“The Truth About Truthers”

That’s the title of this article by Ted Rall. He’s not a 9/11 Truther himself. But at the end of the article he makes an interesting point. After talking about 9/11, the death of Osama bin Laden, the Wag-The-Dog “rescue” of Jessica Lynch and other coverup/conspiracy theories, he says:

“The evolving accounts of Osama bin Laden's death seemed ideally tailored to create the suspicion that big secrets were being covered up…Why does the federal government feed the conspiracy theorists? Maybe it's unintentional, but probably not. I think the U.S. has become like a Third World dictatorship: the more they keep us guessing, the smarter they seem, and the more we'll fear them.”

And that brings us to Iran in the mid-1970s, where I worked for a brief period. The Shah of Iran was in power; Khomeini’s takeover was still three years away. The conventional wisdom was that one out of every five Iranians was an informant for SAVAK, Iran’s dreaded secret police that made the CIA and KGB look like a few boy scouts playing with walkie-talkies. There was also an opposing theory: that there were actually nowhere near that many SAVAK informants, but the Iranian government wanted everyone to think there were spies everywhere so everyone would be scared shitless and keep their mouths shut.