Which conspiracy theory is the most compelling?

[iconoclastNYC]

Poll question: Which conspiracy theory is the most compelling?

Which is the most believable on the available evidence or coincidences? It might be hard to pick one.

[emcguffie]

1. CIA manipulating the press is not a theory.

It's been established.

I think. :shrug: I know what was established was that Katherine Graham actually can be quoted somewhere as saying something like "of course the media has to cooperate with the government, to a degree", and they were happy to do so.

I think there was an agreement some years ago.

I should apologize for not having all my evidence at hand. Maybe later I will.

[lvx35]

4. Yeah, that's well known.

You'd be a fool to think they didn't. Its like when that sniper was on a rampage in DC, and the press says he shot an FBI agent unknowingly...This sounded fishy at the time. Then later you find out he told the FBI he would stop shooting when he hit an FBI agent. Did the FBI manipulate the press? Duh. They actually had a good reason to, as well. But it happens.

[Lone_Wolf]

6. Operation Mockingbird is a fact...

n/t

[JohnyCanuck]

17. Washington Post publisher Philip Graham had close ties to the CIA

Part 1 of a two part-series
Secret admirers: The Bushes and the Washington Post
by Michael Hasty

<snip>

In an article published by the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Henwood traced the Post's Establishment connections to Eugene Meyer, who took control of the Post in 1933. Meyer transferred ownership to his daughter Katharine and her husband, Philip Graham, after World War II, when he was appointed by Harry Truman to serve as the first president of the World Bank. A lifelong Republican, Meyer had been "a Wall Street banker, director of President Wilson's War Finance Corporation, a governor of the Federal Reserve, and director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation," Henwood wrote.

Philip Graham, Meyer's successor, had been in military intelligence during the war. When he became the Post's publisher, he continued to have close contact with his fellow upper-class intelligence veterans—now making policy at the newly formed CIA—and actively promoted the CIA's goals in his newspaper. The incestuous relationship between the Post and the intelligence community even extended to its hiring practices. Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee also had an intelligence background; and before he became a journalist, reporter Bob Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence. In a 1977 article in Rolling Stone magazine about CIA influence in American media, Woodward's partner, Carl Bernstein, quoted this from a CIA official: "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from." Graham has been identified by some investigators as the main contact in Project Mockingbird, the CIA program to infiltrate domestic American media. In her autobiography, Katherine Graham described how her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends from Yale who had organized the ill-fated venture.

After Graham committed suicide, and his widow Katharine assumed the role of publisher, she continued her husband's policies of supporting the efforts of the intelligence community in advancing the foreign policy and economic agenda of the nation's ruling elites. In a retrospective column written after her own death last year, FAIR analyst Norman Solomon wrote, "Her newspaper mainly functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White House, State Department and Pentagon." It accomplished this function (and continues to do so) using all the classic propaganda techniques of evasion, confusion, misdirection, targeted emphasis, disinformation, secrecy, omission of important facts, and selective leaks.

Graham herself rationalized this policy in a speech she gave at CIA headquarters in 1988. "We live in a dirty and dangerous world," she said. "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

I guess it depends on what you mean by "democracy."
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/020504Hasty/020504hasty.html

[emcguffie]

19. thank you.

Hardly a "hypothesis".

[Endangered Specie]

2. Voted None

[The Jacobin]

3. Too bad.

Because the stolen election is true.

[Endangered Specie]

5. Yes yes yes I know...

100% undeniable true, anyone who says otherwise is a freeper :eyes:

If there was a stolen 2000 election option, I would have voted for that.

[LaurenG]

7. Oh, I want to vote but what's a MIHOP and a LIHOP?

I know I should know these things but I don't so help me out please. :shrug:

[emcguffie]

8. MIHOP is "make it happen on purpose", referring to --

9/11, and LIHOP is "let it happen on purpose".

I can't deal with this poll, though it is amusing, because I can't pick just one, and some of them ARE NOT CONSPIRACIES!

[Minstrel Boy]

9. These aren't theories, they are hypotheses.

The theory supporting and uniting all except for the suggestion the Moon landing was hoaxed (which it wasn't), is Dr Peter Dale Scott's theory of Deep Politics: "the constant, everyday interaction between the constitutionally elected government and forces of violence, forces of crime, which appear to be the enemies of that government."

