Conspiracies cannot work because someone will talk?

[gandalf]

Or, our governments would never do anything terrible to their own citizens?

Think again. Or study this recent Gladio thread.

The NY Times reported on Gladio on Nov 19, 1990:

The focus of the inquiry is a clandestine operation code-named Gladio, created decades ago to arm and train resistance fighters in case the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded. All this week, there have been disclosures of similar organizations in virtually all Western European countries, including those that do not belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. ...
The Prime Minister said last week that Gladio later evolved into a branch of an extensive network, operated within NATO and abetted by a 1956 agreement between the United States and Italian secret services. Over the years, he says, 622 Italians belonged to the operation -- civilians who were trained by intelligence operatives and who had fought in World War II or served in the peacetime forces.
Agreement With U.S. Agencies ...
There was Mr. Andreotti's mention of the 1956 agreement with United States agencies, whose aim for decades was to make sure that the Italian Communist Party, the largest in the West, never got a foothold in the Government. And there were long-reported links between Italian secret services and neo-Fascists.
And there is the fact that the major unsolved acts of terrorism that rocked Italy in the 1970's are all presumed to be the work of people on the far right. Left-wing terrorists like the moribund Red Brigades somehow were caught and imprisoned.
Swept up in the dispute is President Francesco Cossiga, who declared recently that it had been his "privilege" to help organize Gladio when he was in the Defense Ministry in the 1960's.
Fact is, he said, "I admire the fact that we have kept the secret for 45 years."

---

Daniele Ganser (PhD), a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, recently wrote a book on Gladio. Here is some stuff from the book.

[wli]

1. false flag

Well, I thought it was false flag before, but the Gladio thing should really be pumped and hard.

[gandalf]

2. Right. It's a pity that the newspapers

don't dare to mention it.

Ganser's book not even got a review in a big newspaper after it was published at the beginning of the year.

[wli]

14. well, spreading the word

That much of "terrorism" is false flag stuff meant to manipulate public opinion and the Gladio thing is evidence of the US doing it will help.

[rman]

3. conspiracies work -untill- enough people talk and enough people listen

watergate, iran-contra.

just to name two unavoidably obvious examples.

[Minstrel Boy]

4. conspiracies work, in part, because people have been told they can't

And they are made to appear foolish for arguing otherwise.

But to put forth a conspiratorial hypothesis about the London event - what is usually, mistakenly called a "conspiracy theory" - is perfectly legimitate and reasonable given the Gladio precedent.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. When they talk and try to spill the beans, fat lot of good it does

if they then get slapped with a gag order and the lamestream media whores ignore the story.

Washington -- April 25, 2005 -- TomFlocco.com -- Former FBI contract translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and her attorneys were ordered removed from the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse so that a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel could discuss her case in private with Bush administration lawyers.

Sibel Edmonds was fired for reporting information she uncovered in the FBI's translation unit In an exclusive interview on Saturday, we asked Edmonds if she would deny that laundered drug money linked to the 911 attacks found its way into recent House, Senate and Presidential campaign war-chests, according to what she heard in intelligence intercepts she was asked to translate.

"I will not deny that statement; but I cannot comment further on it," she told TomFlocco.com, in a non-denial denial.

<snip>

Criminal evidence in Edmonds’ explosive case is apparently getting too close to Washington officials, since the former contract linguist also told us she would not deny that "once this issue gets to be...investigated, you will be seeing certain people that we know from this country standing trial; and they will be prosecuted criminally," revealing the content of the FBI intercepts she heard indicates that recognizable, very high-profile American citizens are linked to the 911 attacks.

http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=109

[gandalf]

8. Exactly. Or lose their jobs

as reported in the book Into the Buzzsaw. EG, Christian Borjesson, CBS producer, who tried to investigate the TWA 800 crash. Was not really a career advancement...

on edit: Or Gary Webb, who, after reporting on CIA distributed crack, first lost his job, then his wife, and then his life.

