Category: General

The @B3nRaching3r Allegations – Part Five

If you have paid any attention to Twitter or the Herald in the last few days, you will be aware that the people behind the blog Lauda Finem decided to release a series of intimate images that were sent to Ben Rachinger by a prominent journalist. I won’t link to the post in question, and I’ll trust readers to realise that giving page views to Lauda Finem is simply a bad idea. I will also talk about the incident without mentioning the journalist’s name, because they are the victim in this piece, no matter what you think of the various conspiracy theories on offer.

So, let us get the big issue out of the way. The photos are of the journalist in question, and they were sent to Rachinger over the a prolonged period of time. It is fair to say that Rachinger and the journalist were engaged in some kind of relationship. At some point these images – which had been sent to Rachinger – were fed to a third party, and that third party provided them to someone at the Lauda Finem blog. Lauda Finem then published the pictures, in part to try and recentre the Rachinger story on their particular claim that the real purpose of Rachinger’s online activity was to entrap the people behind Lauda Finem. They also published the images, it seems, to punish said journalist for connecting Lauda Finem with Cameron Slater and the Whaleoil social media empire. ((Which seems less imperial now due to Slater’s “Decade of Dirt” party absolutely fizzling.))

So, the big question is who gave the pictures to who?

The Lauda Finem story

The person behind the Lauda Finem post suggests they got the photos from someone in the Press Gallery. Rachinger allegedly sent to the images to the entire Press Gallery because he was blackmailing the journalist in question, in order to destroy their career. The journalist, however, asked their friends in the Press Gallery to ignore Rachinger, and so the story went nowhere. That was, at least, until Lauda Finem “went to press”. They published the images to show Rachinger was untrustworthy, and that his story about a solo investigation into Cameron Slater’s activities should not be taken seriously.

It is also clear that the people behind Lauda Finem also wanted to get revenge on the journalist for daring to associate them with Slater. In the post in question they claim they reached out to all and sundry about these images before going to print, so there’s a real question as to why they think thought it was wise to publish this material. Yes, they want to take Rachinger down, but if this is the only ammunition they have – the only way they can prove he’s untrustworthy – it’s an off (to put it really lightly) strategem. Why make a victim out of the journalist in order to attack Rachinger when it makes both Rachinger and Lauda Finem look guilty of leaking private information. Whatever moral high ground the people at Lauda Finem think they might have goes right out the window when they engage in the spreading of the same information they say makes Rachinger look untrustworthy. Oh, they try to make out that Rachinger, the journalist, et al. are all attached somehow to Lauda Finem’s pet enemy, Matthew Blomfield, but most of the actual talk is about leftish and corrupt journalists who need taking down a peg.

Which is to say, the one of the stated reasons the people behind Lauda Finem end up using to defend their release of the images seems to come straight out of Slater’s playbook. Corrupt journos, they say, need to be exposed, by any means necessary. This, for them, inadvertantly supports the idea that Lauda Finem is a satellite blog of the Whaleoil media empire. If the people behind Lauda Finem really aren’t vassals of Cameron Slater, they sure are acting like they are.

The Lauda Finem-sponsored conspiracy theory is itself a weird beast. They have tried hard to sidestep the Slater connection, and make their personal feud with Rachinger all about Matthew Blomfield. The case for a conspiracy by Blomfield against Lauda Finem has not really been set out to any adequate evidential standard; it’s mostly bluster about how he’s very well connected and that he has the Press and Police in the palms of his hand. The fact this conspiracy keeps getting bigger and bigger, involving more and more of the Press indicates either a huge conspiracy on the part of one failed business person, Blomfield, or the people behind Lauda Finem are suffering from acute conspiracist ideation about Blomfield (which is to say they believe in the existence of a conspiracy for no good reason), or this is all part of a disinformation campaign by the Slater media empire – with Lauda Finem as its spokesblog – to distract from the guts of the Rachinger allegations.

Now, it seems unlikely that there is a all-embracing conspiracy concerning the machinations of one Matthew Blomfield, so the most likely hypothesis to explain Lauda Finem’s vendetta against Rachinger and the recent leak of images is either acute conspiracism, or a disinformation campaign. The more Lauda Finem write on the topic, the more they make their particular conspiracy theory look less and less plausible, and the more they make it look as if they might well be doing the work of others.

The Ben Rachinger story

Rachinger claims that he did not have a relationship with the journalist in question, that he did not send those images to a third party and he has not tried to blackmail the journalist. As such, he claims he cannot be held in any way responsible for the leak of the images.

