Most people can’t resist getting the details on the latest conspiracy theories, no matter how far-fetched they may seem. At the same time, many people quickly denounce any conspiracy theory as untrue … and sometimes as unpatriotic or just plain ridiculous. Let’s not forget all of the thousands of conspiracies out of Wall Street like Bernie Madoff and many others to commit fraud and extortion, among many crimes of conspiracy. USA Today reports that over 75% of personal ads in the paper and on craigslist are married couples posing as single for a one night affair. When someone knocks on your door to sell you a set of knives or phone cards, anything for that matter, do they have a profit motive? What is conspiracy other than just a scary way of saying “alternative agenda”? When 2 friends go to a bar and begin to plan their wingman approach on 2 girls they see at the bar, how often are they planning on lying to those girls? “I own a small business and am in town for a short while. Oh yeah, you look beautiful.”
Conspiracy theory is a term that originally was a neutral descriptor for any claim of civil, criminal or political conspiracy. However, it has come almost exclusively to refer to any fringe theory which explains a historical or current event as the result of a secret plot by conspirators of almost superhuman power and cunning. To conspire means “to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful end.” The term “conspiracy theory” is frequently used by scholars and in popular culture to identify secret military, banking, or political actions aimed at stealing power, money, or freedom, from “the people”.
To many, conspiracy theories are just human nature. Not all people in this world are honest, hard working and forthcoming about their intentions. Certainly we can all agree on this. So how did the term “conspiracy theory” get grouped in with fiction, fantasy and folklore? Maybe that’s a conspiracy, just kidding. Or am I?
Skeptics are important in achieving an objective view of reality; however, skepticism is not the same as reinforcing the official storyline. In fact, a conspiracy theory can be argued as an alternative to the official or “mainstream” story of events. Therefore, when skeptics attempt to ridicule a conspiracy theory by using the official story as a means of proving the conspiracy wrong, in effect, they are just reinforcing the original “mainstream” view of history, and actually not being skeptical. This is not skepticism, it is just a convenient way for the establishment view of things to be seen as the correct version, all the time, every time. In fact, it is common for “hit pieces” or “debunking articles” to pick extremely fringe and not very populated conspiracy theories. This in turn makes all conspiracies on a subject matter look crazy. Skeptics magazine and Popular Mechanics, among many others, did this with 9/11. They referred to less than 10% of the many different conspiracy theories about 9/11 and picked the less popular ones; in fact, they picked the fringe, highly improbable points that only a few people make. This was used as the “final investigation” for looking into the conspiracy theories. Convenient, huh?
In fact, if one were to look into conspiracy theories, they will largely find that thinking about a conspiracy is associated with lunacy and paranoia. Some websites suggest it as an illness. It is also not surprising to see so many people on the internet writing about conspiracy theories in a condescending tone, usually with the words “kool-aid,” “crack pot,” or “nut job” in their articulation. This must be obvious to anyone that emotionally writing about such serious matter insults the reader more than the conspiracy theorist because there is no need to resort to this kind of behavior. It is employed often with an “expert” who will say something along the lines of, “for these conspiracies to be true, you would need hundreds if not thousands of people to be involved. It’s just not conceivable.”
By Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed MA DPhil (Sussex)
hat tip: the Independent
Sunday, 7 February 2010
In his February Vanity Fair hitpiece, Christopher Hitchens argues that the post-9/11 world has driven Gore Vidal ‘Loco’ – the signs, he says, were always there, but 9/11 and events thereafter ‘accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant.’
Hitchens begins his missive with Gore’s take on 9/11 itself, in which he ‘insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks on New York and Washington and was seeking a pretext to build a long-desired pipeline across Afghanistan.’
And then Hitchens goes on, drawing on Vidal’s October 2009 interview with Johann Hari:
‘He openly says that the Bush administration was ‘probably’ in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would “certainly fit them to a T”; that Timothy McVeigh was “a noble boy,” no more murderous than Generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that “Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war” by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Coming a bit more up-to-date, Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as “a failure”; the country will soon take its place “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs”; President Obama will be buried in the wreckage – broken by “the madhouse” – after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan and the Chinese emerge supreme. We shall then be “the Yellow Man’s burden,” and Beijing will “have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport.”’
