Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
Further Food for Paranoid Thought

I have failed to keep up very well with the thriving cottage industries created by the many conspiracy theorists who now populate the farther reaches of the Internet (not to mention the remoter shelves at Barnes & Noble).

Oh sure, I’ve looked at the occasional website, even picked up the occasional book. Mostly I’ve relied on friends who do keep up—religiously—with the many explanations of what really happened on 9/11 etc.

It’s possible that the idea I’m going to suggest is already out there in the great Internet jungle, cultivated and embroidered on daily. For all I know, such an idea may have informed the plot of a best-selling novel or even a $200-million Hollywood blockbuster that my limited cultural radar has missed.

So stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Though negligent toward the conspiracists I have paid a lot of attention to our current pack of leaders, you know the ones: the American gang that can neither think—nor shoot—straight. That attention has resulted in some pretty good satire in the pages of Magellan’s Log, and also some pretty good serious analysis of their bizarre (mis)behavior.

Through it all I always had the feeling that I was missing something. Something big. (I know. That’s a dangerous feeling, similar no doubt to what drives the conspiracists.)

But as the paranoid conspiracy guys have taught us, what good is thinking if you can’t try really hard to think the unthinkable.

Here goes.

Among many oddities in the Bush-Cheney behavior, perhaps the strangest is their words and actions regarding Osama bin Laden himself. More accurately: their words and INactions.

It’s the inactions that I want to dwell on here.

Why, given their resources, haven’t they captured him?

Trying to think the unthinkable, I come up with three possible reasons:

1.
Because of the remote, rugged terrain and the intensely tribal nature of the people along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, they just haven’t been able to find him. Unlikely, but possible.

2.
They found him long ago but decided—secretly, of course—it would be smarter to let him live so we could track members of his network as they communicated with him. Not quite as unlikely, and certainly possible.

Which brings us to the clincher. As I say, stop me if you’ve heard this one.

3.
They found him BUT…

Before I explain that big "but" let’s back up for a moment and return to those dear, dead days before 9/11 when America was still an open (sort of), trusting (sort of) society. In other words, the days before the advent of the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, etc.

We were once open and trusting enough that whole groups of ill-intentioned young immigrants could live here and lay foolish (remember the ill-considered truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in 1992?) or not so foolish plans.

We know that one of their not so foolish plans worked like a charm on 9/11.

But what other not so foolish plans might they have also made and laid in those open, trusting, pre-DHS days?

Suppose, just suppose, that in the years right after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the steppes of Central Asia were more or less wide open, some disaffected Russian militarists or nuclear scientists managed to get hold of a few, um, mega-ton devices (some call them "bombs") and offered them for sale to interested, similarly disaffected parties in the region.

Suppose one very well-heeled Saudi prince handed over some big bucks for a few of the devices.

Further suppose that, while plans and training were underway for the team that on 9/11 would turn commercial jets into missiles, other plans and training were underway to implant said devices in certain strategic locations for, um, future use.

Remember, in the days before DHS made us all safe and secure, it would’ve been surprisingly easy to smuggle such devices into the country, implant them, and supply them with remote-controlled detonators.

Suppose this in fact happened (pre-DHS, of course).

Now we get to the part that we know happened: namely, 9/11, and then Bush-Cheney rush off to make first Afghanistan and then Iraq safe for the world.

Early days in that massive misadventure, remember, there was much Washington talk and braggery about catching bin Laden--Bush going on and on about capturing bin Laden dead or alive.

But it didn’t happen. The capture seemed imminent and then it didn’t happen.

Why not? See Possible Reasons 1 and 2 above.

Or consider Reason 3:
It didn’t happen because, we got close. thought we had him, and then our Prince of the Caves revealed to Bush-Cheney the existence of the implanted devices.

Naturally, they would have wanted proof.

So he gave them the location of one device and let them get to it and confirm it was a working nuclear bomb neatly concealed somewhere in America..

Well.

That really would’ve torn it, wouldn’t it? Here were Bush and Cheney riding the coattails of Donald "Shock and Awe" Rumsfeld to a great military victory, and suddenly they were stopped in their tracks.

Because bin Laden’s message would’ve been: Touch me and the bombs go off.

And of course he would’ve known the opposite was true: If he detonated even one of the bombs, a good part of the vast American nuclear arsenal would in turn be unleashed to erase a big chunk of central Asia—including bin Laden himself.

Result: We were back in the good old days of the Cold War and MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction—when the Russians didn’t dare attack us and we didn’t dare attack them.

Except this time, nobody talked about it. Nobody could talk about it.

Not checkmate, but stalemate.

Top-secret stalemate.

Which is exactly where a trillion dollars, 4,000 American lives, and uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives may have gotten us to (if your mind is of a conspiracist bent).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, you can imagine the resources that would have been poured into locating the devices (Washington? New York? San Francisco? Houston?). They may have even found them, but what good does that do?

It’s easy to further imagine the big bucks that have been spent generating endless scenarios, trying to find a way out of this real quagmire, which turns out to be a lot bigger, deeper, and more dangerous than the one we thought we were in.

Paranoids of the world! Enjoy your meal!