In recent history the term “conspiracy theory” is often hurdled to discredit the arguments of people of the opposite ideological spectrum. In some instances discrediting is not enough. If there is enough consensus among those in power, the complete censorship of a voice is possible, as in the case of the removal of Alex Jones from almost every major social media platform (Youtube, Twitter, FB, Apple App Store), and even Paypal. It is often coupled with the label of “conspiracy theorist” to deplatform people without addressing actual arguments and theories at hand. In this essay I want to explore the etymology and history of the term and argue that there is a long historical precedence of world leaders and especially American leaders conspiring to achieve their socio-political goals.

Etymology

Firstly, the word conspiracy means the ‘act of conspiring together’ or ‘an agreement among conspirators’. To ‘conspire’ means to ‘join in secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrong act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement’ or even innocuously defined as to ‘act in harmony toward a common end’. The word has Latin origins with ‘con’ meaning “with or together” and “spire” or to breathe, or in other words to breath together, or to embody the same “spirit”. To put this together with theory we get conspiracy theory approximately meaning a theory or hypothesis about a group of people working together to end, usually diverging the mainstream explanation for historical and current events. If we use the meaning strictly derived from etymology, almost every major historical event involving political coups and revolutions involved groups of people conspiring to take power for themselves. What was considered conspiracy in the moment, we now simply consider and label as history. Rarely do we ever associate the word “conspirators” with groups like the Sons of Liberty, or the Founding Fathers who both conspired against the British crown.

The non-etymological meaning of the word has often taken on the a dismissive tone, typically meaning a theory that is untrue or outlandish. It labels a theory as something not worthy of serious consideration. Sometimes this dismissiveness is understandable given the wide variety of conspiracy theories (some more probable than others) and how often they coincide with another, so that while a person may have very strong reasons and evidence to support one theory, that person may also believe a related theory just because of its close ties. For example, one is much more likely to believe that the Earth is flat if one presupposed that the 1969 moon landings were fake, or vice-versa. This is not to dispute the veracity or falsity of the claim just mentioned, but to state that there are “memeplexes” or ideas that tend to congregate with one another, x.

Part 1: Responding to Common Objections

Before we go any further, I would like review common objections to conspiracy theories and respond to them.

• That they resist falsification
• Become a matter of faith rather than reason
• That they are subject to circular reasoning
• Are believed by people who are psychologically disturbed (paranoia) or subject to illusory pattern perception
• Hiding certain activities would require the cooperation of an impossibly large amount of people without someone whistleblowing.

Falsification - Many scientific theories that are taken as de-facto dogma in the scientific community are in practice unfalsifiable. This does not make them true or false. As John F. McGowan, a former researcher and engineer at NASA, states in his article on falsification “A scientific theory can often be modified in such a way that the core assumptions of the theory remain true and unchallenged but some lesser, peripheral assumptions are modified to make the theory agree with seemingly contradictory evidence “. Let’s use an example within physics and cosmology. Albert Einstein proposed, under the General Theory of Relativity, that the universe must be expanding but since this was not yet observed he added the cosmological constant to his formulation in order to make it consistent with observations. Using this constant it achieved a static universe (space is neither expanding nor contracting). When evidence from Hubble in 1931 showed that it WAS expanding, the cosmological constant was dropped (equal to zero). Most recently, in 1998, it was discovered the at the expansion of the universe is accelerating, indicating the possibility of a positive nonzero value for the constant. So in both cases (a static-universe vs a non-static universe) Einstein was right even when he was wrong. Dr. McGowan concludes that “One can easily see that if the expansion had not been discovered the cosmological constant would have been retained and again the theory would have been confirmed by observations”. To conclude, this standard of falsifiability is often a double standard, leveled against theories and worldviews that stand outside of the mainstream view, but not towards accepted theories even though they are often modified to explain contradictory data.

