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Comment by ern | Hacker News Reader

Iraqi WMDs are an interesting case against broad government conspiracies. Before the invasion, the evidence was weak and fragmentary. After the invasion, it would have been a lot easier (and less embarrassing) to fake the WMDs if they had the capability. The fact that they couldn’t tells me that they aren’t good at high profile hoaxes of physical evidence with lots of witnesses.

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Similarly the Gulf of Tonkin incident was lied about and also resulted in LBJ being granted war powers without congressional approval--even though the incident was also easily dismissed as false. If anything, it served as a blueprint that these two easy tricks could be used again--like in Iraq. And in both cases, they got everything they wanted and no one held them accountable. Why would they need to cover anything up if no one holds them accountable? Focusing on a cover up might have a Streissand effect. So I do think there are broad government conspiracies... The NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory until recently.

> The NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory until recently.

NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory “until recently”? Really? Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace came out in 1982. We have known about the NSA (known, not ‘suspected’) since before Edward Snowden was born. People in the crypto and infosec community have considered them the top threat for decades. Actual techniques and processes are news when verified, but please do not try to suggest that either the existence of nor extent of NSA activity were in any way surprising or considered a conspiracy theory.

Some parts of it were a genuine surprise. In he 90’s we learned of differential cryptanalysis and that the NSA’s involvement in DES strengthened it, not backdoored it as everyone thought. Turns out that was the exception not the rule.

Likewise although certainly some people in tech knew the extant of PRISM, I think all but he most paranoid infosec people presumed they nevertheless obeyed the law and didn’t dragnet snoop on Americans. I’d heard stories of the backbone interconnects that were routing all traffic through NSA servers. I presumed that was just to get access for when they needed it (with a warrant) or to mask what specific data stream they were interested in. I didn’t take as seriously as I should have the possibility that they were in fact simply recording everything.

In my opinion this is like me saying: Greider's The Secrets of the Temple came out in '87. People have similarly considered the central bank a top threat for hundreds of years. It's so laughably obviously a tool of the plutocracy, but just as Clapper testified before congress and other reputable sources had claimed the NSA was not conducting domestic surveillance, as is the case with the Fed's missdeeds. Just have a look at the Fed's website yourself(1). They always try to say, in roundabout ways, that they are not creating money out of thin air, but that is exactly what they do: when the Fed's balance sheet ballooned after 2008 by over 4 trillion dollars--where do people think they got 4 trillion dollars from? That's 4 actual trillion dollars--not being snarky here.

So while I can somewhat agree with you, but I hope you can see my point about what gets labelled as a conspiracy doesn't matter if a lot of reputable people like Bernie Sanders, JFK, Ron Paul, Aaron Swartz, etc have already called foul.

Anyways the EFF has a useful timeline for NSA spying: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline

1 - https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12853.htm

> They always try to say, in roundabout ways, that they are not creating money out of thin air

How else would one create money?

By acquiring whatever backs the money and printing money that represents it. In other words, the treasury would buy gold from somewhere else, and create money representing that value. This is how our monetary system worked when it was gold- & silver-backed. Now it's a fiat system, where there is no reserve of some asset held to back the currency ("out of thin air").

That "backing" is nonsensical. A currency is a proxy for the wealth in an economy. All that using gold or silver to "back" it does is cause the price of that commodity to rise to reflect the size of the entire economy.

As such, the "intrinsic" value of the commodity is irrelevant - it may as well be paper. Which is why that's what it now is.

If anything, it was an effective conspiracy by the Iraqi government to make foreign intelligence agencies believe that Iraq had nuclear weapons or was close to having them. It's entirely rational for someone in Saddam's position to want foreign governments (and not just western ones but Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran as well) to believe he possesses nuclear weapons. Israel plays this game too, with its policy of strategic ambiguity. Saddam miscalculated how U.S. and U.K. policy makers would re-evaluate this ambiguity in the wake of September 11th. In the wake of that miscalculation, North Korea's leadership has been pursuing an upgraded version of his strategy, with unambiguous demonstrations of actual nuclear weapons and ICBMs. Time will tell whether that clarity will prevent a war on the Korean Peninsula or precipitate it.

At any rate the existence of WMD, in general, rather than nuclear weapons in particular, was never in doubt, and stockpiles were found in Iraq and disabled or destroyed. You may remember some of the hand-wringing about Isis overrunning some of the chemical weapons facilities containing sealed bunkers of damaged sarin and mustard gas shells.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...

The chemical weapon remnants uncovered were from before the first Gulf War (1991). FTA:

The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.

AND

American government issued a detailed analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs. The widely heralded report, by the multinational Iraq Survey Group, concluded that Iraq had not had an active chemical warfare program for more than a decade.

The justification for the invasion was an active weapons program, which didn't exist. When people refer to the "WMDs" they refer to this non-existent program, rather than rusty old munitions.

it would have been a lot easier (and less embarrassing) to fake the WMDs if they had the capability.

The goal had already been achieved. Why bother covering up the fact it was based on a lie? Where's the benefit in that?

That people will be more trusting of the next lie. Otherwise, we lose a bit of trust in the government. But then again, our memories are pretty short, so it probably doesn't matter...

That's a bit different in that manufacturing physical evidence, especially large stockpiles of WMD, and planting it in a foreign country is harder to do undetected than making a blurry video or asking a few pilots to repeat a story about an UFO encounter that wasn't 100% true.

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