What do CTers believe? Do they believe, say, that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t assassinate Kennedy? Or that the Bush administration was behind 9/11? Or that NASA faked the moon landings? Or are those all straw men?
How about giving us some real men and tell us directly what CTers believe if those aren’t pertinent examples?
Actually, Harry, I have spent more than a little time in the CT communities. Maybe five-six years watching the UFO camp; fifteen hanging over the shoulder of the paranormal crowd; many journeys into the JFK conspiracists over maybe thirty years.
All it takes is one contrary to (easily verifiable) fact like “Oswald was a lousy shot” or “the rifle couldn’t hit a barn if you threw it from five feet away” or “no one has ever been able to replicate the shooting” or “the posed rifle photo is doctored” - taken at face value in the discussion, no cite, no source - and I really don’t much care what else they say. Since such arbitrary and utterly wrong statements pepper most JFKCT postings and writings, my visits tend to be short.
As for “straw man,” the tendency to argue by throwing around debate terms instead of facts marks a poster as being short on the latter and only able to carry on a discussion among a “community” that doesn’t question any of its beliefs.
But you’re welcome to post one - any one, just one - JFKCT statement you regard as a fact representative of “the community” position and see how long it stands.
Secret agencies, like all organizations, need to keep records of their operations in order to function. For example, much of the Snowden leak consisted of training materials, details on exactly how and where the NSA had access to supposedly secure comm systems, etc – information that had to be retained and disseminated to the proper personnel in order to operate the surveillance program.
Add a dose of bureaucratic caution (nobody wants to be blamed for erasing essential data and screwing up the works), and you get retention (and leakage) of secrets that could have been safely memory-holed long ago.