Matter of Faith - Here is a false dichotomy between faith and reason, often held by those beholden to scientism but even sometimes by Christians. Because this a similar objection as falsification so I will return to the example with physics. Because the prevailing theory is unfalsifiable, there is a certain degree of faith or lack thereof that one must have in it. I say faith because there are contending models that challenge the LCDM models such as the Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) that are supported by similarly credentialed and who I assume to be intelligent researchers. More specifically, they challenge the model due to the fact that dark matter/dark energy has never been directly observed despite the rigorous search for their presence in the universe. Thus, the alternative models are likely based in a lack of faith in dark matter due to the paucity of evidence for them. This lack of faith is based in reasonable grounds, namely that at this point in time dark matter has not been observed. Though proponents of one theory or another would not necessarily describe their stance as one a matter of faith (due to deeply held convictions about faith being opposed to reason), it essentially boils down to just that. In short, reason can inform and justify faith.

Circular Reasoning - The golden calf of modernity and of the West is the scientific method. It is used as standard par excellence of establishing objective facts about the world, but this too is subject to circular reasoning because the scientific method cannot justify the scientific method as it rests on premises outside of itself. This is best explained in one of the most famous problems of philosophy (and of science) through David Hume’s problem of induction. It highlights the lack of justification for the ability to make universal statements based on particular observations about the world, and the presupposition that future events will occur just as it has in the past.

If I as a scientist observe that there experiment X produces result Y 100 times, I have observed 100 particular cases of X->Y. I then go on to propose a universal rule that every time I conduct X I will get Y. This presupposes that 1) The 100 cases of X->Y which I have observed can be generalized to a universal rule: X will always produce Y. 2) The future instances in which I conduct experiment X will resemble the past instances in which I conduct experiment X.

Hume calls into question this jump from particulars to universals (1) as well as the principle of uniformitarianism (2). The circular argument can be seen more clearly when it is restated… The principle X->Y is true because it has always happened. This can be flipped… it has always happened because X->Y is true. The premise presupposes the conclusion, and vice-versa the conclusion presupposes the premise. In other words, it becomes something axiomatic like “It is what it is”.

Such observations rest on premises outside of realms of the scientific method. Like the issue of falsification, circular reasoning is often applied unidirectionally.

Psychological issues - It may very well be possible that people who believe conspiracy theories are more likely to be mentally ill or have psychological issues, and that this issue might characterize the right-wing more often than the left-wing (though the opposite claim could also be proposed). But this is more of an ad-hominem attacking the mental state of people who do not subscribe to the mainstream narrative than an attack on the argument.

Difficulty of hiding conspiracies without being exposed - This argument is based on Dr. Grime’s paper titled “On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs”. In this paper he uses probability and mathematical models to make the case that ‘grand’ conspiracies such as NASA moon-landing conspiracy, climate-change hoax, vaccination conspiracy, and conspiracy to hide cancer cure is impossible. To determine model parameters he used three examples… the NSA PRISM affair with Edward Snowden, the 1932 Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the 1998 forensic scandal. Interestingly, he admits that in smaller types of conspiracies involving 1000 people or less it would be possible to keep a single conspiratorial event below detection.

This paper assumes that everyone in a group has equal access to the same information (more typical of scientific and academic communities). These oversimplified assumptions make it unsuitable for application outside of the scientific realm. For example, it uses total number of conspirators at the NSA at 30,000 but as the paper admits “the proportion of those employed would would have knowledge of this program would likely be a lot less “. It ignores a very standard practice in military and intelligence communities called “need to know” or “compartmentalization”/”compartmentation”. The practice restricts sensitive information only to those who “need to know”, aiming to discourage leaking of information by limiting access to that information to the smallest number of people possible. This is typically done to prevent that information falling to the hands of the enemy in times of war, but it can also be used to hide it from the general populace or even other members of the same organization. In other words, the answer to any question that did not pertain to your specific task/job was “It’s classified”.

For example, in the Manhattan project the “need to know” prevented even Harry S. Truman, then Vice-President, from knowing of the existence of the project until the President Roosevelt had passed away on April 12, 1945 and Truman was sworn in. The Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) enforced a strict policy of compartmentalization that ‘production plant blueprints be broken down and distributed in such a way as to reveal as little as possible to any one individual about the overall character of the project’. General Leslie Groves who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon, and directed the Manhattan project stated this..

“Compartmentalization of knowledge, to me, was the very heart of security. My style was simple and not capable of misinterpretation each man should know everything he needed to know to do his job and nothing else. Adherence to this rule not only provided an adequate measure of security, but it greatly improved overall efficiency by making our people stick to their knitting. And it made quite clear to all concerned that the project existed to produce a specific end product—not to enable individuals to satisfy their curiosity and to increase their scientific knowledge.”

