8 CONSPIRACY THEORIES THAT CAME TRUE: From a Fascist Coup d’état to the FBI Poisoning Alcohol (and Herb)
In 1967, the CIA moved to counter criticism of the Warren Report by weaponizing the term “conspiracy” as a pejorative in order to discredit skepticism towards the official story of the JFK assassination. With the establishment media still employing similar tactics to this day, we take another look at ten conspiracy theories that came true.
1. Fascist Conspiracy to Overthrow the U.S. Government
In the summer of 1933, shortly after Roosevelt’s “First 100 Days,” America’s richest businessmen were in a panic. It was clear that Roosevelt intended to conduct a massive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Roosevelt had to be stopped at all costs. The answer was a military coup. It was to be secretly financed and organized by leading officers of the Morgan and Du Pont empires. This included some of America’s richest and most famous names of the time:
Irenee Du Pont – Right-wing chemical industrialist and founder of the American Liberty League, the organization assigned to execute the plot.
Grayson Murphy – Director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel and a group of J.P. Morgan banks.
William Doyle – Former state commander of the American Legion and a central plotter of the coup.
John Davis – Former Democratic presidential candidate and a senior attorney for J.P. Morgan.
Al Smith – Roosevelt’s bitter political foe from New York. Smith was a former governor of New York and a codirector of the American Liberty League.
John J. Raskob – A high-ranking Du Pont officer and a former chairman of the Democratic Party. In later decades, Raskob would become a “Knight of Malta,” a Roman Catholic Religious Order with a high percentage of CIA spies, including CIA Directors William Casey, William Colby and John McCone.
Robert Clark – One of Wall Street’s richest bankers and stockbrokers.
Gerald MacGuire – Bond salesman for Clark, and a former commander of the Connecticut American Legion. MacGuire was the key recruiter to General Butler.
The plotters attempted to recruit General Smedley Butler to lead the coup. They selected him because he was a war hero who was popular with the troops. The plotters felt his good reputation was important to make the troops feel confident that they were doing the right thing by overthrowing a democratically elected president. However, this was a mistake: Butler was popular with the troops because he identified with them. That is, he was a man of the people, not the elite. When the plotters approached General Butler with their proposal to lead the coup, he pretended to go along with the plan at first, secretly deciding to betray it to Congress at the right moment.
What the businessmen proposed was dramatic: they wanted General Butler to deliver an ultimatum to Roosevelt. Roosevelt would pretend to become sick and incapacitated from his polio, and allow a newly created cabinet officer, a “Secretary of General Affairs,” to run things in his stead. The secretary, of course, would be carrying out the orders of Wall Street. If Roosevelt refused, then General Butler would force him out with an army of 500,000 war veterans from the American Legion. But MacGuire assured Butler the cover story would work:
“You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President’s health is failing. Everyone can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second…”
The businessmen also promised that money was no object: Clark told Butler that he would spend half his $60 million fortune to save the other half. And what type of government would replace Roosevelt’s New Deal? MacGuire was perfectly candid to Paul French, a reporter friend of General Butler’s:
“We need a fascist government in this country… to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”
Indeed, it turns out that MacGuire travelled to Italy to study Mussolini’s fascist state, and came away mightily impressed. He wrote glowing reports back to his boss, Robert Clark, suggesting that they implement the same thing. If this sounds too fantastic to believe, we should remember that by 1933, the crimes of fascism were still mostly in the future, and its danger were largely unknown, even to its supporters. But in the early days, many businessmen openly admired Mussolini because he had used a strong hand to deal with labor unions, put out social unrest, and get the economy working again, if only at the point of a gun. Americans today would be appalled to learn of the many famous millionaires back then who initially admired Hitler and Mussolini: Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, John and Allen Dulles (who, besides being millionaires, would later become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and CIA Director, respectively), and, of course, everyone on the above list. They disavowed Hitler and Mussolini only after their atrocities grew to indefensible levels. The plot fell apart when Butler went public. The general revealed the details of the coup before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which would later become the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. In the 50s, this committee would destroy the lives of hundreds of innocent Americans with its communist witch hunts.
