It is, of course, not just 9/11; false flags and labeling non-consensus opinions as conspiracy theories have been government practice for centuries:
Generally speaking, conspiracy theories form where there is a vacuum of verifiable facts associated with a controversial, usually tragic event. The concept has evolved over the years and is a part of our popular culture. There are legions of conspiracy theorists and “truthers” who have devoted their lives to certain theories, and there are legions of skeptics who have devoted their lives to debunking those theories. All the while, conspiracy theories of every stripe and variety festoon the footnotes of history. Even the origin of the phrase itself is subject to conspiracy theory, as
some researchers have argued that the CIA invented and promulgated the term in order to marginalize fringe thinkers and neutralize investigations.
The internet has obviously had a profound effect on conspiracy theories, simultaneously helping and hurting the cause. While a world of information is at people’s fingertips, so too are alternate worlds of manufactured propaganda. While the Internet may appear to be a democratized, unfiltered path toward facts and truth, it is easily manipulated. Powerful corporations pay a lot of money to have their dirty laundry buried in the search results underneath contrived puff pieces.With nearly the entire mainstream media apparatus at their disposal, the government is a maestro at this practice. As we learned from so-called Operation Mockingbird — a conspiracy theory fact discussed in my first post on the subject, “
Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to Be True,” — hundreds, if not thousands of news organizations have been conscripted into working with the CIA to support pro-government narratives. That was in the 1960s. One can only imagine how vast the network is now. Not to mention the fact that a single proprietary
algorithm owned by Google dictates the vast majority of the population’s exposure to a subject.
In
Part 1, I noted that the list had been meticulously whittled down to focus only on conspiracies that have been irrefutably proven to be fact. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories I think are likely to be true that are not on this list because there simply isn’t enough hard evidence yet to confirm it 100%. I also aimed for a good mixture of old conspiracies and new conspiracies. With groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous out there, the last decade has witnessed a dam burst of new data and documents. Thanks to intrepid journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists, and leakers, the human race continues to tear down the wall of lies erected by the corporatocracy.
Without further ado, let’s get to it….ten more conspiracy theories we can start calling conspiracy facts.
1. Operation Ajax, the CIA’s Iranian Coup
In Iran it was called 28 Mordad coup; the United Kingdom contributed under the name Operation Boot. However you refer to it,
Operation Ajax was an Iranian coup that in 1953 deposed the democratically elected Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the monarchical power of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The primary cause of the coup was Mossadeq’s attempt to nationalize the Iran’s oil fields, which threatened the oil profits of Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company (AIOC).
The U.S. — in addition to protecting its ally’s petroleum monopoly — viewed Mossadeq’s move as communist aggression and therefore helped plan the return to power of one the world’s more insidious dictators, the shah. Operation Ajax resulted almost directly in 1979 Iranian revolution that created an anti-West Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Though it was long considered an open secret, the U.S. government kept the truth behind Operation Ajax concealed from the American people until very recently. The CIA
declassified various documentson the 60th anniversary of the coup.
Because of the recent declassification, much information relevant to this CIA-sponsored coup is now available in the
CIA’s archives.
In describing Operation Ajax, the CIA itself has become rather oddly self-reflective:
“The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.”
In a recent interview on Democracy Now, Bernie Sanders remarked to Amy Goodman that this seminal chapter in the history of U.S./Middle East relations is
almost entirely ignored by mainstream media. “Have you seen many shows about that on NBC?” he asked the crowd.
2. “Nayirah,” the False Pretext for the first Gulf War
It’s now commonly believed that the second Iraq War was sold to the American people — and their congressional representatives — based on an elaborate web of lies and manipulated intelligence.
What is less commonly known is that the first Iraq War came about in a very similar fashion. While, surprisingly, there is
broad agreement that “Operation Desert Storm” was a worthwhile war, many people overlook the role of a fifteen-year-old girl named “Nayirah,” whose
1990 testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus is credited with cementing the idea of Iraqi war crimes in the American popular consciousness. Nayirah testified to having witnessed Iraqi troops tearing babies from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them to die on the floor. It’s a profoundly disturbing image….and
one that was entirely fictitious.
After a lengthy investigation, Amnesty International and other independent watchdog groups discovered that the situation described by Nayirah was fabricated by a PR firm named Hill & Knowlton (the largest in the world at this time), which was hired by the group Citizens for a Free Kuwait in order to create propaganda that would galvanize pro-war sentiment. The man overseeing the campaign was Bush political confidante Craig Fuller. This was a massive project utilizing 119 H&K executives in 12 offices across the United States and even involved casting Nayirah, who turned out to be Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The
Justice Department, which could have investigated the entire effort under the
Foreign Agents Registration Act, turned a blind eye, allowing the Bush administration to pull off a massive “Wag the Dog”-style ideological false flag. Others call it “atrocity propaganda,” a form of psyop (psychological operation).
The “Nayirah” story is just another example of the government falsifying a narrative in order to manipulate the public into supporting war. This kind of psychological propaganda continued all through the second Iraq War and the War on Terror. Just recently, it was revealed that the Pentagon paid PR firm Bell Pottinger $540 million to
create fake terrorist videos in Iraq.
3. Operation Paperclip
Originally called Operation Overcast, Operation Paperclip was the codename of the secret American plan to conscript Nazi scientists into U.S. intelligence services at the end of World War II. This ushered in and shielded about 1,500 Germans, including some engineers and technicians. Ostensibly, the purpose of this redeployment by the
Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was to prevent Nazi scientific intelligence from helping reconstitute a new German government; it was also a tactic meant to ensure the Soviet Union didn’t acquire any new technology.
Whatever strategic mindset might have lived inside Operation Paperclip, at its core, the project gave American identities to some of the most ruthless war criminals the world has ever seen.
According to
Ynet, the new Nazi CIA scientists helped develop chemical weapons for the U.S. and worked alongside American scientists to develop LSD, which the CIA viewed as a
‘truth serum.’
4. Operation Gladio: Anti-Communist False Flags in Italy
Operation Gladio was the
post-World War II love-child of a CIA/NATO/M16 plot to battle communism in Italy.
The operation lasted two decades and used CIA-created “stay behind” networks as part of a “Strategy of Tension” that coordinated multiple terrorist attacks from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Authorities blamed these attacks on Marxists and other left-wing political opponents in order to stigmatize and condemn communism. The operation involved multiple bombings that killed hundreds of innocent people, including children. The most notable attack was the August 2, 1980, bombing of the Bologna train station, which killed 85 people.
In an Anti-Media piece written about five confirmed false flag operations (which includes Operation Gladio, I wrote:
“How do we know about Operation Gladio in spite of its incredibly clandestine nature? There are two principle sources. One, the investigations of Italian judge
Felice Casson, whose presentation was so compelling it forced
Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm Gladio’s existence. The second source is testimony from an actual Gladio operative, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving a life sentence for murder. In a 1990 interview with the Guardian,
Vincenzo stated that Gladio was designed to psychologically coerce the Italian public to rely on the state for security.”
Operation Gladio is a
textbook modern “false flag.” It used terror and violence to discredit an ideology (communism). And to think, this came at a time before the internet when the CIA didn’t have a fully entrenched mainstream media to trumpet, echo, and build consensus around every little nuance (though they were working on it with COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird).
Nowadays, the CIA has multinational propaganda machines — the news networks — to make sure all terrorist attacks fit into the carefully scripted narrative that manufactures consent around our wars for oil, natural gas, and other resources.
5. Government uses insect and rodent drones to spy
It’s somewhat of a cliche to jokingly refer to a surrounding insect or bird as a clandestine spy deployed by the government to watch you. While we lack certain specifics on the ubiquity of the technology, we know definitively that the government has the technology to surveil citizens using insects and other small animals, and they use this technology in military applications.
