their leader is now fish food. Also, the files seized by the SEALS during the mission suggest that the man in the compound was top of the organizational pyramid, and the information gleaned has allowed the “neutralization” of subordinates.
2) The SEAL raid was a fake op, bin Laden wasn’t there, and is alive and well and living in the Af-Pak borderland with his VCR and hookah pipe. The Bush administration never had any real intention of huntin’ the al- Qaeda leader down, because the Bush and bin Laden clans were friends, and commercial allies.
The special relationship between the Bushes and the bin Ladens
In this murky conspiracy scenario, George Bush Jnr and Osama bin Laden are engaged in a pleasant series of quid pro quos: Bush leaves bin Laden untroubled in his cave, and the hirsute terrorist releases an inflammatory video statement days before the October 2004 US presidential election, which proves to be crucial in helping George secure a second term in office. Helping the conspiracy along is a Facebook campaign, “Osama bin Laden Is NOT DEAD”.
A minor riff in the bin Laden death conspiracy is that he tried to surrender but was killed anyway. The meat of this theory is that the US Government wanted to avoid a lengthy show trial so always intended the raid to be an assassination mission. One anonymous White House official did unhelpfully (from the PR point of view) let slip it was a “kill operation”. If so, it would explain the White House’s reluctance to release snaps of the al-Qaeda’s cadaver, since these presumably show the classic assassination technique of a bullet through the brains.
Brandon Franklin Hurst,
Howard Wasdin,
BLACK DEATH
The Black Death was an outbreak of plague caused (possibly) by the bacterium
The dreadful pestilence penetrated the sea coast by Southampton and came to Bristol, and there almost the whole population of the town perished, as if it had been seized by sudden death; for few kept their beds more than two or three days, or even half a day. Then this cruel death spread everywhere around, following the course of the sun… After the aforesaid pestilence, many buildings, great and small, fell into ruins in every city, borough, and village for lack of inhabitants, likewise many villages and hamlets became desolate, not a house being left in them, all having died who dwelt there, and it was probable that many such villages would never be inhabited.
As Knighton noted, ports were the point of the entry for the disease, because the responsible bacterium was carried by fleas of the black rat, of which medieval ships carried scores. While some contemporaries saw the Black Death as an act of God, a punishment for sins, others saw the pandemic as the handiwork of humans—in other words, the Black Death was an early exercise in germ warfare. The Indian princedoms were much suspected, because they had become discontented with the trade rules imposed by the European countries. Consequently the Indian princelings—or at least their hirelings—placed germ-laden rats on Europe-bound ships. When the Black Death had KOd the population of the white-skinned enemy, the Indian Army would march in and take over.
Biowarfare was not unknown in the fourteenth century; there are accounts of the Mongols catapulting disease-ridden corpses into the Genoese-held city of Kaffa, and it is true that the Black Death spread from the East. Furthermore, the pestilence may not have been bubonic plague. Medieval accounts of Black Death symptoms do not match precisely with the symptoms of
History’s scapegoats, the Jews, were also alleged by contemporaries to possibly be the agents behind the Black Death. A Jew, Agimet of Geneva, did confess to having poisoned wells across southern Europe on the instructions of Rabbi Peyret of Chambery (see Document, p.50), who was himself under the control of elders in the enclave of Toledo.
Agimet’s “confession”, extracted under torture, was enough to start a spate of pogroms; in Strasbourg alone 2,000 Jews were pre-emptively slaughtered to stop them poisoning the city’s wells. Records of similar “confessions” were sent from town to town in Switzerland and Germany, with the result that thousands of Jews in at least two hundred settlements were killed and burned in a precursor of Hitler’s holocaust.
There was no international Jewish conspiracy to wipe out Christendom behind the Black Death: It is hardly credible that the Jews of Strasbourg would poison the well they themselves used. Still, the rumour of Jewish involvement made a handy excuse for not paying loans to them. As the chronicler Frederick Closener observed about the burning of the Jews in Strasbourg:
everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled, and the Jews had to surrender all pledges and notes that they had taken for debts. The council, however, took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided it among the working-men proportionately. The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews. If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt.
Strasbourg, incidentally, did not escape the clutches of the plague, which killed sixteen thousand inhabitants.
An Ebola-like haemorrhagic virus is considered by some modern disease experts to be the most plausible cause of the Black Death. If so, it would have been even more uncontrollable as a germ warfare “weapon” in the fourteenth century than
John Kelly,
Philip Ziegler,
DOCUMENT: THE CONFESSION OF AGIMET OF GENEVA, CHATEL, 20 OCTOBER 1348
The year of our Lord 1348.
On Friday, the 10th of the month of October, at Chatel, in the castle thereof, there occurred the judicial inquiry which was made by order of the court of the illustrious Prince, our lord, Amadeus, Count of Savoy, and his subjects against the Jews of both sexes who were there imprisoned, each one separately. This was done after public rumour had become current and a strong clamour had arisen because of the poison put by them into the wells, springs, and other things which the Christians use—demanding that they die, that they are able to be found guilty and, therefore, that they should be punished. Hence this their confession made in the presence of a great many trustworthy persons.
Agimet the Jew, who lived at Geneva and was arrested at Chatel, was there put to the torture a little and then he was released from it. And after a long time, having been subjected again to torture a little, he confessed in the presence of a great many trustworthy persons, who are later mentioned. To begin with it is clear that at the Lent just passed Pultus Clesis de Ranz had sent this very Jew to Venice to buy silks and other things for him. When this came to the notice of Rabbi Peyret, a Jew of Chambery who was a teacher of their law, he sent for this Agimet, for whom he had searched, and when he had come before him he said: “We have been informed that you are going
