The "Bin Laden in China" story

The item about Bin Laden in China that I mentioned in a previous post is intriguing (which I found via a post on Left Coaster).  I really don't know what to make of it.  But I'm guessing that it has less to do with an election-related "October surprise" than it does with someone trying to tag China as a state that sponsors terrorists.  Remember the Saddam/Bin Laden connection that the administration hyped, if more by heavy-handed implication than by specific claim?

The neoconservatives have seen China as a likely candidate to take the place of the Soviet Union as The Enemy to justify an endless arms race and small wars around the world. 

The author of the El Mundo piece is Gordon Thomas, who has published a book apparently suggesting that , among other things, that Bin Laden may have working for China when he launched the 9/11 attacks.  (See the review section on the book, Seeds of Fire, at Amazon.com.)

Seeds of Fire is currently featured in the National Review Book Service as a "Revisionists Beware Special Sale," another indication that he's not exactly mainstream.  The Anti-Defamation League described him as a "[c]onspiracy theorist and sensationalizing author." (Conspiracy and Columbia, ADL.com 2003).

Though I'm not familiar enough with Thomas' work to judge his degree of reliability (or lack thereof), this Bin-Laden-as-Chinese-agent theory sounds concocted.

But the fact that a theory may be kooky doesn't mean the warhawks in the Pentagon and their network of friends at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and elsewhere aren't willing to use them.  Even Dick Cheney seems to have been influenced to some degree by AEI's favorite crackpot, Laurie Mylroie.

For what it's worth, El Mundo allowed the claim into print that a senior Pentagon official confimed the "October surprise" aspect of the story.  Even the best newspapers occasionally get conned.  But I'm willing to believe that a senior Pentagon official gave the statement to Thomas quoted in the El Mundo piece.

I don't attach any credibility to the "October surprise" portion of the story itself, though.  The basis for that claim is just way too thin, though I don't recall ever being accused of being too unwilling to expect unscrupulous behavior from the Bush administration.

But if there is a senior Pentagon official feeding information to a reporter with a reputation as a rightwing conspiracy theorist about China cooperating with Bin Laden against the United States, that fact might have some significance in itself.

If there's anything to this story, it's more likely to be that some warhawks in the Pentagon are promoting the idea of a China/Bin Laden cooperation than the "October surprise" aspect of it.