www.fromthewilderness.com
John
Judge: Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, so long
as you call yourself a coincidence theorist. -
Coalition On Political Assassinations (COPA) presentation,
2002
Philip
Berg: Conspiracy is among the most common legal categories
of crime – conspiracy to commit murder; conspiracy to
commit fraud, conspiracy to provide material support to
a terrorist act, and on and on. -International
Citizen’s Inquiry Into 9-11, Phase One: San Francisco
presentation, 2004
Greg
Palast: People tell me they don’t believe in conspiracy;
I tell them, look – I have the minutes of the meetings!
What more do you want? -Interview
John
Newman: Let me introduce myself. I’m a conspiracy theorist.-JFK
Lancer’s ‘November In Dallas’ conference presentation,
1999
Peter
Dale Scott: “If a nation decides to live by lies, it has
chosen a course of intellectual stagnation, and ultimately
of political decay.” -The Assassinations,
1975 (ix).
Kevin
Costner in Bull Durham: “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald
acted alone; I believe there ought to be a constitutional
amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter…”
E.
Martin Schotz: “One of the primary means of immobilizing
the American people politically today is to hold them
in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed
and nothing can be known…nothing of significance, that
is.” -History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control,
Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy
INTRODUCTION:
9-11, 11-22, AND THE STATE OF THE UNION
Let
me begin by saying that the United States is extraordinary
in that the idealism of our founding documents proceeded
straight from the 18th Century’s Enlightenment principles
of the universal rights of human beings. Though the Indian
genocide, the genocidal African slave trade, and the lack
of women’s suffrage tore gaping holes in the American
application of these principles, our Constitution remained
among the world’s best hopes for the achievement of equality,
opportunity, and civic peace. The French Revolution emulated
our own; the 1994 post-apartheid Constitution of South
Africa — one of the most beautiful documents of hope ever
conceived — was modeled on these same American documents,
and as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed
out, national liberation movements the world over (including
post-French Vietnam in 1945) have taken our Declaration
of Independence as the template of their own Declarations.
Rather than list each of the remarkable advances our democracy
has made — from the Bill of Rights to the Progressive
legislation of the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations,
to Robert Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 — let me
point out that each significant improvement was driven
by popular participation in civic life: in a word, democracy.
Dissidents
are patriotic critics — in the best cases, anti-nationalist
cosmopolitans — whose arguments have not yet won the day.
If ever the merits of their cases are established and
their ideals legitimated, others come to recognize the
urgent benevolence that motivated their dissent, and their
faces appear on postage stamps with those of Thom Paine,
Crazy Horse, and Paul Robeson. A critic is an interpreter
who uses his or her mind and heart to clarify a text or
a situation for the effective benefit of the larger public.
Political criticism is a vexed but noble attempt to think
past the limits of official opinion and earnestly diagnose
the legitimacy of our political institutions and their
occupants. Critics of the national security state are
marginalized as dreamers, sometimes brilliant in their
efforts at information gathering and critique, but finally
unable to dramatically change the brutal order of realpolitik
they denounce. The public they address is mostly indifferent,
powerless, and thoroughly distracted from issues of the
greatest possible relevance to their own well-being.
The
forces of violence, reaction, and American exceptionalism
can claim a long series of epochal triumphs, of which
I will name only the most egregious: Operation Paperclip,
which brought the Nazi Intelligence “community” into the
nascent CIA (thereby rescuing the most depraved murderers
in history from certain death at the hands of British
military tribunals); the National Security Act of 1947,
which established the CIA as a secret society of military
adventurism and political sabotage under the guise of
an intelligence-gathering body; the murders of President
Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, the Reverend Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr, which issued in a disastrous Vietnam War
that killed up to three million people and pitched the
U.S. economy into a permanent free-fall of debt; the Savings
and Loan Robbery, which did so much to bankrupt the vanishing
middle class; the 1990’s three trillion dollar theft under
the auspices of the departments of Defense and Housing
and Urban Development (HUD), which motivated America’s
international creditors to begin withdrawing their confidence
from the dollar; and the “velvet coup” of the fraudulent
presidential election of 2000, which openly discredited
the residual myth of popular sovereignty. But perhaps
11-22-63 and 9-11-01 are the deepest wounds they have
inflicted upon the body politic so far. These represent
two seizures of state power by the most violent elements
of the longstanding elites who make policy in the absence
of popular sovereignty and genuine legislative oversight.
In the long meantime, they have consolidated their power
and expanded their domain of operations and propaganda
with an inexorable momentum.
Policy
is no longer driven by leadership figures, but by consortia
of mutually interested elites. The forty years since 11-22
have seen exponential growth in defense spending as a
portion of the USG’s annual budget. Forty-six cents of
every tax dollar we pay goes to military debt payments,
salaries, deployments, and weapons stockpiling. This flood
of capital into the arms industry drives a domestic policy
of despair and a “foreign” policy of violence. Weapons
are expended so that they can be replaced; their manufacture
enriches Lockheed-Martin, the largest purveyor of lethal
weapons in the world, and its competitive partners. In
pursuit of new raw materials to seize and new markets
to monopolize, corporations and their clients drive policy
toward aggressive expansionism. CIA is the spearhead of
the war process, so its activity has been cloaked from
all genuine Congressional oversight. The beauty of the
CIA’s position is that it apparently always takes its
orders from the President, but for the most part it also
insures that the President orders roughly what CIA wants.
