Jake Anderson
-- May 18, 2015
In recent years, the mere notion of the conspiracy theory has increasingly
been stigmatized and ridiculed by mainstream news outlets, internet trolls, and
“rational” thinkers. Yet, with powerful revelations by Edward Snowden,
Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, and generations of intrepid journalists, we now know
that many outlandish geopolitical and domestic “conspiracy theories” were and
are cold-blooded truths of the modern world. Here are 10 that are
well-documented and profoundly disturbing…
1) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
The
Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of US involvement in the Vietnam
War, never actually occurred.
It’s true. The original incident – also sometimes referred to as the USS
Maddox Incident(s) –involved the destroyer USS Maddox supposedly engaging three
North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. The
Maddox fired almost 300 shells.
President Lyndon B. Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
which became his administration’s legal justification for military involvement
in Vietnam. The problem is the event never happened.
In 2005, a
declassified
internal National Security Agency study revealed that there were NO North
Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident. So, what was the Maddox
firing at? In 1965, President Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was
shooting at whales out there.”
Worth pointing out: The
NSA’s
own historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote a report stating that the agency had
deliberately distorted intelligence reports in 1964. He concluded:
“The
parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated
intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to
re-examine the events of August 1964.”
2) Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Between 1932 and
1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on rural
African American men who had contracted syphilis. The Public Health Service
never informed these men they had a sexually transmitted disease, nor did they
offer treatment, even after penicillin became available as a cure in the
1940s.
Tragically, it’s true. Rather than receiving treatment, the subjects of these
studies were told they had “bad blood.”
When World War II began, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were
only then, for the first time, informed they had syphilis. Even then, the PHS
denied them treatment.
By the early 1970s,
128 of
the original 399 men had died of syphilis and syphilis-related
complications, 40 of their wives had the disease and 19 of their children were
born with congenital syphilis.
Worth pointing out: A similar experiment conducted on prisoners, soldiers,
and patients of
a
mental hospital in Guatemala actually involved the PHS deliberately
infecting the patients and then treating them with antibiotics.
3) Project MKUltra
The CIA ran secret mind control experiments on US citizens from the 1950s
until 1973.
It’s so true that in 1995
President Clinton actually
issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government.
Essentially, the CIA used drugs, electronics, hypnosis, sensory deprivation,
verbal and sexual abuse, and torture to conduct experimental behavioral
engineering experiments on subjects. The program subcontracted hundreds of these
projects to over 80 different institutions, including universities, hospitals,
prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.
Most of this was uncovered in 1977 when a Freedom of Information Act
exposed 20,000 previously classified documents and triggered a series of Senate
hearings. Because CIA Director Richard Helms had most of the more damning
MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, much of what actually occurred during these
experiments is still unknown and, of course, not a single person was brought to
justice.
Worth pointing out: There is growing evidence that
Theodore
Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, was a subject of the Project
MKULTRA while he was at Harvard in the late 1950s.
4) Operation Northwoods
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military drew up and approved plans to
create acts of terrorism on US soil in order to sway the American public into
supporting a war against
Cuba.
It’s true and
the documents are
out there.
Fortunately, President Kennedy rejected the plan, which included: innocent
Americans being shot dead on the streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba
to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in
Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere; people being framed for bombings they
did not commit; and planes being hijacked.
Additionally, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer,
planned to fabricate evidence that would implicate Fidel Castro and Cuban
refugees as the perpetrators of the attacks.
Perhaps most horrifyingly, Lemnitzer planned for an elaborately staged
incident whereby a Cuban aircraft would attack and shoot down a plane full of
college students.
5) CIA Drug Trafficking
During the 1980s,
the CIA
facilitated the sale of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los
Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla
army.
It’s convoluted and complex, but it’s true.
Gary Webb’s book
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack
Cocaine Explosion outlines how CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the
U.S. and then distributed crack to Los Angeles gangs, pocketing the profits. The
CIA directly aided the drug dealers to raise money for the Contras.
