Special Report: Running scared

[nolabels]

Running scared

Bin Laden was captured long ago, Reagan's death was hushed up and the coming election has been fixed. Jonathan Raban on how the White House's obsession with secrecy has turned America into a nation of conspiracy theorists

Wednesday July 21, 2004
The Guardian

Dinnertime is the hour of the conspiracy theory here in Seattle. I've lost count of the times I've been told - always on excellent, but unnameable authority - that Osama bin Laden is already in American hands and that the Bush administration is waiting for the right moment to announce his capture. Ronald Reagan's body was on ice for many months, and his death was only announced when it became necessary to drive Abu Ghraib off the front page. Everybody knows, or thinks they know, that the administration will manipulate the intricate bells and whistles of homeland security to ensure the president's re-election. If terrorists don't strike in the run-up to November 2 (as most people assume they will) the level of alert will be jigged up to red, arrests will be made, the country will be declared saved from an evil plot and mass casualties, and Bush will storm past Kerry in the polls.

The latest theory comes hot from the mouths of anonymous agents in the Pakistan security service: the White House is putting immense pressure on the Musharraf regime to deliver "high-value targets", in the shape of Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, on July 26, 27, or 28, to spectacularly eclipse the opening of the Democratic party convention in Boston. Or, if that's too tall an order, they must be caught before polling day. My informant tells me that a senior Pakistani general, recently on a visit to DC, said: "If we don't find these guys by the election, they're going to stick this whole nuclear mess up our
(snip)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1265652,00.html

[ewagner]

1. ...an odd thing about conspiracy theories....

some are correct.

[Emillereid]

6. I'm sure there must be some -- but just now I can't

think of any conspiracy theories that later turned out to be true. Inform me.

[Qutzupalotl]

7. The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

We know the details thanks to David Brock and The Hunting of the President.

[Champion Jack]

8. conspiracy theories that later turned out to be true:

Bush allowed Saudi nationals including members of the Bin Laden Family to leave the country after 9-11.
................................................................

[starroute]

9. It's like the old rhyme about treason

Treason doth never prosper.
What's the reason?
Why, when it prospers,
None dare call it treason.

Conspiracy theories are much the same. When they turn out to be true, nobody calls them conspiracy theories anymore.

[Upfront]

10. Watergate

Was rumored for months and turned out to be true.

[Emillereid]

12. I meant a conspiracy theory more in line with a secret and nefarious

undertaking like people have suggested here regarding 9/11, keeping someone on ice and then bringing them out at an opportune time, etc. Something that seemed like one thing, but was in fact something else.

[stickdog]

17. You mean like Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Operation

Northwoods, the sinking of the Lusitania, ...

-The "November Surprise:" Republican National Committee
agents negotiate with the Ayhatolla in secret to delay
the release of the Iranian embassy hostages.

-The constant exaggeration of Soviet power by the intelligence
community. Wasn't everyone shocked when the Soviet Union fell?

In a good history book you will find:

-The Tea Pot Dome Scandal
-The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"
-The XYZ Affair
-The "ULTRA" secret (For other code breaking, read "The Codebreakers.")
-The Zimmerman Telegram
-The Gun Powder Plot
-The Manhattan Project (A very large secret kept from the public.)
-The Newburgh Conspiracy (http://www.revwar75.com/ob/newburgh.htm)


You can sometimes get a 'two in one' conspiracy:

-John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry: His 'army' hid
unnoticed at the nearby Kennedy farm for months. He was
financed by a cabal known as the "Secret Six."

-The World War II effort to conceal the D-Day invasion sites:
both "The Man Who Never Was" and "Patton's fake army" were
sub-conspiraces.

Assassination plots on:
Julies Caesar, Hitler, Castro, . . .

The Magna Carta and the U.S. Declaration of Independence
were both conceived under conspiratorial conditions.

If you really want an endless nest of conspiracies built
upon other conspiracies, try a good history of the Russian
revolution. However, you want proven conspiracies, and the
facts of the Russian revolution are still hotly debated today.
It is just too big a tangled web to untangle.

[Emillereid]

20. You convinced me!

Do you think some of the conspiracy theories out and about now will stand up. LIHOP or MIHOP? Another 9/11? Osama on ice till a more opportune time? Iran being set up -- that one seems so obvious, it probably doesn't qualify as a conspiracy.

[doctorbombeigh]

13. Quite a few have turned out to be true...

JFK assasination (even Congress couldn't support the magic bullet)
Iran/Contra
Watergate

All were "wacky conspiracy" theories at one time, but then they turned out to be accurate.

