anthrax: location of the first case (Palm Beach County, where three out of four of the hijack teams had there penultimate base of operations), Moussaoui and Atta's interest in cropdusters (studied before the Gulf War by Iraq as a means of anthrax dispersal), Alhaznawi's skin lesion (after the attacks, identified by his doctor as consistent with cutaneous anthrax). I think anthrax might have been Plan A, but they called it off for some reason.

In the case of OKC95 - McVeigh's older collaborator, Terry Nichols, was visiting the Philippines (ostensibly on a sex tour) when Ramzi Yousef (WTC93 bomber) was there, cooking up 9/11's precursor, Operation Bojinka. There is even testimony from an Abu Sayyaf double agent of a meeting between Yousef and an American, at which they discussed high explosives. Forensically, the car-bombing technique used in Oklahoma City resembles the Middle Eastern style. There is even a report that the CIA's former head of counterte

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 14:18:43 2003

... counterterrorism was tipped off by a Saudi source that a terror attack in Middle America was in the works. (This is reported in the book by McVeigh's lawyer, *Others Unknown*.)

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Thu Feb 13 14:30:24 2003

Could the "Middle Eastern style" carbombing technique not be documented in some publically available (or surreptitiously circulated) literature, either on the Internet or by mail order from survivalist/extremist groups? It's not exactly high technology.

As for Nichols meeting with Abu Sayyaf, if that is true it still does not connect it to the Iraqi state. (Along similar lines, could Yasser Arafat be to blame for OKC, or perhaps the Algerian Islamists?)

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 14:31:37 2003

Zarqawi has reportedly been both in Baghdad (for medical treatment) and in the Kurdish enclave (overseeing chemical-weapons training). Putting what Powell said together with a few other stories, the big picture seems to be: Zarqawi is one of Al Qaeda's current operational commanders, he travels a lot, and he's been laying the groundwork for a new terror wave against American and Israeli targets in Europe, employing chemical agents (e.g. the ricin plot in London), and possibly biological and radiological weapons.

Incidentally, the Kurdish Islamists recently assassinated some of the pro-American leadership, after pretending to defect. Many people have been reminded of the way that Massoud in Afghanistan (leader of the anti-Taliban forces) was suicide-bombed by Al Qaeda agents pretending to be journalists, two days before 9/11.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Thu Feb 13 14:39:43 2003

Well, medical treatment doesn't constitute terrorist training; and in the current climate, one can't expect Saddam to eagerly hand him over to the US. As such, that still doesn't prove Iraqi government ties to al-Qaeda (any more than Britain's government had, at least).

I wonder whether when Iraq has been "liberated", Bush will next start campaining against Venezuelan terrorism.

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 14:54:03 2003

Apparently Oklahoma City contains several thousand Iraqi soldiers who were settled there by the US government, after defecting at the end of the Gulf War. The journalist Jayna Davis has tried to build a case against one of those guys, a former member of the Republican Guard who has a tattoo indicating he's part of Iraqi military intelligence Unit 999, who do all the really nasty stuff. She has a pile of affidavits from witnesses placing him in a bar with McVeigh, practising a getaway on the morning of the blast, and then actually fleeing. I'm agnostic about her work, you'd have to go through all those eyewitness reports in detail to judge their merit.

But a link between Nichols and Al Qaeda's Ramzi Yousef, by itself, takes us a step closer to an Iraqi link, because Yousef was at the center of WTC93, and the Iraqi connection there is very strong.

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 14:57:17 2003

Colonel Qadhafi did say recently, that to eradicate terrorism, you should bomb Riyadh and London. In *Forbidden Truth*, Brisard and Dasquie report that MI6 worked with a Libyan Al Qaeda affiliate to have Qadhafi assassinated.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Thu Feb 13 15:00:34 2003

What's your opinion of Qadhafi, btw? Harmless nutter, James Bond Villain, or somewhere in between?

Posted by: mitch http:// Thu Feb 13 15:13:55 2003

If there was a web personality test, "Which Dictator Are You?", Qadhafi would definitely correspond to the erratic creative type, with his Green Book, rocket car, amazon bodyguards, neologisms ("Isratine" - Israel+Palestine, "jamahiriya" - people+republic)... And he's not done yet - he's a major power in Africa now, thanks to oil money. There are Libyan troops all over the place. If he manages to get nukes, I think he'll say it's for Africa, which has always been central to his ideology ("the blacks will triumph").

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com Thu Feb 13 15:34:05 2003

Qadhafi'd be sort of cool if he wasn't so bloody dangerous. Interesting that Alan Jones, of all people, was borrowing his ideas of greening the desert during that Farmhand brouhaha last year.

Posted by: Ben http://leviathan.weblogs.com Fri Feb 14 01:58:46 2003

Gaddafi is a prime genius, and one of my personal heroes. He is also Al Qaeda's major opponent for the last 10 years.

Posted by: mitch http:// Sat Feb 15 08:11:10 2003

Do you think the CIA framed Libya over the Lockerbie bombing, so they could have Syria on board for Gulf War I?