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Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

That comment is brilliant because a lot of the commentary on past bad deeds exude that stance without stating it so explicitly.

Here's the general lifecycle:

1. Year 0: you are a conspiracy theorist if you think that X is doing Y

2. Year 15: only people on the fringes think that X was doing Y

3. Year [declassified documents]: Some nerd reads it, tells it to a living room full of people

4. Year [declassified documents] + 15: We have learned a lot from how X was doing Y in the past; the leaders of current X will have to reckon with this past [which is definitely the past and has nothing to do with the present]

5. Year [declassified documents] + 30: Yeah, everyone knew that X was doing Y all along, idiot. It was a different time back then and nothing about it is comparable to our current times.

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This is observed post hoc rationalization behavior for a lot of subjects, but it's worth remembering that a lot of the kooky stuff from step 1 turns out to in fact be run of the mill lunacy, so there is some harsh survivorship bias.

I was using the much-maligned term “conspiracy theory”, the term used to dismiss everyone from the well-read critic to the “kooky” Lizard International Government crank, but that was just to illustrate the point about how all of these get put under the same umbrella so that they at worst can be all summarily dismissed as dummies or at sort-of best can be equivocated by way of survivorship bias.

In the Year Zero (before declassified documents) it's not a bad theory that a powerful arm of one of the superpowers in a very free nation could be used for clandestine purposes since the State has a lot to gain from keeping the free men (people) of that nation from knowing about what it is really up to.

Thankfully though we don't need to guess at this point since we have history to back us up.

Off hand thought an a small bit is a game of telephone. What people hear is completely mangled hearsay.

Problem with intelligence agencies is no feedback to keep things same like you have when what people are doing is transparent. You don't have the assumption that sooner or later there will be an accounting. It's no one will ever know.

Yes.

My only critique of your lifecycle is that in more recent times, "Years" should be replaced with "Months".. or sometimes Weeks.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that while, conspiracy theorist tend to both greatly exaggerate what actually happened, and use things that we have evidence of to push wild conspiracies we have no evidence of.

Let me give an example I just found. Because of this post, I looked at the Wikipedia page for MK Ultra and found this line:

> The people under this interrogation were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this.

Thought that was an interesting claim, so I checked the source - footnote 36 - which was Rappoport, J. (1995). "CIA Experiments With Mind Control on Children". Perceptions Magazine, p. 56. It took me a while to track that source down, but I found some pages that had it such as this one[1]:

It claims that there was a vast effort to create children sleeper CIA agents in the U.S. to control America. The evidence is based on “recovered memories,” which is a defunct technique that in the 80’s lead to conspiracies about a nationwide underground Satanic movement that was secretly controlling the U.S. Those theories, this Rappaport article, and even some comments here all lean heavily on Operation Paperclip, with the implication that the scientists the U.S. brought over post-WWII created a secret Nazi movement within our own government.

Looking at Rappaport’s website is interesting too. He believes the “Covid shots were kill shots” and that January 6 was a staged false flag event.

That’s enough time spent on crazy for me today. It takes a ton of time to track down each of these individual sources like this. Honestly, it’s exhausting, and too many people think that some evidence of wrong doing decades ago is an invitation to shut down critical thought and open the door for all sorts of craziness.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070608225401/http://www.totse.c... [2] https://nomorefakenews.com/

Crazy gloms onto these things - both inside and outside the gov’t, and confusion is often used as a tool by ‘friends’ and adversaries.

ARTICHOKE was the predecessor program to MKULTRA, and was explicitly to figure out how to trigger a cut-out to assassinate someone (especially high profile politicians). Here is the memo - https://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/project-artich...

(Copies of course, that I found googling around).

These were real and dangerous programs. The CIA director explicitly ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA documents 2 years before Congress started to investigate it, after a suspicious and rather public death of one of the major Directors of the program. The only reason we have much documentation at all related to it is because several reports got misfiled and were missed during the shredder party, but were found later when the investigation got started. Unfortunately they were mainly financial overviews, not useful program documents.

We know something very similar happened when Congress started looking into the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’/torture programs. Along with active interference in the investigation. And no consequences for anyone involved.

So take that as you will.

CIA got better with cleaning up. Bikowsky and Haspel are ones I remember (maybe because they happened to be woman...).