[merh]

15. Okay the mall bomber that was arrested in November and

detained for months until Ashwipe decided that the admin needed a distraction so they unsealed his indictment in June wasn't exactly OBL, but it was a notorious terra plot thwarted by the admin months after the actual thwart!

Can't blame folks for doubting this crazy bunch of rethugs!

[stickdog]

16. Iran-Contra, Arms for hostages, Gulf of Tonkin, the Holocaust, CIA

drug running, ...

Need I go on? Because I can fill the page here.

[Zorra]

14. U.S. forgives $495 mil in loans to Pakistan

Indeed.

Saturday, July 17, 2004 at 09:02 JST
ISLAMABAD — The United States on Friday canceled $495 million in external debt owed by Pakistan under an agreement signed in the capital by representatives of the two governments.

U.S. Ambassador Nancy Powell and Finance Ministry official Waqar Masood Khan signed the agreement in a ceremony at the ministry. (Kyodo News)

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=7&id=305844

[gratuitous]

2. You think if they have Reagan die again anyone will notice?

I mean, you and I will here at DU, but you can just see the networks, cable outlets and newsweeklies doing a monthly homage to St. Ronnie?

Considering the way the popular media still jump whenever someone in this corrupt administration shouts wolf, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Or maybe Poppy will get offed? Nothing like the grieving son to pull the tear-jerker and sympathy votes.

[lovuian]

3. All those Democrats in one place!!!

:tinfoilhat:
this Democratic convention is going to really hurt !!!

So ya I think the Bushites are going to be going crazy wanting to pull a surprise....

[Seabiscuit]

4. Strange...

I recall thinking Ronnie's brain was "on ice" from 1980-1988. Perhaps they just froze him from the neck down after he retired.

[nolabels]

5. Yea, It is a very special report

Remember smoking don't cancer and is not addictive





http://www.brownandwilliamson.com/index_sub2.cfm?Page=/GC/index.cfm%3FID%3D177%26Sect%3D4

btw I didn't go to the secret information, I don't have clearance :hurts:

[dumpster_baby]

11. "Bush-Cheney 04--The Last Vote You'll Ever Have To Cast!"

On May 26 - a black day for sallow-skinned grocers and news vendors - the attorney general, John Ashcroft, flanked by FBI director, Robert S Mueller, called a press conference to tell the nation of some "disturbing intelligence" that he'd recently received: preparations for an attack on the mainland US were 90% complete; likely targets included the upcoming G8 summit in Georgia, July 4 celebrations, and the Democratic and Republican conventions in Boston and New York. Al-Qaida intended to "hit America hard". Mueller produced seven mugshots - six were of men of, as they say, Middle Eastern appearance - and told us to keep a sharp lookout for these "armed and dangerous" characters. For a few hours, the country shivered in anticipation of the horror about to descend on it, and phone lines to the FBI were jammed with excited descriptions of neighbourhood news vendors and grocers.

Yet the colour-coded alert system remained at yellow, and within the next couple of days it became clear that Ashcroft's disturbing new intelligence was many weeks old, and that much of it came from a discredited source - an Islamist propaganda site on the internet well known to journalists for its daily stream of bloodcurdling boasts. Because Ashcroft had trespassed on the turf of homeland security chief Tom Ridge, and his freelance terror warning wasn't supported by the rest of the administration, we caught a rare glimpse of government Wizard-of-Ozzery at work. Ashcroft, it turned out, knew no more than the rest of us. Like us, he or his flunkies passed their time surfing the net. When he told us that evidence for his grim warning had been "corroborated on a variety of levels", did he mean anything more than that it could be found on more than one website?

[KoKo]

18. "Conspiracy" has taken on the same aura as "Liberal." In fact

a conspiracy can be folks with same aims conspiring to purchase, live together, or do what either innocent folks can conspire to do to achieve a goal.

The sinister application of "Conspiracy" and of the word "Liberal," seems to be what Repugs spend their life doing. Shading a dictionary definition of a word into a "common usage" which is defined by RW Repug "operatives" as a talking point to undercut their opponents.

Sad..how they misuse language to suit their own purposes.

[glitch]

19. what's even sadder is when otherwise intelligent people buy into their

definitions. Here are some more conspiracies that turned out to be true:

Savings and Loan Bailout
BCCI

Oh and then there was that little conspiracy to commit vote fraud in Florida in 2000.

edited to add: remember when the 'Project for a New American Century' was an internet conspiracy theory? That's what Tony Blair called it.

edited again to add:

Enron
Texas energy companies fraud against California