There is some evidence to suggest that insect drones are used domestically to spy on citizens. In 2007, this theory conspiracy theory took shape when anti-war protesters reported strange
buzzing insects. Written off as tin foil material, officials dismissed the suggestion that the government used insect drones to spy. Multiple witnesses
reported erratic dragonfly-type objects hovering in the sky. The very next year, the
U.S. Air Force announced their intended use of insect-sized spies ‘as tiny as bumblebees’ to infiltrate buildings in order to
‘photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.‘
The government has come clean about its use of drones to spy on American citizens, so it’s difficult to believe they wouldn’t have at least tried insect drones.
While we can’t say with 100% certainty that there are insect drones spying on American citizens, though it’s exceedingly likely, what is irrefutable is the use of
micro air vehicles (MAVs) and
“spy animals” as war-time tools. DARPA launched its Stealthy Insect Sensor Project in 1999 as an effort to deputize bees as bomb locators in war zones. This was just the first phase in an ongoing project. In her book
The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency, journalist Annie Jacobsen revealed that the agency’s near-future trajectory is to introduce “biohybrids” — part animal, part machine cyborgs — into the United States’ military arsenal.
In an interview with
Coast to Coast AM, Jacobsen said:
“
DARPA has already succeeded in creating a rat that will be steered by remote control by implanting an electrode in its brain.
“And it’s done the same thing with a moth which is really remarkable because the scientists implanted the electrodes in the pupa stage of the moth when it was still a worm! And then it transformed into having wings, and those tiny little micro-sensors transformed with the moth and the DARPA scientists were able to steer that moth.”
6. CIA assassinations and coups in foreign countries
When operatives for the Democratic Party claim the 2016 United States presidential election was tampered with by a foreign entity, it’s hard not to cringe at the irony. Firstly, they’ve presented no evidence, except to claim that government intelligence agencies believe it to be true. Sorry, that’s not actually evidence. That’s like the police saying they have DNA evidence but never actually scientifically presenting it in court. It’s kind of unnerving that we even have to point that out.
Secondly, our own government and intelligence agencies, namely the CIA, have actively and aggressively subverted countless foreign elections over the last century and, in some cases, have outright funded the assassinations of candidates.
This subject could easily fill a multi-volume book, and countless authors have worked over the years to uncover the role of the CIA in foreign coups. Using every tool in their arsenal — including white, grey, and black psychological operations, counterinsurgencies, and brutal coups aimed at repressing and destroying radically democratic candidates — the CIA has subverted the “will of the people” across the world.
The most commonly noted instances of the CIA meddling in foreign elections and governments include the following:
South Korea (late-1940s);
Italy (1948-mid-1970s);
Guatemala (1954);
Congo (1960),
Dominican Republic (1961),
South Vietnam (1963),
Brazil (1964);
Uruguay (1969);
Bolivia (1971);
Chile(1970-1973);
Argentina (1976);
Australia (1975);
El Salvador (1980);
Iran (late-1970s);
Grenada (1983)
Haiti (1986);
Panama (1990)
Nicaragua (1990);
Czechoslovakia (1990);
Peru (1990-2000)
Yugoslavia (2000). This is but a small sampling of countries where even
mainstream news outlets and, in many cases, the CIA itself, admits calamitous U.S. involvement. There are literally dozens more and, of course, this is restricting the conversation to soft coups — otherwise, we could certainly include the complete military decimation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries during the War on Terror, as well as the myriad imperial wars against perceived communist threats.
‘A foreign government hacked and subverted our election!’
The irony is thick with this one. Payback’s a bitch…..which, of course, isn’t giving our intelligence agencies, who have proven themselves to be pathological liars, the benefit of the doubt regarding their claims of Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. It’s just to kind of say…..you reap the harvest you have sown. When you look at the track record of the United States government, it’s a wonder the average citizen is safe traveling abroad.
7. Mainstream media is the propaganda branch of the State Department
People have long accused the media of being a proxy branch of the State Department, a highly sophisticated and well-produced form of manufactured consensus and controlled opposition all rolled into one. In ostensibly democratic nations, a free and independent press is of paramount importance. But in the U.S., we find a cohesion of the state and corporate news networks that do not constitute ‘state-run media’ in the traditional sense — but it’s close.
Our first solid documentation that the media is an echo chamber for the government came with the disclosure of what has come to be called
Operation Mockingbird. This nefarious and far-reaching conspiracy was documented in Part 1 and involved the CIA essentially conscripting journalists, American news agencies, and major broadcasters to become domestic propagandists and
spies. Eventually, this CIA/media symbiosis included journalists from all the top news organizations. Literally, thousands of people were involved.
This infiltration of the American media and press took place during the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, and was carried out under the auspices of fighting communism. The CIA began to
restrict its use of journalists in the Operation Mockingbird program in 1976, but many people believe
it has since transmogrified into something far more powerful, nefarious, and ubiquitous today.
We’re still in the early stages of proving to the masses that mainstream media is little more than a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the government and its various agencies, but the evidence is accumulating.
During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks exposed a number of disturbing revelations showing
collusion between the media and political operatives. This included collusion between the media, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it wasn’t just about swaying the election. New revelations showed that the
government actively infiltrates powerful media corporations in order to shape their content and narratives. One of the best examples of this was the State Department’s role in affecting a
CBS 60 Minutes interview with Julian Assange.
A more comprehensive list of examples of the Orwellian symbiotic relationship between the press and the government can be found
here.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent addition to this chapter was the “
Countering Disinformation Act” that President Obama slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Christmas Eve of last year. In the context of the still-festering narrative of
foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election,
the act’s putative goal was to fight “fake news,” which many believe is actually a campaign to silence and dismantle alternative media on the Internet.
In order to accomplish this, the government is establishing a Global Engagement Center for managing disinformation and propaganda. Since we already know our government routinely performs psychological operations (psyops, or as they’ve been recently rebranded, Military Information Support Operations [
MISO]), it should come as no surprise that manipulating the civilian population is a permanent goal. In fact, in the
2013 National Defense Authorization Act, the government formally legalized the use of psyops on U.S. citizens. So how does this Global Engagement Center factor in?
The new law states:
“The Center is authorized to provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions for the following purposes:
- To support local independent media who are best placed to refute foreign disinformation and manipulation in their own communities.
- To collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies and partners.
- To analyze and report on tactics, techniques, and procedures of foreign information warfare with respect to disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda.
- To support efforts by the Center to counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.”
While it may not immediately strike one as sinister, this codification of repressing journalists and voices the government deems to be disinformation while creating an even more centralized infrastructure to control “fact-based narratives” in the media should be highly alarming to anyone who cares about a free press. It would seem that while the State already has a steel grip on corporate news networks, they are struggling to control the influence of online independent media. This new law may be the start of this century’s Operation Mockingbird — a new full-scale infiltration of the
local news and a war against anti-establishment narratives on the Internet. This is
already taking the form of
algorithmic censorship through Facebook and Google, as well as a weaponization of the “fake news” narrative.
8. The Deep State (or the conspiracy theory formerly known as The New World Order)
I describe the Deep State in depth in an article entitled “
Forget the New World Order — Here’s Who Really Runs the World.” In it I wrote:
“For decades, extreme ideologies on both the left and the right have clashed over the conspiratorial concept of a shadowy secret government often called the New World Order pulling the strings on the world’s heads of state and captains of industry.
“The phrase New World Order is largely derided as a sophomoric conspiracy theory entertained by minds that lack the sophistication necessary to understand the nuances of geopolitics. But it turns out
the core idea — one of deep and overarching collusion between Wall Street and government with a globalist agenda — is operational in what a number of insiders call the “Deep State.”
In the wake of the 2016 election, the concept of the Deep State has grown into somewhat of a common phrase in the lexicon of alternative media theorists, crossing political boundaries and resonating across the ideological spectrum. Everyone from alt-left socialists to alt-righters now agrees there is an unelected cabal of elite neo-conservative corporatists and crony lawmakers running the geopolitical show.
