For You Conspiracy-Mongers

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Updated August 23:

I don't really believe that this is what happened, but Professor Francis A. Boyle, whom I am acquainted with, tosses out some conspiracy theory here regarding the Anthrax attacks and 9-11. First of all, he claims that the Patriot Act was already written and sitting on John Ashcroft's desk on September 10, the day before the anthrax attacks. That's pretty weird right there.

Boyle is convinced that elements of the US government - he lists Bush, Rice, George Tenet and John Ashcroft - either participated in the 9-11 attacks or at the very least allowed them to go forward. He says that before the attacks occurred, the US military had forces positioned all around Afghanistan and Iraq (the decision of which one to attack would be made by the Administration).

He also lays out a conspiracy theory about the anthrax attacks, claiming that an FBI agent, Spike Bowman, may have been responsible for the destruction of the Ames cultural Anthrax Database in Ames, Iowa, which caused the destruction of evidence necessary to figure out which strain the anthrax came from. Since the FBI seems to know which strain it came from anyway, Boyle's claim seems odd.

This same Bowman later was supposedly responsible for thwarting a FISA warrant for searching Zacarious Moussaoui's computer, which had information on it that possibly could have helped stop the 9-11 attacks. After these two strange and seemingly evidence-tampering actions, Agent Bowman was given a promotion.

Leahy and Daschle were reportedly targeted due to their opposition to the Patriot Act - they were holding up the passage of the Act, then they got hit by Anthrax, Capital Hill was shut down, and all opposition to the bill vanished in the wave of hysteria that followed. Indeed, the FBI is now claiming that Bruce Ivins, the man they are fingering as the author of the attacks, mailed the letters to the two Democrats in order to shove the Patriot Act through.

Boyle points out correctly that under the Patriot Act, the government can call you a terrorist, throw you into Guantanamo, and never let you out.

There are problems with Boyle's theory. If the government itself did the attacks, how did they manage to keep the FBI away from the state authors of the attack?

He also notes that there seems to be an effort (exemplified by John Yu of Stanford Law) underway to seed neoconservative sympathizers of an authoritarian state into the nation's law schools to subvert long-established US law.

The Nazis did something similar in Germany, led by attorney Carl Schmidt, who was the mentor to and hero of Leo Strauss, icon of the neoconservatives. Incidentally, Strauss, a German Jew, supported the Nazi Party, but opposed their anti-Semitism. He wanted to strip the anti-Semitism from the Nazis, but he did support fascism in general. So the icon of the neoconservatives was long a covert supporter of fascism.

It was only after the Nazis turned on the Jews bigtime in 1933 that Strauss turned on the party and left Germany for America. There were many other German Jews like Strauss, who supported Nazi fascism but were uncomfortable with the anti-Semitism, and who only turned their backs on the party when the party went after the Jews in 1933.

Israeli scholar of fascism Zeev Sternhill notes that Italian Jews were some of the most prominent supporters of both Mussolini's fascist party and the Italian Communist Party, for what it's worth.

Boyle notes at the end that an FBI agent interrogated him in 2004 and tried to get him to spy for them on his Arab and Muslim clients who he was representing as an attorney. Boyle refused and was then placed on a no-fly list, and has since found it very hard to leave the country.

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