The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [121]
Another growled:
Your glee about this retarded patsy trying to light his underwear on fire shows your bias. You so want the mainstream media conspiracy theory to be true that you can almost taste it. This story reminds me of the “Let’s Roll” story and the Jessica Lynch story and the Pat Tillman story and the WMD stories and the official 911 conspiracy theory about a bunch of guys with box cutters defeating the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, hitting 3 of their 4 targets, including the most defended building in the world. Explain WTC 7 to me Mr. Shermer. It is still the 47 story elephant in the living room.
But the crème de la crème of conspiracy mongering was this explanation for the underwear bomber:
This guy was let through on purpose. He was a known terror risk. He was handed to the CIA on a plate by his own father! Remember all those Cheney/neocon warnings? They desperately want to blot Obamas copybook. Obama still has nests of neocon vipers in the CIA/Blackwater nexus and the justice department that for some unexplained reason he has been unable to eradicate. As with the 911 horror the Al Qaeda operators were tracked all the way. They were compromised and coordinated by black ops agents working on behalf of the PNAC conspirators. As a sceptic Mr Shermer should be less prepared to swallow the guff dished up to him by the neocon operators.7
How Conspiracies Actually Work
As acknowledged, conspiracies do happen, so I do not automatically dismiss them straight out of the gate. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by a Serbian secret society on the eve of World War I. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin D. Roosevelt was in on it), and Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between the pattern of a real conspiracy and the pattern of conspiracy mongering? As Kurt Cobain, the rock star of Nirvana, once snarled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”
But as G. Gordon Liddy once told me, the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Liddy should know, as he was an aide to President Nixon and one of the masterminds behind the break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Hotel. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off—in this case even something as simple as a hotel burglary was foiled by a security guard, and under the pressure of congressional hearings and journalistic investigations many of the conspiracists cracked and talked. So many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the men in black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. Once again, there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved to pull it off, the less likely it is true.
As an example of how conspiracies actually operate in the highly random and massively contingent real world (as opposed to the hypothetical perfect world of conspiracy theorists), let’s examine in detail the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, who were together in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. This is one of the most important and consequential assassinations in history, for it promptly triggered a military buildup over the summer that led to the guns of August and the outbreak of the First World War. This was unquestionably a conspiracy organized by a secret radical organization called Black Hand, whose political objective was the independence of Serbia from the Austro-Hungarian empire. The assassins were backed by an underground railroad of Serbian civilians and military officers who provided them with