Because it’s such a complex subject and permeates so many different academic, economic, and state apparatuses, it’s virtually impossible to issue a single, simple definition of the Deep State. If I were to hazard one, I would call it
“the nexus of Wall Street and the national security state — a relationship where elected and unelected figures join forces to consolidate power and serve vested interests.” But even that is vague. We could also call it “the failure of our visible constitutional government and
the cross-fertilization of corporatism with the globalist war on terror.”
Former Republican congressional aide
Mike Lofgren gets more specific with
who is involved:
“It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.”
In his writing, Lofgren emphasized the role of FISA international surveillance courts. This was confirmed in a very interesting way when President Donald Trump accused former President Obama of tapping his phones, a charge Obama aides deflected by saying that if such a warrant had been issued, it would have been done through a FISA court. This shows how presidents are able to skirt the constitution by outsourcing surveillance requests. It also shows the interconnectedness of these agencies.
However you want to describe it, it’s the natural conclusion of Operation Mockingbird and most certainly a reality that the elites would have rather kept under the radar. Fortunately for the people of the Earth,
revelations from Wikileaks and other whistleblowers have, over the last couple decades, made it abundantly clear that the Deep State (the New World Order) not only exists, but also that it’s far more sinister and powerful than early conspiracy theorists could have ever imagined.
9. CIA used psychics to infiltrate the Soviet Union during Cold War
It’s a plot in a science fiction movie or TV show we’ve all seen: a psychic being leveraged by a law enforcement agency to track down a criminal. The concept of a government psychic program was popularized by the film
The Men Who Stare at Goats, which lampooned the mythical STARGATE program supposedly run by the CIA. Most people scoffed at the reality of this and considered it a wacky conspiracy theory, but a recently declassified trove of hundreds of thousands of
CIA files finally confirmed not only that psychics are regularly used by police and other law enforcement agencies, but also that the government actually weaponized psychics during the Cold War to try to infiltrate the Soviet Union and gain information.
The documents, made
publicly available thanks to the activist group Muckrock, confirm there were top-secret CIA and Defense Department programs to use remote viewing to infiltrate Soviet military installments. There were also programs developing ways to engage in “psychic warfare,” including the development of a “psychic shield” to block Soviet psychics.
10. CIA monitors U.S. citizens via their smart devices
Early in 2017, the organization Wikileaks began releasing their first post-2016 election cables with a series of explosive data dumps regarding the CIA’s cyber hacking abilities and exploits. It is called
Vault 7. Updated serially in “Year Zero,” “Dark Matter,” “Marble,” “Grasshopper,” “HIVE,” “Weeping Angel,” and “Scribbles,” the
documents show the unprecedented collection of cyber vulnerabilities, exploits, and hacking abilities consolidated within the agency that many believe constitute wide-ranging breaches of civil liberties.
Chief among these breaches is domestic surveillance and extrajudicial cyberhacking, which the
Wikileaks documents confirm are taking place in an abundance of forms. The Vault 7 documents confirm that: The CIA can break into Android and iPhone handsets and all kinds of computers; the agency has the ability to hack into Apple iPhones and Android smartphones and actually assume full remote control of the device; the CIA can access consumer smart TVs to listen in on surrounding conversations; the agency looked into ways to
hack into cars and crash them, allowing ‘nearly undetectable assassinations’ (an assertion that may be relevant to the
Michael Hastings case); the CIA concealed vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers from other countries or governments.
This is just the beginning. Early in the release, Julian Assange said the documents released represented only a
tiny fraction of the total data that was forthcoming. Wikileaks’ episodic data dumps on the CIA’s cyber hacking programs are nothing less than stunning. The establishment’s reaction to the ongoing releases verifies how big of a deal they are.
One congressman went so far as to refer to Julian Assange and his whistleblowing outfit as a “foreign terrorist organization.” This isn’t new or unexpected, as the group’s slow but inexorable drips of revelations about government malfeasance continue to confound and disturb private citizens, consumer rights activists, tech companies, and international leaders alike.
Conclusion
Of course, not all conspiracy theories are true. In fact, there are hundreds, even thousands, that have been roundly debunked. Unfortunately, there are those who seek to lie and invent fictions for monetary gain and fame. Disinformation, propaganda, and dishonesty exist at all levels of society.
However, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Therefore, it’s worth assessing them, even if their claims appear wholly outlandish. Especially if their claims appear wholly outlandish.
The conspiracy theory is a tool in a larger tool kit used by those who wish to decode the grossly imperfect and fluid narrative describing our world.
When investigated responsibly, conspiracy theories function as part of a conceptual spectrum of analysis with which we can investigate government and corporate abuses of power and the manufacturing of ‘consensus reality.’ In the 21st century, when the very transmission of information can be considered criminal, being a responsible conspiracy theorist just means you practice due diligence and hunger for the truth.
Sometimes conspiracy theories become conspiracy facts.
In recent years, the mere notion of conspiracy theories has increasingly been stigmatized and ridiculed by mainstream news outlets, internet trolls, and “rational” thinkers. Yet, with powerful revelations by Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, and generations of intrepid journalists, we now know that many outlandish geopolitical and domestic “conspiracy theories” were and are cold-blooded truths of the modern world. Here are 10 that are well-documented and profoundly disturbing…
1) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of US involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred.
It’s true. The original incident – also sometimes referred to as the USS Maddox Incident(s) –involved the destroyer USS Maddox supposedly engaging three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. The Maddox fired almost 300 shells.
President Lyndon B. Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became his administration’s legal justification for military involvement in Vietnam. The problem is the event never happened.
In 2005, a
declassified internal National Security Agency study revealed that there were NO North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident. So, what was the Maddox firing at?
In 1965, President Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
Worth pointing out: The
NSA’s own historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote a report stating that the agency had deliberately distorted intelligence reports in 1964. He concluded:
“The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964.”
2) Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on rural African American men who had contracted syphilis. The Public Health Service never informed these men they had a sexually transmitted disease, nor did they offer treatment, even after penicillin became available as a cure in the 1940s.
Tragically, it’s true. Rather than receiving treatment, the subjects of these studies were told they had “bad blood.”
When World War II began, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were only then, for the first time, informed they had syphilis. Even then, the PHS denied them treatment.
By the early 1970s,
128 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis and syphilis-related complications, 40 of their wives had the disease and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.
Worth pointing out: A similar experiment conducted on prisoners, soldiers, and patients of
a mental hospital in Guatemala actually involved the PHS deliberately infecting the patients and then treating them with antibiotics.
3) Project MKUltra
The CIA ran secret mind control experiments on US citizens from the 1950s until 1973.
It’s so true that in 1995
President Clinton actually issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government.
Essentially,
the CIA used drugs, electronics, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and torture to conduct experimental behavioral engineering experiments on subjects. The program subcontracted hundreds of these projects to over 80 different institutions, including universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.
Most of this was uncovered in 1977 when a Freedom of Information Act exposed 20,000 previously classified documents and triggered a series of Senate hearings. Because CIA Director Richard Helms had most of the more damning MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, much of what actually occurred during these experiments is still unknown
and, of course, not a single person was brought to justice.
Worth pointing out: There is growing evidence that
Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, was a subject of the Project MKULTRA while he was at Harvard in the late 1950s.
4) Operation Northwoods
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military drew up and approved plans to create acts of terrorism on US soil in order to sway the American public into supporting a war against Cuba.
It’s true and the documents are out there.
Fortunately, President Kennedy rejected the plan, which included: innocent Americans being shot dead on the streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere; people being framed for bombings they did not commit; and planes being hijacked.
Additionally, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, planned to fabricate evidence that would implicate Fidel Castro and Cuban refugees as the perpetrators of the attacks.
Perhaps most horrifyingly, Lemnitzer planned for an elaborately staged incident whereby a Cuban aircraft would attack and shoot down a plane full of college students.
5) CIA Drug Trafficking
During the 1980s,
the CIA facilitated the sale of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army.
It’s convoluted and complex, but it’s true.
Gary Webb’s book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion outlines how CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the U.S. and then distributed crack to Los Angeles gangs, pocketing the profits. The CIA directly aided the drug dealers to raise money for the Contras.