The first claim – that he was not in a relationship with the journalist – is what we might term a “Bill Clinton defence” given that President Clinton was famous, among many things, for claiming that he had never smoked weed because he never inhaled and he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky because they never had penis-to-vulva intercourse. Rachinger seems to be claiming, in effect, that because he and the journalist were never officially “going steady”, that they were not in a relationship and thus – so it seems – the photos cannot originate from him.

denial1

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This is, to quote the “kids”, “weaksauce”. Whilst maybe we can quibble about the precise nature of the relationship, it did happen. ((As part of my continued failure to screencap tweets at the beginning of the year, I cannot offer you as proof the tweets Rachinger was posting publicly on Twitter back in January as evidence that they certainly were involved in some way at that time.)) Denying that actually puts the boot into the victim of this piece, the journalist, once again. Either we have to now imagine the images were unsolicited (which still raises the question of how they got out of Rachinger’s posession) or Rachinger is throwing someone he was in a relationship under the bus (so to speak) in order to make himself look innocent of passing sensitive information to others.

The claim he did not send the pictures to a third party (which he intimates would have to be Cameron Slater – more on that in a moment) does not seem plausible. For one thing, Rachinger has published online private information sent to him, presumably in confidence, before which was irrelevant to the case he was pressing against Cameron Slater. As such, he has prior history of passing on correspondence when it suits his agenda to show how connected he is. ((Rachinger’s argument at the time as to why this sharing of information was not obviously immoral was that as the information was shared with him rather than him getting it via some hack. However, as many argued at the time, if someone shares information with you, you have to be able to argue that either they have no issue with your then passing that information on to a third party, or there is some moral imperative as to why you breach their privacy. At the time, Rachinger’s release of private correspondence was slapdash and seemed, in some cases, simply designed to prove he was connected, rather than because the release of that correspondence was necessary to uncover some crime or immoral act.))

For another thing, how did someone else get the images that were sent to Rachinger by the journalist? The images themselves support the hypothesis that they were sent by Rachinger to some third party. Here are two interesting details “hidden” in the images:

rachinger

“Aww bro she’s like 45. I’m 26” – which is the respective ages of the journalist and Rachinger, and suggests that the message genuinely does come from him.

Rachinger 2

This one is much harder to decipher, although “I’m a … get some … voices paid I can help”, which suggests some line about paying invoices. Notably, this is a message from the third party, and this detail fits in with the story of Rachinger doing paid work for Slater. As such, the leaked images support the theory these images came from Rachinger.

The images in questions are not screencaps but rather photos of a device showing the messages. Rachinger himself identifies the phone as the kind Slater uses in this tweet:

blackphone

So, it’s plausible to think that Rachinger sent the images to a third party, likely Slater, given that he received them in the first place the images provide circumstantial evidence sent the images on to a third party. So, why is Rachinger is denying being the sender. Why? Well, two reasons. One is that he feels there isn’t sufficient evidence to show he can be the originator:

denial3

And because the Lauda Finem story, which denies any role in this matter to Slater, makes out that the images came from someone attached to Rachinger’s alleged blackmailing of the journalist to the Press Gallery. If he can deny that link – he claims to be no blackmailer, after all – then how could the images have originated from him in the first place?

Some have argued that Rachinger could not have sent those images to Slater because by December 18th (the date the images were sent) the working relationship between Rachinger and Slater had soured. Yet according to Rachinger’s own leaks he was asking and receiving money from Slater in February of this year:

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So, the theory the photos can’t have orginated from Rachinger because the relationship between he and Slater had soured by that time is contradicted by Rachinger’s own leaks. We know that Rachinger was asking for and getting money from Slater in as late as February. Not only that, but the general tenor of the leaked communications from February does not suggest that the relationship had soured but rather was in the process of souring. February looks to be the time period in which Rachinger becomes distant from Slater, not December, which indicates that it is well within the realms of possibility that Rachinger passed those images on to Slater.

The most credible hypothesis

The most plausible hypothesis in this particular case is that Rachinger passed the images on to Slater in mid December, and Slater only recently released them to the people behind Lauda Finem in order to destroy Rachinger’s credibility with respect the Nation story. That fits in with idea of Lauda Finem being a Cameron Slater satellite blog and it fits in with these messages Rachinger leaked back when he was writing the Medium posts:

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These messages in totum (which can be seen here, although some of the tweets seem to have disappeared) suggests that in February Slater was taking stock of what Rachinger had given him, and decided he had not received much for the money he had spent on Rachinger’s services. This, co-incidentally, fits in with Rachinger’s oft-repeated claims that when he alleged hacked the Standard he provided Slater with nothing other than publicly available data. This, however, leaves open the question of what Slater is referring to when talking about the “nice pics of cunt journalists”? The most plausible hypothesis at this stage is that the images in question are the pics Slater is referring to.

Why might Rachinger have passed on these images to Slater? Whereas the previous analysis relies on looking at publicly available evidence, the following claims really are conjecture.

There’s the “Matey hypothesis”, where Rachinger, in a moment of friendly discussion with Slater, passes on without thinking much of it, images of the journalist because he’s mentioned knowing said journalist in a somewhat intimate manner. This is the kind of slip people do make, where they feel compelled to prove something they have intimated, thus breaching privacy.

Then there are the variety of “Digger hypotheses”: Rachinger may well have given the images to Slater either as ammunition for Slater’s dirt collection on local journalists or to curry favour with Slater or as part of an attempt to keep Slater’s money coming in (which seems a plausible hypothesis, given what appear to be references to invoices in the images). If any of these hypotheses are true, then they push Rachinger out of the Noble Hacker category (as discussed in the last post). It would leave him firmly in the category of being suspicious in his motivations.

