I played this story for laughs, mainly to fellow journalists, for a good long time. Some were baffled that the appointed head of a corrupt oil emirate would have expected a call from Campbell in the first place. I had no inside knowledge, but it's slightly less weird when you consider that Campbell testified as a witness at the international war crimes trial of the former Liberian president Charles Taylor, over allegations that the notorious butcher had gifted Campbell a pouch of blood diamonds after they met at a dinner party hosted by Nelson Mandela. From which we can only conclude that once you reach a certain level of fame, wealth, and/or power, everyone takes one another's calls. (It's this intuitive awareness that elites occupy an interconnected world of their own, one where the laws governing the rest of us are shrugged off, that is the wellspring of today's conspiracy singularity.)

XREF: Connects to theories of elite power and the anthropology of conspiracy beliefs — the idea that private worlds above the law breed suspicion. DEFINE: Defines the 'conspiracy singularity' as arising from intuitive awareness of elite interconnectedness.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 446