“This drug network,” Webb wrote in a 1996 San Jose MercuryNews article, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”
Worth pointing out: On December 10, 2004, Webb committed suicide under suspicious circumstances, namely the fact that he used two bullets to shoot himself in the head.
6) Operation Mockingbird
In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was just getting underway, the CIA launched a top secret project called
Operation Mockingbird.
Their goal was to buy influence and control among the major media outlets. They also planned to put journalists and reporters directly on the CIA payroll, which some claim is ongoing to this day. The architects of this plan were Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), who planned to enlist American news organizations and journalists to basically become spies and propagandists.
Their list of entrenched agents eventually included journalists from ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Copley News Service. By the 1950s, the CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives.
Fortunately, our media is no longer lured in by corporations and governments to disseminate propaganda and disinformation….hmmm, never mind–strike that last statement.
7) COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of clandestine, illegal FBI projects that infiltrated domestic political organizations to discredit and smear them. This included critics of the Vietnam War, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and a wide variety of activists and journalists.
The
acts committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and, according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination.
Similar and possibly more sophisticated tactics are still used today, including NSA monitoring (see #10).
8) Operation Snow White
Operation Snow White is the name given to an unprecedented infiltration of the US government by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s. They stole classified government files regarding Scientology from dozens of government agencies.
In 1977, the FBI finally cracked
Snow White open which led to the arrest and imprisonment of a senior Church official.
The core mission of the program was to expose and legally expunge “all false and secret files of the nations of operating areas” and to enable Church seniors and L. Ron Hubbard himself to “frequent all Western nations without threat.” By the end, of course, there was nothing legal about their endeavours.
9) Secret Global Economic Policies
For years, activists who feared a sinister globalist corporatocracy were told they were being paranoid. Whether you want to call it the New World Order or not: they were right.
In 2013,
WikiLeaks released the secretly negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. It revealed a closed-door regional free trade agreement being negotiated by countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says TPP has “extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and [will] hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.”
Worth pointing out: In June 2014, WikiLeaks revealed the
even more far-reaching Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), a 50-country agreement that
will promote unprecedented levels of privatization across the world. The agreement will essentially prevent governments from returning public services into public hands. This could dramatically affect our ability to enact environmental regulations and keep workers safe.
10) The US Government Illegally Spies On Its Own Citizens
This used to be laughed at as a dystopian fantasy derived from an overactive imagination,
Orwell’s 1984, and a juvenile distrust of the government. When you claimed “they” were spying on you, people labeled you a paranoid conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat-wearing loon.
Even after it was revealed that the
NSA has been illegally eavesdropping on us and collecting our cell phone metadata for over a decade, people still hedged on the meaning of it.
Yes, they are analyzing our transmissions, but it’s under the auspices of national security. “In a post 9/11 world” certain liberties must be sacrificed for the sake of security, right?
It turns out that is patently untrue.
Not only is there no evidence that the NSA has protected us from terrorism, there is growing evidence that it makes us
more vulnerable. Thanks to revelations about the NSA and their Prism project, we know that the scope of the NSA’s eavesdropping is even beyond what we originally believed.
In early June of 2014, the Washington Post reported that almost 90% of the data being collected by NSA surveillance programs is from Internet users with no connection to terrorist activities. According to the American Civil Liberties Union,
this is in clear violation of the constitution.
The
ACLU is pursuing a lawsuit against the NSA, claiming that the dragnet-style mass collection of data violates the Fourth Amendment right of privacy as well as the First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
mainstream adherents like to pretend they’re confident that the official narrative is accurate, but they aren’t. A lot of hardcore conspiracy analysts like to pretend they know the real story, but they don’t. There’s simply not enough publicly available information for anyone to be certain exactly how things went down that day; all we can know for sure is that (A) the official story is riddled with plot holes, and (B) the American power establishment has an extensive and well-documented history of using false flags and propaganda to manipulate the public into supporting evil acts of military interventionism.
Introduction
Some people have argued that global warming is a conspiratorial lie, deceiving the public for pernicious reasons. The most well known of these people is Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who in 2012 published a book entitled
The Greatest Hoax, which warns people against “the global warming conspiracy.”
Some members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have endorsed this view. Believing that the Bush-Cheney administration conspired with others to claim falsely that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, they say that the government’s false conspiracy theory about 9/11 should make us suspicious that other governmental claims may also be conspiracies to mislead the public.
Suspicions about governmental conspiracies are not baseless. Claims that the U.S. government has given a false account of this or that event are, however, generally rejected by the press. Since the time of The Warren Commission Report, which did not quiet suspicions that the assassination of President Kennedy had been an inside job, beliefs about huge government crimes have been derided by the CIA and the press as “conspiracy theories” in the pejorative sense of the term.
People who give voice to such beliefs are ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists,” a label that implies that the conspiracy claim is obviously false.
Nevertheless, as
Lance deHaven-Smith has discussed in his 2013 book
Conspiracy Theory in America, it is well known that the U.S. government has indeed orchestrated conspiracies with enormous consequences, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Iran-Contra affair, as well as, more recently, the claims that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks and was prepared to use weapons of mass destruction.
So if people, believing that there is good evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, are aware of the U.S. government’s involvement in these other conspiracies, there is no good reason to doubt that there are additional examples of conspiracies that have been engineered at the highest levels.
In particular, if it is assumed that 9/11 was indeed an inside job, would this assumption provide a good basis for suspecting that the theory of global warming has resulted from a deceitful conspiracy?
The phrase “theory of global warming” is used here as shorthand for a fourfold conviction:
- Increases of the percentage of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are raising the planet’s average temperature.
- The main cause of these increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases is the burning of fossil fuels.
- The global warming produced by these fossil-fuel emissions is starting to change the climate.
- This climate change, if it continues, will become increasingly destructive.
Because this fourfold conviction is held by virtually all climate scientists around the world, the theory of global warming can also be called “the position of climate science.” Individuals and organizations who dispute climate science in this sense are referred to as “climate-science deniers,” “climate-change deniers” or “global-warming deniers.” Often the term “denialism” is used for the active argument against climate science, with those engaged in this argument called “denialists.”
I ask the question about
the relevance of 9/11 to climate science not only because many members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have supported global-warming denialism, but also because the success of this denialist movement has been disastrous.
As I have documented
in a 2015 book, the denialist movement was formed and financed by the fossil-fuel industry, and the doubt it created has been used to delay legislation to restrict the use of fossil fuels – a delay that may result in the destruction of civilization. Climate deniers call this fear “alarmism.” But
there are times when alarm is appropriate and, my book argues, this is the supreme example.
Believing that it is a shame that many members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have been misled into supporting self-interested propaganda by the fossil-fuel industries, I ask whether this movement’s basic conviction - that the official story about 9/11 is a lie - provides a basis for accepting climate-science denial.
The transition from the one to the other is typically made on the basis of two beliefs:
- Climate scientists’ claims about global warming are analogous to the government’s claims about 9/11.
- Just as evidence proves the falsity of the government’s 9/11 account, evidence shows the falsity of the idea that the burning of fossil fuels is threatening civilization by warming the planet.
The first two parts of this article looks at these two beliefs in order; the third part argues that we do indeed have a climate emergency.
Part I: Are 9/11 and Global Warming Analogous?
Because the claims about global warming are analogous to the government’s false claims about 9/11, some people believe, these claims are also probably false.
But the Bush-Cheney administration’s claims about 9/11 are not at all analogous to the widely accepted views about global warming.
9/11, Global Warming, and Science
A well-known member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, who writes under the name “Victronix,”
has argued that standard beliefs about 9/11 and global warming are not only very different, but also different in ways that prevent 9/11 beliefs from providing an analogy to scientists’ belief about global warming. The idea that global warming is a lie, she pointed out, implies that “the vast majority of the scientific community is working in collusion to create a worldwide hoax - including Russia and China and the entire industrialized world - that a worldwide environmental crisis is unfolding.” In other words, thousands of scientists from many countries around the world, including countries that are strongly opposed to each other, all agreed to tell a huge lie.