I’m not sure being responsible/involved with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri is good. Maybe better than MKULTRA? Seems dubious though. They did finally release him instead of ‘disappearing’ him though. So that is one point in their favor I guess?

To your point, better I guess? Still a sad and unconscionable thing for the gov’t to be doing IMO.

It all comes down to how much proof you require before you believe something. Some people do not require iron clad proof before they agree something looks fishy. Others require a very high level of proof before they agree something happened. If you require a high degree of proof you will always have to wait for declassified documents or leaks before you agree on anything.

I can understand why people chose to wait. You have so many different conspiracies and most people simply do not have the time to sift through hundreds of documents to make yourself an opinion. People already barely have the time to read the news let alone follow the conspiracy rabit hole. Most people simple chose to wait and see.

It does get annoying when people immediately dismiss any doubts you have as conspiracy nonsense though. Most people believe in some form of conspiracy without realizing it. How many agree that Epstein did not kill himself?

Or, most people don’t want to believe something uncomfortable until it no longer matters (if ever), and classifying/making these programs secret is exactly so the general public (which is composed mostly of those people) has plausible deniability?

Which is also why whistleblowers get at most some feathers rustled, but rarely results in actual structural change.

Because the public mostly is concerned about how they feel, not what is actually happening.

You're conflating the CIA with the public which makes no sense.

How so?

I’m saying that the public tolerates this situation (and the CIA et al use the classification system this way) because the public prefers feeling a certain way about what their government is doing, over knowing what their government is doing.

Nominally, if the public cared more about what was actually happening:

1) Church commission type investigations would be a monthly occurrence (at the scale the gov’t current works at), not a one time fluke (historically)

2) Classified information and secret programs would require third party independent oversight (actual oversight. Not FISA like rubber stamping, which BTW came out of the Church commission investigations).

3) classified information would have very short timeframes before mandatory publication (at most a decade)

4) people would actually go to jail for abuses.

None of which happens.

> I’m saying that the public tolerates this situation (and the CIA et al use the classification system this way) because the public prefers feeling a certain way about what their government is doing, over knowing what their government is doing.

Based on what evidence? Think about what you are saying.

1. The clandestine arms of the US government has hidden things from the public

2. But this was because the public wanted it

Explain how (2) came about.

The US was much more open about things like the Vietnam War because there was virtually no public opposition at the start of it. Then a culture of opposition eventually emerged. When Reagan took office his administration interferred in Latin America. But then they found out that they couldn't just do that in the open like in the past because there was too much public opposition. So the operations had to be more clandestine.

Public interest in US government operations abroad directly lead to a more clandestine approach—the exact opposite effect that you are claiming.

> Nominally, if the public cared more about what was actually happening:

And these things would come about how? Again, you're missing a step and somehow think that the public can will these concrete legislations into effect. How?

The US government has been around for centuries while what could be called universal democracy only came about in the 1960's (arguably). And what democracy? A stronger one than pre-WWII, but still an elite-ruled democracy.

My position is de-facto true - if it weren’t, after the Snowden leaks (among others), the next round of representatives/President would have as their top issue disbanding the NSA/CIA no? As freedom from an abusive gov’t surveillance apparatus would have to be a major concern!

Or at least there would have been a serious investigation with large scale imprisonment of gov’t employees on the top of the list of issues?

Instead, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone outside of a small minority of mostly computer geeks that cared at all. Because most folks didn’t want to look or know.

After all, the evidence in those leaks is damning. And they were very widely distributed. And they shows large scale illegal spying on the US population, abuse of power (spying on ex’s being one well documented behavior), lying to Congress and the American public, etc.

Instead, Snowden has been actively hunted down as a traitor (with pronouncements of him as a public enemy being common), a token investigation was done which resulted in no actual changes or actions except for the Director of the NSA being brought up to (verifiably) lie to Congress and the Public, and some hand waving pronouncements that they totally stopped doing what they denied doing in the first place. And then they made sure to be more clandestine. Which Congress and the public never tried to stop them from doing!

The US public wants to be ‘safe’ and know their government is ‘protecting them’, and ‘the bad guys are getting punished’. If you don’t believe me, look up the polls for those in favor of torture after 9/11. I certainly overheard it a lot! Gitmo became a common term.

