Since a conspiracy is merely an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime, the concept of a “conspiracy theory” shouldn’t be the least bit bizarre or suspect. Nevertheless “conspiracy theory” seems to be particularly worrying to the Obama administration, if one of the President’s recent appointments is anything to go by.
The individual in question is Cass Sunstein — one of the panel of “outside experts” appointed to review the NSA’s massive breaches of domestic and international law. The panel contains such “outsiders” as Richard Clarke, a White House insider who worked at the NSC for Clinton and Bushes 1 and 2, and Michael Morrell, who spent 33 years at CIA, and stepped down as CIA director just five months ago. It would be a joke if it wasn’t so sad and bad, I know, but in some ways the appointment of Sunstein is even more troubling.
Russia Today reports that Sunstein (another White House insider and Harvard Law Professor) coauthored a paper in 2010 titled “Conspiracy Theories” which warned of the great dangers posed by people who believe in such things, and called on Obama’s government to engage in “cognitive infiltration” where “government agents might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories.”
Wow. Did you read what I just read? Did I get it right? Unfortunately yes. An internet search leads to an abstract of his 2008 paper “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures” here.
In theory, it’s possible to download his paper as a .pdf. In practice, it isn’t. The links on the abstract page don’t work, and the links on the RT article and Glen Greenwald’s piece in Salon are either broken or lead to the broken abstract page.
Why would this be? Isn’t Professor Sunstein keen to share his controversial ideas with us? Or would he prefer not to share them because they’ve been operational for quite some time? The Guardian reported in 2011 that the Pentagon has developed software enabling a handful of loyal Bradleys and Chelseas to create multiple fake online personae, “to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions”. The article speculated that the Pentagon’s “sock puppet” HQ was based at McGill AFB near Tampa, FL, home of the US Special Operations Command.
What does this mean to those who have investigated the Kennedy assassination, or the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, or the 9-11 atrocities, or other conspiratorial wickedness? Possibly that the number of crazed posts your website receives are not the work of individual nutters, but rather of US military contractors and employees, paid by our tax dollars, to muddy the waters, upset sane people, and drive the discourse into the ditch.
US government agencies have been doing this since long before the invention of the Internet. COINTELPRO, an FBI operation which ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, produced bogus information against leftist groups, created false left-wing organizations (the Fair Play for Cuba Committee?) and paid government agents to pretend to be left-wing or right-wing activists (Lee Harvey Oswald?).
It’s easier to spot the provocateur when you can see him or her (though the British police have also done an amazing job of infiltrating Green groups with agents provocateurs, and getting their members pregnant!). When it’s just a name on a website it’s much harder to know whether the person posting is a harmless nut, a dangerous nut, or something else.
And Sunstein’s project seems to be working. In June of this year, John Simkin, a British academic who ran one of the best Kennedy-related websites, announced he was closing his forum due to abusive and demented posters — and this was a site where posters, in theory, used their real names. (Fortunately he reconsidered and the JFK Assassination Debate Forum is live again). But you only have to read the mad garbage which swiftly shows up in Guardian reader comments to see that Sunstein’s sock puppets are alive and well.
Question: what is so frightening about conspiracy theories that they must be suppressed in this manner, at taxpayers’ expense?
the president and the provocateur 