At first I sneered when I received this email from Konformist. "Top 10 Conspiracy Theories of 2003-2004"? A little late, aren't we? But it's actually pretty good.

Top 10 Conspiracy Theories of 2003-2004
By Mike Ward, AlterNet
May 18, 2004

On August 6, 2001, while vacationing in Crawford, Texas, George Bush
received an intelligence briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to
Strike in U.S." It included revelations that al Qaeda members were
conducting "surveillance of federal buildings in New York"; the World

Trade Center was mentioned in the first paragraph, the prospect of
terrorist "retaliat[ion] in Washington" in the second. According to
the briefing, Osama bin Laden's organization was acting in
ways "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of
attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New
York."

But Bush must have had headphones on, because 36 days later when he
saw Flight 11 fly into the World Trade Center, he claims his first
thought was, "There's one terrible pilot." Even after the second
crash Bush assures us he was unsure what was going on: "I grew up in
a period of time where the idea of America being under attack never
entered my mind."

The attacks of 9-11 have since been used to justify two military
actions that the government has chosen to call "wars," the more
recent of which - a "pre-emptive," which is to say unprovoked,
assault on Iraq - has yielded American soldiers their bloodiest two
weeks of combat since 1971. Odd, then, that every expressed reason
for the Bush administration's massive and deadly undertaking in Iraq,
most conspicuously Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass
destruction, has evaporated under scrutiny. In fact, the only thing
we know for sure is that the invasion isn't about oil. Tony Blair,
among others, has been quite clear on this: any attempt to explain
the war in Iraq as an oil war is a "conspiracy theory."

This makes one wonder whether other so-called conspiracy theories
might be more worthy of consideration than we've been led to believe.
Some months ago I wrote an article originally published in Popmatters
magazine about this. In light of subsequent events, the time was
right to revisit it - particularly since the political climate in
America, with its indefinite detentions and pointless color-coded
alerts, has taken a more Orwellian turn than anyone ever imagined
possible.

1. Prior Warnings.

Right after September 11, rumors began floating around that World
Trade Center employees of the Jewish faith had been mysteriously
alerted to stay home that fateful morning. This racist fantasy had an
equally ugly counterpart among anti-Islamic reactionaries: that
Muslims the world over knew of the 9-11 attacks in advance and
managed, en masse and in their millions, to keep it a complete
secret.

Such bizarre hearsay about collective foreknowledge has many
unpleasant effects, not the least of which is to delegitimize an
otherwise worthy question: was anyone told beforehand that something
shocking might happen on or around 9-11? It turns out quite a few
people claim to have received such warnings. Although the mainstream
press tends to mention these accounts in isolation or attribute them
to uncanny serendipity, when taken together they cry out for further
explanation.

The airport security service for San Francisco mayor Willie Brown,
for example, had contacted him eight hours prior to the strikes and
warned him not to fly, and controversial author Salman Rushdie also
claims to have gotten warnings before September 11 not to take to the
tarmac. As reported in the Sept. 24, 2001 issue of Newsweek, several
employees at the Pentagon cancelled their flight plans the night of
September 10, citing "security concerns." And last but not least,
Justice Department head John Ashcroft had stopped flying commercial
aircraft two months before 9-11. Why? The FBI cited an
unfavorable "threat assessment" - but after September 11 has been
unwilling to elaborate on this.

2. What Was With That Handshake, Anyway?

As I write a scandal is unfolding at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq,
where American soldiers are accused of torturing and brutally
humiliating prisoners, possibly at the behest of military
intelligence officers. In a particularly bitter irony, Abu Ghraib was
once a favored torture chamber of Saddam Hussein, a fact that leads
some to ask whether there are actually any good guys in the U.S.-Iraq
conflict.

There are more reasons than this to wonder. Where Iraq's human rights
violations are concerned, U.S. foreign policy has long been sterner
in rhetoric than in deed, dating back at least to the 1980s - when
many Bush administration figures were dealing with Iraq on behalf of
then-president Reagan. Among these were Mideast envoy Donald
Rumsfeld, whose 1983 meeting with Hussein resulted in a videotaped
handshake that has since crossed the world countless times on the
Internet. Speculation abounds as to what may have transpired at this
meeting, but one thing is certain: at the time Hussein was employing
chemical weapons almost daily in his hideous war with Iran. In 2003
the Bush administration referred to these gas attacks as part of its
justification for invasion, but for whatever reason it has taken 20
years for Rumsfeld et al. to discover their own outrage over these
horrific crimes.

3. That's Our Plan and We're Sticking to It.

From the toppling of the Taliban to the creation of the Homeland
Security Department, September 11 has been used to justify virtually
every action that the Bush administration has taken since. But as
with so much concerning the administration, this is more complicated
than it appears. Case in point: conspiracy theory web sites - and
later on, mainstream progressive e-zines - have made much hay of the
Project for the New American Century, an extragovernmental pressure
group which has long been bent on conquering Iraq. As far back as
1998, PNAC sent the Clinton administration a now-notorious letter
insisting that the sanction-choked country posed an imminent danger
to the United States. P-Nackers such as conservative writer Bill
Kristol argue that the oil moguls and weapons firms PNAC represents
have long been preoccupied with Iraq out of an abiding humanitarian
concern, but the fact remains that where Iraq is involved, September
11 has not altered policy so much as it has been used to justify
policies that were already in place.