By contrast, she said, 9/11 involved “a single national government (and collusion by other intelligence and government leaders who also benefit) with highly limited and controlled science whose evidence is completely controlled, destroyed or hidden.” This “controlled science” is very different from the science supporting global warming belief: “Scientists all over the world can and are investigating and confirming the same findings over and over.”
Unlike the purported events used to claim that Muslims attacked America on 9/11, the science of global warming is based on “ongoing events whose evidence is available to everyone all over the world to examine simultaneously using the scientific method and simple tools to measure and analyze.”
Making this point more succinctly, Australians
Will Grant and Rod Lamberts wrote: “The idea of an international conspiracy across dozens of disciplines, hundreds of institutions and thousands of individuals is honestly laughable.”
The different relations to science can also be stated in another way:
The theory of global warming is analogous not to the U.S. government’s account of the 9/11 attacks, but to the 9/11 Truth Movement’s rejection of the government’s account: Just as the 9/11 Truth Movement is supported by scientists from various fields, including physics and chemistry (as well as by students of architecture and engineering), the idea that fossil fuels are causing global warming and hence climate change is supported by most of the scientists who publish about climate change – indeed, at least
97.5% of them.
So this is the appropriate analogy: The 9/11 Truth Movement, which is supported by scientific evidence, is disputed by the U.S. government, which the 9/11 Truth Movement regards as behind the 9/11 attacks. And the theory of global warming, which is based on scientific evidence, is disputed by the fossil-fuel industries, which climate scientists see as primarily responsible for global warming.
So in each case, the views of independent scientists are disputed by huge enterprises, which clearly have self-interested reasons for challenging the scientific evidence.
Accordingly, the idea that 9/11 skepticism is similar to global warming skepticism has the relationship backwards. When it is claimed that “they” are deceiving the public about global warming, just as “they” deceived the public about the 9/11 attacks, it is necessary to determine the identity of the “they.” The best clue to the likely “they” in each case is to determine who would have benefitted from deception.
The 9/11 Truth Movement has considerable consensus on the question of who benefited from the official account of 9/11: The Bush-Cheney administration (which wanted
Afghanistan’s minerals and natural gas and also
planned to attack Iraq for its oil); the biggest U.S. oil companies (the CEOs of which
were covertly members of Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force); Israel (as
stated by the 9/11 Commission Report’s executive director, Philip Zelikow); the U.S. military (the budget of which
went way up); and the U.S. intelligence agencies (whose budgets
doubled after 9/11). But who are the “they” with regard to global warming?
Who Benefits from Climate Denial?
Victronix concluded her discussion of global warming by asking, “who benefits from the claims that human involvement is a hoax?” The answer to that question is, of course, fossil-fuel companies, which have spent
hundreds of millions of dollars to promote denial of climate science.
For many years, the main promoter of climate-science denialism was ExxonMobil, the world’s most successful corporation, earning roughly $40 billion a year and paying its CEO over
$30 million a year.
Besides giving millions of dollars to scientists, lobbyists, and politicians to promote climate denial, ExxonMobil gave at least
$25 million since 1998 to support some 100 climate-denying front groups. ExxonMobil thereby created the impression that climate denial had arisen spontaneously from scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens. According to a 2009
article by Raw Story, a “group promoting climate skepticism has extensive ties to Exxon-Mobil” (it was on a website responding to this article that Victronix posted her comments).
The group in question, which is named the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, published a report entitled
Climate Science Reconsidered. Arguing that global warming is not human-caused, this report said: “Nature, not human activity, rules the planet.” In addition, reported the
highly praised book Merchants of Doubt, the report said that global warming is “unequivocally good news,” because rising CO2 levels “increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests.”
This denialist report was released and promoted by the Heartland Institute, which between 1998 and 2009 had received at least
$676,500 from ExxonMobil. The lead author of this report was S. Fred Singer, who has had a notoriously bad scientific career, having previously been proven wrong in a series of issues in which he contested the scientific consensus. But his career path has been financially successful.
In 1998, Singer started an organization called the Science and Environmental Policy Project, in order to begin a book on global warming, and for which ExxonMobil gave him $20,000 between 1998 and 2000.
As
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway reported in Merchants of Doubt, Singer had previously helped the tobacco industry’s effort to avoid regulations about environmental smoke, also called secondhand smoke. Singer used this project to promote what he called “sound science” and to denounce “junk science,” by which he meant, specifically, the EPA’s 1992 report that secondhand smoke causes cancer. Singer also became an advisor to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which was funded by Philip Morris to attack the EPA’s report,
even though Philip Morris and hence Singer knew that the EPA report - which was based on scientific studies from around the world - was sound, not junk, science.
Singer had earlier earned money by joining the efforts of industries that wanted to prevent legislation to reduce acid rain. By 1983, there was an overwhelming scientific consensus that acid rain was produced by the sulfur released during the burning of fossil fuels, and the United States and Canada were set to sign an agreement to reduce the emissions of sulfur. But the Reagan Administration, which strongly opposed any such legislation, appointed Singer to an acid-rain task force, for which he was allowed to write a separate appendix, claiming that the science was still uncertain. As a result, the United States did not sign the agreement with Canada, and sulfur dioxide levels did not begin declining until 1990 when legislation based on the scientific consensus
was finally passed.
Singer also, while serving as the chief scientist for Reagan’s Department of Transportation, argued against the scientific consensus that a growing hole in the ozone layer was caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were used in spray cans, refrigerators, and air conditioners. The aerosol industry, seeking to prevent legislation, hired scientists to dispute the scientific consensus, and Singer joined in, arguing that an “ozone scare” had been created by “corrupt scientists.” The scientists who had shown that the CFCs in the stratosphere destroyed ozone won a Nobel Prize, so Singer attacked the Nobel committee! But eventually, Singer’s argument “
was proved wrong, when CFCs were banned and the ozone hole began to repair itself.”
Nevertheless, after having been wrong time and time again, Singer was asked by the Heartland Institute to be the lead author of its report, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which claims that the burning of fossil fuels is not creating dangerous global warming. Besides whatever money Singer made for writing this book, he has also served as a consultant by several other
organizations funded by ExxonMobil, including Frontiers of Freedom (which ExxonMobil gave at least $1,272,000) and the National Center for Policy Analysis (which ExxonMobil gave $615,900).
Did Singer actually believe his arguments about secondhand smoke, acid rain, the ozone layer, and fossil fuels? This seems unlikely, especially given information learned from leaked documents. For example,
by 1965, showed one document, tobacco industry scientists were “unanimous in their opinion that [tobacco] smoke is . . . carcinogenic.”
The same pattern appears to have occurred with regard to global warming.
A document shows that in 1995, the oil industry’s own scientific advisors said: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases is well established and cannot be denied.” Nevertheless, just as the cigarette companies continued to deny the existence of evidence showing that cigarettes cause cancer, ExxonMobil not only continued to deny that oil and gas emissions cause climate change but also paid tens of millions to hire others, such as Fred Singer, to support this denial.
In the meantime, Koch Industries, which is invested in various kinds of fossil fuels, including the
Canadian tar sands, has begun providing even more financial support for global-warming denialism than ExxonMobil: Between 1997 and 2010,
Koch Industries gave over $67 million for this purpose. At that point, the Kochs no longer allowed their contributions to be traced. But these contributions may have become even higher, as suggested by stories in the Guardian and the Washington Post.
Two dark money trusts (which promise their contributors complete anonymity), named Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, between them doled out $118 million to 102 groups,
reported the Guardian. The purpose of the money was to help
“build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising ‘wedge issue.’" This funding stream, said the Guardian, “far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers.”
However, it is possible that much of this money actually came from the Kochs: A 2014
Washington Post story suggested that these two dark money trusts were simply part of a “Koch-Backed Political Network,” which raised over $400 million for right-wing political causes in 2012.