The Committee heard the testimony of Butler and French, but failed to call in any of the coup plotters for questioning, other than MacGuire. In fact, the Committee whitewashed the public version of its final report, deleting the names of powerful businessmen whose reputations they sought to protect. The most likely reason for this response is that Wall Street had undue influence in Congress also. Even more alarming, the elite-controlled media failed to pick up on the story, and even today the incident remains little known. The elite managed to spin the story as nothing more than the rumors and hearsay of Butler and French, even though Butler was a Quaker of unimpeachable honesty and integrity. Butler, appalled by the cover-up, went on national radio to denounce it, but with little success.
Butler was not vindicated until 1967, when journalist John Spivak uncovered the Committee’s internal, secret report. It clearly confirmed Butler’s story: In the last few weeks of the committee’s life it received evidence showing that certain persons had attempted to establish a fascist organization in this country…
There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned and might have been placed in execution if the financial backers deemed it expedient… MacGuire denied [Butler’s] allegations under oath, but your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made to General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principle, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various form of veterans’ organizations of Fascist character.
Needless to say, the survival of America’s democracy is not an automatic or sure thing. Americans need to remain vigilant against all enemies… both foreign and domestic.
2. The FBI Crime Lab Cover-Up
In the early 1990′s, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, one of the FBI’s top scientists, blew the whistle on how the FBI was manipulating crime lab data in order to sway trials and frame innocent people who were convicted and sent to prison for crimes they did not commit based on faulty evidence. In 2012 it emerged that the Justice Department had been “withholding information for years about hundreds or even thousands of cases that were tainted by faulty forensic work in the FBI Crime Lab.”
A Washington Post exposé found that, “hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.” To millions of people whose knowledge of crime labs comes from television shows such as CSI, Bones, Crossing Jordan and the venerable Quincy M.E., the forensic experts who work at such labs seem to be infallible scientists who use validated scientific techniques to follow the evidence to the truth, regardless of where it leads. Sadly, that is far from accurate. “The CSI effect has caused jurors to expect crime lab results far beyond the capacity of forensic science,” wrote Jim Fisher, a former FBI agent and retired criminalistics professor who taught forensic science at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, in his 2008 book titled Forensics Under Fire: Are Bad Science and Dueling Experts Corrupting Criminal Justice? Fisher notes that problems in forensics “have kept scientific crime detection from living up to its full potential.” His conclusion is that “bad science, misadventures of forensic experts [and] human error” exemplify “the inability of our 21st century judicial system to properly differentiate between valid research and junk science.”
Crime lab workers are not necessarily scientists. In fact, sometimes only a high school diploma is required for employment as a forensic technician or arson investigator. Nor are lab examiners and their supervisors always the unbiased investigators portrayed on TV; in fact, many crime labs are run by or affiliated with police departments, which have a vested interest in clearing unsolved crimes and securing convictions. Police often share their suspicions regarding suspects with lab workers before forensic examinations are performed. This has been shown to prejudice lab personnel in areas as diverse as fingerprint examination and chemical testing for accelerants in arson investigations. Further, some lab examiners feel they are part of the prosecution team, helping the police and prosecutors convict suspects regardless of the results of forensic testing. In such cases, forensic experts and other lab personnel may lie about test results, be misleading about the reliability of their methods, and/or cover up test outcomes when they are beneficial to the defendant.
When it comes to putting people in prison, it seems as if law enforcement can’t act fast enough. But when it comes to getting them out — especially after the uncovering of misconduct or malfeasance — there seems to be a distinct lack of urgency.
The Inspector General of the Justice Department This is the third report to follow up on the DOJ “task force” and its efforts to right the wrongs caused by “serious irregularities” in its lab.
The report made public Wednesday was the third since 1997 to follow up on irregularities at the famed FBI lab. The prior inspector general reports focused on lab problems. The new report focused on the Justice Department’s task force created to identify and follow up on the cases involving scientifically unsupportable analysis and overstated testimony by FBI Lab examiners.