[Beelzebud]

6. The Freemasons founded America, and have managed to not talk about it

for about 230 years...

[Octafish]

7. In really big conspiracies...

The conspirators kill those who spend money, let alone talk.

Crooks know enough to keep their wugs shut, let alone traitors.

Remember how the Mafia didn't exist according to J Edgar Hoover? He didn't believe in that particular conspiracy. The hoove did believe in a global communist conspiracy:

"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."

Welcome to the real world. Nobody talks who wants to keep breathing, that is except those who give a damn about their country, planet, fellow human beings.

[Mairead]

9. "staybehind" programs date back at least to the Nazi 'Werwolf' program

I'm not sure they can be counted as proper conspiracies, though, since the key principle of that kind of resistance program is that the members not conspire. Each member survives by being a cell of one, their very existence unknown to any other.

The group-oriented kind exemplified by the Maquis and other bits of French WW2 resistance is quite different and nowhere near so secure.

[MisterP]

10. Grey Wolves in Turkey, now Wolf Brigades in Iraq

http://www.albionmonitor.com/9703b/turkeycia.html

[gandalf]

12. That is quite an interesting story

thanks for the link.

[Mairead]

17. Interesting indeed. Thanks.

I never knew enough about such operations to be able to say what percentage is likely to be ultranationalist/fascist, but from conversations with people who were closer to them than I, I'd guess probably 80% are. It takes a certain attitude of mind.

[rman]

13. The "members" may not know but the organizers do

Anything like these stay-behind ops requires secret planning and implementation, and i doubt it was just one person who did all the planning and implementing.

[Mairead]

16. My points were 2: that staybehind operations were never a proper secret

they're simply not something that was ever really publicised; and that they're not actually a good example of large-scale secret-keeping, since only, as you say, the tiny number of organisers knew anything much and a few can always keep a secret if it's in their interests to do so.

[rman]

20. "need-to-know-basis"

As with any large organization that deals with sensitive information, everyone else but the top knows what they know only on a "need-to-know-basis". Only a few know all the sensitive information. But secrecy in planning and execution is still crucial.

So the conspiracy may not be big in terms of the number of people who are in on it, but it may still be big in terms of the scope of the entire operation - and it's definitely a conspiracy.

Wrt to Gladio we still have this statement of one of the organizers: "Fact is, he said, "I admire the fact that we have kept the secret for 45 years."

[Hidden Stillness]

11. The Whole Modern Repub Party is a Conspiracy

For those who think you can't keep a conspiracy quiet for all those years and "therefore," "it didn't happen," I remember hearing about a situation in the sport of (male) bike-riding, and steroid checks. I don't really follow the sport, so I don't know names, but a star on the Italian team, who had won many races, awards, etc., over an 11-year career, something like that, never failed a banned-substance test, always cleared, the leader of the team, retired and admitted that the entire team had been using banned substances all along, and described how it was done. No one suspected this person at all, unlike Lance Armstrong. If you like another example: Where is Jimmy Hoffa?

[K-W]

15. This whole conspiracy thing is a crime against language.

Conspiracies happen all the time.

Conspiracy Theory is a term that has come to mean an unsupported/unlikely conspiracy theory. Often a conspiracy theory is bad because it postulates a level of secrecy and cooperation that is unrealistic. I'm sure we've all read such theories.

But those are bad conspiracy theories, not conspiracy theories. And the fact that they are bad is the significant factor, not the fact that they involve conspiracies.

Simply through a trick of language the elites in this country have managed to discredit every theory no matter how plausible that involves a conspiracy.

[Mairead]

18. Very nice. Well said! (nt)

[gandalf]

19. Given Gladio: Why are speculations about the London bombings forbidden?

Here we have a precendence. But serious discussions about mere indications that something could be fishy with the London bombings are censored or absolute tinfoil-hat stuff?

OK, let's post another Rove thread.

[Ready2Snap]

21. But, after 45 years, everybody who gives a rat's ass is dead.