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2171Faut-il ou ne faut-il pas s’intéresser au “complot”, disons d’une façon générale? Drôle de question. On peut lire par ailleurs, dans notre rubrique Analyse, quelques éléments de réponse de notre part.
Voici deux textes qui abordent cette question, qui serviront à compléter notre dossier. Il s’agit non seulement de textes contestataires des thèses officielles, — il le faut, sans quoi aucune discussion n’est possible autour du concept de “complot” puisque ce concept recouvre le vide, — mais surtout de textes qui s’emploient à la mise en perspective de la notion de “complot” dans la réalité informationnelle présente.
. • Un texte du journaliste et chroniqueur John Laughland, dans The Spectator du 17 janvier 2004 (accès payant), également disponible sur Antiwar.com. Le titre nous dit à peu près tout sur l’orientation choisie par Laughland : « I believe in conspiracies ».
• Le second article est de Mary Maxwell, Ph.D., une scientifique et activiste politique. L’article date du 15 novembre 2005, sur OnLine Journal. Elle s’attache à la question de la présence sur Internet des théories dites “complotistes” à propos de l’attaque du 11 septembre 2001.
John Laughland says the real nutters are those who believe in al-Qa’eda and weapons of mass destruction, — The Spectator, 17 January 2004.
Believing in conspiracy theories is rather like having been to a grammar school: both are rather socially awkward to admit. Although I once sat next to a sister-in-law of the Duke of Norfolk who agreed that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, conspiracy theories are generally considered a rather repellent form of intellectual low-life, and their theorists rightfully the object of scorn and snobbery. Writing in the Daily Mail last week, the columnist Melanie Phillips even attacked conspiracy theories as the consequence of a special pathology, of the collapse in religious belief, and of a ‘descent into the irrational’. The implication is that those who oppose ‘the West’, or who think that governments are secretive and dishonest, might need psychiatric treatment.
In fact, it is the other way round. British and American foreign policy is itself based on a series of highly improbable conspiracy theories, the biggest of which is that an evil Saudi millionaire genius in a cave in the Hindu Kush controls a secret worldwide network of ‘tens of thousands of terrorists’ ‘in more than 60 countries’ (George Bush). News reports frequently tell us that terrorist organisations, such as those which have attacked Bali or Istanbul, have ‘links’ to al-Qa’eda, but we never learn quite what those ‘links’ are. According to two terrorism experts in California, Adam Dolnik and Kimberly McCloud, this is because they do not exist. ‘In the quest to define the enemy, the US and its allies have helped to blow al-Qa’eda out of proportion,’ they write. They argue that the name ‘al-Qa’eda’ was invented in the West to designate what is, in reality, a highly disparate collection of otherwise independent groups with no central command structure and not even a logo. They claim that some terrorist organisations say they are affiliated to bin Laden simply to gain kudos and name-recognition for their entirely local grievances.
By the same token, the US-led invasion of Iraq was based on a fantasy that Saddam Hussein was in, or might one day enter into, a conspiracy with Osama bin Laden. This is as verifiable as the claim that MI6 used mind control to make Henri Paul crash Princess Diana’s car into the 13th pillar of the tunnel under the Place de l’Alma. With similar mystic gnosis, Donald Rumsfeld has alleged that the failure to find ‘weapons of mass distraction’, as Tony Blair likes to call them, shows that they once existed but were destroyed. Indeed, London and Washington have shamelessly exploited people’s fear of the unknown to get public opinion to believe their claim that Iraq had masses of anthrax and botulism. This played on a deep and ancient seam of fear about poison conspiracies which, in the Middle Ages, led to pogroms against Jews. And yet it is the anti-war people who continue to be branded paranoid, even though the British Prime Minister himself, his eyes staring wildly, said in September 2002, ‘Saddam has got all these weapons ...and they’re pointing at us!’
In contrast to such imaginings, it is perfectly reasonable to raise questions about the power of the secret services and armed forces of the world’s most powerful states, especially those of the USA. These are not ‘theories’ at all; they are based on fact. The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other US secret services spend more than $30,000,000,000 a year on espionage and covert operations. Do opponents of conspiracy theories think that this money is given to the Langley, Virginia Cats’ Home? It would also be churlish to deny that the American military industry plays a very major role in the economics and politics of the US. Every day at 5 p.m., the Pentagon announces hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to arms manufacturers all over America — click on the Department of Defense’s website for details — who in turn peddle influence through donations to politicians and opinion-formers.
It is also odd that opponents of conspiracy theories often allow that conspiracies have occurred in the past, but refuse to contemplate their existence in the present. For some reason, you are bordering on the bonkers if you wonder about the truth behind events like 9/11, when it is established as fact that in 1962 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer, tried to convince President Kennedy to authorise an attack on John Glenn’s rocket, or on a US navy vessel, to provide a pretext for invading Cuba. Two years later, a similar strategy was deployed in the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident, when US engagement in Vietnam was justified in the light of the false allegation that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on a US destroyer. Are such tactics confined to history? Paul O’Neill, George Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, has just revealed that the White House decided to get rid of Saddam eight months before 9/11.