Dr Jamey Hecht writes: "Deep politics is a robust theory, a powerful explanatory account of demonstrable phenomena; it applies to myriad cases and offers a unified understanding of their causes and meanings. Like Goethe’s conceptual account of color, and like Newton’s rival account which refuted it, Scott’s deep-political theory applies uniformly to the domain it describes."

[emcguffie]

16. please see my post on this thread about the CIA and the press.

Those references are pretty good. I admit I haven't checked the references, haven't gotten the books and read them. But I don't think this is a theory. I think it has been established. Just because you don't read about it on the front page of the NY Times doesn't make it not true. After all, they don't want everyone to realize what they are doing. But it isn't hard to find out about it.

[Cocoa]

10. Jeff Gannon is Johnny Gosch

kidding. ;-)

[Zynx]

11. CIA drug dealing is a fact, not a conspiracy theory

[wli]

12. the "conspiracy theory" slur is propaganda

It's deliberately misrepresenting perfectly valid arguments and evidence, and there is some evidence that the term itself was even introduced as a propaganda device to discredit people who publicized evidence of wrongdoing or complicity in crimes after a specific suspicious event.

Actual crackpots make unsubstantiated claims. This newer phenomenon is reporting of significant circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing by government officials and significant circumstantial evidence of the complicity of governmental organizations in several recent crimes.

Furthermore, opinion is not a court of law. Circumstantial evidence suffices as a valid basis for opinions.

Finally, what the "problem" really boils down to is unsubstantiated claims. "Conspiracy theory" is vague and meaningless, and effectively ad hominem. The things in need of criticism are lack of evidence and logical fallacy, not the nature of the conclusion.

[emcguffie]

13. I have found a bit of this about the CIA and the press...

This is a long article, mostly on journalists working for the CIA.

From:
http://www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/20000318mediaoverb.htm

A Report on CIA Infiltration and Manipulation of the Mass Media

by Ashley Overbeck/September 1999

Should CIA agents be allowed to pose as journalists to further the aims of their clandestine activities? Members of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on the future of U.S. intelligence in the post-Cold War world say yes, and a CIA official recently came forward to admit that the Agency already occasionally does so despite regulations barring the practice. But is this a breaking story or just the latest chapter in a spy story that traces its roots back to the 1950's? While they may act like strangers in public, the press and the CIA have a sordid past that spans more than four decades.

The CIA-Press Connection in the 1950s and 60s
The CIA-press connection traces its roots back to the early days of the Cold War, when Allen Dulles (who became CIA director in 1953) began courting the nation's most prestigious journalistic institutions for Agency operations. The mood of the day precluded the need for secretive infiltration, as Carl Bernstein points out in his 1977 expose on the topic. "American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against global Communism," he writes. "Accordingly, the line separating the American press corps was often indistinguishable."

.....snip.....

Reporter Russell Warren Howe also has a long history of CIA service. In 1958, he once said, his "days as an asset had just begun." He worked for the CIA proprietary "Information Bulletin, Ltd." and its successor, "Forum Service" (later known as Forum World Features), in addition to the CIA-funded "Africa Report and "Survey." Howe was fully aware of his employer's CIA ties, referring once to the FWF as "the principal CIA media in the world." According to the Church Committee, the Post management was aware that one of their reporters worked for a CIA publication, and that on several occasions they knowingly reprinted propaganda from that paper in the Post.

..... snip.....

Sources

"The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered it Up," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.55-67.

"CIA in America," CounterSpy, Spring 1980, p. 42-43.

"Washington Post -- Speaking for Whom?" CounterSpy, May-July 1981, p. 13-19.

Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: the CIA in a Democratic Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 182-311.

"'Loophole Revealed in Prohibition on CIA Use of Journalistic Cover," New York Times, February 16, 1996, p. A24.

"Making Intelligence Smarter," report of a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1996.

"Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Spring-Summer 1983, p. 3-12.

"The CIA's use of the press: a 'mighty Wurlitzer,'" Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1974, p. 9-18.

http://www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/20000318mediaoverb.htm

[JohnyCanuck]

18. Another link on Operation Mockingbird

In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great): "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."

In 1951 Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".

One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

[radwriter0555]

14. a theory is something that hasn't been proven, or is open for variables.

Few of the events you list are actually in question and most are proven events.

[Darwins Finch]

15. Had to vote "other"

since you didn't have a "stole 2000 election" choice.

Besides, I've always had a personal weakness of another conspiracy, Project Rainbow (aka "The Philadelphia Experiment"). But technological conspiracy theories don't get as much play around here as political ones (go figure). Anyone remember HAARP? :)