Isn’t this a distraction from the real story?

Some will say “Isn’t this all a distraction from the main story, which is about #dirtypolitics?” Yes, it kind of is, but it also speaks to the allegations themselves. On a “positive” side it really does indicate that Slater and Company are worried about the Rachinger allegations and want it shutdown. That shows the existence of a conspiracy. As I have argued in the previous posts, we need to treat this claim serious, because it has all the hallmarks of being a warranted conspiracy theory; this is all evidence that the #dirtypolitics campaign continued after the 2014 General Election.

However, the analysis of this material also shows that part of the narrative Rachinger wants us to believe – that he’s a noble hacker – simply isn’t – as many people have already noted – the most plausible hypothesis. It seems likely that he – for some reason – passed on sensitive information to Slater.

What this also shows is that it is plausible to believe that Rachinger may well have been a willing accomplice of Slater for some time up to and after the release of “Dirty Politics” (which he claims changed his opinion on Slater as a person). If Rachinger passed the images on to Slater in December, post the election, then either Rachinger has misled us about when he changed his opinion on Slater (which supports the other hypothesis in this matter, which is that they had a falling out rather than Rachinger going rogue and starting a one person investigation) or Rachinger thought that the sacrifice of the journalist was worth it to keep Slater happy and unsuspecting as Rachinger performed his investigation. Either way, this new evidence (which happens to dovetail nicely with some of the evidence Rachinger himself has leaked) challenges the narrative Rachinger has presented, and suggests that, at least up until February, Rachinger might have been a willing conspirator in #dirtypolitics.

Now maybe, just maybe, Rachinger is innocent of leaking images of the journalist to some third party, and this is all a large and elaborate plot against him (certainly, people are claiming that I have fallen for a plot by Cameron Slater and the people behind Lauda Finem to smear Rachinger). Given what we know about Slater’s operations post the release of “Dirty Politics”, it is very likely indeed that the leaking of the images of the journalist was designed to derail the debate about the seriousness of Rachinger’s allegations. However, we also know that Slater’s modus operandi is the weaponising of dirt; he collects information to use against others and attacks by insinuation and then by release. What’s striking about this particular attack by (as we all presume, Slater, operating through Lauda Finem) is that Rachinger’s actions – releasing large chunks of data online – means he has provided evidence himself that makes it seem likely he passed those images on to Slater in December (for reasons which may not be not entirely clear). There is enough circumstantial evidence, some of it which much be stressed emanated from Rachinger himself, to support the claim he’s not entirely innocent in this matter. At the moment the most plausible story about the source of the images in the Lauda Finem post is that Rachinger likely passed the aforementioned images on to Slater, and somehow they were passed on to the “fine” people at Lauda Finem.

06/14/2015

The @B3nRaching3r Allegations – Part Four

The Ben Rachinger ((I must apologise for consistently mispronouncing his name on the podcast; it irritated me when the people behind Lauda Finem couldn’t do enough due diligence to spell my surname correctly, so sorry.)) story has been picked up by the media. It started with on TV3’s “The Nation” last Saturday and then was followed up by an article in the New Zealand Herald on Sunday. Rachinger had suggested just a few weeks back on Twitter – despite prior claims to the contrary – that all was good in the mainstream media, which is when I think we can date the Nation taking an interest in his story.

The story itself, as presented in the 10 or so minutes on the Nation, is interesting precisely because of how it differs from Rachinger’s narrative in the (now deleted) Medium posts. ((Thank the gods for services like Instapaper.)) The story we saw on Saturday morning was simple and concise: Rachinger first got in contact with Slater when the Whaleoil blog was hit by a denial of service attack in early 2014. Rachinger offered to help Slater secure his site against further attacks, and they struck up a correspondence. This led to Rachinger being paid by Slater to do work for him. Eventually Rachinger was sufficiently trusted by Slater that he asked Rachinger to hack the Labour Party-aligned blog, the Standard. However, by this time Rachinger was aware of the claims made against Slater in Nicky Hager’s book “Dirty Politics” and he claims he decided to launch his own investigation/entrapment of Slater. So, whilst Slater thought Rachinger was hacking the Standard, Rachinger was simply pulling publicly available data from the site. Slater eventually worked out that he really was getting nothing useful and terminated the relationship.

The story on the Nation, then, is the story Rachinger posted on Medium but stripped of much of the ancillary and sometimes quite questionable details. There is no hyperbole about Rachinger’s sacrifice, or how he is now being hounded by influential people and has had to go on the run. There is no talk about the Tony Lentino job Slater tried to get for Rachinger, which always seemed like an irrelevant sideline. The discussion about Slater’s connection with the Israeli Embassy: gone. Finally, there was no attempt to link the Standard hack to David Farrar or Matthew Hooton (which, as I covered previously, was always a stretch). Just a simple story of a hacker who was asked to infiltrate a blog and took Cameron Slater along for a ride.

