Pat Shannan's MUSINGS
The Wildest Conspiracy Theory of All
Only the extremely naïve or the participating liars would publicly speak that government-sponsored conspiracies do not exist. Few conspiracies get uncovered and exposed at the outset, as did the Watergate break-in, but as the years pass some of the more blatant ones that fooled us initially come to light, e.g. the "surprise" attack at Pearl Harbor, the deep-seeded plots to eliminate JFK, RFK, and MLK; and the Gulf of Tonkin charade, that non-existent "provocation" which became the excuse to send the eventual half-million-man American "peace" force into Vietnam. And wasn't it convenient that the governor of the state around which the 2000 election dispute centered just happened to be the little brother of the eventual winner!
It could be said, and with probable accuracy, that the truth of the Watergate caper was allowed to spill forward because it was a political conspiracy involving the two major parties and not a government conspiracy requiring the plugging of all holes to prevent exposure to the American people. Two ambitious and industrious newsmen were able to make big careers out of exposing Watergate only because their editors early in the game did not shut them down. Reporters and cops have lost their jobs for refusing to back off of lesser cases, when ordered to do so by their superiors.
The exposure of Watergate by newsmen thrust ahead by miles the belief that America still has a "free press."
We must admit that independent researchers can manufacture plots out of near-nothing to come out of left field with some mighty weird conclusions. But even the "Bush, Prince Charles et. al. are actually reptilians whose real faces appear during secret meetings after dark" or "The Arizona forest fires were set to drive the separatists back into the cities where they can be easily rounded up" stories do not nearly equal in number and insanity the weirdo stuff Americans have actually bought and continue to swallow daily.
One that we literally buy and swallow is rat and roach poison, in the ridiculous belief that it inhibits tooth decay. Printed in bold type on the label of the recommended roach poison at Walgreen's is: Active Ingredient - Sodium Fluoride - 95%. The small print says, May be fatal if swallowed. Do not contaminate food or foodstuff. Keep out of reach of children and domestic animals. Rinse container thoroughly before disposal. Do not inhale; keep away from cuts, scratches. But of course, a little bit of it is good for our teeth. Sure it is. Well, at least the officials at the EPA are finally admitting that fluoride is killing people. No report yet as to whether or not these brilliant scientists have figured out exactly why.
In 1995, the FBI, by hiding evidence to the contrary, made the world believe that an air blast from an ANFO-laden truck destroyed the OKC federal building. Officials never explained how and why columns in the back of the building collapsed while many nearer the truck remained intact.
In June, government sources finally admitted (after six years of denial since the TWA-800 shootdown) that hand-held Stinger missiles indeed have the capability to reach out more than 3 miles and hit aircraft flying at 13,500 feet. "Conspiracy Nut," author, public speaker and retired Navy Cmdr. Bill Donaldson (now deceased) had fingered the American-made Stinger missiles as being the culprit in the fall of 1996. He believed that the reason for the silence and cover-up was the fact that these had been sold to Israel a few years earlier.
Surely the goofiest conspiracy theory of all has got to be one of the latest. There is a nutty group of dingbats out of Washington who actually believe that 19 Middle Eastern terrorists (seven of whom returned from the dead) came to America undetected to learn to fly with but elementary instruction in single-engine trainers. Then one day they were able to randomly pick four commercial airliners - each with a mysteriously minimal number of passengers aboard - commandeer control with nothing more than box-cutters as weapons, and fly around the northeastern U.S. for 90 minutes before crashing into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. They claimed the mastermind of the whole caper was some eccentric billionaire hermit who lives in a cave so remote and obscure that even the CIA cannot locate it.
No fighter jets were sent out from Andrews AFB or anywhere else because, according to this "intelligence group," the highly trained group of terrorists was able to secretly penetrate and lock down the Air Force's NORAD system.
White House spokesmen, the FIB, and news parrots all told us that the terrorists turned off the airliners' transponders and the planes became impossible to track. Is this all it would take to for incoming enemy missiles and bombers to also become invisible?
The latter part of this unbelievable conspiracy theory was debunked on June 20th when a private plane wandered into restricted D.C. airspace, apparently unwittingly. It was spotted by ATC at BWI who called Reagan Washington National airport at 7:59 p.m. with the warning. At exactly 8:03 - four minutes later - NORAD deployed the jets from Andrews. And, as the USA-Today headline said, the "Incident was over in 46 minutes."
Now either NORAD's abilities have improved drastically in only a matter of months or the Pentagon's information service has been over-dosing us with Bravo Sierra.