The takeaway for me is that I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist. Oh sure, I never thought that Lance Armstrong was a super cyclist. But my mind never wandered further than briefly wondering how he doped without detection. Had I known anything about competitive cycling, it would have been more obvious to me that the team had to have been in on it. Voicing such thoughts over the past dozen or so years would have put me in the realm of being labeled a conspiracy fruitcake. A place a try to avoid, particularly when I don’t much care about the actors and their plots to scam the all too willing dupes. Or dopes as apparently all the sponsors and cycling writers (like Bissinger and Kurtz* were. (Dare we note how many sports writers fell for the college football hero’s imaginary dead girlfriend story that is currently being called a hoax? Oh, right Manti Te’O believed that a woman he never met was his girlfriend.)
The first takeaway for CT vigilantes should be that conspiracies are really, really common. Most are ordinary, inconsequential and limited to a few people. Often called secrets. The second takeaway is that the number of conspirators can be large and imposing silence on them for a considerable period of time isn’t all that difficult. Third, conspiracies are generally organic and not the product of a single master-mind. That leads to fractured knowledge of the details of the conspiracy amongst the participants.
In “Kill Anything That Moves,” Nick Turse is exposing a conspiracy. One hidden for decades. One that killed a multiple of those that died on 9/11. When Sy Hersh exposed the massacre at My Lai, it rocked this nation more than Abu Ghraib did. We’ve long known that there was a conspiracy to hide that massacre (with Colin Powell a player in the cover-up). What angered and perplexed many was the extraordinarily light sentence terms of Lt. Calley’s conviction – less than what Bradley Manning has already endured. Now, thanks to Nick Turse, we know that My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg. My Lai was SOP. Crafted and executed by an unknown number of military and civilian Americans. No one “master-mind” – but conforming to the ethos of those in charge such as:
GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: Well, the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is–is not important.
Repulsive – but at the same time oddly familiar.
”We’re dealing with an enemy that has no conscience,” Bush said on the campaign trail last year. ”Today, if you noticed, there was a car bomb near a school. These people are brutal. They — they’re the exact opposite of Americans. We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity. We believe in freedom. They have an ideology of hate. And they’re tough, but not as tough as America.”
Or yesterday
“But,” she [Hillary Clinton] added, “when you deal with these relentless terrorists, life is not in any way precious to them.”
Oh, and there was no conspiracy to take this country to war in Iraq – it was nothing but a whole lot of people in high-level, important positions that were duped. OTOH – 9/11 was a conspiracy with a master-mind, OBL, directing the actors from a remote, foreign location.
*Isn’t Kurtz one the guys that also bought into the GWB WH lies over and over again?