Part of me would like to think that the calm, cautious reporting of the salient details is very much due to this series of blogposts. Realistically, though, it’s much more likely to be the result of good journalism on the part of the Nation’s staffers. Getting an actual journalist to present your story can do wonders.

The Nation story also plays down the police informant angle; there was nothing about Rachinger’s claims to be regularly meeting with a police handler throughout his association with Slater. Indeed, there was little to no discussion as to when Rachinger decided to start his one person investigation/entrapment of Slater. ((Indeed, the fact he refers to it as being his own investigation – rather than one in which he was supposedly helping the police – is interesting to the point that you would either think he has post facto made up a noble reason to have got onside with Slater, or that the police asked the Nation not to mention Rachinger’s central role in their investigation.)) This is important, because according to numerous internet commentators (including myself), either:

  • Rachinger went in at the beginning as a noble hacker intent on blowing open Slater’s criminal activities (what we might call the “Noble Rachinger” hypothesis), or
  • Rachinger was sincere in his offer to help Slater and later came to regret his association (the “Credulous Rachinger” hypothesis) or
  • Rachinger was an eager and willing accomplice to Slater who then was either burnt by Slater or burnt Slater, causing them to become enemies (the “Suspicious Rachinger” theory).

I think it’s fair to say that Rachinger’s deleted Medium posts and (for the moment) inaccessible tweets slip and slide between the Noble and Credulous hypotheses. Yet a lot of people side with the Suspicious construal because they either:

  1. claim to have been in correspondence with Rachinger over the period of time he was working for or with Slater, and thus they say this correspondence reflects a different story from the one Rachinger has presented or
  2. they cite Rachinger’s past behaviour online (doxing, threatening to contact people’s employers, et cetera) and argue that there is no reason to charitably assume Rachinger was acting nobly.

Myself? I suspect some version of the Credulous or Suspicious hypothesis is the most likely, given his past behaviour, the nature of some of the correspondence Rachinger leaked and the fact he came to the attention of Slater due to a video which criticised one of the people on Slater’s hit list, Kim Dotcom. That, however, is by-the-by; the story we saw on the Nation states that Rachinger was bluffing Slater by the time it came to the request that the Standard be hacked. If we accept that to be true, then what the Nation presented was clear evidence that Slater decided to pay someone to illegally access data on a blog as part of his ongoing #dirtypolitics campaign, which is conspiratorial in nature.

So, is this a warranted conspiracy theory? Well, no matter what we think of Rachinger himself the evidence he has provided seems reasonably clear (if we assume the various screenshots, bank account transactions and the like have not been faked). Slater and at the very least his mysterious funder (more on that in a second) were engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

How involved, then, was Rachinger? Well, Rachinger says he did not hack the Standard. There are two good reasons to believe this. The first is that Slater’s response and subsequent falling out with Rachinger shows that Slater not only thought he got nothing useful from Rachinger, but that he had been played. The second reason is that Lynn Prentice, the Editor at the Standard, claims there was no evidence of a hack. ((Although there are two reasons why Prentice might say that if an undisclosed hack had occurred. The first is that the hack was successful and invisible, and thus Prentice didn’t know about it. The second is that you might not want to admit to being hacked in the first place. However, given the evidence of the falling out between Slater and Rachinger, I think we should accept Prentice’s supporting claim here as good evidence that there was no hack.)) As such, it seems that whatever happened, the Standard remained unhacked.

Now, some are speculating that Rachinger planned to hack the Standard, but failed or discovered such a hack was outside his realm of IT comfort. That is to say, Rachinger might be trying to make his failure and subsequent falling out with Slater look noble. ((Indeed, given that we got no story about him working with the police throughout this period, this particular hypothesis seems like a reasonable thing to consider.)) However, for our purposes we can ignore claims about his motivations (and potential failures) and focus purely on the fact Rachinger is admitting he was complicit to some extent in Slater and Company’s criminal enterprise. ((I know some will say that ignoring Rachinger’s motivations here is a bad idea, since it speaks to character and his past behaviour online. I’m not downplaying that. Rather, I am focused in this particular analysis on the claim of conspiracy by Slater and Company.))

