Sunday, September 1, 2013

Many Decades Later

Trey Smith


There are lots of "kooks" out there who refuse to accept the government's version of what took place on 9/11. Some say it was an inside job. Others contend that the US didn't act on intelligence it had in hand. Some say the towers that came down were the result of controlled demolitions, not airplanes flying into buildings. Some assert that a missile, not an aircraft, hit the Pentagon.

(Personally, I don't know what to believe. I don't accept the government's version, but I don't ascribe to a particular conspiracy theory.)

Whenever people doubt the veracity of the official story, countless others dismiss their theories or questions with a simple declaration: If what a given conspiracy theorist says is true, don't you think the truth would have leaked out by now? It is because the official version has stood up to the test of time that we should accept it as fact.

But here is the problem with that simplistic rationale: The true nature of events often does not come out for years...or decades. We often learn that the official storyline was a well-manufactured lie. Take, for example, the revelation concerning the CIA and Iran that came out 2 weeks ago.
Sixty years after the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a declassified CIA document acknowledges that the agency was involved in the 1953 coup.

The independent National Security Archive research institute, which published the document Monday, says the declassification is believed to mark the CIA's first formal acknowledgment of its involvement.

The documents, declassified in 2011 and given to George Washington University research group under the Freedom of Information Act, come from the CIA's internal history of Iran from the mid-1970s and paint a detailed picture of how the CIA worked to oust Mossadegh.

In a key line pointed out by Malcom Byrne, the editor who worked through the documents, the CIA spells out its involvement in the coup. "The military coup that overthrew Mossadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government," the document says, using a variation of the spelling of Mossadegh's name.

While this might be the CIA's first formal nod, the U.S. role has long been known.

President Barack Obama acknowledged the United States' involvement in the coup during a 2009 speech in Cairo.

"In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government," the president said.

In 2000, then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke of the intervention, and in the same year, the New York Times published what it said was a leaked 1954 CIA-written account of the overthrow.
Even if we take 2000 as the year that the truth of this matter was first revealed, that still is 47 years after the fact! That is 47 years in which conspiracy theorists were labeled as kooks. It is 47 years of people being told that, if the conspiracy theorists were correct, why hasn't the truth leaked out?

If we apply this formula to 9/11, then we really won't know what happened until 2048 (when I would be, if still alive, 91 years old).

Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you that this or that conspiracy theorist is a certifiable kook. That kook may turn out to be right...30 or so years down the road.

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