That doesn’t mean they wanted to see or know about the reality of it though. If they did (despite their efforts to ignore it), it would be outrage not indifference from the general population, and it wouldn’t be a small handful of activists going after the agencies, but enterprising politicians of all stripes taking advantage of the new ‘mandate’ to clean things up.

MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE before it existed because ‘The Russians are figuring this out so we need to figure it out first’. A natural response, and if they panned out, all the sins would have been forgotten. The US would be a world power from more than just Nukes!

They have to be clandestine about the sins, and the failures though or it gets folks worked up and then they get actual problems (Church commission, funding cuts, etc.). Which as long as they hide it (and they are allowed many tools to do so) no problems.

I certainly haven’t seen any public discourse or overheard any conversations about getting rid of the ability to classify things. Have you?

It’s the ‘he’s not cheating if I don’t know about it’ response.

> My position is de-facto true - if it weren’t, after the Snowden leaks (among others), the next round of representatives/President would have as their top issue disbanding the NSA/CIA no? As freedom from an abusive gov’t surveillance apparatus would have to be a major concern!

So you have no evidence. You're just vaguely gesturing towards the lack of something.

No smoking gun. No causal link.

And you dare call this a de facto true stance?

> Or at least there would have been a serious investigation with large scale imprisonment of gov’t employees on the top of the list of issues?

What list of issues? Oh, you mean the monthly plebiscites where the citizens vote on what issues the representatives are supposed to be working on?

What are you even talking about? There is no “list of issues”. There are two parties, they decide the issues, and if the public doesn't like those issues then they foment some Culture War nonsense while the election is underway. What choice does the people have?

Vote third party? Get a rogue candidate inside one of the two Party Machines?

The US is democratic to a certain extent but it's pretty indirect.

> The US public wants to be ‘safe’ and know their government is ‘protecting them’, and ‘the bad guys are getting punished’. If you don’t believe me, look up the polls for those in favor of torture after 9/11. I certainly overheard it a lot! Gitmo became a common term.

Uh-huh. And you think the major issue that people have with the War on Terror today was that they went after terrorists? Not the fact that they invaded Iraq illegally and occupied Afghanistan for two decades despite having weak ties to Bin Laden?

And what does keeping people safe have to do with doing underhanded/clandestine/illegal shit? Precisely nothing. No one is mad about a government actually protecting its citizens. People are mad when a government agency goes so far against the credo that it has to actively hide what it's doing.

> That doesn’t mean they wanted to see or know about the reality of it though.

No evidence.

> MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE before it existed because ‘The Russians are figuring this out so we need to figure it out first’. A natural response, and if they panned out, all the sins would have been forgotten. The US would be a world power from more than just Nukes!

No evidence.

> They have to be clandestine about the sins, and the failures though or it gets folks worked up and then they get actual problems (Church commission, funding cuts, etc.). Which as long as they hide it (and they are allowed many tools to do so) no problems.

No evidence.

> I certainly haven’t seen any public discourse or overheard any conversations about getting rid of the ability to classify things. Have you?

Again the proof by omission.

> It’s the ‘he’s not cheating if I don’t know about it’ response.

No evidence.

I like that you simulteanously believe that

1. The US government conspired against all Americans by spying on them

2. The People was of course oblivious to this

3. The people of the US are so all-powerful that this would be immediately solved after the revelations if there was only enough interest to solve it

When you want to read instead of straw man, let me know.

I neither said, nor implied any of your points 1-4.

> It all comes down to how much proof you require before you believe something.

Not really. It's about making educated guesses based on history. If some institution (a totally hypothetical one) has consistently worked a certain way based on proof for decades then you can expect it to be more likely for it to continue to do so. So if this institution tends to lie 95% of the time based on the evidence, which is more reasonable?

1. Maintain the stance that they might be lying with a high likelihood

2. Assume good faith until iron-clad evidence to the contrary (X years later). Then after that, of course, in any new scenario keep assuming good faith because there has been no FOIA or release of declassified documents yet

> 2. Assume good faith until iron-clad evidence to the contrary (X years later). Then after that, of course, in any new scenario keep assuming good faith because there has been no FOIA or release of declassified documents yet

A lot of Americans suffer from "lazy decency bias". It allows for the worst of humanity to regularly skate for some heinous actions.