Slater has, of course, denied criminal activity. In fact, he claims he operates entirely legally. As Russell Brown pointed out on Twitter, that’s just not true, and Lynn Prentice has called Slater out on the hypocrisy of crying foul when the Whaleoil blog was hacked (which led to the eventual #dirtypolitics revelations) but then wanting to hack the Standard. However, the Herald story mentions that the Counties Manukau CIB are investigating Rachinger’s claims, which means they at least think there is a case to be made for this being a serious offence. However, they also admit that Rachinger’s history of putting evidence online has complicated the investigation. This is a serious problem, because the investigated know what they are being investigated for and thus can work to answer those questions preemptively (and to their favour). This is what I call the “Kerry Bolton defence”, named after the far-right, Aotearoa (New Zealand) based author Kerry Bolton. ((Bolton was accused of being a Holocaust denier on a Radio New Zealand programme by (my friend) Scott Hamilton. Bolton denied this and complained to the Broadcasting Standards Association (BSA) and initially had his complaint upheld. However, this was, in part, because Bolton took down many of the web resources Hamilton used as evidence, and so Bolton made it look as if Hamilton was smearing him unjustly. However, Hamilton was able to show that a) the resources had existed and provided other written evidence, which lead to a rare retraction of a BSA ruling.)) It’s much harder to prosecute someone if they not only know the details of an investigation but can then work to counteract those details whilst the investigation is on-going. The worry is that Rachinger’s publication of his amassed evidence (including large chunks of private correspondence which was irrelevant to his central claims about a criminal conspiracy led by Slater) will lead to the police saying “Too difficult; we give up!” or “Well, we can’t use this in court now…” Whilst there will be, I suspect, huge public and political pressure for this investigation to get as far as the prosecution phase, it is also possibly that it will end badly for the public (and not so badly for the conspirators).

Which leaves me – for the time being – with the biggest unanswered question in this morass of conspiracy theories. Who is Slater’s mysterious funder, the person who was able to stump up the $5000 Rachinger offered (or asked for) when the Standard hack was proposed? In the Medium posts Rachinger hinted that the identity of the funder would eventually come out. In the Nation story, however, he admits he does not know who Slater’s funder is, which either means he never knew or the person who suspected it of being is no longer a viable suspect. So, the funder remains mysterious.

It’s possible there is no funder, of course. This ties into my previous discussion of Slater as a fantasist; he may have claimed there was someone wealthy working with him to make himself look more important. Some have mooted that the $5000 likely came from one of Slater’s many fundraising drives, since Slater keeps pleading poverty. Or there really is a funder and it’s one of the likely suspects named in “Dirty Politics”. Or… Or is there another player-qua-conspirator yet to be revealed? Will time tell, or is the investigation now so comprised that we will never know? I guess we might find out should there ever be reason for me to write part five…

06/08/2015

How I learnt to stop ideating and love conspiracism

One thing that was completely new when it came to reworking the dissertation into “The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories” was my discussion on this thing called “conspiracism”. Conspiracism, or conspiracist ideation, is a frequently used term in the academic literature on belief in conspiracy theories, where conspiracists – aka conspiracy theorists – are diagnosed with some pathology of reasoning or psychology. Conspiracism, as a thesis, both explains the conspiracist’s weird belief in some conspiracy theory, as well as why the rest of us are justified in our scepticism of conspiracy theories generally.

As readers of this blog will know, I do not consider belief in conspiracy theories to be inherently problematic. Rather, I think belief in particular conspiracy theories is a problem when said belief does not resemble an inference to the best explanation. However, I think there is room for discussion of conspiracism, as long as we acknowledge that not all conspiracy theorists are conspiracists. Sure, some conspiracy theorists – the conspiracists – believe conspiracy theories for rationales not related to arguments and evidence, but it would be a mistake to diagnose those conspiracy theorists and apply said diagnosis to all conspiracy theorists.

Yet, this is what a lot of conspiracy theory theorists – my fancy term for academics who study conspiracy theories – end up doing. They construe belief in conspiracy theories as conspiracism, diagnose what is wrong with conspiracists and then declare “Case closed!” This is what Quassim Cassam effectively did in his article “Bad thinkers!” ((I have co-written a reply to Cassam’s piece with me colleague and friend Lee Basham; expect me to trumpet it to the heavens when it gets published.)), and it’s a worrying tradition. In part it causes concern because it shows that a lot of smart people are getting their methodology back-to-front (you don’t assume belief in conspiracy theories is bad to sure that belief in conspiracy theories is bad; you have to examine the common sense intuition and ask “Is that actually true?”) and because, as Peter Knight has argued elsewhere, it resembles a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theorists (since conspiracy theory theorists are claiming they are colluding in a process they actually don’t seem to necessarily be involved in).

I’ve been thinking about writing a paper on conspiracism for a while, in part to build on the analysis of the book and in part to get the idea out there in a shorter form (after all, the book is both expensive and long). Whilst I was in Brisbane waiting to get on my plane to LAX back in March, I discovered – to my horror – that I had already written some form of this paper in the middle of last year and completely forgotten about it. Turns out teacher training, practicum and endless (and mostly pointless) assignments made me forget I had written almost five thousand words on the topic. Not only that, but there were two versions of the paper I had written at two different times, both of which shared the same structure but used different examples and sources.

I have now spent the last month rewriting both versions of the paper into one new version, which I’m about to share with my peers for feedback before submitting it to a journal. In about six thousand words ((I’d like to trim it down to about five thousand, but that does not seem to be working out at the moment.)) I start by defending a general definition of conspiracy theory with no pejorative implications (i.e. it does not build in that belief in such theories is prima facie irrational) before showing how conspiracism is talked about in the literature and why we should restrict talk of conspiracism to a subset of conspiracy theorists – the conspiracists – rather than all conspiracy theorists.

