1. Great post on how wrong it is to dismiss an idea because ‘it’s a conspiracy theory’:
“History is full of examples of powerful people conspiring to increase their wealth and power at the expense of the masses. When they do that, they almost invariably try to cover up their misdeeds by establishing “official” stories to hide the truth. And our country has by no means been immune to this phenomenon, as I have discussed in several previous posts.
Because DUers are in general much more informed and open minded about these things than most Americans, they are usually much more inclined than most Americans to be skeptical of “official” stories propagated by their government, corporate news media, or other sources of elite opinion.
Given both the motive and capacity of the powerful to increase their own power at the expense of everyone else, our country and the world need people who have the capability of being skeptical of “official” government accounts. Indeed, that is the main reason why our Founding Fathers created the First Amendment to our Constitution. We need a free and independent press who refuse to take government (or any powerful institution or corporation) at its word, but rather that will routinely take what the powerful say with a grain of salt and investigate their claims in an attempt to find the truth.
William Rivers Pitt made a similar point in his book, “The Greatest Sedition Is Silence”. In that book he discusses a grave conspiracy theory (not to be discussed in this post) that involves the U.S. government. He notes that people who voice ideas like that tend to be excoriated as “unpatriotic”. But in reality it is those who are willing to question our government when it is wrong who care most about our country and constitute some of the most valuable resources that our nation has.
These are some of the reasons why it is very frustrating to me when those of us who challenge the accepted, “official” view of events are excoriated as “conspiracy theorists” in the most pejorative sense of the word. Those who excoriate us in this way define “conspiracy theorist” as those who are exceptionally inclined to believe alternative accounts of the “official story”, in the absence of any credible evidence to support those beliefs, because they are paranoid, gullible, or stupid.
In support of the pejorative definition of a “conspiracy theorist”, some have said that our exceptional beliefs or claims demand exceptional proof. But my contention is that many of our “exceptional” beliefs or claims for which we are labeled “conspiracy theorists” are in reality not so exceptional. In the lead up to the Iraq War, the claim that the Bush administration lied to the American people to justify that war was deemed an exceptional claim (and unpatriotic or treasonous). And many people today still feel that a belief that our government was complicit in President Kennedy’s assassination is an exceptional belief. But why should such beliefs be considered exceptional – and therefore demanding of substantially more proof than the “official” story? Given a good familiarity with history, it seems to me that a benign motive for the invasion of a sovereign country, or a lone assassin of a popular leader should be considered the more exceptional beliefs…
Vincent Bugliosi as an archetypical example of anti-“conspiracy theorist” bias
I have a great deal of respect for Vincent Bugliosi because of his stands on both the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, which made George W. Bush president in 2000, and on Bush’s lies that got us into the Iraq War. Bugliosi is more outspoken on those issues than any other prominent writer, going so far a to advise that the Supreme Court justices responsible for the Bush v. Gore decision be tried for treason and that Bush himself be tried for murder for leading us into a fraudulently based and completely unnecessary war.
Bugliosi’s excellent book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder”, drips with contempt for Bush on almost every page, as he argues vehemently that George W. Bush should be prosecuted for murder, for purposely and with malice aforethought, lying our country into a needless war against a nation that posed no danger to us whatsoever.
Bugliosi’s disparaging of those who question the official 9/11 story
Yet, surprisingly, Bugliosi disparages those whose opinion of Bush is just a teeny bit worse than his own. Referring to George W. Bush’s statement that “Had I known that there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack”, Bugliosi writes:
But other than some nuts on the far left who were loony enough to actually believe that Bush was complicit in 9/11, shouldn’t this go without saying?
I find it so weird that he should toss out a gratuitous insult at us on the “loony left” in the midst of his accusations of mass murder against George Bush. On the one hand he accuses Bush of the murder of thousands of American soldiers in his effort to advance his fraudulently based war, and yet at the same time he says that it should “go without saying” that Bush “would have moved mountains” to stop an attack that served to justify his war. Why should that “go without saying”? Because the attack killed thousands of Americans? Bugliosi already accused Bush of maliciously murdering thousands of Americans. Yet, so certain is he that Bush wouldn’t purposely allow a few thousand additional Americans to die, that anyone who disagrees with him on that point is “loony”.
