The Great WTO Pie Hoax
January 7, 2001

It's well known that some regions of cyberspace Internet chat rooms,
for instance are rife with poseurs and imaginary characters. But the
World Wide Web is also a breeding ground for more elaborate
deceptions, as demonstrated by the following cautionary tale about
gall and gullibility in the information age.

The story begins with www.gatt.org, which looks at first glance like
an official Web site of the World Trade Organization, the
five-year-old Switzerland-based successor to the organization that
oversaw the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Unfortunately for
the organizers of an October legal seminar on international trade in
Salzburg, Austria, a glance was all they gave it before clicking on
the "contact" link and sending a speaking invitation to Mike Moore,
the W.T.O.'s director-general.

Big mistake: it turns out the site is run by the Yes Men, a loose-knit
group of anti-free-trade activists that views hoaxes as a legitimate
weapon of protest.

Excerpts of what transpired follow, culled from e-mail correspondence
and faxes posted at
www.theyesmen.org/wto


It didn't take long for the Yes Men to accept the invitation in Mr. Moore's name, with a caveat:

Gentlemen,

Thank you for your kind invitation.

I may not be able to attend personally, but I would like very much to
send a substitute. Would this be possible? Please let me know and I
will begin the search process.

Thank you,
Mike Moore

The director of the seminar's sponsor was happy to oblige:

Dear Mr. Moore:

Michael Devine advises me that you wish to send a staff member to
speak at the 26-29 October conference in Salzburg.

If you will confirm name of the individual and contact information, I
will have further information sent.

Regards,
Dennis Campbell
Center for International Legal Studies

At this point, Charles Cushen, a computer programmer in Los Angeles who had been masquerading as Mr. Moore and "Alice Foley," Mr. Moore's secretary, created Andreas Bichlbauer (choosing the name at random from a Vienna phone book), and made travel arrangements for Dr. Bichlbauer and two "security agents," including a cameraman.

Dr. Bichlbauer raised eyebrows with his speech, titled "Trade Regulation Relaxation and Concepts of Incremental Improvement: Governing Perspectives from 1970 to the Present"


Dear Ms. Foley:

We were somewhat puzzled by Dr. Bichlbauer's participation at the
conference. . . .

The essential thrust of his speech appeared to be that Italians have a
lesser work ethic than the Dutch, that Americans would be better off
auctioning their votes in the presidential election to the highest
bidder and that the primary role of the W.T.O. was to create a
one-world culture.

In the late afternoon, a cameraman (I think it was the same one who
filmed Dr. Bichlbauer's speech) appeared at the hotel and sought to
interview our delegates. He said Dr. Bichlbauer had been hit in the
face with a pie outside the hotel and wanted to know if the delegates
thought Dr. Bichlbauer's speech had provoked the attack. . . .

Several of our delegates (including work-ethic impaired Italians)
approached me to express concern about the speech, the alleged pie
incident and the cameraman who sought interviews in the late
afternoon.

Your clarification will be appreciated.

Regards,
Dennis Campbell

Alice Foley's immediate reply:

Dennis Campbell,

Indeed you are correct, Dr. Bichlbauer was in fact "pied" after
speaking at the Salzburg C.I.L.S. conference. At present we are not
completely certain of all the details, but it appears that the
cameraman you mention had something to do with it. . . . This
cameraman . . . seems to have essentially been an agent provocateur
who planned the pieing from the start. . . .

We hope you understand that this sort of incident reflects primarily
the unfortunate circumstances under which the W.T.O. must accomplish
its work, and that our security can never be entirely adequate to the
situations we face.

Alice Foley

After another message from Mr. Campbell in which he reiterated that some delegates found Dr. Bichlbauer's remarks offensive or flippant, the doctor offered his side of the story:

Professor Campbell,

I was disappointed to hear from Alice Foley that some people in the
audience on Saturday disliked my lecture. . . . Those who were upset
by the lecture were clearly unreceptive to any message departing from
the simple W.T.O. "party line" as it is presented in larger arenas. At
this conference we hoped to examine this "party line" through
repackaging in a clearer and more carefully delineated fashion, for
the sake of more lucid examination and a greater awareness of "issue
extremes" for use in more politic descriptions those intended for the
consumption of larger blocs of the consuming public. . . .