In any case, whether Charles and David Koch have given over $100 million to support climate denialism, or “only” $67 million, this is pocket change for them: By 2010, their company, Koch Industries, was worth $35 billion; by 2013, they had brought their wealth
up to $68 billion. They evidently find the use of a little pocket change to promote climate denial, and hence to head off legislation to restrict fossil-fuel burning, a worthwhile investment.
Who Would Benefit from Fabricating Global Warming?
There is a clear answer, accordingly, to the question of who benefits from climate denial. But if climate science is a lie, who would benefit from spreading this lie?
The idea that the “government” – perhaps the U.S. government, or U.S. and European governments, or perhaps most of the world’s governments - fabricated global warming would make this lie parallel to the 9/11 lie, with each being a government-created lie. But this would make no sense. Neither the U.S. government nor governments in general have wanted to reduce their burning of fossil fuels. The climate scientists of the IPCC – indeed, most climate scientists everywhere - have been pleading with governments to reduce their fossil-fuel use, but in almost all countries, the use has continued to rise.
Some people suggest that the “government” in question is the United Nations. But the U.N. is not a government and has no power to act apart from the willingness of the nations to follow its suggestions – or, in the case of the Security Council, of the nations constituting it. The U.N. did create the IPCC and supports its work, but it has no power to act on climate change other than calling meetings and publishing reports. And the IPCC did not create the idea that emissions from fossil fuels are causing global warming, which in turn causes climate change. Rather, the IPCC was formed in response to a growing consensus among climate scientists about these connections.
So, if there is a culprit for a global warming hoax, it must be the scientists themselves. And that is, indeed, what many deniers claim. For example, a 2007 documentary film, “
The Great Global Warming Swindle,” argued that “the publicized scientific consensus is the product of a ‘global warming activist industry’ driven by a desire for research funding.”
Some climate scientists do indeed apply for grants, and a few of them actually receive them. But there are five reasons to doubt that the desire by scientists for funding could explain their published statements about global warming:
Although there is considerable fraud in science – as has been
extensively documented - scientists who engage in fraud are a small minority. Although there are many reasons to criticize mainstream science, few scientists would consciously engage in fraud. Of course, scientists who work for corporations or government agencies must sometimes either falsify evidence or lose their jobs. Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement believe that this was the case with the
scientists at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), which was tasked with writing the reports about the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. But this was an example of “controlled science,” which, as Victronix said, “is very different from the [peer-reviewed] science supporting global warming.”
Even if a few important climate scientists had published false evidence for global warming, they would not have been able to persuade most of the rest of the world’s thousands of climate scientists to support their false claims. The fact of fraud by individual scientists provides no evidence that thousands of scientists around the world could be persuaded to engage in fraud.
The support for global warming comes from a wide
variety of types of evidence. The idea that all of these different experiments and tests could have been coordinated to support the same bogus conclusions makes the mind boggle.
If most scientists are primarily motivated by money, they would have gone into some other line of work. It is true that a few people, after going into science for noble reasons, have become devoted to making money to an unseemly degree. But getting government grants is seldom a road to riches. As
Grant and Lamberts said: “Tell the TCCD [Typical Climate Change Denier] to go to any university car park and count the luxury vehicles parked near science buildings. They won’t even need all their fingers to keep track.”
There are indeed scientists who have made significant amounts of money by writing about globl warming, but these are scientists who have argued against climate science. For example (in addition to Singer), take Patrick Michaels, who has written many books and articles with titles such as “Global Warming Myth” and Climate of Extremes. Michaels has served as a consultant for a large number of climate denial organizations funded by ExxonMobil. And in 2006, a furor was raised when it was revealed that a coal-burning electric association had, at its members’ expense,
paid Michaels $100,000 “to help confuse the issue of global warming.”
Again, if there is an analogy between 9/11 and global warming, it is not between the official 9/11 story and the theory of global warming. It is between climate science and the 9/11 Truth Community’s position. Just as large numbers of independent scientists have rejected the official 9/11 story, most climate scientists reject the idea that global warming is a hoax.
And just as a few scientists whose salaries are paid by the U.S. government have supported the official account of 9/11, Singer, Michaels, and some other scientists paid by the fossil-fuel industry have endorsed climate-change denial. In the one case, independent science is opposed by Big Government; in the other, independent science is opposed by Big Carbon. In both cases, the scientific evidence is overwhelmed by Big Money, whether this be governmental or fossil-fuel money.
The relation between climate denial and the 9/11 attacks has been described as even closer by a former U.S. Senate candidate from Vermont,
Craig Hill. “[W]hat the 9/11 false-flag op and denying global warming have in common,” wrote Jerry Mazza in a summary of Hill’s thesis, “is oil, and gas . . . , and the desire to quench an unquenchable thirst for these fossil fuels.” Moreover,
Hill said, just as the perpetrators of 9/11 shrouded it in unscientific myth and lie, the oil companies have also “shrouded the evil effects of warming in unscientific myth and lie.”
In other words, said Hill, both the Bush-Cheney administration and the climate deniers funded by ExxonMobil and the Kochs have foisted a false, unscientific theory on the world, especially the American people, for the sake of oil. (To be sure, Hill’s statement would need to be qualified by the fact that, as mentioned earlier, oil did not provide the only motive for the 9/11 attacks.)
Part II: Does Scientific Evidence Disprove Global Warming?
In addition to suspecting global warming to be a hoax, some members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have endorsed the view, promulgated by climate denialists, that the true facts do not support the global warming theory. Instead, these denialists argue, the facts show the global warming theory to be a fabrication.
One of those members is Australian chemist Frank Legge. Besides warning Victronix that she should “be careful about using global warming in the argument,” because it is “looking pretty shaky from a scientific point of view,” he in 2008 wrote an article called
“The Global Warming Emergency.” Because this was so many years ago, I wrote Legge in November 2014 to ask if he still stands by that essay. He replied that if writing it now, he would update a few items, but “the general thrust would be exactly the same.”
Legge said that the conclusion that there is a climate emergency would require a threefold argument: (1) Global warming is occurring, it is not trivial, and the claim that the temperature and sea level will continue to rise must be based on good science; (2) “the current and predicted temperature is unusual and dangerous”; and (3) “the warming is largely caused by man-made carbon dioxide.”
1. Is Global Warming Significant and Destined to Rise?
Suggesting that global warming, if it is occurring at all, will be minor and short-lived, Legge based this suggestion on several claims, which he derived from climate-science deniers.
Satellite Data
In one of his arguments, Legge wrote: “The recent warming period is giving signs of coming to an end: satellite measurements of global atmospheric temperature have been declining this decade.” In support of that argument, Legge referred to an argument by Roy Spencer, one of the handful of climate scientists who reject the consensus view. But citing Spencer’s claim about satellite measurements hardly adds credibility to Legge’s argument.
In the 1990s, Spencer and fellow climate denier John Christy argued that the satellite data showed no warming – that the
troposphere was not warming in conjunction with surface warming.
Joe Romm, a physicist who founded Climate Progress - one of the most highly respected websites dealing with climate science - said that Spencer and Christy had “created one of the
most enduring denier myths,” namely, “that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did.” A scientist on the
RealClimate website wrote:
"Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but . . . did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess."
Spencer and Christy’s treatment of this issue, along with some others, led Romm to write
an article asking, “Should You Believe Anything John Christy and Roy Spencer Say?”
Urban Heat Island Effect
Besides supporting Spencer’s argument for preferring satellite to other evidence, Legge said: “There is also ongoing debate about whether proper allowance has been made for the confounding effect of urban encroachment on temperature stations.” Legge was here referring to the so-called
urban heat island (UHI) effect, which can occur when weather stations are situated in urban areas, where the air tends to be warmer than rural areas. Fellow climate denier
Patrick Michaels has claimed that at least half of the alleged global warming is due to this phenomenon.
Legge, however, cited the climate denialist who has made this case most strongly, former TV weatherman Anthony Watts, who has a website called “Watts Up With That.” Watts had long argued that temperature recordings have been skewed by the fact that most recordings are made in urban areas. In 2010,
Watts wrote: “UHI is easily observable. I’ve been telling readers about UHI since this blog started.”
