Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (48 page)

In fact,
Teeth of the Tiger
was published in 2003, making it more or less impossible for Clancy to have based his plot on any supposed rumors after David Kelly’s death, but very easy for Shrimpton to have based his accusations on a newly read Clancy. Interestingly, Shrimpton is not mentioned by name in Baker’s book, though he was one of the early supporters of the murder theory.

But whoever Baker’s source was, the MP now banked the supposed information and moved on, in characteristic fashion. “The key question,” he asks, “is whether the actions of the Iraqi group were self-generated, and subsequently covered up by the government, or whether a tiny cabal within the British establishment commissioned the assassins to undertake this. Perhaps it was somewhere in between, with a nod and a wink being unofficially offered. That would, after all, be very British.”
⁶³
Again, the outrageous claim is made to sound almost normal by the last two sentences—as though there is plenty of evidence that such things have occurred before. But turn it around. It would be very British for the authorities to permit or connive in the assassination of a British subject on British soil by representatives of another country. There is not a single case of such a thing happening in modern British history. Of course there isn’t.

So strong is Baker’s notion of the corruptibility of his fellow Britons that he is prepared to suggest that both Dr. Kelly’s wife and the head of the subsequent inquiry might have been persuaded into selling the idea of suicide to the nation. “It is even possible to surmise,” he writes, “that perhaps both Lord Hutton and Janice Kelly were told [that there had been a murder], and each was asked to go along with the story for the sake of the country, although there is of course no evidence to this effect.”
⁶⁴
To “surmise” means to infer something from incomplete evidence, and Baker admits that there is none at all. So what he means is that it is possible to speculate, as, of course, it is about anything.

So, where does Norman Baker arrive at the end of all this? It was more likely that there was a Tom Clancy operation involving exiled Iraqis who were never seen, found, or identified (whom one might have expected to be busy just after the liberation of their country) to kill a British subject and government employee who had already spoken to the press and who was at the epicenter of British media attention, and that this operation was covered up by a combination of the Oxfordshire police, the Oxfordshire coroner, those working for the Hutton Inquiry, and—quite possibly—Lord Hutton, Tom Mangold, and Janice Kelly herself, than that a man in a fix was prepared and able to sever his ulnar artery and take twenty-nine co-proxamol tablets.

Even before Baker’s book was excerpted and serialized in the mass-circulation
Daily Mail
, one of its most serious columnists, Melanie Phillips, declared herself convinced by what she had heard of his arguments. “Mr. Baker cannot easily be dismissed as a crank,” she wrote. “He is an exceptionally tenacious digger into things others prefer to keep hidden.” She, too, had received information from unnamed “people familiar with the shadowy world in which Dr. Kelly moved,” and they were convinced it was murder.
⁶⁵
Her colleague on the
Mail on Sunday
, Peter Oborne, contributed to the blurb on the book’s back cover, writing that Baker’s “research is very detailed and his conclusions must be taken seriously.” In a review in the
Daily Telegraph
, a former MP, Nigel Jones, saluted this “somberly factual book,” the antihero of which “is Tony Blair, and the cronies, lickspittles and murderous spooks who throng his corrupt court.” Jones was utterly persuaded by Baker and intolerant of his critics. “His own courageous and well-publicized probing into Kelly’s death has been dismissed with the usual ‘we don’t do that kind of thing, old boy.’ But, as this disquieting book makes very clear—unfortunately, we do.”

This was a reminder, were one needed, that, given the desire to believe, it is easy to confuse detail with thought. In conclusion, it is worth referring to the preface to the English edition of Fritz Tobias’s book on the Reichstag fire, in which one great British historian, A. J. P. Taylor, quotes another, Sir Lewis Namier: “There would be little to say on this subject, were it not for the nonsense that has been talked about it.”
⁶⁶

9. “I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!”

I do not know whether Vincent Foster was depressed before his death.
It is irrelevant anyway. The hard evidence indicates that the crime scene
was staged, period. Even if Foster was depressed, somebody still put a gun
in his hand, somebody still inflicted a perforating wound on his neck,
his body still levitated 700 feet into Fort Marcy Park without leaving soil
residue on his shoes, and he still managed to drive to Fort Marcy Park
without any car keys.

—AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD, 1997

The Lady in Red

In the summer of 2009, many in the world’s media suddenly became aware of a new conspiracist phenomenon. A video shot by a citizen cameraperson sitting approximately halfway back in the auditorium at a town-hall meeting in Georgetown, Delaware, on June 30 was put on YouTube a week or so later, and within days went viral.

The clip begins with the rangy figure of Congressman Mike Castle, Delaware’s sole representative in the U.S. House, face to the camera, choosing a questioner from the audience. “This lady in red . . .” he says. From the back it is hard to make out anything about the woman who now stands up, except that she seems to wear glasses and have her hair in what might be called a Sarah Palin semi-bun. The woman in red is brandishing something. She announces, “I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America, saying I am an American citizen, with a seal on it, signed by a doctor, with a hospital administrator’s name, my parents, my date of birth, the time, the date. I want to go back to January 20, and I want to know why are you people ignoring his birth certificate.” There is a loud cry of “Yeah!!!” and some applause, and a little booing. The woman continues, without specifying whom she is talking about—perhaps because she does not need to. “
He
is
not
an American citizen! He is a citizen of Kenya! My father fought in World War Two with the greatest generation in the Pacific theater for this country, and I don’t want this flag to change.” She waves a small American flag and shouts, “I want my country back!”
¹
And sits back down.

