I’m watching back-to-back episodes of the X-Files (I have such a life) and I just thought, what is the most elaborate conspiracy, of any kind, that actually occurred? I’m mostly thinking government conspiracies, but corporate ones can count too if they were equally huge.
Watergate has got to be up there.
That landing a faked manned mission on the moon has to be up there.
No… sorry just kidding.
Please don’t pummel with rhetoric and blunt objects,
No, maybe the WMD silliness in Iraq.
I believed it and, Jean, my wife, did as well.
In fact a lot of people believed it.
And it was a deliberately crafted hoax.
We were all convinced that they had chemical weapons hidden there,
Maybe even biological or nuclear ones as well.
After all, they had gassed the Kurds.
And we SOLD the regime chemical weapons back when they were fighting Iran.
But when we finally got there… guess what?
No weapons of mass destruction.
Not even weapons of moderate destruction.
Tanks, howitzers, artillery, infantry.
All of which we destroyed in the first two weeks of the Second Iraq War.
That sounds pretty elaborate to me.
My vote is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/jul/tuskegee/
That has to be on the list.
Some other possibilities:
Iran-Contra Affair. US officials, including politicians and senior military personnel, sell weapons to a country that has an arms embargo placed on it. They use the money gained from selling the arms to fund a Nicaraguan terrorist group in. there were also allegation that they were assisting the terrorist smuggle drugs into the US, though these were enver conclusively established.
CIA Operations in Chile.. For a period of 30 years the CIA interfered with democratic elections in a sovereign nation, ranging from propaganda, blackmail and extortion all the way to assassinations.
[The Lavon Affair](Lavon Affair). Israeli secret service agents make terrorist attacks against British and American targets, then plant evidence intended to make it look like Moslem terrorist groups were responsible.
In what sense was this a conspiracy? It involved a single research institution that published its results in Journals and Newsletters while the trial was occurring.
It wasn’t very ethical, but it’s a stretch to call it a conspiracy.
Some other possibilities:
The Lavon Affair. Israeli secret service agents make terrorist attacks against British and American targets, then plant evidence intended to make it look like Moslem terrorist groups were responsible.
Fixed broken link
In terms of sheer scope of lives, dollars and they number of players involved I can’t think of anything that comes close to the invasion of Iraq. The difficulty is that to have a conspiracy (in the classic sense) you usually have to have some mastermind pulling the strings with a defined goal in mind.
A lot of what happened with the lead up to invading Iraq was cynical, ignorant, arrogant, stupid, paranoid and incompetent behavior by people who often, for entirely separate reasons, had the common goal of pushing US and Iraq into collision.
There are individual instances where information was willfully manipulated or facts manufactured out of thin air by various players including Ahmed Chalabi and his sponsored defectors telling elaborate lies, or cherry picked (the Vice President and his nested intelligence gatekeepers), or willfully swallowed (the US military and the US media) or warnings ignored (the President and his administration) or people who knew the BS being spewed was inaccurate keeping their heads down (US intelligence services) or even those who eagerly anticipated and justified the conflict as proof of their theories of how the middle east would be pacified and the region made safer for Israel (several noted neo-cons).
The road to war with Iraq was an epic cluster fuck, but was it truly a conspiracy? Chalabi is (IMO) the only one who can really be said to be knowingly manufacturing bullshit about WMDs etc. to keep the US interested in engaging Iraq. Some claim the Israeli intelligence services were helping Chalabi but that’s unproved. Beyond him everyone was operating in their own self interests that just happened to coincide with his goals.
All this was a giant threshing machine that moved us towards war. But was it a true “conspiracy” with a central mastermind? That’s a more complicated question. Cheney is probably the most powerful player in this machine, but it’s not clear he was operating in bad faith with respect to knowing the information he was selling was bad or that he had an ulterior motive. His motives were quite explicit (ie Iraq is a real threat we need to crush them).
Deepthroat?
I’d suggest that to those living in North Korea, the entire country is one incredibly elaborate conspiracy.
I was going to say I’m not sure this counts, because the CIA did have certain informants who were telling them Iraq had WMD, even if they put far too much stock in those informants. By many accounts the politicians involved (Tony Blair for instance) supposedly were genuinely surprised and dismayed when no WMD were found.
