A Word About Conspiracies (Excerpt From "Crossing The Rubicon")

Bully_Pulpit
Bully_Pulpit Members Posts: 5,501 ✭✭✭✭✭
edited October 2011 in The Social Lounge
A word about conspiracies
I am an investigator and a journalist. It is not my business to speculate, and my
reasoning is not theoretical. As a detective it is my job to gather evidence, consider
its authenticity, posit a hypothesis, and test that hypothesis against the larger
pattern of facts. So much for “theory.” As for the word “conspiracy,” it’s among the
most common terms in the rigorous legal language of American jurisprudence. A
conspiracy is generally defined as two or more people who plan to commit an illegal
act and who then take one or more specific actions in furtherance of that plan.
Conspiracy is a very real term for tens of thousands of minority men and women
in the United States who are serving sentences of — in some cases — more than
twenty years in federal penitentiaries like Leavenworth for “no-drug conspiracies.”
In many of those cases someone talked about acquiring drugs and someone else
made a phone call asking if someone else had the drugs (in many cases only in very
small amounts), and that’s all it took to throw away the lives of these non-violent
offenders.
One of the most trumpeted themes in the post-9/11 world has been a blanket
assertion that such a large conspiracy (if conducted within the US government)
could never be concealed from the American people or the people of the world
before the crime was committed. It has been sounded by the likes of David Corn
at The Nation and former National Security Counterterrorism Chief Richard
Clarke. Clarke wrote in his 2004 bestseller Against All Enemies,
Conspiracy theorists simultaneously hold two contrary beliefs: a) that
the US government is so incompetent that it can miss explanations
that the theorists can uncover, and b) that the US government can
keep a big and juicy secret. The first belief has some validity. The second
idea is pure fantasy.1
Richard Clarke misled you here. He also informed, in some very surprising
ways. In fact, as I will show you later, he misled in many places in his book. From
the Manhattan Project to the Stealth fighter, the US government has successfully
kept secrets involving thousands of people. Secondly, in order to execute a conspiracy
of the size and type I am suggesting, it is not necessary that thousands of
people see the whole picture. The success of the US in maintaining the secrecy
around the atom bomb and the Stealth fighter, or in any classified operation, lies
in compartmentalization. A technician in Tennessee refining uranium ore in 1943
would have had no knowledge of its intended use, or any moral culpability in any
deaths that occurred as a result of it. Another technician in Ohio, mixing a polymer
resin in 1985, would have had no knowledge of what an F117A looked like
or what it was intended to do.
The government routinely protects itself against disclosure by compelling millions
of employees to sign security agreements and secrecy oaths which would
make them subject to immediate incarceration or loss of benefits if they talked,
2 crossing the rubicon
even about criminal behavior. Perpetrating the murders of 9/11 required only a
few people inside a small circle who did indeed “need to know” the entire plan, or
most of the plan, in order to complete their tasks. For reasons of physical safety,
freedom from legal sanction, and job security, participants would be motivated —
and therefore, guaranteed — not to inform on one another.
This was one of many lessons I learned painfully with my first exposure to
covert operations in 1976. In this book I will introduce you to several people who,
I believe, had to have known enough to understand that the US government was
planning for 9/11 to be successful ahead of time. I make no claim that these are
the only ones involved at such a level, nor do I claim to know how many other
such people might exist. My investigation will, however, demonstrate how easy it
is in practice to conceal a broad conspiratorial agenda when the suspects control
information flow and operational procedures inside the government. After two
and a half years of investigation my estimate is that the number of people with
complete foreknowledge of the attacks of September 11th would likely not exceed
two dozen, all of them bound to silence by Draconian secrecy oaths. The actions
of some I will name in connection with 9/11, however, certainly place them on a
list of possible suspects who need to be thoroughly questioned in a public forum
that includes consequences for dishonesty.
For many of you, the facts I present will be things you have never heard of or
even considered. I guarantee that they will be fully documented in academic style
footnotes so that you — members of the jury — may take them into your own
rooms and evaluate them as you would “people’s exhibits” in a murder trial. I ask
you to accept nothing that I tell you at face value. Rather I demand of you that
you make full use of the footnotes by examining the primary sources to which
they refer. Examine them as you would a shell casing, a photo of a ? footprint,
a bank statement, or witness testimony. That is your obligation, your
sacred duty.
Given that September 11th was a homicide, it was absurd that pronouncements
of guilt were made within hours of the attacks, even before interrogation of material
witnesses (including key members of the US government and the bin Laden
family) or the collection and analysis of physical evidence could take place. Much
of the physical evidence was destroyed without examination. That in itself is a key
anomaly suggesting guilty knowledge on the part of whoever directed the destruction
of evidence at a crime scene. In the case of the World Trade Center, a detective
would demand an answer from the Department of Justice and the FBI.
To date, the case that 9/11 was perpetrated solely by Osama bin Laden and al
Qaeda has never been proved, even to the most rudimentary standards. In fact,
some 35 months after the attacks there has not been a single successful 9/11 prosecution
anywhere in the world. The only conviction that had been secured, a
German prosecution against Mounir el Motassadeq, charged with aiding the socalled
Hamburg cell of Mohammed Atta, was overturned in 2004 because the US
Introduction 3
government refused to produce key witnesses and evidence relevant to the
charges.2 Every defendant in a Western criminal case has the right to examine the
evidence used against him and to cross-examine witnesses.
That fact raises another set of critical questions.


