-Caveat Lector- from: http://sightings.com/general10/conspiracy.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://sightings.com/general10/conspiracy.htm";>The Conspiracy Conspiracy</A> ----- The Conspiracy Conspiracy By Jon Carroll >From The San Francisco Chronicle 5-23-1 I say the word "conspiracy," and what springs to mind? Nutballs. Fruit bats. People with tinfoil hats. A conversation you had once with an apparently reasonable person who casually introduced alien abductions and anal probes into his conversation about TWA Flight 800. You might say that conspiracies have been marginalized. "Conspiracy theorists" are crazy people, dwellers on the fringe, oddballs, misfits. And certainly there are an adequate number of people eager to fill that role. Real fruit bats with pie charts: Come on down! And yet there have been real conspiracies, and the conspirators did not wear tinfoil hats. The Bay of Pigs was a really dopey conspiracy, as was Watergate. Iran-Contra wasn't much better. A conspiracy to discredit Bill Clinton with suborned testimony and wild rumors was launched and financed; one of the members of that conspiracy is about to become our solicitor general. Bill Clinton engaged in a conspiracy to hide his sexual behavior. (Vernon Jordan! Come on down!) Tobacco companies certainly conspired to keep health information from the public; energy companies may have conspired to jack up prices illegally. And these are the ones we know about. These are the ones run by the stupid people. The smart conspiracies are still hidden. So, suppose you were in a conspiracy to cripple the government of the United States. Not destroy it, because it has its uses; just make it weak. Let's not say whom you work for; let's just say that's your goal. What would you do first? How about destroy the FBI? It's in charge of gathering intelligence of the sort that might uncover a conspiracy. It's already suspect; its most famous director was a loony-tune who saw threats to the republic in free-speech advocates and civil rights workers. It wouldn't take much to convince people that the FBI is not your friend, is part of a government that seeks to harm you. (You might throw in a bunch of corruption elsewhere in government too, blatant payoffs and telegenic idiots. Result: More and more smart people eschew public service. Bad for the government.) What happens next? A series of blunders designed to reinforce the contention that the FBI is an agent of repression. Burn up some children in a religious compound. Kill the wrong people in an Idaho survivalist camp. Make sure that the FBI has such a bad computer system that it can't find its own records of its highest-profile case. And throw in a Russian spy who sells secrets undetected for 15 years. I mean, these are the folks in charge of internal security. They're the ones protecting us from real conspiracies. And now, dig this: The spy goes to the same conservative church as the director of the FBI! They see each other every week! Both the director and the spy call themselves patriots, and yet while they were there, the FBI became a laughingstock. Now, a suspicious man might see intention behind all this. A suspicious man might ask: Who benefits from a weak and foolish FBI? Well, here's one idea: people who have illicit business they need to do in private. Lots of business. A cartel of interests, you might say. People who share a common goal. Another thing this cartel might want is a weak military. Real low salaries, despite many promises to the contrary. Discredited weapon systems that are funded anyway. Enormous cost overruns that eat up budgets. Lots of fuzzy nostalgia about the men who fought World War II; studied indifference to the professionalism of the men and women who might fight the next war. Weak FBI, weak military. Who's in charge? That's not clear; the policies in these areas have stayed the same since 1980. What's going on? More tomorrow. We're playing "let's pretend" here. We are asking ourselves questions and seeing where the answers lead. We are trying to puzzle out certain inconsistencies. So we now have an FBI whose incompetence is well known and well publicized. Who benefits? Those who distrust government in the first place. The neo-Nazi survivalist white supremacist nutballs. In the past decade, the FBI has managed to make us all think: You know, there may be something to what those guys are saying. Not the ideology part, the other stuff. The conspiracy stuff. The FBI managed to make David Koresh look like a victim. It turned Richard Jewell into a hero. Suppose you were an honest citizen and the FBI came knocking on your door -- wouldn't you be afraid? Would you even cooperate? Suppose that had been the idea all along: to make citizens distrust their national police force. Consider the military. Overpraised and underpaid, politicized to within an inch of its life. The Gulf War was supposed to be a great victory, until you checked out the details. The weapons didn't work that well. Saddam Hussein is still in power. We killed a whole bunch of civilians, and nothing changed. Meanwhile, we have congressmen insisting on weapons systems that don't work. No one wants to say a word against the American soldier -- but no one wants to be one, either. It's an Army of One -- maybe literally. Suppose that had been the idea all along: to burnish the image of the Army while making the reality tawdry and dumb. Suppose the idea were to force the good men out while amping up the patriotic rhetoric. Suddenly, things don't compute. Suddenly, Gore Vidal and Timothy McVeigh find they have a lot to talk about. In 1999, according to a U.N. report, 10 percent of the economy of the world was devoted to illegal drugs. Americans spent an estimated $78 billion on illegal drugs. The illegal drug industry produced $400 billion in gross revenues. That's enough money to fund a rather large conspiracy. Let's do some irresponsible speculating: The war in Colombia, the war we are pretending that we are not engaged in, is a battle for control over the drug trade. We are using yesterday's code words, "guerrillas" versus "democratic governments," but it's really thugs versus thugs. Both "indigenous movements" and "reform politicians" either are or will be corrupted by drug money, or they will be killed. I think there are two superpowers in the world: the illegal drug cartels and the U.S. government. I think everything else is window dressing. The drug cartels are opposed to the legalization of recreational drugs. Legalization would destroy their stranglehold on the market and lower their profit margins. Also opposed are multinational pharmaceutical companies (expensive pain pills would take a dive if marijuana were legalized); the prison industry, which has a financial stake in an ever-increasing inmate population; and a legion of sincere people who look at the very real ravages of addiction and think tougher laws are the answer. Perfect for demagogues: They can rail against drugs, which is exactly what the drug cartels want. They can thunder against the FBI, while refusing to fund a modern database system for the agency. They can authorize billions for a missile defense system, a glossy solution to an imaginary problem. I wonder how many American politicians are owned by drug cartels. They're owned by energy companies and tobacco companies; why not some well-laundered money from people in the herbal relaxation business? But, as I said, this is all just speculation. Let's go see a movie about World War II. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. 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