The first section – on a general, non-pejorative definition – is basically the first two or three chapters of the book in three thousand words (so, one fifth of the previous analysis) and if you have been reading this blog for a while it’s all rather predictable (and I pay homage to my mentor, Charles Pigden, an awful lot). The second section – on conspiracism – is actually a notable improvement on the work in “The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories” (although it might still peeve my friend Lee Basham just a little), in that I diagnose the fault of the existing talk of conspiracism and conspiracists in a more finessed way than I did when I first approached the topic about a year and a half ago.

Basically, in the book I say “Here’s a term we use loosely in the literature, so let’s just get more precise in our usage!” Now I am arguing the problem of talk of both conspiracism and conspiracists in the literature is that people use it (probably without thinking) to mask a transition between claims that, yes, some conspiracy theories might turn out to be warranted but, oh by the way, conspiracy theorists are crazy so let’s just ignore conspiracy theories! So, the problem is not so much that the term is being used loosely but rather the term masks a shifting of the burden of proof from conspiracy theory theorists to conspiracy theorists. Rather than requiring conspiracy theory theorists to support their assertion that belief in conspiracy theories is suspicious, conspiracism shifts the debate into requiring that conspiracy theorists effectively say “I’m not a conspiracy theorist!” (because conspiracy theorists and conspriacists are taken to be one and the same) to avoid being charged with irrationality or suffering from some psychological defect.

The paper, which currently has the title “#notallconspiracytheorists” (because I’m hip, down with the kids and making fun of the hashtag #notallmen) is almost ready for public consumption of some sort. So, expect more thoughts on this in a public forum soon. Still, why not give me your thoughts in the comments? I’d love to hear what you think on this topic.

05/25/2015

The death of Osama bin Laden and the reputation of Seymour Hersh

Just over a week ago Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who brought us the story of the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal, published a 10000 word story – in the London Review of Books – about what really happened in Abbottabad the day Osama bin Laden died. If Hersh’s claims are to be believed, then the official story of bin Laden’s death – that his location was discovered through the use of torture… Sorry, enhanced interrogation and he was then killed whilst trying to be taken alive by Navy Seals – is not just false, but the result of a massive conspiracy to cover up how the US found bin Laden and what really happened afterwards.

Elements of the official story of bin Laden’s death have been treated as suspicious from the off; no one seemed to be convinced, for example, that bin Laden was buried at sea. It seemed such an obvious fabrication that many have wondered why the US continued to maintain it. Yet, whilst many of us thought the real story of Osama bin Laden’s death was more complicated than what we had been told, not many of us thought the story was almost completely a fabrication. Yes, there were conspiracy theories about it (including reports that bin Laden had died earlier), but few of us thought that the official theory might turn out to be a false narrative.

Hersh’s story changes that, if we believe his sources. To my mind the biggest part of the story isn’t the possibility that Washington concocted an elaborate cover story for what should have been a simple assassination mission, but, rather, the story of how the US claimed they found bin Laden: the enhanced interrogation of a courier.

The CIA’s enhanced ((Not enchanted, despite autocorrect thinking better of it.)) interrogation programme had little going for it, but part of the narrative of its necessity, post the Senate report which condemned all aspects of it, was that it helped them get to bin Laden. Yet, if Hersh’s story is to be believed, it didn’t. There was no courier, just someone in Pakistani intelligence who happily handed over the location of bin Laden for a large part of $25 million. If Hersh’s story is true, then the CIA’s one card to justify torture – it got us bin Laden – goes out the window. You can kind of see why elements of the intelligence community might want to stop that particular story from becoming part of the accepted wisdom.

So, what to think of “The Killing of Osama bin Laden”? Whilst there has been a lot of debunking of Hersh’s story all over the (mostly) American press, the article most people cite approvingly (when nodding their heads and saying “Well, it’s a bit of a conspiracy theory, isn’t it?”) is Max Fisher’s piece at Vox. Fisher summarises Hersh’s story thusly:

The truth, Hersh says, is that Pakistani intelligence services captured bin Laden in 2006 and kept him locked up with support from Saudi Arabia, using him as leverage against al-Qaeda. In 2010, Pakistan agreed to sell bin Laden to the US for increased military aid and a “freer hand in Afghanistan.” Rather than kill him or hand him over discreetly, Hersh says the Pakistanis insisted on staging an elaborate American “raid” with Pakistani support.

According to Hersh’s story, Navy SEALs met no resistance at Abbottabad and were escorted by a Pakistani intelligence officer to bin Laden’s bedroom, where they killed him. Bin Laden’s body was “torn apart with rifle fire” and pieces of the corpse “tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains” by Navy SEALs during the flight home (no reason is given for this action). There was no burial at sea because “there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.”

In this telling, the yearslong breakdown in US-Pakistan relations, which had enormous ramifications for both Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan, was all staged to divert attention from the truth of bin Laden’s killing. The treasure trove of intelligence secured from bin Laden’s compound, Hersh adds, was manufactured to provide evidence after the fact.