Download the free e-book and read it, its pretty good. I often hear ppl on this website say well where are the whistleblowers, well Mike Ruppert is such a whistleblower/insider like I said check out this e-book theres lots of great info in there about various topics like the bush family, the cia drug smuggling/ iran/contra, 911 and various other topics.
http://ebookee.org/go/?u=http://depositfiles.com/files/nkk4n45qx

Also if you have netflix streaming capabilities check out a documentary called "Collapse" its a sit down with Michael Ruppert himself as he goes through the state of the united states and our depleting energy resources as well as other topics.

Comments

  • Bully_Pulpit
    Bully_Pulpit Members Posts: 5,501 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2011
    Another excerpt:
    2 + 2 = 4
    In the classic dystopian novel 1984 George Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom
    to say two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The totalitarian
    power of Orwell’s nightmare state couldn’t be maintained without the
    successful eradication of precisely this freedom.
    In May 1999 I had an experience that crystallized something I had known for
    a long time, but had never seen so clearly. At a sparsely attended and self-congratulatory
    “People’s Tribunal,” I witnessed the burial rite for an important issue that,
    had it been fully pursued, might have prevented the attacks of September 11,
    2001. The subject of the tribunal, being held on a Saturday at the University of
    Southern California, was the drug war and the CIA’s connections to the drug
    trade. Two and a half years earlier, the nation had been aflame after Pulitzer Prizewinning
    journalist Gary Webb reported on incendiary documents and witnesses
    linking the Agency directly to the ? ? epidemic that devastated America’s
    inner cities during the 1980s.
    What happened to Webb and his stories remains an object lesson for researchers
    and activists in the post-9/11 world. Members of Congress such as Maxine Waters
    16 crossing the rubicon
    of California, who had once vowed to make the issue her “life’s work,” presided over
    the demise of the story. Webb, pilloried by the media and punished by his employer
    the San Jose Mercury News, had in 1997 and 1998 been thoroughly vindicated
    by Congressional investigations. Webb’s greatest vindication of all came in the form
    of a CIA Inspector General (IG) report released in a declassified version by CIA
    Director George Tenet on October 8, 1998 — one hour after Congressman Henry
    Hyde’s House Judiciary Committee had voted out articles of impeachment against
    William Jefferson Clinton.11
    Something got lost in the news that day. The cover letters and the summaries of
    the IG report, which is still on the CIA website, said that the exhaustive investigation
    had found no evidence that the CIA had done anything seriously wrong. Those
    who actually read the entire report, however, found devastating and damning admissions
    of criminal behavior on the part of the CIA and Vice President George Herbert
    Walker Bush. We have seen that pattern repeated over and over since 9/11.
    Webb was an “Enemy of the State” in the minds of most Americans. He had
    challenged their sacred beliefs. Representative Waters, however, had seen her president
    safely through the impeachment and then gone strangely silent about a
    report that could have toppled a government and changed the world. The truth
    often gets traded too cheaply, and the victim of such trades is always the future.
    I had been through similar experiences during the Iran-Contra scandal. I had
    read about, and later interviewed, others who had the same experiences in the case
    of POWs and MIAs abandoned in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. I had
    studied how the investigation into the murder of President John F. Kennedy had
    been controlled. I had also acquired personally painful and verifiable knowledge
    that the murder of John’s brother Robert was a CIA operation. All the goodwill