Dr. Bichlbauer

Two days later, hoping to elicit further response, Mr. Cushen slipped again into his Mr. Moore persona:

Dear Professor Campbell:

I was dismayed to learn of your unfortunate experience with our
representative, Andreas Bichlbauer. . . . I will recommend that Dr.
Bichlbauer be required to attend a refresher course on public
speaking, communication and policy before any further appearances on
behalf of the W.T.O. . . .

However, having examined the presentation exhaustively, I am forced to
conclude that never in any particulars do Dr. Bichlbauer's statements
. . . depart from the spirit if not the precise letter of our
intentions and aims. That is, while we of course do not advocate
vote-selling or siesta-banning at the present time, it is quite true
that efficiency and the streamlining of culture and politics in the
interests of economic liberalization is at the core of the W.T.O.'s
programme, and such practices as described by Dr. Bichlbauer are
useful in clarifying the long-range interests of global development as
promoted by our organization and others.

Mike Moore

On Nov. 1, Alice Foley had more bad news for Professor Campbell:

Dear Dennis Campbell,

The situation has, I regret to say, somewhat deteriorated from an
already unpleasant state of affairs: Dr. Bichlbauer has contracted a
rather serious infection from the pie, which forensic analysis shows
contained an active bacillus agent. It is not certain whether foul
play was involved. . . . I know that this question will sound harsh,
but could any of the lawyers present have been angry enough at Dr.
Bichlbauer's lecture to do this? . . .

Alice Foley

On Nov. 6, using addresses collected in Salzburg, Alice Foley e-mailed six conference participants with the message that Dr. Bichlbauer was near death from his infection and concluding:

Please, please let us know if anything at the conference struck you as
strange, or if you can imagine anyone performing this masterpiece of
cowardice, that so threatens to delete Dr. Bichlbauer from our midst
in the prime of his usefulness.

A similar e-mail message sent two weeks later to 77 delegates elicited a range of responses, most indicating that the insult to Italian work habits had made the biggest impression.

Dr. Bichlbauer's death was announced via e-mail on Nov. 27.

The legal center's response on Nov. 29 provided the first clear sign that it finally recognized the hoax and asked the Yes Men to "let it rest."

Alice Foley issued the following pseudo-clarification to the delegates:

Those who found Dr. Bichlbauer's talk "peculiar," "puzzling" and so on
were alert to a situation that has only now become clear to our
overcentralized eyes: Dr. Bichlbauer was an impostor! . . . He, his
"security guard" and his "cameraman" . . . belong, it turns out, to an
anti-trade cabal called "The Yes Men," whose interests run exactly
counter to our own, and who will stoop to any level whatsoever to make
points. (The point they were attempting to make with this trickery,
according to the handwritten letter which we received by this
morning's post, had something to do with "corporate power" and
"democracy," though the syntax and handwriting of the letter are,
truth be told, too execrable to make much of. . . . It is of course
extremely embarrassing to us that we can have been conned, like common
dowagers, in this way. . . .

Postscript: A W.T.O. spokesman said last week that while his organization deplored the Yes Men's deceptive Web site and the hoax, it respects the nature of the Internet as a forum for free expression.

Mr. Cushen said "Mr. Moore" had recently received an invitation to a textile conference in Finland and that his group was hoping to scrape together the money needed to send a successor to Dr. Bichlbauer. "We think the ethical thing to do is to represent the W.T.O. more honestly than they represent themselves," he said.

"There are a thousand forms of subversion, all of them interesting.
But few, in my opinion, can equal the convenience and immediacy
of the cream pie." --
Noel Godin, European Master Entarteur


Thanks to: The Biotic Baking Brigade [coming soon to a pie-o-region near you]

Friends of the BBB
c/o POB 40130,
San Francisco, CA 94140,
Amerika

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