The Manhattan Project is now widely known among the public so it is not the best example of successful compartmentalization. However, the point was to show that this is standard practice in the military-industrial complex (coincidentally overlapping with the scientific community at times).

Examples

Let’s go over some of the more popular conspiracy theories.

• NASA faking the moon landing via collaboration with Hollywood
• JFK Assassination being planned by secret societies
• Deep State/NWO
• Jeffrey Epstein’s death being a suicide
• 9/11 being a controlled demolition

Something that has to be noted is that conspiracy theories are theories only up until they are vindicated.. Examples of conspiracies in recent history that would have STAYED conspiracy theories if they were not investigated by people like Carl Bernstein in the next example below, or if someone had not confessed to the truth include like US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in the second example..

• Watergate Scandal in which the Nixon’s administration’s attempts to break into the DNC and their conspiracy to cover it up by using federal officials to deflect
• Gulf Of Tonkin incident in which the US fabricated claims that Northern Vietnam had attacked US Navy destroyer USS Maddox in order to escalate conflict in Vietnam
• The 81 times the US tried to change other country’s governments between 1946-2000

Epistemological Challenges

Like some scientific theories, many conspiracy theories are plausible and are unfalsifiable. That is unfalsifiable unless admitted to at a later date by a conspirator or through declassification of documents. And similar to other theories, conspiracy theories are more often a matter of BELIEF or NON-BELIEF and sometimes whatever is in between, rather than a matter of TRUE or FALSE. This is because there are epistemological barriers to practically ALL historical events as most of what we know is based on the testimony of other people. By the very nature of the past, it is not possible to access it anymore, except through the testimony of those alive or of those dead. Even much of what we know what is happening in world today is digested through medium like news organization, social media, etc. The reliability of news is often judged by if it can be verified by other news organizations also labeled as credible, but is it possible that they are reporting circularly, and are simply playing a game of telephone? Or in other words, is what is happening in the world only credibly “happening” if enough “reliable” news sources report on it and “verify” it? And is the opposite true… is it possible that events are not “happening” if the “reliable” sources are not reporting on it? In short, can an event be entirely fabricated (or erased) if the people at the institutions through which we perceive the world willed it?

Part 2: Insitutional Analysis of Government and Media

What we know and what we DONT know is heavily filtered through institutions and organizations like the NYT, CNN, CBS, NBC, Time, Fox, etc, and government agencies like the CIA, FBI, White House Press Secretary. In theory, the journalist and figures at these organizations have the duty to deliver the truth to the world, and specifically to the American people. And under this theory, they would call one another out if there was misleading reporting, and in doing so hold each other accountable. But what if, that theory weren’t true? What if there was reason to believe the journalism promised by them is not true, or more often a mixture of lies and truth. Or that by the lack of reporting on certain issues a problem or an issue would be completely unknown among the American populace.

So lets dive into some factual events that wouldn’t alienate or offend the traditional party lines… There are generally two kinds of relationship between the government (intelligence agencies to be more specific) and the media. The first in which they work hand-in-hand as partners, though not necessarily 100% in cooperation. And the second in which the government knowingly misleads the media in order to prop a narrative.

This history of partnership between our most trusted sources of information and the unelected non-partisan portion of our government started in the mid 20th-century. For this portion of the essay I will be quoting extensively from an essay published by Carl Bernstein on October 20, 1977 on the CIA’s relationship with the media. There are several key figures that we have to keep track of…

• Allen Dulles - 1st civilian Director of the CIA (DCI) overseeing the Bay of Pigs invasion, Project MKULTRA, The 1953 Iranian coup d’état, and the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état. Allen and his brother John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State at the time under Eisenhower) were both on United Fruit payrolls, likely the financial incentive behind the overthrow of Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954.
• Henry Luce - Founder of a whole host of American magazines including… Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated who was very close to Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles. In the era before television, Life offered the main medium through which America consumed news, via an all-photographic news magazine.
• Charles Douglas Jackson - An expert on psychological warfare who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from 1932-1945, a precursor to the CIA during WW2, and the Psychological Warfare Division as Deputy Chief with SHAEF. Later he became Managing Director of Time-Life International and later publisher at Fortune Magazine. For a short stint he became a speechwriter for President Eisenhower’s successful 1952 campaign, agreed to be Eisenhower’s middleman between the CIA and Pentagon, and from 1953-1954 served as an advisor to the President on psychological warfare..
• Arthur Hays Sulzberger - Publisher of NYT from 1935-1961 after his father-in-law Adolph Ochs died in 1935. Like Luce, he was close to Allen Dulles. After his retirement, his son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos succeeded him, followed by his son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger two years later. To this day only Sulzbergers have held the position of publisher at the NYT, making it a de-facto family business.