The problems ultimately lead back to 13 examiners. But those problems were multitudinous. In total, these 13 took part in nearly 8,000 cases, 2,900 of which resulted in convictions. This discovery led to the appointment of a DOJ task force, which then led to… not much.
The new report said the Justice Department “failed to ensure that prosecutors made appropriate and timely disclosures to affected defendants” and that the department “failed to staff the Task Force with sufficient personnel to implement a case review of the magnitude it undertook.” The work took far too long, investigators said.
How did this lack of activity on law enforcement’s end add up for some of those affected?
Three other defendants, Donald E. Gates, Santae A. Tribble, and Kirk L. Odom, had served sentences in excess of 21 years based in part on FBI hair analyses and testimony that DNA analysis subsequently proved erroneous. The OIG drills down the specific failures of the DOJ task force, as well as those who were supposed to be cooperating with the investigation.
Despite some effort by the Task Force to segregate for priority treatment cases involving defendants on death row, the Department and the FBI did not take sufficient steps to ensure that the capital cases were the Task Force’s top priority. We found that it took the FBI almost 5 years to identify the 64 defendants on death row whose cases involved analyses or testimony by 1 or more of the 13 examiners. The Department did not notify state authorities that convictions of capital defendants could be affected by involvement of any of the 13 criticized examiners. Therefore, state authorities had no basis to consider delaying scheduled executions.
No problem. Just death on the line. No need to push the disputed cases to the front of the line. Not even if it kills someone who would have been exonerated.
As a result, one defendant (Benjamin H. Boyle) was executed 4 days after the 1997 OIG report was published but before his case was identified and reviewed by the Task Force. The prosecutor deemed the Lab analysis and testimony in that case material to the defendant’s conviction. An independent scientist who later reviewed the case found the FBI Lab analysis to be scientifically unsupportable and the testimony overstated and incorrect. Two other capital defendants were executed (Michael Lockhart in 1997 and Gerald E. Stano in 1998) 2 months and 7 months, respectively, before their cases were identified for Task Force review as cases involving 1 or more of the 13 examiners.
Although we found no indication in the Task Force files that the Lab analyses or examiners’ testimony were deemed material to the defendants’ convictions in these cases and, according to the FBI, the OIG-criticized examiner found no positive associations linking Lockhart or Stano to the crimes for which they were convicted and executed, the Task Force did not learn this critical information before the executions so that appropriate steps could have been taken had the analyses or testimony been material to the convictions and unreliable.
There’s a lot more bad news in the report, but nothing really tops the FBI contributing to the death of at least one innocent person. This isn’t something that was uncovered after the execution. This information came to light in 1996, but no one involved made any attempt to prioritize affected convictions. Innocent people died or were locked away for years and yet, the DOJ portrays itself as the injured party.
“Decades ago, the FBI corrected the deficiencies that led to the creation of the Task Force,” the department noted in its official response, adding that the Task Force’s work was “unprecedented both in its magnitude and its complexity.”
Really?
Lab examiner Michael Malone’s work led to someone being falsely imprisoned for 27 years. He also contributed faulty work that resulted in the overturning of five other convictions. Malone retired in 1999, but was still working for the FBI as a contractor (performing background checks). The OIG’s review finally led to his termination of his employment with the FBI… on June 17, 2014.
According to the evidence gathered by the OIG, the FBI greatly contributed to the inability of the task force to do its job in a timely fashion, with a majority of reviewed cases being returned to the DOJ more than 14 months after the FBI obtained them. Some, including capital cases, were held onto for as long as two years.
What the FBI plans to do in the future to prevent more injustices is yet to be seen. The OIG suggests it partner with the opposite end of the spectrum for best results.
We encourage the Department and the FBI to consider working with defense organizations, such as the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers or entities which work to ensure protection of defendants’ rights, such as the Innocence Project and the American Civil Liberties Union, to ensure a comprehensive and effective plan designed to achieve maximum and effective notice to all potentially affected individuals.
