Why I am a Conspiracy Theorist

[John Simkin]

The problem with a great deal of this is that many of the 'conspiracies' listed (some of which John doesn't believe in and some he does) are so weak that a 5 year really ought to be able to see through them without too much cerebal activity.

I find this statement offensive. However, that seems to be your style of argument. To say that I believe in conspiracies that a “5 year really ought to be able to see through them without too much cerebal (sic) activity” is of course a ridiculous statement.

I consider myself to be a serious historian and I am willing to debate the evidence with you. Please make it clear which conspiracies fall into this category and I will supply the evidence to show you why some historians believe that there is great doubt about the official story.

Sorry you have chosen to be offended but I am sure my average 5 year old could make short shrift of the following;

9/11, Diana, Marilyn, NHS doctor assassins, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Apollo, Hilda Murrell, David Kelly.

Where would you like to start?

Of those you list the only one I said I believed in was the death of David Kelly. Is that the one you think the "average 5 year old could make short shrift of"?

Which might suggest you were premature to take offence. All of them have featured here at one time and another from people you have invited onto this forum. I cannot be expected to be able to guess which ones you happen to believe or not.

And yes I do think the conspiracy stuff surrounding the death of David Kelly is nonsense.

Here is a list of reasons why people who have investigated the death of Dr. Kelly believe that it was likely that he was murdered rather than committed suicide.

(1) Although he was under intense pressure, he was known to be a strong character and belonged to the Baha'i faith, which prohibits suicide.

(2) Those closest to him (such as his sister), and even neighbours he met on his last walk, said that on the day he died he had shown no signs of depression.

(3) Dr Kelly's body had been moved from its original prone position on the ground, and propped up against a tree. Items said to have been found near his body had not been seen by the paramedics who first found him. This is supported by the medical findings of livor mortis, which indicates that Kelly died on his back, or at least was moved to that position shortly after his death. A logical explanation is that Dr. Kelly died at a different site and the body was transported to the place it was found.

(4) Police documents show that the investigation into Dr. Kelly’s death (Operation Mason) began at 2:30pm on the 17th, about one hour before Dr. Kelly left the house on his final walk.

(5) The search-team that found Dr. Kelly reported the find to police headquarters, Thames Valley Police (TVP) and then left the scene. On their way back to their car, they met three 'police' officers, one of them named Detective Constable Graham Peter Coe. Coe and his men were alone at the site for 25-30 minutes before the first police actually assigned to search the area arrived and took charge of the scene from Coe. Five witnesses, including the two paramedics, called to the scene, said in their testimony that two men accompanied Coe. Yet, in his testimony, Coe maintained there was only one other beside himself. He was not questioned about the discrepancy. It would seem that the presence of the “third man” could not be satisfactorily explained and so was being denied.

(6) Dr. Nicholas Hunt, who performed the autopsy, testified there were several superficial scratches or cuts on the wrist and one deep wound that severed the ulnar artery but not the radial artery. The fact that the ulnar artery was severed, but not the radial artery, strongly suggests that the knife wound was inflicted drawing the blade from the inside of the wrist (the little finger side closest to the body) to the outside where the radial artery is located much closer to the surface of the skin than is the ulnar artery.

(7) It is extremely unusual for someone to kill themselves by slitting his ulnar artery. For example, Kelly was the only one in Britain to kill himself in that way during that year. This is hardly surprising since this is just about the most improbable way to commit suicide, made even more difficult by the inappropriate knife that Dr Kelly is said to have used. It has been pointed out that a second person situated to the left of Kelly who held or picked up the arm and slashed across the wrist would start on the inside of the wrist severing the ulnar artery first. In fact, a complete autopsy report would state in which direction the wounds were inflicted.

(8) Medical specialists have argued that they did not believe the official finding that Dr Kelly died either from haemorrhaging from a severed ulnar artery in his wrist, or from an overdose of coproxamol tablets, or a combination of the two. Such an artery, they said, was of matchstick thickness and severing it would not lead to the kind of blood loss that would kill someone. They also pointed out that, according to the ambulance team at the scene, the quantity of blood around the body was minimal.

