THE CONSPIRASPHERE
NOEL ROONEY hears some recent rumblings on the 9/11-Saudi connection and finds that Glastonbury's 'spiritual activists' have been spooked by 5G
WOO WOO ABOUT WIFI
It’s strangely poignant that in the middle of one world-altering event we should be reminded of another. Earlier this month, an inadvertent slip of the black redacting pen, in a document presented by the FBI to the courts, named a mid-ranking Saudi official who, it appears, is implicated in the 9/11 attacks. The document was disclosed as part of a lawsuit by families of the victims (just one of dozens of suits still in progress relating to the attacks, 18 years on) alleging Saudi collusion in the terrorist operation.
Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, who worked at the Saudi embassy in Washington during 1999 and 2000, oversaw the activities of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs in the USA. He is implicated with two other officials, Fahad al-Thumairy and Omar alBayoumi, who are strongly suspected of supporting two of the 19 plane hijackers, providing them with money, bank accounts and an apartment. This is the first time that al-Jarrah has been named publicly and, if FBI bluster is anything to go by, it has set the cat among the pigeons in Quantico.
The extent of Saudi involvement in the attacks has been a deeply unsettling topic for US security agencies; it’s also a principal aspect of the conspiracy theories calling 9/11 an inside job, and a central element in many of the lawsuits still being pursued by families of victims. It will be interesting to see if the embarrassment caused to the FBI by the accidental disclosure gets as far as the Saudi government. In any case, it has certainly rejuvenated the 9/11 truth movement, which had been looking rather moribund of late. Curious that Donald Trump wasn’t galvanised into tweeting on the subject, given his regular campaign promises to look into 9/11.
But then he is currently busy tweeting about another, less well-known, conspiracy theory from 2001, involving the accidental death of a young intern working for then Congressman (and now MSNBC presenter and openly critical of the President)
Joe Scarborough. Trump’s hints that his ex-buddy Scarborough murdered the unfortunate Lori Klausutis have embarrassed the GOP, further antagonised the media, and brought the conspiracy trolls out of the aether to make life hell again for the Klausutis family. Who says the Donald can’t multi-task?
Meanwhile, in leafy Glastonbury, conspiracy theory is shaping up to achieve the status of official policy. Last month, the council published a report demanding the UK government investigate the potential risks of 5G technology, and threatening (impotently but amusingly) to oppose the rollout of 5G infrastructure in the area. Several members of the committee tasked with discussing the issue resigned before the report was published, claiming that the whole process had been hijacked by conspiracy theorists and ‘spiritual healers’, one of whom did manage to get his thoughts on the deliciously tenuous link between 5G and coronavirus into the report.
But Glastonbury’s spiritual activists only managed second place in the coronavirus conspiracy theory silly stakes, outpaced by the eagle-eyed pareidolia of an Australian conspiracist who noticed that the Aussie $10 note includes an image of coronavirus. Apparently this is proof that the pandemic is a hoax, as the note has been in circulation since 2017, and is brought to you by the same group who organised a fetchingly petite anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne recently. I was disappointed by how lazy this claim turned out to be. The $10 bill has a lot of interesting imagery which is ignored in favour of one passing resemblance, and there wasn’t even a bit of investigative origami (a staple of good banknote conspiracism) to spice the proceedings. The caption on the Facebook photo exposing the nefarious monetary premonition reads, predictably: “You can’t make this up!”
Oh yes you can!