This will hopefully give the DOJ and FBI some more insight into what it’s like for the other side whose best efforts to defend the accused are undermined by shoddy lab work or the withholding of exculpatory evidence. What it absolutely doesn’t do, though, is give Benjamin Boyle back his life, or add years of extra life to those who gave up a decade or two of theirs while locked away for crimes they didn’t commit.
3. J. Edgar Hoover’s Repeated Denial of the Existence of the Mafia
For years, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover denied the very existence of the Mafia. While acknowledging the existence of criminals, many of whom came from Sicily, Hoover refused to entertain the notion that such groups conspired in different areas of the country as part of an organized crime racket. Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, articulated the principles of the game. It was a strict underworld rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer. “Ways could be found,” he said in his memoirs, “so that he would not interfere with us and we wouldn’t interfere with him.”
The way the Mafia found to deal with Edgar [Hoover], according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality. The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar’s compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year’s Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell’s guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde [Tolson]. At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by Costello’s associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello.
Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Costello’s, and Costello was said to be the club’s real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals. Seymour Pollock, an associate of Meyer Lansky’s, said in 1990 that Edgar’s homosexuality was “common knowledge” and that he had seen evidence of it for himself. “I used to meet him at the racetrack every once in a while with lover boy Clyde, in the late forties and fifties. I was in the next box once. And when you see two guys holding hands, well come on! . . . They were surreptitious, but there was no question about it.”
Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, the highest-ranking mobster ever to have “turned” and testified against his former associates, was at the track in 1948 when Frank Bompensiero, a notorious West Coast mafioso, taunted Edgar to his face. “I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front,” Fratianno recalled, “and said, ‘Hey, Bomp, lookit there, it’s J. Edgar Hoover.’ And Bomp says right out loud, so everyone can hear, ‘Ah, that J. Edgar’s a punk, he’s a f—–‘ degenerate queer.'” Later, when Bompensiero ran into Edgar in the men’s room, the FBI Director was astonishingly meek. “Frank,” he told the mobster, “that’s not a nice way to talk about me, especially when I have people with me.”
It was clear to Fratianno that Bompensiero had met Edgar before and that he had absolutely no fear of Edgar. Fratianno knew numerous other top mobsters, including Jack and Louis Dragna of Los Angeles and Johnny Roselli, the West Coast representative of the Chicago mob. All spoke of “proof” that Edgar was homosexual. Roselli spoke specifically of the occasion in the late twenties when Edgar had been arrested on charges of homosexuality in New Orleans. Edgar could hardly have chosen a worse city in which to be compromised. New Orleans police and city official were notoriously corrupt, puppets of an organized crime network run by Mafia boss Carlos Marcello and heavily influenced by Meyer Lansky. If the homosexual arrest occurred, it is likely the local mobsters quickly learned of it. Other information suggests Meyer Lansky obtained hard proof of Edgar’s homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations. The first hint came from Irving “Ash” Resnick, the Nevada representative of the Patriarcha family for New England, and an original owner-builder of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. As a high-level mob courier, he traveled extensively. In Miami Beach, his Christmas destination in the fifties, he stayed at the Gulfstream, in a bungalow next to the one used by Edgar and Clyde. “I’d sit with him on the beach ever day,” Resnick remembered. “We were family.”
4. Alcohol Being Poisoned by the Feds During Prohitibion
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.” Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes —but that’s due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
Anyone remember the U.S. government’s controversial decision in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, an herbicide. Its use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 1920s—if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they’d brought it upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn’t really all that toxic, the outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.
During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: “Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.” Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy.