(9) Although Dr Kelly was said to have swallowed 29 coproxamol tablets, only one-fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach, and the level found in his blood was far less than a fatal dose.

(10) The behaviour of the coroner was extremely unusual in the case of Dr. Kelly. The normal practice in such circumstances would be for the coroner to issue a temporary death certificate pending the official inquiry into such a death. But in this case, the coroner issued an unprecedented full death certificate, just one week after the inquiry started into the circumstances of Dr Kelly's demise and after the coroner had held a meeting with Home Office officials.

(11) Many of the above points surfaced in evidence to the Hutton inquiry. However, this evidence was not investigated as Lord Hutton pointed out that his brief was simply to inquire into “the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly” rather than the death itself.

So that we do not get distracted from other aspects of this thread I have started a new thread where we can discuss this case.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14916

[Guest]

I have answered you in that thread John. Perhaps this one can now revert to 'Why I am a conspiracy theorist?'

[John Simkin]

5. Conspiracy diverts intelligent people from genuine political action which might reduce corruption and the abuse of power in our democratic systems.

In time I will answer all the points made by Andy.

First of all, I would reject the idea that publicizing political conspiracies is an alternative to political action. I became a libertarian socialist at the age of 18. Ever since that time I have committed a considerable amount of my time to political action. The main objective of this action has been about creating a more equal and just society. This has taken many different forms. For a time, I was very active in the Labour Party. This included applying pressure on the Labour Party, and after 1964, the government, to introduce socialist policies. This included legislation to ensure equality in the fields of class, gender and race. This involved passing resolutions at local party meetings, making speeches at national conferences, going on demonstrations, writing letters to newspapers and articles for magazines (for three years I was editor of a Young Socialist magazine). The people who thought like I did were fairly satisfied with what we achieved between 1964-70.

In the early 1970s I reassessed what I was doing concerning political action. I came to the conclusion that I was wasting too much energy in the Labour Party. I therefore decided to work outside the party system. I still went on demonstrations but most of my energy went into writing. This usually involved the subject of history. Most of this has been pre-20th century material. However, it did not take me long to realize that one of the problems about writing about the past is that the ruling elite have done what they can to cover-up their most unpleasant deeds. I therefore came to the conclusions that I had a responsibility to spend some of my time concentrating on what I would describe as revealing “hidden truths”. This only amounts to about 10% of all my writing, and even less than that in terms of sales of books, articles published, web-page views, etc.

I was warned from the beginning that I should leave these subjects alone. I was told by one friend that it would severely damage my reputation as a historian. One of the worst things you can say of a historian is that they are a “conspiracy theorist”. I rejected that advice as I believe that this label is the main way the ruling elite keep academics from looking into these subjects.

As the recently published official history of MI5 (Defence of the Realm) by Christopher Andrew has acknowledged, that several of these conspiracies, including the “Zinoviev Letter” and the “Wilson Plot”, were true. People who originally wrote about these matters were of course described as “conspiracy theorists”. I am sure that in time historians will also eventually accept the truth of current conspiracies such as the death of Dr. David Kelly. Of course, by that time, as in the case of the “Zinoviev Letter” and the “Wilson Plot”, it is too late to have any real political impact.

[John Simkin]

Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein's bio-weapons capability.

Responding to the Guardian's revelation that the source, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi or "Curveball" as his US and German handlers called him, admitted fabricating evidence of Iraq's secret biological weapons programme, Powell said that questions should be put to the US agencies involved in compiling the case for war.

In particular he singled out the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency – the Pentagon's military intelligence arm. Janabi, an Iraqi defector, was used as the primary source by the Bush administration to justify invading Iraq in March 2003. Doubts about his credibility circulated before the war and have been confirmed by his admission this week that he lied.

Powell said that the CIA and DIA should face questions about why they failed to sound the alarm about Janabi. He demanded to know why it had not been made clear to him that Curveball was totally unreliable before false information was put into the key intelligence assessment, or NIE, put before Congress, into the president's state of the union address two months before the war and into his own speech to the UN.

"It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable," he told the Guardian . "The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA as to why this wasn't known before the false information was put into the NIE sent to Congress, the president's state of the union address and my 5 February presentation to the UN."