4. The Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Your Liberties.

Similar stories haunt the USA Patriot Act, which was promoted as a
response to 9-11 but in fact resembles anti-terrorist measures passed
following the Oklahoma City bombing as well as an anti-drug bill that
was scuttled in 2000 for being too "reactionary." The stunning 9-11
attacks created a more compliant social climate for such harsh
measures, so that after the attacks Congress passed the Patriot Act
without even bothering to read the provisions it had earlier found so
untenable.

Different people draw different conclusions from this. Unabashed
conspiracy sites like www.prisonplanet.com speculate that the
government deliberately orchestrated the 9-11 attacks in the hopes
that this would drum up support for war and indoctrinate the American
people into willingly abandoning their freedom. Others such as Gore
Vidal make slightly more temperate accusations, that corruption and
real-politik policies left American security in a dire state of
neglect, setting the stage for the attacks. Whoever is right, it
seems clear that although life in America has changed radically in
the wake of 9-11, the plans in the highest levels of the government
have remained oddly unchanged.

5. The War in Iraq Is Not About Oil.

We have noted with relief the assurances of those on high that the
Iraq War has nothing to do with control of natural resources. We can
therefore assume that the following facts, though interesting, are
completely irrelevant:

Iraq holds the world's second-largest oil reserves, and owing to
decades of wars and sanctions many of these fields lie un- or
underdeveloped, simply waiting for sufficiently motivated energy
firms to come along and tap them.

As luck would have it, executives from such firms are exceptionally
well-positioned to influence the current administration.

Oil and gas prices in the U.S. are currently the highest they've ever
been, a problem that oil from Iraq is likely in the coming years to
help alleviate.

And finally, the highest priority of the administration's military
forces when they moved into Iraq was to secure its oil ministry, even
as museums and hospitals in Baghdad were being looted.

6. Bread and Circuses.

For a long time following 9-11, strange facts such as these were
rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. This is no longer true.
Anomalies from the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing to the
agenda of PNAC are now common knowledge, but many people seem not to
have noticed.

Why this is? Part of the answer probably can be found by looking at
the assumptions underlying the media's coverage of war. Although they
will occasionally cover news items that might damage the U.S.
government's credibility, in general the American media have waxed
awfully uncritical since the cynical days of Vietnam, and
particularly since 9-11. For example, the attack on Afghanistan,
which was portrayed as a response to 9-11, was also presented as a
kind of World War II re-enactment in which the U.S. - with its 700 or
more military bases in 120 countries worldwide - was cast as
a "sleeping giant" in a stunt intended to link 9-11 and Pearl Harbor.

Bush spoke of America, which has engaged in more than 200 military
actions since 1945, as a "peaceful" nation, but "fierce when
stirred
to anger." The "axis of evil" speaks for itself.

Such puffery not only misrepresents the U.S. government as benevolent
in foreign affairs and reluctant to use military force, it also
dehumanizes Islam in American eyes, much as the Japanese were
dehumanized in World War II. It is additionally useful for shaming
those who question government actions, tarring them as a kind of
Fifth Column. But the most important effect of the war on
terror/World War II analogy is to create the illusion of clear lines
between good and evil in the current conflict when in fact those
lines, as in Vietnam, are becoming blurrier by the day.

7. What You Gonna Do When They Come For You?

Propaganda of earlier decades is usually pretty easy to recognize. In
hindsight, for instance, most of us can see that the duck-and-cover
newsreels of the 1950s and '60s were selling Americans a bill of
goods about the "survivability" of nuclear war.

But how good are we at recognizing media PR today? Some would say not
terribly - at least if the popularity of reality TV is any
indication. From Survivor to Fear Factor, reality shows all ask us to
identify with people whose lives are being captured on camera, often
almost continuously. And they encourage us to think that's okay.

This is happening in the context of an increasingly intrusive
surveillance apparatus in America and Western Europe, where the
average city-dweller can expect to be photographed by closed-circuit
cameras anywhere from a dozen to 73 to 300 times a day. Not many
people complain about this, perhaps at least in part because Big
Brother has changed the way Americans feel about Big Brother. But
it's hard to imagine earlier generations accepting such a state of
affairs, weaned as these generations were on novels and movies -
1984, Fahrenheit 451, even Videodrome - which warned that excessive
surveillance would spell the end of freedom.