Gore Vidal has ‘descended straight to the cheap, and even to the counterfeit’, becoming a peddler of ‘crank-revisionist and denialist history’ in an ‘awful, spiteful and miserable way’. His writing and speaking witnesses ‘the utter want of any grace or generosity’, the ‘entire absence of any wit or profundity’, all replaced by ‘sarcastic, tired flippancy’ and ‘lugubrious resentment’. Even a cursory reading of Hitchens’s attack leaves a distasteful residue on the tongue – Gore Vidal is now eighty-five; has lost of the use of his legs; and lost his partner of 50 years. It is unsurprising that his irony is more cutting, his criticisms more caustic, and his tone more inflexible. Hitchens approach, however, is to relentlessly kick an old man when he’s down, rather than to engage critically and constructively with what his still sharp mind has learned.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and five co-defendants have been charged with conspiracy and related charges. Their trial, recently announced by president Barack Obama, will be held in federal court next year in New York. KSM has been labeled the “mastermind” behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and Obama has already declared him guilty. This article will analyze those conspiracy charges.
Conspiracy charges are very common in federal court, especially in the racist war on drugs, because it is easier to obtain convictions by positing a “conspiracy” than by proving defendants guilty of an actual crime. Now the federal government is using conspiracy charges in the racist war on terror.
Charging someone with “conspiracy” amounts to accusing that person of thoughtcrime. If a person imagines committing a crime, and discusses their thoughts with a second person who then mentions it to a third, all three people are vulnerable to conspiracy charges. This may be the case even when the first person is a government agent! A classic example is the case of the Liberty City 7, a hapless group of impoverished pot-smokers who, after being handed $50,000 by two undercover FBI agents, obligingly fantasized about blowing up the Sears Tower. In addition to indulging in pot-fueled verbal fantasies, these defendants supposedly committed one “overt act”: they bought boots. The feds had to stage three show trials before they finally got a conviction, making a mockery of the Constitution’s guarantee, “nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” The case of the Liberty City 7, and countless similar conspiracy cases in the federal courts, suggest that the world’s leading wild-eyed conspiracy theorists are federal prosecutors.
The charge sheet against KSM and his co-defendants lists alleged overt acts, numbered 1 to 169, which the government claims furthered the 9/11 conspiracy. For the government to win the case, they need to convince the jury that each defendant committed at least one overt act that furthered the alleged conspiracy. A quick perusal of the charge sheet, however, shows no evident connection between the vast majority of these overt acts and any alleged conspiracy to commit mass murder.
But to be cleared of all 169 overt acts, the defendants’ best strategy may be to force the government to prove that the posited “Osama and 19 hijackers” conspiracy actually took place. Hundreds of expert witnesses (many listed here) are available to prove that it did not. Evidence that the 19 alleged hijackers were framed, discussed in Jay Kolar’s scholarly article “What We Now Know About the Alleged 9/11 Hijackers” and in the works of David Ray Griffin, suggests that the current defendants may also have been framed. Intelligence agencies and associated criminal networks routinely frame patsies to take the blame for terrorist acts, assassinations, and similar crimes (Webster Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror).
In 1994, several months before the first commercial web-browser software launched the popular explosion of the world-wide web, R. J. Rummel’s book, Death by Government, was published. Bigeye.com gave it a separate webpage. A quick review of this book’s chapter headings underscores the fact that a murder of 3,000 or so people resulting from governmental activity (if that is the case of 9/11) would be an exceedingly small “drop in the bucket” in the over-all scheme of things.
Persons who are curious about what may or may not have happened on Sept. 11, 2001 must separate evidence from narrative. Because the 9/11 narrative has been strongly established, an unbiased researcher must not begin with any “official” narrative (one that tells you what happened). Start from scratch by putting aside all aspects of the narrative you have seen and heard on TV or read in mainline news sources. This is what THESE PEOPLE have done.
I know your initial response: “What about (phone calls, ‘hijacker’ tape, 19 flight-school Muslim terrorists …”). Many of us have been asking questions, perhaps the same ones you have, and seeking answers for several years. I’d like to recommend to you a recent book, The Hidden History of 9/11, edited by Paul Zarembka. Unless your mind is closed (“I know [the official story] must be true ’cause the government tells me so”), before you read the book spend time with bigeye.com’s 911 links. If you know little of the real 911, you can easily educate yourself by watching videos on THIS PAGE.
When you grasp the WHY of 9/11 you will have less emotional resistance to discovering who murdered over 3,000 of our citizens. The late Aaron Russo’s documentary videos offer a broad theory of the WHY. They need to be seen, although it seems unrealistic that a controlling oligarchy would risk employing technical expertise to execute 911. A more plausible theory, starting from CUI BONO, (Who Benefits? – the Latin starting argument in determining guilt) was propounded at the end of 2003 by Professor Paul J. Balles. Motive and benefit may be shared by both the guilty and the innocent. To accomplish a sophisticated event like 911 requires means and opportunity, as well as motive (benefit).
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