dittologica

During the Cold War, when communists were known to lurk in every dark corner waiting for orders to destroy the American way of life, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy was the master unmasker of those fiends. In an often cited bit of theater in front of the Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy claimed to be holding in his hand a list exposing 205 employees of the State Department as communists. Although many of the people named on his list lost their jobs, McCarthy’s claims were never proven. But the brandishing of that list in his hands gave him far greater authority than a mere man with no list to brandish.

Half a century later things have moved on. Today it is terrorists (some of whom are also communists) who lurk in every dark corner, awaiting orders to destroy the American way of life. And instead of papers containing lists, today’s descendants of Joe McCarthy brandish captured laptop computers with e-mails and electronic documents containing the identities and plans of their deadly foes.

On the 1st of March, Raul Reyes, a top leader of the Colombian rebel group, FARC, was killed by the Colombian military in a cross-border air strike into Ecuador. Colombian government forces were directed to a point just over the border in Ecuador by U.S. contractors tracking the signal from a satellite phone Reyes was using. Reyes was the FARC’s lead negotiator in talks over the release of hostages held by the group. According to press reports, discussion of hostage releases was the ruse used to keep him on the line while his location was traced. [link]

The devastating air strike killed Reyes and 24 other people who were at the location.
Philip Sherwell, reporting for the conservative British paper, the Daily Telegraph, arrived at the scene after the attack and described it this way:

“The combat fatigues dangled from a branch 100 feet above the jungle floor – a testament to the ferocity of the bombardment that turned this remote, mosquito-ridden corner of the Amazon rainforest in northern Ecuador into an international flashpoint last week. The same missiles that blasted the uniform high into the jungle canopy gouged deep craters out of the rust-red earth and cut a wide swath through the vegetation.” [link]

And yet, miraculously, a laptop computer containing what is claimed to be incriminating evidence against FARC and the Venezuelan and Ecuadoran governments survived the conflagration. One account even asserts that three laptops survived the attack. [link]

Such miracles are not entirely uncommon. Consider the discovery of the intact passport of Satam al-Suqami, one of the 9/11 hijackers, several blocks from  the collapsed World Trade towers, and the visa of Ziad Jarrah found amidst the widely scattered wreckage of the hijacked plane that went down in Pennsylvania farmland.

Another captured laptop computer, this one ostensibly from Iran, was brandished by the Bush administration as proof that Iran plans to produce nuclear weapons, thus providing a potential pretext for the U.S. to attack that country. Sadly for Bush and company, the miraculous Iranian laptop was acquired via an Iranian group classified by the US government as a terrorist organization, which in turn seems to have acquired it from the Israeli intelligence services. Both the CIA and the IAEA have examined the evidence on that dodgy laptop and neither is willing to assert that the information obtained from it is valid. [link]

Like the Israeli-supplied laptop, the information purportedly found on the Colombian laptop is being used as a vehicle for ratcheting up tensions with another potential US adversary: Venezuela. Supposedly, this computer contained information showing that Hugo Chavez’s government had paid $300 million to the FARC guerrillas. Investigative journalist Greg Palast has provided an English translation of the relevant part of the incriminating e-document:

“… With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call “dossier,” efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the boss to the cojo [slang term for 'cripple'], which I will explain in a separate note. Let’s call the boss Ángel, and the cripple Ernesto.” [link]

Palast points out that this is the sole mention of the number 300, from which the assertion of a $300 million payment was inferred. If the laptop did miraculously survive the bombing that killed Reyes and his companions, the evidence extracted from it seems very thin indeed.

Following the Colombian incursion into Ecuador, tensions between Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia briefly worsened, with military mobilizations along the borders.

However, while the leaders of the respective countries agreed to reduce tensions shortly afterwards, the mass opinion-forming press did not. Headlines were filled with speculation and statements by Chavez haters. Florida Representative Connie Mack got big headlines when he teamed up with other conservative legislators in a bid to declare Venezuela a terrorist state based on the contents of the miraculous Colombian laptop. An alarming Reuters story declared, “Venezuela’s navy plans to build torpedoes, mines”—apparently a very underhanded thing for a navy to do. Peru—the  other remaining South American ally of the US besides Colombia—provided the subject of an alarming story about the apprehending of two Peruvians caught crossing into the country from Ecuador carrying $150,000. According to the International Herald Tribune:

“[Peruvian] President Alan Garcia’s Cabinet chief, Jorge del Castillo, said in a meeting with foreign journalists. ‘Where did they get it?’”

The inevitable conclusion was that they got it from Hugo Chavez. A reference to the miraculous Colombian laptop at the end of the article wraps up the case. [link]

The moral of the story is, never pass up the opportunity to acquire a stray laptop. It may work miracles for you, such as confirming that everything you want everyone to believe is true.