In his 25-000 word essay, Bernstein claims that “more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.”, some tacit and others explicit. Among executives who lent their support include William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of NYT, James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations include the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Associated Press (AP), United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

In 1975, a committee organized by Senator Frank Church investigated the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the IRS for intelligence abuses. It was dubbed the Church Committee. Due to the CIA’s intentional obfuscation of the scope of their involvement with the press, it is hard to discern exact details of the ‘role played by newspaper and broadcast executives in cooperating with the agency’ in that investigation. Nevertheless, Bernstein provides testimonies from CIA officials, and journalists describing their relationship. For example, Allen Dulles initiated a procedure in which any American correspondents coming from abroad would divulge the contents of their notebooks to the CIA. These arrangements were made with dozens of news agencies, and were so common that Hugh Morrow, a former Saturday Evening Post correspondent stated “It got to be so routine that you felt a little miffed if you weren’t asked”. Other journalists had a more explicit role with the Agency such as Joseph Alsop who went to the Philippines in the 1953 election under at the request of the CIA. Later he even stated that “I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done it. The notion that a newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.”.

The roots of these relationships stem from war-time cooperation between journalists and the OSS, the predecessor organization to the modern CIA such as in the case of Stewart Alsop and Charles Douglas Jackson. Bernstein states “When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue.”. However, in the post-war error the enemy was no longer the Axis powers, but the threat of communism. So readers must understand that the Cold War sentiment was extremely strong at the time and people at all levels of the organizational hierarchies at news agencies felt a duty to work together with the government to fight ‘global communism’.

What was the nature of those 400 journalists? They mainly aided in intelligence gathering which they were already inclined towards due to the liberties already afforded to journalists.

“He is accorded unusual access by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off‑limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities.” - Bernstein describing journalist’s job.

Journalists were even used to recruit foreigners as spies, and after recruitment, also served as go-betweens between spies and the CIA, often relaying messages in between foreign nationals and the Agency. Sometimes they even planted ‘subtly concocted pieces of misinformation’, hosted parties to bring together American agents/spies, etc. Secrecy agreements, and employment contracts were signed by some, while others relationships were much more informal. Those who cooperated often benefitted as a result of their cooperation as described in the following quotes by Bernstein “Within the CIA, journalist‑operatives were accorded elite status, a consequence of the common experience journalists shared with high‑level CIA officials.”.

The next thing to look at is the relationships between the news executives and the CIA. Bernstein reports that according to CIA officials, the Agency’s relationship with the NYT was by far the most valuable among newspaper agencies. This was due to two reasons: the NYT was “the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men (referring to Allen Dulles and Arthur Hays Sulzberger) who ran both institutions.”. In a pattern that would be repeated by other organizations, actual arrangements between the Agency and the NYT were handled by subordinates. During the Church Committee a senior CIA official reviewed a part of the Agency’s files and found documentation of ‘five instances in which the Times provided cover for CIA employees between 1954 and 1962’. Each instance involved executives of the NYT but did not identify Sulzberger only those of subordinates who were not identified by the official.

He then reports that CBS “unquestionably the CIA’s most valuable broadcasting asset”, and in a similar fashion as NYT, CBS’s executive William Paley had a close relationship to Allen Dulles. Like C.D. Jackson, Paley also served in WW2 in psychological warfare but in the Office of War Information (OWI) instead of the SHAEF before returning to his position at CBS. The later CBS news directors/presidents Sig Mickelson (1949-1961) and Richard Salan (1961-1964) continued such relations with the CIA. CBS provided cover for CIA employees, established communications between the Washington bureau chief and the CIA, gave the CIA access to their newsfilm libraries, and in the years between 1950s and the early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA for private dinners and briefings. “Salant discussed his own contacts with the CIA, and the fact he continued many of his predecessor’s practices, in an interview with this reporter last year. The contacts, he said, began in February 1961, “when I got a phone call from a CIA man who said he had a working relationship with Sig Mickelson. The man said, ‘Your bosses know all about it.” Salant even served on a CIA task force that explored spreading American propaganda broadcasts to China. This task force also included ‘Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and John Haves, then vice‑president of the Washington Post Company for radio‑TV5.’.

