Conspiracy World: Welcome to M. Mouse Productions

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

28 January 15

ow did you respond when our crazy Libertarian uncle Ron Paul ran the article by Paul Craig Roberts alleging that a highly professional intelligence service had orchestrated the murderous attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo? Did you laugh out loud? Or did you cry, fearing that “the truthers” were taking over the world as we know it?

Don’t get me wrong. I love unravelling conspiracies, covert action operations, and CIA destabilization campaigns. Over the years, I’ve made a good part of my living exposing them on television, in print, and now online, most pointedly with “Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev” (Part I and Part II). But, doing the hard work to dig up the dirt and document who did what and to whom is a far cry from easily poking holes in official or mainstream media accounts and using that to assert “the truth.” Holes, loose ends, suspicious coincidences, and outright lies need to be contested. But they rarely reveal what really happened, no matter how many times would-be investigators repeat the phrase “false flag” or ask “cui bono,” to whose benefit?

“The Charlie Hebdo affair has many of the characteristics of a false flag operation,” Roberts wrote. “The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a disciplined professional attack of the kind associated with highly trained special forces; yet the suspects who were later corralled and killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like two different sets of people.”

Watching the over-heated accounts on television and the strange street videos of the killers shouting Allahu Akhbar, many people around the world probably shared the same impression, at least at first. But nothing in all of this gives Roberts license to engage in rank speculation, ideological conjecture, and what he calls “plausible inference” to conclude that real jihadists would never have staged such an attack, or that the CIA and its NATO and Mossad allies ran the operation because the French government was showing too much independence.

Roberts may be guessing right. He may be guessing wrong. But he is only guessing, and badly at that, ignoring evidence that suggests he got the story dead wrong. If, as he claims, the bumbling and unprofessional Kouachi brothers were simply “convenient patsies” for the real masked commandos, why did Chérif Kouachi take credit for the killings when the French television reporter Igor Sahiri called him at the print works where the brothers had holed up? This was on the morning before they committed “martyrdom by gendarme.”

“I just want to tell you that we are defenders of the Prophet,” he told the journalist. “I, Chérif Kouachi, was sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen. I was over there. I was financed by Imam Anwar al-Awlaki.” The Americans had killed the US-born Awlaki in September 2011 in a drone attack in Yemen. Why, if the Kouachi brothers were only “patsies,” did al-Qaeda in Yemen take credit for the killings? And why did Chérif’s friend Amedy Coulibaly, who called the same TV station to say that he was working for the Islamic State, support the brothers by taking hostages at the kosher supermarket?

Anyone can suck his thumb. But until Roberts looks at all the evidence and puts together a solid case for his half-baked theories, why take him or his claims seriously? Why join him in a Conspiracy World that is so patently Mickey Mouse? Is it because he plays to old wounds, rehashing long-simmering arguments about 9/11 and earlier CIA operations in Europe, such as Operation Gladio? However instructive these may or may not prove to be, they can add nothing tangible in the absence of specific evidence about the Charlie Hebdo killings.

None of this would matter if Roberts were a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Unfortunately, he is not. As a former Voodoo economist in the Reagan administration, he has become a widely quoted figure in a growing cottage industry that peddles unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, some from groups with their own political agenda.

“Who ordered the attack against Charlie Hebdo?” headlined Thierry Meyssan, founder and president of the Voltaire Network in France. It was ordered by the United States, he argues, and specifically “by the neo-conservatives and liberal hawks,” as part of their “clash of civilizations.” What, then, of the claims made by Chérif Kouachi or al-Qaeda in Yemen? Like Roberts, Meyssan simply ignores them, assuring us that “the mission of this commando had no connection with jihadist ideology.”

Facts have never been Meyssan’s strong suit. Author of the international best-seller L’Effoyable Imposture – in English, The Big Lie – he not only questioned official accounts of the 9/11 attacks, which many of us continue to do. But he also blamed the destruction of the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon on Washington insiders, military industrialists, and Mossad, while claiming that Osama bin Laden was a CIA fabrication who never stopped working for Washington. All this without the hard evidence to make his case. He also cozies up to Holocaust deniers and overt anti-Semites, making himself wildly popular in the Muslim world. And, in the present case, he has become an apologist for very real jihadis committing very nasty crimes.

In its first post-attack issue, Charlie Hebdo called Meyssan and his ilk “Scavengers of Conspiracy Theory.” Scavenger in French is charognard, or carrion-eater, which is also slang for bastard. The survivors of the Kouachi brothers take their murderous attack to heart, and have little patience with bastards like Meyssan covering up for the killers. Nor should the rest of us. If those who believe they know “the truth” can substantiate their conspiracy theories, more power to them. If all they can do is throw around allegations with little or no evidence, they should quit distracting well-meaning people from dealing with the real world. In other words, Messieurs Roberts and Meyssan, put up or shut up.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.