    and energy of the researcher-activists in each of these cases was deliberately and
    meticulously sabotaged by interested parties and their allies in the dominant political
    class.12
    By May of 1999 what should have been hundreds of thousands of people in
    the street and a massive government scandal had dwindled to about a hundred or
    so apparatchiks who would wave the People’s Tribunal as evidence of their leadership.
    I laughed with pity as they returned to the beltway to ask for larger grants
    from their patrons, major foundations and other institutionally compromised
    entities. The people who ran the tribunals were ultimately beholden to the same
    powers that had created the problem in the first place. Experts with compromised
    wallets had staged a controlled burn of brief outrage, cooling rapidly to insouciance.
    The inconsistencies were soon forgotten.
    There’s an old saying that in a ham and eggs breakfast, the chicken is involved,
    but the pig is committed. None of us who were convinced of the urgency of the
    CIA-drug story and who were heartbroken by its burial doubted that unless people
    found the courage to deal with the problem, something much worse —
    something as bad as 9/11 — was certain to happen.
    Introduction 17
    Yet one speaker at the USC event, retired San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara,
    gave me something powerful to take away. He said: “When Richard Nixon started
    the War on Drugs in 1972 the federal budget allocation for the war on drugs
    was $101 million. Today the federal budget allocation is $20 billion. And yet today
    there are more drugs in this country, they are less expensive, and they are of better
    quality than they were in 1972.”
    Pigs listen harder than chickens do. There were only two plausible ways to
    interpret that amazing fact. One could assume that a twenty-seven-year failure,
    despite a budget almost 200 times greater than when it began, and despite the
    application of the best minds in politics and law enforcement, was somehow the
    result of a collective and contagious stupidity. Not only had these people been negligent
    and incompetent, their budgets had been increased as a reward. This is
    exactly what we are being asked to accept about the attacks of September 11, 2001.
    Even in the arguably less urgent matter of illicit drug proliferation, a sane person
    should have demanded a total restructuring of the contaminated government entities,
    mass firings, and a serious strategy review. It was our money, the product of
    our labor, and our children’s lives that these failures had wasted.
    On the other hand, one could infer that this state of affairs — having been
    managed by the most educated and influential elite in the country — reflected
    exactly what was intended: a global drug economy that generated an estimated
    $600 - $700 billion a year in liquid cash profits from which someone was deriving
    great benefit. Who?
    Occam’s Razor (a principle of reasoning associated with medieval thinker
    William of Ockham, 1288 - 1327) recommends choosing the simplest workable
    explanation for a phenomenon. In that moment of clarity I had a vision of the
    degree of reality-twisting, pretzel-bending logic in which the “experts” had
    engaged. They had orchestrated the destruction and marginalization of people
    who held mirrors up to their irrationality. In the post-9/11 world, we live with the
    ultimate insanity that this thinking has produced.
    When a flock of birds suddenly changes direction, simultaneously and uniformly,
    is it a conspiracy? Or is it just an instant recognition by every member of the flock
    where their collective interests lie?
    It was at USC that I began to understand that the people shielding the system,
    and the knowingly guilty perpetrators within it, were hiding a truth that threatened
    all of them, the way psychologically sick families sometimes hide the sexual
    violation of their own children by a relative. I remembered the words of psychiatrist
    Carl Jung: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience
    legitimate suffering.”