Indeed, one ought to speak of a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about the role of secret services in politics. This is especially true of the events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is the height of irresponsibility to discuss the post-communist transition without extensive reference to the role of the spooks, yet our media stick doggedly to the myth that their role is irrelevant. During the overthrow of the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, on 22 November 2003, the world’s news outlets peddled a wonderful fairy-tale about a spontaneous uprising — ‘the revolution of roses’, CNN shlockily dubbed it — even though all the key actors have subsequently bragged that they were covertly funded and organised by the US.
Similarly, it is a matter of public record that the Americans pumped at least $100 million into Serbia in order to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and huge sums in the years before. (An election in Britain, whose population is eight times bigger than Yugoslavia’s, costs about two thirds of this.) This money was used to fund and equip the Kosovo Liberation Army; to stuff international observer missions in Kosovo with hundreds of military intelligence officers; to pay off the opposition and the so-called ‘independent’ media; and to buy heavily-armed Mafia gangsters to come and smash up central Belgrade, so that the world’s cameras could show a ‘people’s revolution’.
At every stage, the covert aid and organisation provided by the US and British intelligence agencies were decisive, as they had been on many occasions before and since, all over the world. Yet for some reason, it is acceptable to say, ‘The CIA organised the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran in 1953’, but not that it did it again in Belgrade in 2000 or Tbilisi in 2003. And in spite of the well-known subterfuge and deception practised, for instance, in the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s, people experience an enormous psychological reluctance to accept that the British and American governments knowingly lied us into war in 2002 and 2003. To be sure, some conspiracy theories may be outlandish or wrong. But it seems to me that anyone who refuses to make simple empirical deductions ought to have his head examined.
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
By Mary Maxwell, Ph.D., 15 November 2005, OnLine Journal, USA
How long must we wait to judge the validity of the September 11th conspiracy theories that have floated around on the Internet for years? I believe there is a way to grant status and authority to the many excellent reports and analyses whose only sin is that they appear in electronic form instead of newsprint. Moreover, we should start this process right away. After all, if our government is behaving maliciously, we need to know it, communicate it to others, and act on it with urgency. This will require that we make judgments about September 11th now and not wait for ‘perfect proof.’
Here is the system I propose for rating the credibility of online journalism. Without a doubt, there is plenty of junk on the Internet; as always, we must jettison the junk. Then, casting our eyes to the universe of non-junk material on the Internet, we should assess the relative worth of what we see there. Two newly coined terms, trutho and truthilla, can help us grade the material.
Let us append the label trutho to a report on the Internet, if we would accept a similar report in a newspaper as being true. (The news reporter passed through some sort of vetting procedure before getting published, which cannot be assumed of an at-home Internet writer.) Trutho, then, should imply a basic degree of reliability. The standards are not as demanding as, say, those that a court applies to evidence or that a lab scientist must use for measuring.
The term truthilla will be applied to those statements on the Internet that an individual or organization has put forward, but which await confirmation or refutation. In other words, it is perfectly legitimate to speculate, to hypothesize, and to proffer bits of data that may be of some benefit to readers. Why ridicule a writer because she fails to take her idea to completion? Truthilla, then, is a little truth, or a part of the truth. Again I say, it is not junk.
There is nothing to prevent an author from declaring, “this is trutho” or “this is truthilla” regarding his own work. Since he would be awarding himself a seal of approval, readers must still be critical of his writing. So what does a writer gain by labeling his work trutho? It is not the writer that gains, but the whole Internet community. Once we show confidence in our medium, we can stop accepting the stigma, which the mixed quality of the Internet conferred on us.
The inside-job theory concerning September 11th – which accuses the government of collusion with the ‘hijackers’ – is already backed up by hundreds of trutho pages on the Internet. Almost any reasonable person would be persuaded by this denuded-of-junk material. Luckily, there is a good structure to the research that was contributed by many people over the four years since 2001. The main four parts of that structure are as follows:
• speculation as to motive. E.g., the government conjured up a fearsome enemy, Osama, because that would give the green light for military invasion of Afghanistan, and it would prepare Americans to surrender many of their political freedoms;
• evidence that suggests insider foreknowledge. E.g., the telltale fact that Larry Silverstein leased the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers only six weeks before the event and set himself up for large reimbursement by insurance companies, and the fact that many FBI whistleblowers claim that the White House obstructed their pre-9/11 trailing of suspected terrorists;
• the flimsiness of the official story. E.g., the government’s highly implausible claim that NORAD, with its superb surveillance system, lost track of four planes, and the allegation that someone found the passport of one of the hijackers on the ground in New York – a miraculous occurrence if it fell from a burning plane;
• lack of any proper investigation or prosecutions. E.g., the official 9/11 Commission did not require sworn testimony from Vice President Cheney, and the firefighters’ request for a proper incident report has gone unheeded. Even public debate was suppressed by dubbing it ‘unpatriotic’ or ‘paranoid.’