I agree that probably they currently have many illegal programs ongoing or in the works. But that does not tell you the exact purpose of these programs. Which of these conspiracies actually hit upon an accurate piece of information and which extrapolated a bit too far? I have zero trust in the CIA but that does not really help to judge which leaks have merit. Just because the CIA lies 95% of the time does not mean that other people cannot lie and fake documents.

> I have zero trust in the CIA but that does not really help to judge which leaks have merit.

Fair. So when somebody shares their pet theory about the CIA doing some shit and they don't have evidence on hand, how do you respond?

"I don't know if that's true. It might be true but I'm not persuaded of it."

"That's a conspiracy theory, it isn't true. Take your meds, schizo/troll."

I'm not accusing you personally of this, but the second kind of response is very common.

> Fair. So when somebody shares their pet theory about the CIA doing some shit > and they don't have evidence on hand, how do you respond?

Me personally i would listen just out of curiosity as long as it stayed civil. Most of the time it does so most of the time you can just listen and decide if you want to take it on board.

> I'm not accusing you personally of this, but the second kind of response is > very common.

I agree yes. People forget just how crazy certain theories sounded at the time. With MKULTRA you had the government giving hard drugs to citizen to see if they could brainwash them. If i came out today and said that the government operates an underground clinic to create super soldiers people would think i have lost my marbles.

The takeaway I guess is that it’s best for any unethical top-secret programs to have as outlandish and ridiculous a premise as possible.

Even if there is a leak, no one would believe it!

That would explain why Operation Condor leaked. It needed something more outlandish. Like instead of assassinations and regime change, perhaps replacing key South American leaders with American body doubles with allegiance to the CIA?

Well, with the recent discovery and harnessing of Vita-Rays, I might be inclined to think that's not so far-fetched.

It’s a variant of ‘Dad didn’t molest you, he loves us!’, unfortunately.

And frankly, what are they supposed to do about it anyway?

Unlike said molestation case, calling the cops is definitely not going to help re: the CIA.

> Just because the CIA lies 95% of the time does not mean that other people cannot lie and fake documents.

What material difference does this make? You're just muddying the waters. I presented a case for what kind of default stance is reasonable to take based on the available evidence. Not that one should believe everything anyone says about the CIA.

Say that the CIA provably (documented) killed 20 particular innocent people (hypothetically). Then there are five people who each claim that the CIA killed whoever (their cousin, their wife) innocent people based on no evidence. The takeaway from that is that the CIA has killed innocent people (and by extension: can do it again), not that you should believe your uncle when he says that the CIA killed his dog.

hmm very good point, that being said, I would probably tend to put more stock in the word of an honest normal person, than a proven murderous organisation accountable to nobody, but that may just be me

> Most people believe in some form of conspiracy without realizing it.

Virtually everybody does, but the term 'conspiracy theory' has twisted to mean only those theories about conspiracies which the government doesn't officially endorse. If the federal government tells the public a theory about a group of men who conspired to hijack four airliners and crash them into buildings on the same day, that is literally a conspiracy theory but isn't considered to be a conspiracy theory in the twisted colloquial sense of the word because the government endorses it as truth.

And it's not really about the evidence. How many people have personally sifted through all the evidence before deciding what to believe? Few people have the time, inclination and access. Instead people delegate that responsibility, usually to the government. The veracity of the evidence is taken on faith. For instance, how many people who take the 9/11 Commission Report as truth have even read the report itself, let alone reviewed all the evidence that supposedly backs it up? I think not many. How many people who believe the report have also heard that intact passports from four of the hijackers were supposedly found in the rubble of the fiery wrecks? How many have heard that one of those passports was supposedly found on the street of NYC, and nobody knows the identity of the person who found it?

But this theory about a conspiracy isn't a conspiracy theory because.. the government says it's true.

>"there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail"

-Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9/11 commission

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_9/11_Commis....

Also Lee Hamilton:

>As chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran (1987), Hamilton chose not to investigate President Ronald Reagan or President George H. W. Bush, stating that he did not think it would be "good for the country" to put the public through another impeachment trial.[5] Hamilton was later chair of the House October Surprise Task Force (1992).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hamilton

>Others require a very high level of proof before they agree something happened. If you require a high degree of proof you will always have to wait for declassified documents or leaks before you agree on anything.

A lot of those people are just too naive politically...

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