Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 6
ОглавлениеYESTERDAY’S SECRETS MAKE TODAY’S NEWS
Once you know about Operation Northwoods, you’ll never be quite sure whether the Kennedy assassinations were the tip of the iceberg.
Once you’ve seen what WikiLeaks has revealed about the radioactive poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, you won’t be so sure about the British secret services.
Once you’ve weighed the evidence yourself, you may well decide that there was a second Yorkshire Ripper, that cricketing hero Bob Woolmer was murdered and that rock icon Jim Morrison’s death in Paris was anything but straightforward.
Suddenly, leaked cables and declassified papers are rewriting history. Did Lech Walesa spy for the Polish version of the KGB? Did British scientists spray chemical and biological warfare agents from aircraft over Swindon, Norwich and Southampton? And was a Conservative government minister conspiring with the police and the Primate of All Ireland to hide a Catholic priest’s involvement in one of the worst bombings of Ireland’s troubles?
WHOSE SIDE ARE THEY ON?
Conspiracies – real and imagined – have shaped the world we live in. MI5, MI6, the hyperactive CIA and the coolly efficient Mossad, the bloodstained KGB and its orphan child, the FSB, have all pushed and pulled the destinies of rulers and nations. So have fakers and manipulators, business moguls, politicians and gangsters.
Millions of people honestly believe that 9/11 was a ‘false flag’ operation, a cruel, staged attack on Americans by the American government, aimed at justifying George Bush’s War on Terror. Many in Britain think the loose ends and inconsistencies around the London 7/7 bombings are signs that they were not what they seemed.
Such brutal cynicism ought to be unthinkable. But when you know that America’s top generals, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed off a plan to stage bomb blasts and shootings on the streets of Washington and Miami as an excuse for attacking Cuba, the unthinkable cannot be ruled out. That plan was Operation Northwoods and it went right to the top before JFK and his defence secretary vetoed it.
Would a UK government agency drip sarin nerve poison on to the skin of young volunteers after telling them it was researching a cure for the common cold? It would. It did. And it killed at least one of them in less than an hour, though it took 50 years to admit it.
Were the deaths of the Polish president and 95 other VIPs in the Smolensk air disaster in 2010 just the result of pilot error? Did weapons expert David Kelly really commit suicide after leaking information about the build-up to the Iraq War? Is there something more than posturing behind rap music’s deadly obsession with Illuminati symbols and messages? Who was responsible for the crash that killed Princess Diana? And why do pilots still shudder at the thought of TWA Flight 800, the jumbo jet that exploded off Long Island with 230 people on board?
SOME NEW ANSWERS, MANY MORE QUESTIONS
Just glancing through the first ten conspiracy cases examined in this book, you can see many of the key themes emerging. Ghastly crimes, sneaky cover-ups and botched investigations provide most of the 50 chapters, with a lot of political manipulation and secret service skulduggery in the background.
But this is not meant to be a dull reference book, so bunching the assassinations together or having one section dedicated to air crashes and another to CIA plots didn’t seem right. In the end, the running order has been chosen with an eye to pacing and readability, with surprise as the key ingredient. If you are not being shocked or surprised every couple of pages, this book is not doing its job.
Bug-eyed monsters, rampant paranoia and ‘Elvis lives’ stories have given conspiracy theories a bad name. When you’ve got wild-eyed obsessives who believe everything’s a conspiracy versus sneering Establishment figures who insist that nothing is, the argument is never going to get far. But an idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it and there really are a lot of legitimate, unanswered questions in this area. The newest evidence available today, via WikiLeaks, declassified internet archives and freedom of information requests in the UK and America, shows that a surprising number of them need to be looked at with fresh eyes.