Fisher’s piece is a criticism of both Hersh and Hersh’s story. Fisher’s criticisms centre on Hersh’s use of anonymous sources, the numerous contradictions Fisher thinks are in the piece… And because Hersh has become a bit of a conspiracy theorist in recent years. The later claim is interesting because all of Hersh’s previous big stories have been called conspiracy theories by the authorities. Fisher acknowledges this particular fact of illustrious Hersh’s career and sidesteps it. Rather, Fisher is concerned with reports that Hersh has, among other things, recently accused the American Military-Industrial Complex as being run by Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta; Fisher wants us to think that Hersh has recently become fond of unwarranted conspiracy theories based upon elements of his ideology, rather than from a careful appraisal of the evidence.

The claim the US military is beholden to Catholic fraternal orders does seem like an odd claim. Fisher might be right to think that some of Hersh’s recent views have a more complex origin than careful investigative journalism. However, let’s leave Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta to one side, and focus on the other, more salient objections to Hersh’s story. No matter Hersh’s belief in other conspiracy theories, we can still assess the evidence for this particular conspiracy theory about the real story behind the death of Osama bin Laden.

Hersh has been criticised for his use of unnamed sources. This seems to be an interesting and new standard on which to judge investigative journalism. Journalists use unnamed and anonymous sources all the time when reporting and so attacking Hersh’s story for using them is somewhat odd. Then again, this fits into what I consider to be a curious double-standard when it comes to talk of conspiracy theories; as soon as something is labelled a conspiracy theory the burden of proof gets shifted on to the conspiracy theorist no matter the evidence. Yet in cases like this, you can expect sources to want to remain anonymous. Let’s face it; unless you are a disgraced general, leaking classified information – even information would shows the public have been misled or lied to – gets you a fair amount of time in chokey. As such, it’s to be expected that a) such leaks would like to be kept anonymous and b) someone like Hersh would want to protect his sources from being identified.

Probably a better criticism is Hersh’s reliance on two sources. However, whilst the story of what is meant to have really happened to bin Laden comes, for the most part, from one person (with another basically nodding their head in agreement), Hersh also claims that other sources he spoke to confirmed this partiuclar version of events. Hersh also has support from other journalists who have looked into the raids, like Carlotta Gall, for example. Gall in particular claims to have spoken with high-ranking personnel in Pakistani who told her, independently of Hersh’s story, the same kind of details Hersh’s narrative relies upon, and there also seems to be confirmation of details of Hersh’s narrative coming out of Pakistan itself.

Fisher claim that Hersh’s story is filled with internal contradictions. However, Greg Grandin, for one, takes Fisher’s to task over this. Grandin points out that people are failing to distinguish between actual contradictions in Hersh’s story, and their own notions of how they think intelligence agencies should run. Grandin’s contention is Hersh’s story contradicts Fisher’s take on intelligence operations, rather than the reality of what might have happened.

So, while it is true that Hersh’s story, if true, means US/Pakistan relations were weird in the build up and aftermath of bin Laden’s death, the US purposefully damaged its relations with a foreign nation, lied to its own public and that the security apparatus of two states engaged in quite disturbing behaviour. However, the right response to those allegations is not “It cannot be true!” but “Is it true?” Dismissing Hersh’s story on the back of it being improbable to one’s own views is the wrong move. This is especially the case here, because no matter what we think of Hersh’s recent output, he’s made what seemed like implauslbe claims in the past which have, nonetheless, been vindicated. Who would have thought that American soldiers loved torturing people and taking selfies with their victims, for example? ((Well, actually, lots of people, particularly the kind of people who study the psychology of soldiers in wartime.))

Now, some of Hersh’s critics have dismissed his story by asking something like “How could the Obama Administration keep such a story secret, and for so long?” (which is a way of saying “The claim of conspiracy is too implausible!”) Trevor Timm’s response – and surely it is the right one – is to quote Daniel Ellsberg (of “The Pentagon Papers” fame) and point out that the line “Washington is bad at keeping secrets” is a lovely story the Press and Public tell each other. However, it simply isn’t true. From the NSA’s bulk collection policy to those pesky WMDs in Iraq, Washington has managed to keep secrets from the Public and Press for long periods of time, and involved hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the process. Sure, there were leaks eventually, but the standard response to those leaks look amazingly like the response to Hersh’s claim; deny, obfuscate, deny, deny!

All-in-all, I’m not sure what to think of “The Killing of Osama bin Laden”. Parts of it ring true and parts of it, if we accept Hersh’s claims, make for a pretty weird state of affairs. I am, however, happy to say that I am fascinated by just how strong the pushback has been. On the face it, Hersh’s story does not look to be one we can easily dismiss, and for that reason we should be carefully investigating his claims, not attacking the messenger. Josh and meself will be discussing this story on this week’s episode of “The Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy”, so I guess I’ll have a more informed opinion on the issues surrounding “The Killing of Osama bin Laden” later this week.

Stay tuned!