Finally we get to Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, who like the executives in the prior two organizations was good friends with Allen Dulles. Luce allowed ‘certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.’. The middleman between the CIA and Time Inc. was C.D. Jackson, who while he was a Time executive ‘coauthored a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s’. Taking into account his other interactions with the government, C.D. Jackson is the perfect example of the implicit revolving door policy that the US government has with the news world’s most prominent figures. Though Luce had a middleman, he ‘made it a regular practice to brief Dulles or other high Agency officials when he returned from his frequent trips abroad’. Lastly, in the same time period that CBS was having ‘briefing’ dinners with the CIA, similar dinners were held for between Time magazine’s foreign correspondents and the CIA.

The CIA’s cooperation with journalists met public resistance in 1973, and further during the Church Committee’s investigation. The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) at the time, William Colby responded by cutting relationships that were not ‘fruitful’ and as many as a hundred were terminated in between 1973 and 1976. However, those deemed productive were still maintained and even during the Church Committee ‘at least fifteen news organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976.’ and ‘continued to maintain ties with seventy‑five to ninety journalists of every description—executives, reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists, bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical crews.’

After Colby was succeeded by George Bush Sr. the CIA announced a new policy that stated they would not enter into any formal paid or contractual relationship with news correspondents. This terminated ‘less than half of the relationships still affiliated with the agency’. Nevertheless, many relationships remained intact through voluntary unpaid cooperation.

So from 1950s to the 1970s there was widespread use of journalists by the CIA… That means that one of the most important institutions of America, namely the press that delivers information that most Americans expect to be factual and objective, has built a strong working relationship with the government. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this. However, if the government were to have any reason to obfuscate illegal activities that were not in the interest of the American people would the press hold them accountable? The answer is… sometimes, but let’s move on to another question.

Modern Relationship between Government and Media

Where does this leave us today? What is the relationship between intelligence communities and media? This leads me to the second type of relationship, in which the government uses the press for their own agenda. This is best exemplified in media coverage of the Iraq War, in which the Bush administration sold the American the lie that the Iraqi government and Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that they had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Prior to the actual war, there was massive misinformation spread by both British and American governments that was propagated (unknowingly or knowingly) that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government had access to WMDs. On September 24, 2002, in the foreword to the September Dossier a document detailing the investigations by the British government into Iraqi WMDs, former British PM Tony Blair stated in a foreword that ‘the document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.’ This provided the context from which the claim that Iraq sought “significant quantities of Uranium from Africa”, was repeated by George W. Bush Jr’s 2003 State of the Union Address despite the fact that Joseph C. Wilson, on CIA’s request, made a trip to Niger in February 2002 and concluded that there “was nothing to the story”, and reported his findings in March 2002. This conclusion was even corroborated by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) on March 1 2002, when they published an intelligence assessment named ‘Niger: Sale of Uranium to Iraq is Unlikely’. Ultimately all allegations included within the September Dossier has been proven to be false. If the government did not outright lie to the American people, they definitely misled them.

I will use the FAIR report to give a general perspective of the media once the Iraq War started in March… In this three week study FAIR looked at 1,617 on-camera sources documenting the war, studying ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and PBS. They characterized sources by ‘name, occupation, nationality, position on the war, and the network on which they appeared’. For example, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, an NBC analysist, was considered pro-war as he was a board member for the Committee for a Free Iraq, a pro-war group. They found that across the board, and especially within American sources, the sources favored the Iraq War with 64% for all sources, and 71% for American sources. Additionally, they found that of the U.S. sources (that made up 76% of all sources), 68% were current or former officials, and that of the 840 current or former officials only 4 held anti-war opinions. This bias manifested itself in the lack of coverage of Iraqi civilian causalities (anywhere between 100,000 to 650,000).