In 2010, when Watts made this comment, it seemed for various reasons that a project called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, organized by UC Berkeley professor
Richard Muller, was soon to verify Watts’ claims. As Joe Romm explained:
Muller had long been critical of climate science, believing that many scientists and their admirers, including Al Gore, had exaggerated the evidence. Moreover, the “Climategate” charges made him suspect that climate scientists had “concealed discordant data,” about which he examined the claims of denialist bloggers.
Muller chose as a climate scientist Judith Curry, who,
according to Romm, has “now taken the crown as the most debunked person on the science blogosphere” and who has, in fact, “abandon[ed] science.”
Climate denying billionaire Charles Koch was to fund the study, and Watts and other deniers were even allowed to
work with the BEST team.
However, Muller chose good scientists to carry out the study, including lead scientist Robert Rohde, and the study did not work out as deniers expected. Based on data from some 40,000 weather stations around the world, the study’s results,
reported the BBC, were “remarkably similar to those produced by the world's three most important and established groups, whose work had been decried as unreliable and shoddy in climate sceptic circles” – namely, the reports by NASA, NOAA, and the “collaboration between the UK Met Office and UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), from which the emails that formed the basis of the ‘Climategate’ furor were hacked.”
Muller told the BBC: “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.”
Writing in
the Wall Street Journal, Muller said:
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. . . . Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.”
Writing
in the New York Times, Muller called himself “a converted skeptic.” He now believes, he said, that the prior estimates of the rate of warming increase were correct and that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.”
Before Muller’s report had been published,
Watts had written: “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise.” However, after learning what the result actually was, Watts reneged. He first refused to accept Muller’s report on the grounds that it had not yet been peer reviewed. “When the science and peer review is finished,”
Watts predicted, “the results are likely to look different.”
However, when the report
was published (in a peer-reviewed journal), the results, contained
in five papers, were not different. In an interview, moreover, Muller emphasized the report’s main point about UHI, saying “urban heat islands contribute essentially
zero to the warming.” This report, which challenged Watts’ main claim to fame, was never accepted by him, in spite of his promise.
Sensitivity: Feedback as Negative
Climate scientists acknowledge that they have an imperfect understanding of “climate sensitivity,” meaning the amount the planet will warm because of the various feedbacks affecting the climate. Sensitivity is usually discussed in terms of the temperature increase to be caused by a doubling of the preindustrial CO2 concentration of 275 parts per mission (ppm) to 550 ppm. If the sensitivity is extremely low, then doubling the concentration of CO2 would not raise the planet’s temperature much. But if sensitivity is very high, the doubling will be catastrophic. The IPCC puts the likely temperature increase to range between 2 and 4.5°C, with 3°C being most likely, and James Hansen, whose ideas are taken very seriously by fellow climate scientists, believes the increase to be near the
top of that range.
By contrast,
Roy Spencer argued that the sensitivity is much lower – so low in fact, reported Legge, that the feedback will be negative, not positive, so that “there is no cause for alarm.”
In 2011,
Spencer argued this case in a paper that was severely criticized by climate scientists. For example,
Kevin Trenberth wrote:
“[I]t is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published [because] there is no merit whatsoever in this paper.”
The fact that it was published led the journal’s editor to resign, saying that Spencer’s paper was "
fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted” by the team of reviewers, which he (the editor) had chosen.
2. Current and Predicted Warming: Not Unusual and Dangerous?
In line with Legge’s claim that insofar as there is currently some global warming, it is minor and short-lived, he also argued that the warming is not unusual and dangerous.
Medieval Warm Period
He based this view primarily on the Medieval Warm Period, citing denialist stories claiming that during this period – which occurred between the 10th and 15th centuries, A.D. - the planet was warmer than today. Referring to the fact that the Vikings had farms in Greenland, Legge said that “it appears that the present temperature is not yet quite as high as during the Medieval warming.”
However, a Skeptical
Science article reported: “The Medieval Warm Period was not a global phenomenon. Warmer conditions were concentrated in certain regions.” There were indeed areas that were warmer than they were in 1990. However, “Some regions were even colder than during the Little Ice Age. To claim the Medieval Warm Period [MWP] was warmer than today is to narrowly focus on a few regions that showed unusual warmth.” When considered globally, “temperatures during the Medieval Period were less than today.”
In addition, a 2012 report in the journal Geology, headed by a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that “the MWP
wasn’t all that warm after all - and certainly not as warm as the climate is today.” Even islands 400 miles north of Norway during the past 25 years, he said, have been “3.6°F and 4.5°F higher . . . than the summers the Vikings enjoyed.”
Present Warm Period
On the question of whether today’s temperature is dangerous in the sense that it might lead to runaway global warming, Legge argued that this “seems unlikely . . . as it did not happen in the previous warm periods.” However, that probability cannot be judged apart from the question of what has caused the recent warming, which Legge assumed to be just one more example of natural variability.
Legge’s assumption does not fit the facts. One problem is that, after a long period of decline, there was an unprecedented increase in global temperature in the 20th century. A graph tracking the temperature over the past millenium shows the 20th century as a virtually vertical line, making the graph look somewhat
like a hockey stick – a change that could not be considered natural. Ever since physicist Michael Mann used this graph in a 1998 paper, denialists have argued that it was based on errors - saying, for example, that the “hockey stick is broken.” However, Mann’s conclusions have been confirmed by several studies
using different sources, including boreholes, corals, ice cores, stalagmites,
and tree rings.
The attempt to explain the 20th-century increase as an example of natural variation is made even more difficult by a
2013 study in Science of the global temperature for the past 11,300 years. This study showed that the planet, after the Medieval Warm Period, had been cooling for 5,000 years. But in the 20th century, this long period of cooling was abruptly ended, with the rate of warming since 1900 being 50 times greater than the rate of cooling in the previous 5000 years.
Climate deniers try to explain this 20th-century uptick in the global temperature by increased radiation from the sun, which was true of the Medieval Warm Period. However, the increase in solar radiation leveled off after 1950, so that since about 1970,
greenhouse gases have clearly been the main contributor to warming. Since 1970, in fact, the sun and the climate temperature have been
moving in opposite directions: While the sun has had a slight cooling trend, the climate has been getting warmer and warmer. As one scientist put it, “We should be cool, but we're not.”
This contrast has been articulated by physicist
Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Within a hundred years, the cooling of the previous 5000 years was undone,” said Rahmstorf. “[W]ithout the increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans, the slow
cooling trend would have continued.”
3. The Role of Carbon Dioxide
In arguing his third claim – that CO2 cannot explain whatever recent global warming there has been – Legge employed several of the common denialist points, all of which have been answered in the literature, most systematically at Skeptical Science.
CO2 Minor Compared with Water Vapor?
One of Legge’s reasons for claiming that increased CO2 cannot explain much is that “it plays a minor role compared with water vapour.” His argument is that, because water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, constituting most of the greenhouse effect, CO2 is insignificant.
However,
although water vapor is indeed the dominant greenhouse gas, it is also the dominant feedback agent. And as CO2 emissions make the temperature go up, evaporation increases, putting more water vapor in the atmosphere, which further increases the temperature. There is, accordingly, a positive feedback loop. The water vapor feedback doubles the warming that would be caused by rising CO2 alone. As
Skeptical Science explained:
“Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 would warm the globe around 1°C. Taken on its own, water vapour feedback roughly doubles the amount of CO2 warming. When other feedbacks are included . . . , the total warming from a doubling of CO2 emissions is around 3°C.”
Another important factor is that, whereas the water vapor in the atmosphere is short-lived (it arises from evaporation and then falls as rain and snow), CO2 stays there for about a century. So after CO2 enters the atmosphere, it will increase the water vapor, with its powerful greenhouse effect, for a long time.