Mr. Castle, a moderate Republican, seemingly taken aback by both the sentiment and the support for it, insists that “if you’re referring to the president there, he is a citizen of the United States.” Some catcalls follow. Apparently emboldened, the questioner rises and shouts out, “I think we should all stand up and pledge allegiance to the flag!” Several people yell, “Pledge allegiance!” and one loudly opines that Castle “probably doesn’t even know it!” Surreally, Castle then leads the people of Georgetown in this enforced act of loyalty, as though there had been a doubt about his patriotism that now needed to be expunged.

The Lady in Red was many people’s first Birther. But for the next few weeks the question of whether Barack Obama was an American citizen at birth, and the fact that there was a debate about that question, were hotly discussed on mainstream news channels in the United States, and the peculiarity that a significant number of Americans thought that he wasn’t a citizen (and that he was therefore ineligible to be president) was featured widely outside the country. One of the earliest Birthers, the Philadelphia lawyer (and 9/11 Truth activist) Philip J. Berg, observed that until the Delaware eruption, “the coverage has been minuscule” and confined to Internet and marginal radio stations, but that the Georgetown meeting had set off “a vast uptick.” On his radio broadcast, the sonorous CNN host Lou Dobbs, in “only asking” mode, repeatedly suggested that Obama set minds at rest by producing his long-form birth certificate. The more pungent right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh argued that the new president had “yet to prove that he’s a citizen.”

At the same time, a group of mostly Texan Republican congressmen sponsored a measure, drafted by Bill Posey of Florida, “to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of President to include with the committee’s statement of organization a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate,” a requirement that had somehow been regarded as superfluous in the previous 230 years of the republic. By mid-August 2009, a quarter of Americans polled were of the opinion that Barack Obama was not an American citizen by birth, and another 14 percent were unsure, with 10 percent naming Indonesia as his place of birth, 7 percent opting for Kenya, and 6 percent agreeing that it was Hawaii, but a Hawaii that, in their opinion, was not part of the United States in 1961 when Obama was born. Twelve percent, when prompted by the mischievous pollsters, pronounced themselves unsure that Obama wasn’t French. There were political, gender, and ethnic disparities. Sixty-two percent of Birthers were Republicans (44 percent of Republicans believed that Obama was not a citizen, compared with 36 percent who thought he was), 57 percent were “conservative,” 56 percent were male, and 86 percent were white.
²

A Question of Certification

Section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution lays down that “no person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.” It follows that a diehard Republican, discovering that Barack Obama failed to meet these provisions, might feel like Henry VIII when advised that his marriage with Catherine of Aragon was conveniently illegal, and that he would now be free to discard her in favor of Anne Boleyn. Americans had felt this way before. In the 1880s, Democrats had tried to discredit the Republican president, Chester Arthur, alleging that he had been born half a century earlier in Canada, and had at some time purloined his dead brother’s Vermont birth identity.

Obama himself had always said that he was born in Hawaii, on August 4, 1961, by which time (despite subsequent eccentric objections) the state had been in the Union for almost two years. Clearly being over thirty-five and having dwelt in the United States for more than fourteen years, he met the eligibility test. Indeed, at a relatively early stage in the presidential campaign, his election team—unnoticed by most of the world—had released details of his Certification of Live Birth, a computer-generated contemporary document with the Hawaii state seal. Such family as Obama had and all his early friends either attested to his Hawaiian birth or else knew nothing to contradict it. There seemed, then, little ground for doubting his eligibility, unless one believed that some form of conspiracy had taken place to suppress information of his true place of birth—a conspiracy that had lasted (by November 2008) Obama’s forty-seven years on the planet.

Yet even by the time of the Georgetown meeting, there had been or were a number of lawsuits in various parts of the United States in which plaintiffs sought judgment against the new president on the basis of his disputed citizenship. In New Jersey, one Charles Kercher had claimed that Congress had failed in its duty to ascertain properly whether or not Obama was qualified; in Pennsylvania, Philip Berg (who spoke at the meeting in London described on pages 229-31) had filed three suits; Alan Keyes, a black Republican presidential primary candidate in 2008, was at the top of a list of Californians who requested that the state’s electoral college votes be withheld from Obama until his eligibility had been established in a manner that satisfied them. In Hawaii, an Illinois lawyer filed a suit demanding that the state’s euphoniously named governor, Linda Lingle, release further documents establishing Obama’s birth in the state; again in California, a dynamic if erratic Moldovan-born immigrant, Orly Taitz, filed on behalf of the independent presidential candidate Ron Paul’s running mate, Gail Lightfoot, and separately on behalf of an Army Reserve major, Stefan Cook, who argued that he couldn’t be sent by an ineligible president to serve in Afghanistan. And so on in Georgia, Washington state, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and more.

Not all Birthers (as people questioning the new president’s eligibility quickly became known) adopted the Lady in Red’s direct approach to the issue of Obama’s birthplace. The advanced Birthers did not even doubt that, when Obama’s Kenyan grandmother appeared to agree that he had been born in Africa, this was a case of a fairly obvious linguistic misunderstanding between her and her questioners. The more sophisticated professed not to know or have theories about where else he might have been born, or indeed, not even to doubt his word, but simply—guilelessly—to demand that he furnish further proof that he had been hatched in Honolulu. They demanded that he “produce the birth certificate”—the long-form document referred to in Georgetown, and thus allay doubts. The short-form certification, they argued, would not do, because it was a noncontemporaneous and less detailed document. And what, they asked, could be more reasonable than that? If Mr. Obama himself were only to, say, appear on prime-time TV displaying his long-form certificate with “a seal on it, signed by a doctor, with a hospital administrator’s name, my parents, my date of birth, the time,” and so on, then all this could be laid to rest!