The Dead Drop: October 5

STRAIGHT UP WTF:  ANI, which describes itself as “South Asia’s Leading Multimedia News Agency” reported this week that Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Mehmood Shah Qureshi, says Islamabad is open to discussing the 'issue' of Dr Shakil Afridi, who is in jail in Pakistan on charges of helping the U.S. track down Osama bin Laden.  His family has said that Afridi is in poor health, yet Arab News reports that the good doctor's review petition was once again adjourned.  So, just to recap: Pakistan - which said it didn't know that bin Laden was camped out in its own backyard - is still keeping a man it says helped the U.S. figure that out - in jail....Uh-huh.

DEEP STATE CONSPIRACY OF THE WEEK: It was inevitable, of course, that with all the talk about Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, someone was going to blame the CIA for something.  Conservative radio host Michael Savage stepped up and promoted an odd conspiracy theory which asked whether Ford is “tied to the CIA?”  The evidence?  She is a professor at an “off-brand university” which is down the street from Palo Alto, and allegedly heads up the CIA's internship program at Stanford. The claim also hinges on the fact that Ford’s brother used to work for a law firm called BakerHostetler which did work with Fusion GPS (of Russia collusion fame).  Unstated is that her brother, Ralph, left the firm six years before Fusion GPS was created.  The oddest claim, however, is that Ford is the granddaughter of Nicholas Deak, who worked with the CIA during the Cold War and died in 1985.  Except she is not.  Savage’s theory was then picked up by Alex Jones.  Another conspiracy theorist by the name of Rick Wiles, floated the theory that the CIA “brain-washed” Ford before her testimony asking “Did we just watch a CIA mind-control assassination, an assassination of somebody’s character, of their reputation?” The urban myth busting outfit Snopes.com looked into many of the charges and found them decidedly false in a very lengthy post. Among the threads in the conspiracy theory is that Ford’s father, Ralph Blasey II supposedly ran three CIA-front companies including Red Coats, Inc. – an office cleaning outfit.  Fiendishly clever, CIA! All those janitors emptying the trash are really intelligence collectors, eh? The Red Coats website says that Blasey is actually VP for business development….but close enough.