In addition to the general pro-war stance that was standard in media, the on the ground news was largely done by ‘embedded reporters’. The Pentagon established this policy as a way to get more favorable reporting among British and American journalists than if they were reporting from outside the battlefield. Journalists would naturally favor the troops of their own country, and especially of those who were protecting their physical safety. More egregiously, the Pentagon ran a propaganda campaign called the Pentagon military analyst program. It sought to “spread the administrations talking points on Iraq by briefing retired commanders for network and cable television appearances”. In a 2008 NYT article titled ‘Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand’, David Barstow contends that the many of the media’s ‘independent’ news analysists “have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air”. These analyst’s business relations were always hidden from viewers, and sometimes even to the networks themselves. The program is likely the source of the pro-war advocacy that was noted by the FAIR study. Even if it were not for the exposure of this program, the retired military officials could not be entirely be relied on as independent analysts due to the fact that they were still being payed by the government via pension.

Even more recently, it was discovered on October 2nd of 2016 that the US Department of Defense (DOD) paid Bell Pottinger, an international public relations and marketing company, $540 million to create fake videos and news articles to portray al-Qaeda in a negative light. The former chairman of Bell Pottinger, Timothy Bell said “It was a covert military operation. It was covered by various secrecy documents. We were very proud of it. We did a lot to help resolve the situation. Not enough. We did not stop the mess which emerged, but it was part of the American propaganda machinery,”. Staff from the PR firm moved to the US camp based in Baghdad where they worked with high-ranking military officers, as well as reporting to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the National Security council.

Despite the fallout of the Church Committee’s investigation into the CIA, and the resultant reduction of the CIA’s cooperation with the press, the overall scheme of government cooperation (or co-opting) of media has not stopped. Even in 2020, the media continues to hire ex-intelligence agency members such as… John Brennan (CIA Director to NBC), Jeremy Bash (DOD Chief of Staff/CIA to NBC), Andrew McCabe (Deputy Director of FBI to CNN), James Clapper (Director of DIA to CNN), Josh Campbell (FBI to CNN), Asha Rangappa (FBI to CNN), Steven Hall (CIA to CNN), Phil Mudd (CIA and FBI to CNN), Michael Hayden (NSA, DIA, CIA to CNN), and more. If anything, the intelligence agency’s presence has not diminished but has increased! The same community of unelected officials who specialize in misinformation, propaganda, coup-staging, torture, etc etc are the same people telling us information in media, and if they are not the same people they are working with those who tell us what is true and what is false.

###Conclusion

Those called conspiracy theorists have reason to believe that the people at the institutions are not trustworthy, and there is a titanic heap of evidence to support them. From the very beginning of the history of the American intelligence community in WW2, there was already strong bonds forged between them and the American press and media. Such bonds may have been necessary, even justified in times of war in order to win ideological and political conflicts. But just as they lie and manipulate foreign governments, they do the same to the American people.

So the question is not whether these institutions lie. The question is whether the lies that they have sold the American people merit a categorical loss faith in them.

Links

https://web.archive.org/web/20180217220924/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html - NYT article on Regime change and the US https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0738894216661190 - Study done on regime change by US and Soviet Union as referenced by NYT article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(information_security)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/truman-is-briefed-on-manhattan-project - ‘President Truman is briefed on Manhattan Project’

https://fas.org/irp/ops/ci/docs/ci2/2ch1_f.htm - ‘Security and the Manhattan Project’

http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php - The CIA and the Media

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/07/us/role-of-cia-in-guatemala-told-in-files-of-publisher.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html - Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

https://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=88389

https://maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1157 - Church Committee Final Report, Vol 1: Foreign and Military Intelligence

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005524009.pdf - 2010 Task Force Report on Greater CIA Openness

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/mainstream-media-outlets-keep-hiring-cia-intel-veterans-and-its-gross-62490d866362

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/thatcher-pr-guru-lord-bell-ran-540m-pentagon-false-propaganda-campaign-iraq-1584495 - Bell Pottinger and the DOD

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmfaff/813/81306.htm - September Dossier

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/24/iraq.speeches - Tony Blair Foreword to the September Dossier

https://web.archive.org/web/20050721011624/http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/sec2.pdf - Intelligence report on Niger-Iraq uranium sale