On 5 February 2003, a month before the invasion, Powell went before the UN security council to make the case for war. In his speech he referred to "firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails … The source was an eyewitness who supervised one of these facilities". It is now known that the source, Janabi, made up the story.

Curveball told the Guardian he welcomed Powell's demand. "It's great," he said tonight. "The BND [German intelligence] knew in 2000 that I was lying after they talked to my former boss, Dr Bassil Latif, who told them there were no mobile bioweapons factories. For 18 months after that they left me alone because they knew I was telling lies even though I never admitted it. Believe me, back then, I thought the whole thing was over for me.

"Then all of a sudden [in the run up to the 2003 invasion] they came back to me and started asking for more details about what I had told them. I still don't know why the BND then passed on my information to the CIA and it ended up in Powell's speech.

"I want there to be an inquiry so that people will know the truth. So many lies have been told about me over the years. I finally want the truth to come out."

Powell has previously expressed regret about the role he unwittingly played in passing on false information to the UN, saying it had put a blot on his career. But his latest comments increase pressure on the intelligence agencies and their former chiefs to divulge what they knew at the time and why they failed to filter out such a bad source.

George Tenet, then head of the CIA, is particularly in the firing line. He failed to pass on warnings from German intelligence about Curveball's reliability.

Tenet put out a statement on his website in response to Curveball's admission. He said: "The handling of this matter is certainly a textbook case of how not to deal with defector provided material. But the latest reporting of the subject repeats and amplifies a great deal of misinformation."

Tenet refers to his own 2007 memoir on the war, At the Centre of the Storm, in which he insists that the first he heard about Curveball's unreliability was two years after the invasion – "too late to do a damn thing about it".

In the light of Curveball's confession, politicians in Iraq called for his permanent exile and scorned his claim to want to return to his motherland and build a political party. "He is a xxxx, he will not serve his country," said one Iraqi MP. In his adopted home of Germany, MPs are demanding to know why the BND, paid Curveball £2,500 a month for at least five years after they knew he had lied.

Hans-Christian Ströbele, a Green MP, said Janabi had arguably violated a German law which makes warmongering illegal. Under the law, it is a criminal offence to do anything "with the intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially anything that leads to an aggressive war", he said. The maximum penalty is life imprisonment, he added, though he did not expect it would ever come to that.

Curveball told the Guardian he was pleased to have finally told the truth. He said he had given the Guardian's phone number to his wife and brother in Sweden "just in case something happens to me".

Further pressure on the CIA came from Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time of the invasion. He said Curveball's lies raised questions about how the CIA had briefed Powell ahead of his fateful UN speech.

Tyler Drumheller, head of the CIA's Europe division in the run-up to the invasion, said he welcomed Curveball's confession because he had always warned Tenet that he may have been a fabricator.

Tenet has disputed Drumheller's version of events, insisting that the official made no formal warning to CIA headquarters.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/16/colin-powell-cia-curveball/print

[Jack White]

Just Powell's belated CYA.

[John Simkin]

Just Powell's belated CYA.

The problem with exposing political conspiracies is that it is always too late to do anything about it.

[Len Colby]

Just Powell's belated CYA.

The problem with exposing political conspiracies is that it is always too late to do anything about it.

In theory charges could be brought against the guilty and I imagine that people don't enjoy having their reputations destroyed.

[Michael Hogan]

From countercurrents.org

Why I'm A “Truther”

By Paul Carline

March 31, 2011

http://www.countercurrents.org/carline310311.htm

[Len Colby]

A perfect example of how truthers’ views are based misinformation and faulty logic. Meyssan has been complexly debunked by other truthers. Gage a retired architect of low rise structures like fast food joints and high school gyms is not an authority on the structural engineering of skyscrapers. His group only has about 20 members who structural engineers only 1 or 2 seem to have read the NIST report and only 1 or 2 who seem to have experience with tall buildings (with no overlap). Gallop was a secretary in the Pentagon accounting office NOT a “Top Secret Military Specialist” there is no reason to be suspicious that her 10-week old son “was given immediate security clearance upon arrival” does the author think a baby too young to walk or speak is a potential security threat?