…
The marginalization of those who seek the truth
I’ve said it before: I believe the major reason for the marginalization of those who refuse to accept the “official” version of events is that if people knew more about the reality of those events, the seeds of rebellion to the agenda of the wealthy and the powerful would be sown. In the run-up to the Iraq War, our corporate news media utterly failed to expose it for the fraud that it was because powerful interests in our country wanted that war. The U.S. Senate rejected the proposed National Standards for United States History by a vote of 99-1 because, as Lynn Cheney put it, the document contained “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, and a disparaging of the West. And how much faith in their government would Americans lose if they knew that it was complicit in the assassination of President Kennedy – or worse?
But it’s not just the powers that be who insist on disparaging those who disagree with them. Through their never-ending propaganda they spread their attitudes throughout our country. The example of Vincent Bugliosi, discussed above, is a good example of that.”
2. What a surprise:
“ Radical Dutch anti-immigrant party has US ties“
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/05/radical-dutch-anti-immigrant-party-has-us-ties/
3. This is awful, and Britain has no search and seizure protections:
“Police State Measures in the UK: Police ‘arrest innocent youths for their DNA’, officer claims
Hundreds of teenagers are having their DNA taken by police in case they commit crimes later in life, an officer has disclosed.
Officers are targeting children as young as 10 with the aim of placing their DNA profiles on the national database to improve their chances of solving crimes, it is claimed.
The alleged practice is also described as part of a “long-term crime prevention strategy” to dissuade youths from committing offences in the future.
Civil liberty campaigners have condemned the tactic of as “diabolical” and said it showed contempt for children’s freedom.
A Metropolitan Police officer made the claims after figures were released showing that 386 under-18s had their DNA taken and stored by police last year in Camden, north London.
The officer said: “Have we got targets for young people who have not been arrested yet? The answer is yes.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13882
4. “What the new Jim Comey torture emails actually reveal
It’s worth noting that all of the officials involved in these events — including Comey — are right-wing ideologues appointed by George Bush. That’s why they were appointed. The fact that Comey was willing to go along with approval of these tactics when used individually — just as is true of his willingness to endorse a modified version of Bush’s NSA warrantless eavesdropping program in the face of FISA — hardly proves that there was a good-faith basis for the view that these individual tactics were legal.
But the real story here is obvious — these DOJ memos authorizing torture were anything but the by-product of independent, good faith legal analysis. Instead, those memos — just like the pre-war CIA reports about The Threat of Saddam — were coerced by White House officials eager for bureaucratic cover for what they had already ordered. This was done precisely so that once this all became public, they could point to those memos and have the political and media establishment excuse what they did (“Oh, they only did what they DOJ told them was legal”‘/”Oh, they were only reacting to CIA warnings about Saddam’s weapons”). These DOJ memos, like the CIA reports, were all engineered by the White House to give cover to what they wanted to do; they were not the precipitating events that led to and justified those decisions. That is the critical point proven by the Comey emails, and it is completely obscured by the NYT article, which instead trumpets the opposite point (“Unanimity at DOJ that these tactics were legal”) because that’s the story their leaking sources wanted them to promote.
What’s most ironic about what the NYT did here is that on the very same day this article appears, there is a column from the NYT Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, excoriating the paper for having published a deeply misleading front page story by Elizabeth Bumiller, that claimed that 1 out of 7 Guantanamo detainees returned to “jihad” once they are released.
That happened because Bumiller followed the most common method of modern establishment reporting: she mindlessly repeated what her government sources told her to say. As Hoyt put it:
But the article on which he based that statement was seriously flawed and greatly overplayed. It demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war.
That is exactly what Shane and Johnston did with these Comey emails. Just as Bumiller did, they included some contrary facts buried deep in the article about Comey’s objections, but the headline and the way the entire article was framed will create the impression — as intended — that there was unanimity among DOJ lawyers regarding the legality of the Bush interrogation program. Other journalists, too slothful to read the Comey emails themselves, will get the message and go forth and repeat it, and it will soon be conventional wisdom that “everyone” at the DOJ agreed these torture techniques were legal.
Any rational and minimally well-informed person who actually read the Comey emails would walk away with the exact opposite point — what is “stunning” was how extreme was the pressure from the White House to issue these memos and how compliant DOJ lawyers were to White House dictates. But that’s how our media works: anonymous government officials tell them what to say; they write it down uncritically; and it then becomes conventional wisdom regardless of how false it is.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