“
This drug network,” Webb wrote in a 1996 San Jose MercuryNews
article, “
opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and
the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital
of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in
urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s
gangs to buy automatic weapons.”
Worth pointing out: On December 10, 2004, Webb committed suicide under
suspicious circumstances, namely the fact that he used two bullets to shoot
himself in the head.
6) Operation Mockingbird
In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was just getting underway, the CIA
launched a top secret project called
Operation
Mockingbird. Their goal was to buy influence and control among the major
media outlets. They also planned to put journalists and reporters directly on
the CIA payroll, which some claim is ongoing to this day. The architects of this
plan were Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham
(publisher of The Washington Post), who planned to enlist American news
organizations and journalists to basically become spies and propagandists.
Their list of entrenched agents eventually included journalists from ABC,
NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI),
Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Copley News Service. By the
1950s, the CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities
with tens of thousands of on-call operatives.
Fortunately, our media is no longer lured in by corporations and governments
to disseminate propaganda and disinformation….hmmm, never mind–strike that last
statement.
7) COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of clandestine, illegal FBI projects
that infiltrated domestic political organizations to discredit and smear them.
This included critics of the Vietnam War, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin
Luther King and a wide variety of activists and journalists.
The
acts
committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged
documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and,
according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination.
Similar and possibly more sophisticated tactics are still used today,
including NSA monitoring (see #10).
8) Operation Snow White
Operation Snow White is the name given to an unprecedented infiltration of
the US government by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s. They stole
classified government files regarding Scientology from dozens of government
agencies.
In 1977, the FBI finally cracked
Snow White open
which led to the arrest and imprisonment of a senior Church official.
The core mission of the program was to expose and legally expunge “
all
false and secret files of the nations of operating areas” and to enable
Church seniors and L. Ron Hubbard himself to “
frequent all Western nations
without threat.” By the end, of course, there was nothing legal about their
endeavors.
9) Secret Global Economic Policies
For years, activists who feared a sinister globalist corporatocracy were told
they were being paranoid. Whether you want to call it the New World Order or
not: they were right.
In 2013, WikiLeaks released the secretly negotiated draft text for the entire
TPP
(Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. It
revealed a closed-door regional free trade agreement being negotiated by
countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Brunei Darussalam,
Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United
States, and Vietnam.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says TPP has “
extensive negative
ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process,
and [will] hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.”
Worth pointing out: In June 2014, WikiLeaks revealed the even more
far-reaching
Trade in Services
Agreement (TiSA), a 50-country agreement that will promote unprecedented
levels of privatization across the world. The agreement will essentially prevent
governments from returning public services into public hands. This could
dramatically affect our ability to enact environmental regulations and keep
workers safe.
10) The US Government Illegally Spies On Its Own
Citizens
This used to be laughed at as a dystopian fantasy derived from an overactive
imagination, Orwell’s 1984, and a juvenile distrust of the government. When you
claimed “they” were spying on you, people labeled you a paranoid conspiracy
theorist, a tinfoil hat-wearing loon.
Even after it was revealed that the
NSA has been illegally eavesdropping
on us and collecting our cell phone metadata for over a decade, people still
hedged on the meaning of it. Yes, they are analyzing our transmissions, but it’s
under the auspices of national security. “In a post 9/11 world” certain
liberties must be sacrificed for the sake of security, right?
It turns out that is patently untrue. Not only is there no evidence that the
NSA has protected us from terrorism, there is growing evidence that it makes us
more
vulnerable. Thanks to revelations about the NSA and their Prism project, we
know that the scope of the NSA’s eavesdropping is even beyond what we originally
believed.
In early June of 2014, the Washington Post reported that almost 90% of the
data being collected by NSA surveillance programs is from Internet users with
no connection to terrorist activities. According to the American Civil
Liberties Union, this is in clear violation of the constitution.
The
ACLU is
pursuing a lawsuit against the NSA, claiming that the dragnet-style mass
collection of data violates the Fourth Amendment right of privacy as well as the
First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
source --
(ANTIMEDIA)