Although claims of the government meddling with the environment, food and water supply are routinely dismissed as “conspiracy theories” by mainline talking heads, such a precedent goes right back to the 1920′s, when the FBI deliberately poisoned alcohol in an attempt to enforce prohibition laws. “Once Prohibition went into effect, the FBI saw fit to enforce it as well as possible, since the law is the law, and, by adding potentially fatal impurities to it, endeavored to teach the public that it was going to lose with Mr. Booze. These impurities included methane, formaldehyde, ammonia, and even arsenic and kerosene. But the FBI’s usual method, without informing the populace, of course, was to denature drinkable alcohol, which is called ethanol, by adding rubbing alcohol, which is made of water and propene. Propene is distilled from natural gas and oil; rubbing alcohol does a fine job cleaning wounds and preventing infection, but will destroy your intestines, kidneys, and liver if you drink it. The FBI also added acetone, which is paint thinner.
5. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male is the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history, as noted by Arthur L. Caplan (1992). Begun in 1932 by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), the study was purportedly designed to determine the natural course of untreated latent syphilis in some 400 African American men in Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama. The research subjects, all of whom had syphilis when they were enrolled in the study-contrary to the “urban myth” that holds “black men in Alabama were injected with the virus that causes syphilis” (Walker, 1992)-were matched against 200 uninfected subjects who served as a control group.
The subjects were recruited with misleading promises of “special free treatment,” which were actually spinal taps done without anesthesia to study the neurological effects of syphilis, and they were enrolled without their informed consent. The subjects received heavy metals therapy, standard treatment in 1932, but were denied antibiotic therapy when it became clear in the 1940s that penicillin was a safe and effective treatment for the disease. When penicillin became widely available by the early 1950s as the preferred treatment for syphilis, this therapy was again withheld. On several occasions, the USPHS actually sought to prevent treatment. The first published report of the study appeared in 1936, with subsequent papers issued every four to six years until the early 1970s. In l969, a committee at the federally operated Center for Disease Control decided the study should continue. Only in 1972, when accounts of the study first appeared in the national press, did the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) halt the experiment.
At that time, 74 of the test subjects were still alive; at least 28, but perhaps more than 100, had died directly from advanced syphilis. An investigatory panel appointed by HEW in August 1972 found the study “ethically unjustified” and argued that penicillin should have been provided to the men. As a result, the National Research Act, passed in 1974, mandated that all federally funded proposed research with human subjects be approved by an institutional review board (IRB). By 1992, final payments of approximately $40,000 were made to survivors under an agreement settling the class action lawsuit brought on behalf of the Tuskegee Study subjects. President Clinton publicly apologized on behalf of the federal government to the handful of study survivors in April 1997. Several major ethical issues involving human research subjects need to be studied further.
The first major ethical issue to be considered is informed consent, which refers to telling potential research participants about all aspects of the research that might reasonably influence their decision to participate. A major unresolved concern is exactly how far researchers’ obligations extend to research subjects. Another concern has to do with the possibility that a person might feel pressured to agree or might not understand precisely what he or she is agreeing to. The investigators took advantage of a deprived socioeconomic situation in which the participants had experienced low levels of care. The contacts were with doctors and nurses who were seen as authority figures. The USPHS practiced deception in recruiting subjects for the study. It was never explained to the subjects that the survey was designed to detect syphilis. The term “bad blood,” which was a local colloquialism for everything from anemia to leukemia, was used by the doctors and never defined for the subjects. Subjects were never told they had syphilis, the course of the disease, or treatment.
The treatment presented consisted of spinal taps, which were described as “spinal shots.” The second major ethical issue is the withholding of treatment for research purposes. This is the gravest charge against the study. Patient welfare was consistently overlooked, although there have been multiple attempts to justify why penicillin treatment was withheld. Some physicians felt that repair of existing damage would be minimal, and others felt that the damage that could result from reactions to the penicillin therapy, including fever, angina, and ruptured blood vessels, would outweigh its benefits. At the time of the Tuskegee Study, no data was available on the efficiency of penicillin treatment in late syphilis, and short- and long-term toxic effects of drugs had not been well documented. In short, when the study was evaluated periodically, researchers judged that the benefits of nontreatment outweighed the benefits of treatment. Moreover, the subjects were never given a choice about continuing in the study once penicillin had become available; in fact, they were prevented from getting treatment.