When he doesn’t do so, and insists on forming his own
intelligence apparatus inside the White House or the Pentagon
— as in the Nixon and G. W. Bush administrations, respectively
— the CIA is likely to destroy the administration. Whenever
that happens, the administration is unseated on the strength
of some nonviolent crime like a “third rate burglary”
or the disclosure of a CIA operative’s identity. Bombing
Cambodia or Afghanistan at the cost of thousands of lives
never ranks as an impeachable offense.
Only
a handful of Senators have endured the overwhelming personal
and political risk of applying even a kernel of real power
to the disciplining of the Intelligence “community”: Senators
Frank Church, Gary Hart, Richard Schweiker, John Kerry,
James Trafficant; Richard Shelby, and Charles Grassley
are among this small number.
Since
the Vietnam War, the diplomatic arm of the U.S. government
has withered into a propagandistic rubber-stamp instrument.
Whereas the Department of State was once so powerful that
its Secretary shaped foreign policy by reporting viable
options to the Chief Executive, today the Department has
been reduced to visa functions, information gathering,
and statute enforcement. But as we’ve seen, CIA regularly
overrides the visa authority of State (often with murderous
results), and intelligence agents of all sorts violate
the Arms Export Control Act at with an institutionalized
impunity. To view the heartbreaking laxity of this law,
see the page on the website of the State Department which
explains its mandate.[1]
One
more bitter irony is the CIA’s use of the State Department
as a hidden channel for its covert programs; more broadly,
State is a tool for the implementation of policies driven
by the lobbies from oil, arms, drugs, and construction.
If it were really a public (and not a private) institution,
the diplomatic arm of a democratic government, it would
advance diplomacy-based solutions to international crises[2].
Instead, private firms (e.g., Kellog, Brown and Root;
DynCorp; Halliburton; Bell; Bechtel; Boeing; etc.) and
their proxies in the NSA and NSC (e.g. Oliver North, Elliot
Abrams, John Poindexter, etc) and CIA (e.g. Ray Cline,
Laili Helms, etc.) wield it as one special sword-and-shield
in their vast tactical arsenal.[3] Colin Powel, the current
Secretary, is a military man whose rise to power began
with his cover-up of the Mi Lai massacre.[4] Where the
public perception of Powell’s role in the months leading
up to Gulf War II was that of a moderate who pushed for
diplomacy, at the crucial moment Powell neither strategized
for such a policy, nor resigned in protest: he became
the very spokesperson of the martial policy he had formerly
seemed to oppose. In doing so by means of false documents,
it’s been suggested that Powell made the State Department
look both servile and conniving. And he certainly committed
a repetition of the “moral suicide” that started his political
career.
So
much for diplomacy. As for an informed electorate, all
major American newspapers and television networks are
owned by defense corporations like G.E. The Permanent
Warfare State has absorbed the media into its own project,
neutralizing mainstream American journalism. Even the
largest and oldest Leftist journal, The Nation,
utterly fails the 9-11 test that any reliable news outlet
must pass. In this case, as in that of 11-22, journalistic
integrity can be measured by the frequency with which
the phrase “intelligence failures” appears in its pages.
As I’ve written elsewhere, crime and failure are not the
same thing.[5]
Elsewhere
on the Left, Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn seem
to me quite wrong about 9-11 and its significance, but
they are vocal and passionate critics of the long history
of global CIA / NSC / JCS violence and political sabotage.
Yet both writers argue that leadership figures count so
much less than the elites they represent, that it doesn’t
much matter who is in office. This kind of thinking prizes
independence more than insight; since everyone else quarrels
over who killed JFK and what it means, one can easily
find a fresh position by simply declaring that the assassination
itself is a red herring, the wrong place to look for an
understanding of politico-economic reality. A single hearing
of the American University Speech, a single reading of
NSAM-263, ought to persuade anyone so circumspect as Noam
Chomsky that unique officeholders do emerge, at
least once or twice per century.
By
the same token, Chomsky and Cockburn are important critics
of the crypto-fascism of the G.W. Bush administration.
But their insight is sometimes limited by their commitment
to a structural view of society. Admittedly, had it not
been for Adolph Hitler, Hermann Goering, and Heinrich
Himmler, some other successful fascists might well have
shattered the Weimar Republic and begun a domestic and
international reign of terror. But I believe that the
Nazi regime was staffed by especially damaged and talented
individuals whose capacity for sadistic destruction exceeded
that nearly-universal disposition demonstrated in Stanley
Millman’s obedience experiments and the Stanford Prison
simulation study. So it is with the neocons and most of
the executive branch in the G.W. Bush administration.