8. Chip Me!

In the finest homesteading tradition, the Jacobs family of Boca
Raton, Florida, has volunteered to plumb a new technological
frontier: They have agreed to have "VeriChips," computerized ID tags
about the size of grains of rice, surgically implanted in their
bodies. On May 10, 2002, their dream was realized. Today the Jacobses
constantly emit a low-frequency hum that's readable with a
specialized scanner, which makes their medical histories accessible
in much the way your Shoppers Food Warehouse preferred customer card
allows your cashier to learn, with a single swipe, that you prefer
Charmin.

Implantable chip technology is in its rudimentary stages today; in
the future, more sophisticated chips are likely to be put into your
kids as homing devices to help discourage child abductions; they
could serve as permanent biometric identifiers; still more advanced
models might even be able to monitor your body chemistry and
administer precise doses of psychiatric drugs to regulate your mood.

Despite the Jacobs' enthusiasm, some are less than tickled about this
new technology, particularly since being chipped, like owning a
credit card, will probably someday become a prerequisite to such life
necessities as renting an apartment. Also, once the chip is in your
body, you have precious little say in what the device does. The
ramifications of this are ominous, particularly where chips that
administer psychoactive drugs are concerned. In his conspiracy
nightmare "Blueprint for a Prison Planet," Nick Sandberg sums up the
worst-case scenario: "With implant technology accepted as being part
of life in the twenty-first century," he wonders, "who is going to
notice if they no longer require us to actually program them, but
seem to do it without our help, no longer allowing us access to our
true feelings even if we wanted them?"

9. Peak Oil and the End of the World.

Chicken-littlism may well be humanity's oldest avocation. Since the
beginning of what some of us like to call "civilization," doomsayers
from the Muggletonians to the Heaven's Gate cult have frantically and
confidently spoken of the world's imminent demise - and each time,
they've been all wet. The latest pessimistic vision of the future
regards "peak oil": the idea that as rising demand for oil outstrips
the capacity of producers to supply it, formerly stable economic
systems will be thrown into disarray, leading eventually to the kind
of anarchy foretold in movies like Mad Max.

One would hope peak oil is a hand-wringing fantasy on a par with the
survivalist craze that accompanied Y2K. But there are some facts in
favor of the peak oil agitators: a recent, stubborn rise in gas
prices, with little relief in sight; the ominous fact that the
world's total oil production declined in 2001 and 2002, and rose in
2003 by only .5 percent, while demand rose by nearly 2 percent; and
the otherwise inexplicable war in Iraq - which, though a political
liability in the short run, is likely in the long haul to yield the
U.S. virtually unending supplies of oil just when the peak oil
theorists claim it's going to start getting quite scarce.

If the peak oil theory is right, the Iraq war, terrible though it is,
will be remembered - like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or
the Nazi invasion of Poland - as a mere prelude to a much bloodier
affair. According to proponents like Kenneth Deffeyes and Colin
Campbell, the coming decline in oil supplies will trigger privations
in seemingly unconnected economic sectors. Industrial agriculture,
for instance, depends heavily on oil and so much of the world's
population will face starvation in a future of dwindling fossil
fuels. Many oil-peakers speak of a coming "die-off," as the world
population adjusts to the resources available to it - by perishing in
the billions from war, famine, exposure, and civil unrest.

10. Life After the Fall.

The peak oil theory has been around for some time now, so some people
have thought long and hard about its consequences. Such folks include
new-urbanists like Jane Jacobs - who forecast that Americans will see
fewer lengthy commutes and more self-sustaining local communities, as
higher prices at the pump obviate automobile addiction in the U.S. -
and more pessimistic "anticivilization" thinkers like Internet scribe

Ran Prieur and Richard Heinberg, who foresee a future in which a much
smaller populace ekes out a spartan but sustainable existence,
feeding largely off the detritus of late capitalism's industrial-
sized excesses and marveling at the degree of this generation's
waste. Conventional wisdom holds, somewhat vaguely, that alternative
power sources such as hydrogen or nuclear power will come along at
the last minute to rescue the West from such a fate. But the
anticivilization thinkers have worked long and hard to imagine the
consequences if no such alternative is found.

It's worth noting that the world they envision is one in which many
people live today. It resembles, for instance, the privations of Sadr
City - the now-famous ghetto of Baghdad where running water is
unreliable and raw sewage flows in the streets - or the arid
countryside of Sudan, where political upheaval has displaced a
million people and the prospect looms of another Rwandan-style
genocide, complete with the same indifference from the supposedly
humanitarian West.

In The Soft Cage, a book on the rising surveillance state in America,
Christian Parenti quotes Slovenian writer Slavoj Zizek regarding
9/11. Writing of that horrifying taste of third-world violence in the
first-world streets of America, Zizek sardonically welcomes Americans
to "the desert of the real." "The point," Parenti explains,
"is not
to justify the crimes of 9/11," but instead to awaken Americans to
the reality that "the world is a brutal, vicious place and that
America is deeply implicated in its worst aspects." In other words,
even if the well-to-do in the West can somehow avert the fate that
the peak oil theorists predict, for peoples around the globe the end
of the world is now - and this has been true for a long time.


Mike Ward is a contributor to PopMatters.