6. Germany’s claim that the Lusitania was carrying munitions/Churchill’s Role
Did Winston Churchill engineer a conspiracy to sink Lusitania and bring the United States into World War I? The speculation about the conspiracy theory comes from a letter Winston Churchill sent to Walter Runciman, the president of Britain’s Board of Trade. In this letter, Churchill wrote the following:
“It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany . . . . For our part we want the traffic — the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still….” When Lusitania was scheduled to arrive in Liverpool on 6 March 1915, Trade Division signaled Lusitania at Cunard’s request, relaying,”Owners advise keep well out. Time arrival to cross bar without waiting.”
Admiral Henry Oliver also sent two destroyers, HMS Laverock and HMS Louis to receive and escort Lusitania, and sent Q ship HMS Lyons to patrol Liverpool Bay, even with the shortage of available destroyers at the time. Captain Dow, not wishing to disclose his location to listening Germans, steamed Lusitania into Liverpool by herself.
Compare this with Lusitania‘s last crossing, where the Admiralty took no precautions to protect Lusitania.
No specific orders, no escorts, no Q ships. Even when the destroyers Lucifer, Legion, Linnet, and Laverock were sitting idly at Milford Haven, Wales, and were available for such a job. Even when the Admiralty knew full well of the danger Lusitania was heading into, the Admiralty did not relay the news of the sinkings of Earl of Lathom, Candidate, Centurion, and the attempt on the Cayo Romano, to Lusitania despite the fact that these incidents were reported to the Admiralty and specifically requested to reach Lusitania.
Twenty-three merchant vessels had been torpedoed in the general area Lusitania was steaming through since Lusitania left New York, and absolutely no word of any of these attacks were relayed to Lusitania. Radio silence would not have been an excuse, as Admiral Oliver could have alerted Vice Admiral Coke at Queenstown of the danger if he could not reach Lusitania.
Furthermore, radio exchanges between Lusitania and the Admiralty from 5 to 7 May remain classified to this day. This has led to speculation that Captain Turner had requested to divert Lusitania north around Ireland and through the North Channel and was denied. The North Channel route was cleared of mines by 15 April 1915 and the Admiralty could permit merchant ships to pass through if given the OK. Being denied this route, Captain Turner would have had to take Lusitania south, where she was torpedoed.
The fact that no correspondence between Churchill and First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher from the time of Lusitania‘s last crossing has survived has also fueled speculation that something was going on. The precautions taken to ensure Lusitania‘s safety in March and the safety of other vessels since the Germans declared the waters around Britain a war zone were conspicuously absent on Lusitania‘s last crossing. The Admiralty had ten days to aid Lusitania and did not. From this, one would come to two conclusions:
1. The Admiralty did plan to expose Lusitania to danger in the off chance that a German submarine would attack her, enraging the American public.
2. The Admiralty fouled up, and their gross negligence resulted in a tremendous loss of life.
The loss of almost 2,000 lives caused such outrage that it propelled the U.S. into the First World War. But just recently in 2012, divers have revealed a dark secret about the cargo carried by the Lusitania on its final journey in May 1915. Munitions they found in the hold suggest that the Germans had been right all along in claiming the ship was carrying war materials and was a legitimate military target.
7. The Lavon Affair
In 1954, Israeli agents working in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including a United States diplomatic facility, and left evidence behind implicating Egyptian Muslims as the culprits. The ruse would have worked, had not one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to capture and identify one of the bombers, which in turn led to the round up of an Israeli spy ring. Some of the spies were from Israel, while others were recruited from the local Jewish population. Israel responded to the scandal with claims in the media that there was no spy ring, that it was all a hoax perpetrated by “anti-Semites”. Honorable Chairman, members of the Knesset.