References:

Fisher, Max. “The many problems with Seymour Hersh’s Osama bin Laden conspiracy theory”, Vox, May 11, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden

Gall, Carlotta. “The Detail in Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden Story That Rings True”, The New York Times Magazine, May 12, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/magazine/the-detail-in-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-story-that-rings-true.html?nytmobile=0&_r=0

Grandin, Greg. “It’s a Conspiracy! How to Discredit Seymour Hersh”, The Nation, May 12, 2015, http://m.thenation.com/blog/207001-its-conspiracy-how-discredit-seymour-hersh

Hersh, Seymour M. “The Killing of Osama bin Laden”, The London Review of Books, May, 2015 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

Mir, Amir. “Brig Usman Khalid informed CIA of Osama’s presence in Abbottabad”. The News, May 12, 2015, http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-2-317717-Brig-Usman-Khalid-informed-CIA-of-Osamas-presence-in-Abbottabad

Timm, Trevor. “The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful”, Columbia Journalism Review, May 15, 2015, http://www.cjr.org/analysis/seymour_hersh_osama_bin_laden.php

05/18/2015

Real Politik – An interview with me by James Tracy

James Tracy teaches in the School of Communication & Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, and he very kindly invited me on to his show, “Real Politiks”, to discuss my work and recent book. James and I enjoyed many conversations (and a few drinks) at the Conference on Conspiracy Theories in Miami, and I plan to have him on the Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy in the near future.

05/16/2015

A Problem in Liberalism

I’ve never been a big fan of Liberalism (with a capital “L”), mostly because I think it’s political philosophy which prizes individuality over the community; I’m more of a Communitarian than anything else. ((Although, in truth, I am – like in most things – a pluralist who mixes and matches views)) So, given I’m currently rereading Jack Z. Bratich’s “Conspiracy Panics”, I’ve been struck by his discussion of Liberalism. Jack (nota bene: I once got drunk with him, so I feel comfortable talking about this on a first name basis) talks, in chapter 1, about Liberalism not as a theory but rather, a practice, and how Liberalism is meant to be the ongoing process of making us nice to one another without the need to enact tiresome legislation for that purpose.

Channeling Michel Foucault, Jack presents an argument to the extent that the purpose of Liberalism is to move political discourse away from the margins to the centre because, after all, that is the nice, sensible place for people to be, and it reduces the danger of extremism. It is also, qua Foucault, the reason why we are so worried about any form of extremism in our politics, whether it is hard right, hard left… Or even soft left or right. Anything off-centre is an extreme, something we should counsel against. We have seen this both in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and the UK where it comes to parties on the Left competing with Centre Right governments; you want to appeal to the centre because that is what nice Liberals do. What nice Liberals don’t do is direct their politics to the margins because the Centre is sensible and Liberals are sensible people.

As such, the goal of NZ and UK Labour, such Liberal counsellors contend, is one of two classic responses: educate the masses to make them sympathetic to the Centre (Liberalism) or other the margins and talk about them as extremists. The former means you are competing for the voting base the centrist party in power has already captured, whilst the latter means making enemies of people who would otherwise normally support you. So, act like National and the Tories and claim that the Greens and the Scottish National Party are a bunch of extremist ne’erdowells you would never countenance going into government with.

The problem, as far as I can see, for the Liberal project – if we accept this particular construal of that thesis – is that you need a well-educated, comfortably well-off populace for liberalism to succeed. I.e. if you want people to support sensible, centrist solutions, they need to be unsympathetic to extremist views by dint of being educated with Liberal political virtue and not being worried about how no one can afford to buy a house in Auckland these days. Yet the political practice of many Western, Liberal-leaning democracies over the last few decades has been to erode both easy access to welfare and to fiddle with the education system, often in disastrous ways. In effect, it seems like centrist governments are making it harder to sustain the Liberalism which made such centrism/Liberalism so popular.

So, it is with some interest that I read David Cameron’s new advocacy for stamping out extremism:

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance.

This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach. As the party of one nation, we will govern as one nation and bring our country together. That means actively promoting certain values.

Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights regardless of race, gender or sexuality.

We must say to our citizens: this is what defines us as a society.

So, rather than sustain a populace immune to an extremism which questions these views via making the populace literate ((That is, specifically educated for the virtue of the Liberal and thus centrist society.)) and comfortable, the Conservatives will impose their political virtues (which seem quite Liberal on the face of it, even though I know many people will say elements of the Conservatives are anything but Liberal) by edict.

Because that will work out just great. No one goes to extremes when they are being told just what kind of citizen they have to be, after all.

This seems like it’s a problem. You have a set of Liberal virtues which need to be upheld because you are in the Centre, but you have a society which is showing expressions of what you take to be extremism. You could forego the austerity and dismantling of the welfare state which is causing people to go to extremes (a bottom-up approach), or you could impose your political virtues (a top-down approach). Yet the great thing about democracy was that it was meant to allow people to express their dissent within the system, wasn’t it? Or, as Foucault might ask, is government more about stability than it is representation? Because if governments are about stabilising the Centre, then it’s easy to see why some people on the margins think they are conspiring to stay in power.

05/13/2015