Accordingly, one should not denigrate the importance of CO2 by comparison with water vapor. Rather, they work together. It is the positive feedback relation between them that explains why the climate is so sensitive to additional CO2 emissions.
CO2 Increase Followed Temperature Increase?
According to Legge, it is an “inconvenient fact” for Al Gore “that the temperature rises about 1000 years before the CO2 level rises.” Legge was referring to the fact that, based on Antarctic ice core data from the past 400,000 years, changes in CO2 level followed temperature changes by
some 600 to 1000 years. This fact has been used by climate deniers, such as U.S. Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, to argue that today’s global warming could not possibly be explained by the increasing percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
However, whereas the initial increase in temperature during this period was due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, this increase led to a positive feedback process: The rise in ocean temperatures led to releases of CO2 from the oceans into the atmosphere, which increased the planet’s warming, which in turn led to the release of more CO2 from the oceans, and so on.
As
Skeptical Science explained:
“This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation.”
In fact, as Skeptical Science continued, “While the orbital cycles triggered the initial warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occurred after that atmospheric CO2 increase.“
Global Temperature Pause?
In a third argument against the role of rising CO2, Legge said that “it is hard to see any correlation between the rising CO2 level and temperature during the last decade.” This statement reflects the apparent fact that, although CO2 and the surface air temperature of the planet went hand in hand in the 1980s and ‘90s, the two seemed to diverge in the present century: While the CO2 ppm continued to rise, the increase in the air temperature seemed to slow down. This appearance led to the conclusion that there has been an end to - or at least a pause in - global warming.
However, that conclusion was based on the equation of the planet’s temperature with its surface air temperature. This is a very big mistake, because about “
90 percent of the warming of the planet is absorbed in heating the oceans.” Accordingly, there has not really been a pause, but only – in Joe Romm’s phrase,
a faux pause. All that has happened is that a higher percentage of the warming than previously went into the deep ocean, evidently because of
changes in the trade winds.
Global Warming’s Evil Twin
About
half of the human-caused CO2 produced since the beginning of the industrial age has been absorbed by the ocean, and this absorption has resulted in
ocean acidification, which Jane Lubchenco - who headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - called global warming’s “
equally evil twin.”
Ocean acidification results from the fact that about 30 percent of our CO2 emissions have been absorbed by the ocean. This absorption keeps down the warming of the atmosphere that would otherwise be produced by these emissions. But this absorption also reduces the ocean’s PH level, thereby making the water more acidic. Tests have shown that since the industrial revolution, there has been a
30% increase in the ocean’s acidity. This acidity increases when CO2 mixes with water, resulting in
carbonic acid. Just as carbonic acid eats out limestone caves, it does the same for animals with chalky skeletons, which make up a big percentage of sea life. Elevating the percentage of carbonic acid makes it increasingly difficult for these organisms - such as plankton, corals, crabs, clams, mussels, oysters, and snails - to calcify to
make their skeletons.
The planet’s CO2 is now slightly above 400 ppm. If it reaches roughly 500 ppm, says one expert, “you put
calcification out of business in the oceans.” If this happens, phytoplankton and corals will die, which will mean the death of all sea animals, from plankton to fish to whales. And this will greatly increase the food problem, because the ocean serves as the primary source of food for
3.5 billion people.
Part III
Climate Emergency
Once it is seen that the recent temperature increase is not due to natural variability, but instead to the increase in greenhouse gases, it is obvious that climate change is dangerous, not only because of the risk of seafood extinction and runaway global warming, which is likely to occur if global warming continues, but also because of various features of climate change, such as sea-level rise.
While admitting that the sea level had been rising, Legge said that “in the last few years [it] appears to be falling or at least to have leveled off.”
However, if the percentage of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise, the sea level, which rose about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the 20th century, will rise much faster in our century. Until recently, IPCC
scientists expected it to rise 3 feet (roughly 1 meter) by 2100, with some scientists predicting more like
6 to 7 feet (2 meters). But in 2015, leading climate scientist James Hansen and 16 fellow scientists released
a new study saying that, if fossil fuels are not radically curtailed, the ocean could rise 10 feet (about 3 meters) before the end of the century.
The sea has already risen enough to force people - such as those in Bangladesh, the Sundarbans, and the Carteret islands – to move, because their lands flooded or at least became too salty to farm. Also, the same fate
threatens the coastal areas of many countries, including Australia, China, Japan, and the United States. “If you live in South Florida and you’re not building a boat,” said a geology professor in Florida, “you’re
not facing reality.”
In addition, although sea-level rise may be the most obvious danger created by global warming-caused climate change, there are dangers in every feature of climate change – as I have documented in the first part of my
Unprecedented:
- The weather, which has recently become extreme, will continue to get more extreme.
- Heat waves will become hotter, eventually becoming so hot that humans and plants will not be able to survive.
- Droughts will last more often and longer, with some places becoming permanently dry; and the drier weather will result in more and worse wildfires.
- Storms of various types – rain storms, snow storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes - will become more deadly.
- Fresh water will become increasingly insufficient, due to various factors, including loss of snowpack and the melting of glaciers (which provide the major source of water for billions of people).
- Food will become increasingly insufficient, due to drought, excessive heat, sea-level rise, and fresh-water shortage (as well as loss of seafood because of ocean acidification).
- Sea-level rise and other features of climate disruption will increasingly create climate refugees and climate wars.
Contrary to Legge’s supposition, therefore, we
do have a climate emergency.
The
website for Skeptical Science - which advocates “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism” – has rebutted (
under “Arguments”) over 175 denialist claims, beginning with the most popular ones, such as “climate’s changed before,” “it’s the sun,” “it’s not bad,” and “there is no consensus.” In most cases, these claims can quickly be seen to be false with only a little study, so people who support them are either deceivers or deceived.
The deceivers are the fossil-fuel companies, along with their hirelings, who make these claims while knowing them to be false. As pointed out above, the oil companies have known this since 1995, just as tobacco companies have known cigarettes to be carcinogenic since 1965.
The deceived are those who believe these claims while being unaware, as journalist
Mark Hertsgaard said, “that they are mouthing talking points originally developed by big money interests.”
Many climate deniers identify with the Tea Party, which was originally portrayed in the press as if it were a spontaneous grassroots movement. In reality, however, it is an example of astroturfing, in which seemingly grassroots campaigns have been manufactured to mask the sponsor’s identity. In this case, the Tea Party was created by the Koch brothers (whose father had been one of the founders of the John Birch Society), especially by David Koch through his organization, Americans for Prosperity. Although Americans for Prosperity claimed to be a grassroots organization, and although David Koch tried to deny responsibility for it, the evidence shows it to be largely his creation - as indicated by the title of Jean Mayer’s New Yorker article “
Covert Operations,” along with the title of a New York Magazine article, “
The Billionaire’s Party.”
The covert operations of this billionaire’s party are carried out only on behalf of causes that support Koch interests, which generally are not the interests of the members of the Tea Party.
Frank Rich wrote:
“When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket . . . , his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,
and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes.”
Although the Kochs call themselves libertarians, they are “libertarians who hate the free market” (as pointed out by an article discussing the Koch brothers as “
America’s Greediest”).
In an essay entitled “The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires,”
George Monbiot said that the Tea Party is “mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting.”
Likewise, Frank Rich wrote that the agendas of the Kochs often run counter to “the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News,” after which Rich added: “The Koch brothers must be
laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests.” And the Koch brothers do, incidentally, keep going to the bank: From 2010 to 2013, as mentioned earlier, they raised the value of their company from $35 billion
to $68 billion.
Conclusion
I wrote this article because members of the 9/11 Truth Movement should not let themselves be deceived by the fossil-fuel corporations and the front-organizations they have created. Holding that the Bush-Cheney administration gave the public a completely unscientific account of what happened on 9/11, the members of this movement should not accept the completely anti-scientific denial of global warming and climate change.
Seeing the official story of 9/11 as a self-serving lie sold by Big Government, the members of the 9/11 Truth Movement should not fall for the self-serving lie told by Big Money.