The now-famous Operation Northwoods provided for American
deaths, but on 9-11 those deaths ran into the thousands,
and most of the people murdered that day were well within
the ethnic and socio-economic identity with which their
actual killers identify to the most vulgar extremity of
white supremacy and social Darwinism. That’s not quite
typical, even among imperial dynasties.
Disputes
among critics are harmless compared to the government’s
assault on the public mind. Given what we now know about
the national and global consequences of this assassination,
our trouble in 2002 has grown more or less directly out
of 11-22-63. And in response to the pressures of recession,
the Patriot Act, endless war, and the events of 9-11-01
— in other words, in response to the dawning reality of
Peak Oil — the Political Justice movement is indeed growing,
and many of those drawn to it find themselves led on as
if by a specter to the 9-11 and / or the Kennedy Assassinations.
Whether their initial interest is in heroin traffic, CIA
black ops, police malfeasance, Constitutional history,
the Federal Reserve, US-Latin American economic partnership,
or any other aspect of the modern world, sooner or later
the myriad implications of these events become relevant,
and on looking at the evidence, another critic is born.
THE TERM
‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’
This phrase is among the tireless workhorses of establishment
discourse. Without it, disinformation would be much harder
than it is. “Conspiracy theory” is a trigger phrase, saturated
with intellectual contempt and deeply anti-intellectual
resentment. It makes little sense on its own, and while
it’s a priceless tool of propaganda, it is worse than
useless as an explanatory category.
“Theory”
is a term from Plato, derived from the Ancient Greek theorein,
“to see.” From it we get the word “theater.” Theory is
a conceptual overview of the way something works.
In science, the word refers to a guiding set of concepts
derived from testable hypotheses about a domain of facts
in nature or procedures in an art.[6]
When
the evidence is gathered together, some observer sees
it in such a way that it configures an hypothesis.
When
that hypothesis is verified by induction and experiment,
it can be gathered together with similar hypotheses from
analogous cases.
If we say, 9-11 was orchestrated by the bin Laden organization,
the Pakistani intelligence agency, and elements of the
neoconservative group that seized power in 2000, that’s
an hypothesis, derived logically from a set of documented
facts that constitute evidence. It isn’t a theory. It
can become part of a theory if it’s joined with other
hypotheses into a coherent descriptive pattern that can
help to predict future events in general terms.
For
instance, the amply demonstrated hypothesis that the 35th
President of the United States was murdered by a consortium
of interests including the CIA, Cuban exiles, organized
crime, and the military. 11-22 and 9-11 are examples of
premeditated murder by more than one person – in law,
they are cases of conspiracy to commit murder (and fraud,
and perjury, and treason). Taken together, they imply
a theory whose greatest expression is the work of Peter
Dale Scott, who coined the term deep politics:
“the constant, everyday interaction between the constitutionally
elected government and forces of violence, forces of crime,
which appear to be the enemies of that government.”[7]
Deep politics is a robust theory, a powerful explanatory
account of demonstrable phenomena; it applies to myriad
cases and offers a unified understanding of their causes
and meanings. Like Goethe’s conceptual account of color,
and like Newton’s rival account which refuted it, Scott’s
deep-political theory applies uniformly to the domain
it describes.
Conspiracy,
on the other hand, is a hypothesis about a particular
case at hand. The only rigorous meaning that the phrase
“conspiracy theory” can have would be that political crimes
involving more than one actor are usually exceptional
episodes unrelated to one another – rather than the ongoing,
systemic and unacknowledged relationships between authorities
and the criminals they are paid to hinder and to punish.
The
appeal of the phrase “conspiracy theory” lies in the slang
meaning of “theory”: unproven and even unprovable claims
about the way things get done in government and business.
But there are two problems here.
First, a theory is still rightly called a theory long
after it has been proven, even to the limits of human
understanding. Einstein’s theory of Relativity and Darwin’s
theory of evolution are incomplete, like every product
of human thought. But they are as certain as any grounds
we can give for them, as certain as the palpable facts
on which they rest. The public imagines that this word
“theory” implies confusion and controversy. It doesn’t.
The
second problem is this: in order for a theory to be worthy
of that name, it must be falsifiable. This is a
term invented by Karl Popper; it means that your description
of events has to be demonstrably true based on valid experiments
– or genuine evidence – that might otherwise have proven
it demonstrably false. Like the hypotheses that form its
bones and flesh, a theory must turn out to be either true
or false, or it’s not a theory. For instance, consider
the beautiful claim that the world is governed by a God
who rules by reward and punishment. Nothing observable
counts as evidence for or against the claim. If I say
“show me a sign,” an immediate lightning bolt on my head
is not evidence of a God any more than the absence of
a sign is evidence against it. Nothing can count as a
test, so theism is not a theory; it may be something wonderful,
but it’s something else. Relativity, however, is a theory
of the natural world, verified by experiments like Michaelson-Morley
which demonstrated its conformity to observable facts
– and had the experiments turned out differently, the
theory would have been falsified. The public thinks falsifiability
means that the theory can already be disproved and is
therefore wrong. It actually means that the theory is
either right or wrong, but not meaningless.
