Direct Action <<>> I believe in conspiracies

[Ivo Skoric]

Well, in 2053 it will probably be acceptable to say that CIA 
organized overthrows in Belgrade 2000 and Tbilisi 2003. Particularly, 
because they did it well. How many more operations they did in 1953 
that we still don't know about, because they went the wrong way?
ivo

On 17 Jan 2004 at 0:03, Miroslav Visic wrote:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issu
e=2004-01-17&id=3943




          "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. "

I believe in conspiracies
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John Laughland says the real nutters are those who believe in
al-Qa’eda and weapons of mass destruction

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 ‘conspir- acy 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. --

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Nemo me impune lacessit. No one strikes me with impunity.