The overwhelmingly huge majority of major crimes involve a conspiracy. Simple: a conspiracy is "a plan by TWO or more people to commit a CRIME". A "conspiracy theory" is the notion that certain crimes, attributed to just one person by officialdom and the media, were possibly committed by more than one person... in other words, the more likely probability, statistically speaking.

So how did this phrase "conspiracy theory" get so much traction, and how did it's meaning get transformed over the years to include the invocation of "nonsense" or "absurd" in the minds of the casual reader? Three letters: JFK. The unlikely-to- impossible version was the "lone gunman" theory, and it absolved official parties from any blame.

In the decades following JFK's assassination, the term "conspiracy theory" has become a catch-all phrase to divert blame away from government employees, departments and agencies. The association of "conspiracy" with the absurd in the mass psyche has been facilitated effectively by the inclusion of "alien abductions", "faked moon landings" and other ridiculosities... and insodoing, it has become very simple to reduce the reality of major crimes and atrocities committed by rogue groups within governments, militaries, intelligence agencies and the like, to the non-credibility of, for example "holocaust denial" or "Elvis is still alive".

In other words, if a huge crime was committed, and the explanation leaves much to be desired, then the best way of diverting attention away from the perpetrators is to seed the phrase "conspiracy theory" into the dialog. Bingo! A switch fires off in the public "consciousness" (or lack thereof), and the knee jerk response promptly replaces logic and reason.

So, the next time something drastic happens, or visible people who are a thorn in the side of authority suddenly "commit suicide", and the official explanation makes little sense (or even relies on physical impossibilities), just wait for the "weasel brigade" to start weaving the old, well-worn, but still effective "conspiracy theory" yarn. As soon as that happens, you can bet your ass that folks in positions of power are being protected from justice.

To "conspire with others" to commit a crime, is the usual way it's done. It's a part of both the practical considerations and logistics of the act, and human nature itself. And when certain people in high places, who are above the law can do it, they will... just because they can. That's human nature as well.

Get real!

The MSM are so busy saying that anybody that questions authority are crackpots without actually investigating any of the major concerns. If 84% of Americans don't believe the official 9/11 theory - that should be telling them something... Mind you I'm getting fed up with the number of people latching onto speculative theories on 9/11 rather than keeping to the facts. I guess they could be disinfo agents and sock-puppets...

It's not my intention to bring up controversy by drawing upon a controversial researcher (Webster Tarpley), and typically I don't promote his material for public outreach on behalf of specific truth concerns, but here in one particular segment of a chapter in his "Synthetic Terror" volume that I have found helpful to better grappling with the topic at hand here:

“The entire controversy about conspiracy theory is a diversion, and is generally conducted in such a way as to lead away from the facts on the table. Charges of conspiracy theory represent in their own way a form of ideological terrorism, and grow out of the intellectual climate of cold-war McCarthyite witch-hunts. Conspiracy itself has a history as long as long as humanity, since it is one the primordial forms of political action. Machiavelli wrote about conspiracy in a long chapter of his Discourses; what he means by conspiracy is a plot to kill a ruler and to seize power in his place, like the conspiracy organized by the Pazzi family against the Medici in the late 1480’s. Conspiracy is also an active category of the Anglo-Saxon common law.

Conspiracy theory as a term of approbrium (condescension) is relatively new. It dates back to the work of (historian) Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University. Hofstadter was himself a kind of neocon ante litteram, a neocon before there was a word for it, who became a direct beneficiary of McCarthyism: he took over a job vacated by Professor Philip Foner, who had come under ostracism as a member of the Communist Party USA. In his essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964) and in his other writings Hofstadter took issue with the 1880’s-1890’s prairie populist critique of international bankers, a critique which today seems prophetic in its foreshadowing of destructive shenanigans of Lord Montagu Norman of the Bank of England during the interwar period (Norman was part of Brown, Shipley in London, the home office of Prescott Bush’s Brown Brothers Harriman in Wall Street) and the International Monetary Fund during the entire postwar period. But for Hofstadter, radical critics of Anglo-American finance oligarchy were paranoids. His essay is doubly suspect because it appeared in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and seemed to suggest that the many critics of the Warren Commission report were also paranoids. An interesting problem was posed for Hofstadter in that sophisticated Western Europe, where populist paranoia was supposedly less strong, was even more critical of the Warren Commission report than was the alleged US citadel of paranoia.

Hofstadter’s favorite habit of tarring political forces he did not like, such as the populists, with the brush of paranoia appears illegitimate. The paranoid typically fears that there is a conspiracy afoot specifically against himself. For Hofstadter the notion becomes impossibly broad: anyone who thinks he sees a conspiracy anywhere is ipso facto a paranoid. What is lost here is the necessary reference point in reality: is there a conspiracy going on or not? US attorneys have been proving the existence of conspiracies to juries for a long time, and they have generally escaped the charge of paranoia.

It is impossible to write political history without admitting from time to time the possibility of confidential agreements for concerted action made in advance. There are of course times when conspiracy plays no role: an absolute tyrant at the height of his power has no need of conspiracy; he can act directly by issuing orders. Similarly, an absolute spontaneous mob – a rarity, although a theoretical possibility – is also innocent of conspiratorial planning. Between these two extremes, some form of surreptitious concerted action can frequently be found.

As has been stressed throughout this book, US society today is neither a tyranny nor a democracy; it is organized from top to bottom according to the principle of oligarchy or plutocracy. The characteristic way in which an oligarchy functions is by means of conspiracy, a mode which is necessary because of the polycentric distribution of power in an oligarchic system, and the resulting need to secure the cooperation and approval of several oligarchic centers in order to get things done. Furthermore, the operations of secret intelligence agencies tend to follow conspiratorial models; this is what a covert operation means – coordinated and preplanned actions by a number of agents and groups leading toward a pre-concerted result, with the nature of the operation remaining shielded from public view. So, in an oligarchic society characterized by the preponderant role of secret intelligence agencies – such as the United States at the beginning of the 21st century – anyone who rules out conspiracies a priori runs the risk of not understanding very much of what is going on. One gathers that the phobia against alleged conspiracy theory in much of the postmodern academia is actually a cover story for a distaste of political thinking itself.

“Conspiracy theorist” is an all-purpose term of ad hominem argument to dismiss arguments which cannot be refuted. This goes back years after the Kennedy assassination, when the public was expected to accept that it was US government policy that this great crime, along with the further assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, would remain permanently unsolved, and that those who objected would be vilified.”

Webster Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror – Made in the USA , p.340-342 (Progressive Press, 2006)