More evidence can be found, in abundance, at websites such as the Center for Cooperative Research and the Centre for Research on Globalization.
I do not aim to be the person who coordinates the whole September 11th argument. I merely want to highlight the intellectual respectability of Internet work, such as the above. It’s trutho. The word truthilla would be an appropriate label for many of the bits and pieces. If only one FBI agent had ever questioned the activities at a flight school, her report of that, which is a truthilla, would have ended up on the cutting room floor. (Note: even on the cutting room floor it still has truthilla quality, except now it is not going to be used.)
I feel no embarrassment in saying that I accept the inside-job theory. To me it makes perfect sense. Once I have admitted this, however, I am forced to move to the next stage and face the truly frightening question, “What should we do now that our government seems to be our violent enemy?” For the moment, let us look at one more conspiracy theory that has been canvassed on the Internet.
In March 1981, shortly after Pres. Reagan took office, he was the target of an assassin’s bullet, which missed his heart by less than an inch. Was this event, in reality, a bold coup d’etat attempt by his vice president, G. H. W. Bush? Here are some of the items I have read on the Internet about this: 1) John Hinckley, the person who fired the shot at Pres. Reagan, was a friend of Neil Bush, the son of the vice president. (Strictly speaking, it is John’s brother Scott, who is pals with Neil.) 2) Another shot came from the window of the hotel. 3) Pres. Reagan wrote in his memoirs that he felt the pain near his ribs only after the Secret Service man had bundled him into the limousine. 4) That limousine arrived at the hospital 15 minutes later than another car that left at the same time, the excuse being that the driver, a man based in Washington, D.C., had got lost in Washington, D.C. 5) Hinckley’s motive for attempting to kill Reagan was, supposedly, that he had a crush on the actress Jodie Foster and wanted to impress her. 6) The senior Bushes and senior Hinckleys changed their stories twice in 24 hours as to whether the two families knew each other. 7) Hinckley pleaded ‘not guilty’ by reason of insanity. 8) His psychiatrist was from Tavistock Clinic in England, home of the infamous experiments on mind control, which can be used to program assassins (‘Manchurian candidates’).
As to the question of whodunit, there is no machine that can process the above information and yield a definitive answer. It falls to the mind of the individual to make a judgment. The first thing I did when considering the above facts, was to evaluate my sources. Much of the information had come from George Bush: An Unauthorized Biography by Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, which is available in full on the Internet. The publisher, Executive Intelligence Review, gets its funding from Lyndon LaRouche. I take LaRouche to be a very intelligent man, but he has developed a cult around himself, which makes me wary. So I double-sourced the information, e.g., by checking Reagan’s memoirs as to the timing of the pain in his chest.
I also summoned the courage to attend a conference in Hartford, Connecticut, presented by middle-aged survivors of government mind control. There, I met the author Kathleen Sullivan (a retired assassin) and purchased her book, Unshackled. I also met Carol Rutz, author of A Nation Betrayed, in which she details the torture she received at the hands of Dr. Josef Mengele -- not at Auschwitz, but in America in the 1950s! (Note: In 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued an apology for having let Mengele escape from a displaced persons camp.) It seemed to me that these two women spoke with credibility. Now I am even more inclined to accept the coup d’etat interpretation of the March 1981 attempted assassination of Reagan.
Interestingly, I have found an updated report on Hinckley that says he became eligible for release from the hospital after many years, but the release was denied. Why? Because the staff had found a letter that he had recently composed to Jodie. For my money, that means that the Bushes cannot afford to let him out into free society, where he may be questioned by those who suspect that his role was that of a mind-controlled patsy. As to why the elder Bush may have ‘needed’ to perform a coup d’etat, many recent books, such as Joseph Trento’s Prelude to Terror and Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith’s The Octopus claim that the then vice president was overseeing a massive importation of illegal drugs.
Would that I did not believe the coup d’etat theory! Would that I could accept the Arab hijacker explanation of September 11th! Would that I were not scared out of my wits right now! If the father of the current president goes in for untimely succession to office, and if the current president is comfortable with the ghosts of 3,000 New Yorkers, then I need to rethink my whole world. Quite frankly, I have lost interest in planning my spring garden party.
Mary Maxwell, Ph.D., P.O. Box 4307, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA, is a political scientist. She can be emailed as ‘mary’ at her website marymaxwell.us She hereby permits anyone to distribute this article provided it is unaltered and credits the author.
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
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