However, reading about it, it seems the CIA hardly had any sources of this kind and the few they did have later admitted they were lying because they’d been offered green cards in return for the ‘right’ information. The overwhelming consensus of multiple intelligence agencies and the majority of the sources at the time was that there was no evidence Iraq was developing WMD. Does sound pretty close to a full-on conspiracy to me.
I don’t understand this. If a WMD could be either chemical, biological, or nuclear, then Iraq definitely had WMDs. They used them against the Kurds. The U.N. had an embargo against Iraq because Saddam would not allow inspectors in to verify their removal or destruction. Was Saddam part off the conspiracy too?
What you had in Iraq was the lawful removal of a bloodthirsty tyrant who murdered hundreds of thousands of people, suppressed human rights on a massive scale and paid terrorists every time they killed an Israeli. Which is why liberals/progressives/fools were so upset about it. Their history is replete with unrequited love for the worst butchers in history: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Arafat, Pol Pot. Could the intelligence on WMD have been better? Yes. But it wasn’t the only reason why the Allies intervened and you have some 25 years of hampering U.S. intelligence agency efforts by people like Frank Church and Jamie Gorelnick. You would think if liberals/progressives/fools were one-thousandth in favor of freedom as they claim they are, they would at least acknowledge the evil of saddam Hussein and his two vile sons. But nnnoooooo!!!
I suppose if you want conspiracies, you have the coverup of extramarital affairs of JFK and FDR with their attempts to tell tthe SEC how much to fine an FDR crony (what David Brinkley said years later FDR did in front of several reporters) and JFK threatening to have CBS's license revoked if they didn't redo an interview with Walter Cronkite (JFK changed his mind when Cronkite said it wasn't fair play).Covered in post #2. And Deep Throat was a source, not a conspiracy.
One of the most audacious and significant conspiracies, if true, is the Reichstag fire in 1933. Hitler’s Nazi party didn’t have a majority in the German Parliament at the time. So the Nazi party supposedly ordered the parliament building itself to be set on fire. They then accused the Communist party of starting the fire as the beginning of a revolution, declared emergency rule and arrested all the Communist politicians, giving themselves a majority in the parliament, which in turn helped allow Hitler to make himself dictator of Germany a few months later.
In 1962 the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff signed a recommendation that JFK order Operation Northwoods, which would have involved America deliberately carrying out terrorist attacks on US cities including Washington DC and Miami, shooting people in the streets, bombing buildings, hijacking planes and/or sinking ships full of Cuban refugees, in order to blame those attacks on Fidel Castro and use them as a pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. JFK rejected it and removed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a result, and incurred the ire of the army chiefs afterwards for “going soft” on Cuba.
I wouldn’t call the Labon affair an elaborate conspiracy; on the contrary, it was a half-assed, slipshod undertaking that collapsed before it barely started. Its main importance was its political fallout, both domestic and international, and its impact on the Israeli intelligence community.
UN inspectors were in Iraq during much of the post Desert Storm period. They were periodically withdrawn due to political pressure or physical threats. Much of the equipment and stockpiles from DS1 and before were destroyed, placed under supervision (uranium yellowcake), or removed from the country. You can read the Wiki articles about Scott Ritter (Iraqi WMD inspector for the UN) were the Iraqi program and the UN efforts to dismatle it are discussed. Note: He’s a bit of a scumbag but was at the heart of the action.
Also see Iraq and weapons of mass destruction - Wikipedia
for a quick overview.
Bottom line: Most of the program in Iraq was dismantled; testimony and evidence presented to Congress and the UN to the contrary were fraudulent, not just mistakes or differences of opinion.
Back to the OP, Bernie Madoff, Teapot Dome, Enron are high on the scale of economic conspiracies.
Question - conspiracy versus crime? Is it a conspiracy when no criminal charges are pressed; otherwise a crime? How about the period of time the action occurs; months = crimes, years = conspiracy?
Although infamous because of the high rank of those involved, it wasn’t that elaborate and was poorly executed.
The legal definition is two or more people plotting to commit s crime. The crime does not need to be committed necessarily. It has nothing to do with time. In the broader non legal sense it includes hoaxes and such that are not actual crimes.