Pearl Harbour, the Kennedy assassinations, the Moon landings, 9/11 and many other events which people claim that the U.S. government had a shadowy hand in - covering up certain events for their own goals.
However, the greater a conspiracy’s scope, the greater number of people necessary, the higher the probability of the truth being leaked.
For instance, people claim that in 1969 the U.S. government faked the Moon landings, but a few years later couldn’t cover up the fact that hotel was broken into or the Pres getting his pole polished, which is why I don’t give much credence to conspiracy theories.
These days, how much could the government cover up? Aliens? Assassinations? Or do they have a hard enough time covering up standard national secrets?
There are many military and intelligence operations that are entirely or largely secret and you could perhaps use that as a measuring stick. On the other hand there is no end to the list of embarrassing things you would think the government would have kept secret if it possibly could have.
It did a pretty good job with the Manhattan Project. A massive factory in Tennessee with thousands of employees, a secret lab in New Mexico staffed with world-famous scientists, all of it kept almost completely invisible until the first bomb was dropped.
The phony army commanded by Patton that was thought to be the true invasion force aimed at the Pas de Calais was a pretty huge undertaking too, and worked astonishingly well.
There’s nothing about the accepted criminal definition of the term that requires a conspiracy to be a secret*, so it should be obvious that that’s not the definition we’re using.
*In the US, at least, a criminal conspiracy is simply an agreement between two or more parties to commit an illegal act.
According to this nutjob hiring Stephen King to kill John Lennon. Odd they could manage to hire King, have him kill Lennon, and later have him stalk Springsteen, and arrange to try to kill him with a van and later kill the van’s driver, yet they put a photo of him getting Lennon’s autograph in the media.
BTW, I emailed this guy that King is 6’3" and the person in the photo is obviously about 5’8". His response was “look-alike Chapman is actually over six feet tall.”
I’m having a problem with your definition of conspiracy as a factual operation that is entirely secret in terms of not only having a circle of conspirators do the planning of events but also people executing the plan so the plan “doers” are part of the conspiracy. While, it is perfectly possible for someone to execute a plan and not be aware how the plan was devised and put in motion.
In fact, I find this assumption one of the most insulting pillars of the so called “high-level” or conceptual debunking that you even included in OP which, and I’m paraphrasing, states that the complexity of the plan execution is what needs to be examined if one is to point to a conspiracy and not just the plan alone and, the larger the scope and number of people involved smaller the possibility of conspiracy to stay conspiracy.
This kind of thinking creates a discourse in which things that happen on a large scale and are evident CANNOT be thought of as conspiracies because everyone knows about it. According to such developed discourse, war in Iraq is not a conspiracy.
I subscribe to the conspiracy paradigm in which Iraq war is the perfect example of a conspiracy. Very similar to Suez War (Suez Crisis - Wikipedia) conspiracy but no one actually talks about it as a conspiracy but rather something that happened due to historical determinism of the Cold War and early ME imperial struggle and god knows what other “logical” cause & effect framework might have been invented to “explain” things after the fact .
That a) only lasted a couple years though, b) was during a large military build-up, when it was a lot easier to construct secret labs and the like without anyone asking a bunch of questions, c) was during a period when people felt that asking a bunch of questions about mysterious goings-ons might hurt the war effort.
And it wasn’t that well kept a secret. The Russians probably knew as much about it as FDR, multiple European Scientists guessed the general idea of the program because their US counter-parts stopped publishing nuclear science papers and Congress started an investigation to find out where all the money was going, which only stopped because FDR convinced then Congressman Truman to back off.
So I don’t think you could keep such a large project secret today, and even back then it wasn’t that well kept a secret.
I do too. The Bush Administration, the military, and parts of the press worked together to convince the public that Iraq had a large stockpile of WMDs, an active program to build nuclear weapons, and ties to Al Queda, and that the goal of the war was to liberate Iraq and create a democratic government. In reality, they knew that Iraq to not have WMDs, was not building a nuclear bomb, had no meaningful ties to Al Queda, and that the war’s real goal was to enrich the military-industrial complex. While most people today know the truth about the WMD claims, they do not know the full truth about what happened in the run-up to the war, even though that truth has been published in numerous books and articles. It looks to me like a conspiracy and a highly successful one.
Likewise, most of the same players have worked for the past decade to cover up the fact that Saudi Arabia, the Bush Administration’s biggest ally in the Middle East, is chiefly responsible for the existence of Al Queda and numerous other terrorist groups and branches of radical Islam. Money paid by the American government goes to the Saudi government as “aid”, and of course much of the profits from gasoline sales end up in the hands of the Saudi government as well. From there, it gets distributed to a galaxy of persons, organizations, and phony charities supporting Islamic extremist groups. Once again, most of the American public is clueless about this. It’s another successful conspiracy.
You’ve assumed so many things here that I don’t know where to start. How do you know for certain what everybody knew at the time? How do you account for the fact that it was widely reported at the time that the intelligence linking al Qaeda and Iraq was shoddy? It was also widely reported at the time that the yellowcake thing in his 2003 State of the Union address was wrong. I knew about all of that stuff at the time and I knew that there were no WMDs, and I didn’t get that information by going to Iraq or through the Pentagon. It was in newspapers and on the web.
Then how do you explain the fact everybody has known since September 2001 that most of the Al Qaeda hijackers were from Saudi Arabia?
It was not a phony army group (not a Field Army). The Headquaters of the First US Army Group, later became the actual 12th Army Group HQ. Many actual formations were used as well as Units that were earmarked as follow up.
Saudi Arabia, probably the most liquid nation on the planet and a big owner of US Government Securities gets aid? Now thats a conspiracy if I hav ever seen one.
Having worked for the government (military), I feel pretty confident in saying there are far too many inept/loudmouthed employees to cover up any kind of massive conspiracy.
Darn, and here I thought the OP was talking about a plot the U.S. government could cover up. Why would you need to cover up something everyone knows about?
In my humble experience, conspirators do not call press conferences or go on Oprah to discuss their conspiracies. Secrecy is a necessary element to a conspiracy, otherwise when you show up to commit the crime you run into people with guns and video cameras.
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As Marley23 noted, a conspiracy in which the premises are widely debated in public is no conspiracy at all. If we start labeling as conspiracies “government policies I didn’t like that were promulgated using questionable or deceptive tactics” we’d have to go back and throw all living Presidents and a shitload of Congresspeople in jail.