The trial that started two days ago in Egypt against 13 Jews is disturbing everybody and brings about an emotional turmoil and deep bitterness in the country [Israel] and in the whole Jewish world. Indeed, it must cause concern and anxiety in the hearts of all justice-seeking people around the universe. The Committee for Foreign Affairs and Security has alreadv dealt and will further deal with this serious issue. But at this stage I feel obliged to make a short announcement. In my speech in the Knesset on November 15 1 said “The uncontrolled behavior of’ Egypt . . . does not indicate . . . that its leadership . . . is seeking moderate approaches and peace. How far Egypt is from this spirit [of moderation and peace] can be learned from the plot woven in Alexandria, the show-trial which is being organized there against a group of Jews who became victims of false accusations of espionage, and who, it seems, are being threatened and tortured in order to extract from them confessions in imaginary crimes.”
This gloomy assumption was verified and was revealed to be a cruel and shocking fact, by the declaration of the accused Victorin Ninyo in the military court in Cairo that was published this morning. [According to this declaration] she was tortured during the interrogation which preceded the trial and by that torture they extracted from her false confessions to crimes which did not happen. The government of Israel strongly protests this practice, which revives in the Middle East the methods used by the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. The government of Israel strongly rejects the false accusations of the general Egyptian prosecution, which relegates to the Israeli authorities horrible deeds and diabolic conspiracies against the security and the international relations of Egypt.
From this stand we have protested many times in the past persecution and false accusations of Jews in various countries. We see in the innocent Jews accused by the Egyptian authorities of such severe crimes, victims of vicious hostility to the State of Israel and the Jewish people. If their crime is being Zionist and devoted to Israel, millions of Jews around the world share this crime. We do not think that the rulers of Egypt should be interested in being responsible for shedding Jewish blood. We call upon all those who believe in peace, stability and human relations among nations to prevent fatal injustice. But as the public trial progressed, it was evident that Israel had indeed been behind the bombing. Eventually, Israeli’s Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon was brought down by the scandal, although it appears that he was himself the victim of a frame-up by the real authors of the bombing project, code named “Operation Susannah.” It is therefore a fact that Israel has a prior history of setting off bombs with the intent to blame Arabs for them.
This is not the only example of a “False Flag” operation designed to trick the United States into attacking Israel’s enemies. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a Mossad defector now living in Canada, Ronald Reagan was tricked into bombing Libya by means of a radio transmitter smuggled into Tripoli by the Mossad, which broadcast messages designed to fool the United States into thinking Libya was about to launch a massive terror attack on the west. On the basis of this fake evidence, the US bombed Libya, killing Khadaffi’s daughter. “The Jews of Iraq” is a story by a Jewish writer revealing yet another false flag operation where Israelis used bombs and planted the blame on Arabs More recently, Captain Ward Boston, who served as senior legal counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the Israeli attack on USS Liberty, has come forward to report that the Court of Inquiry was ORDERED to conclude that the attack was an accident by President Lyndon Johnson. In hindsight, given the use of unmarked aircraft and boats by Israel during the actual attack, it appears that Israel intended to sink the US ship and frame Egypt for the attack, tricking the US into the war against Egypt.
8. Geo-Engineering
For years, the establishment media denied that geo-engineering projects were taking place, despite the claims of many researchers linking the phenomenon of “chemtrails” to atmosphere manipulation programs. However, towards the end of the last decade, numerous geo-engineering projects which were centered around injecting the upper atmosphere with artificial substances were made public, such as those at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C, which in 2009 began conducting studies which involved shooting huge amounts of particulate matter, in this case “porous-walled glass microspheres,” into the stratosphere. The notion that governments are spending millions on artificially engineering the climate can no longer be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program was created in 1989 with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and is sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Science and managed by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research. One of ARM’s programs, entitled Indirect and Semi-Direct Aerosol Campaign (ISDAC), is aimed at measuring “cloud simulations” and “aerosol retrievals”. Another program under the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Science Program is directed towards, “developing comprehensive understanding of the atmospheric processes that control the transport, transformation, and fate of energy related trace chemicals and particulate matter.” The DOE website states that, “The current focus of the program is aerosol radiative forcing of climate: aerosol formation and evolution and aerosol properties that affect direct and indirect influences on climate and climate change.”
What are other examples of conspiracy theories that came true? Let us know in the comments…..
