Thread by @caitoz

Conspiracy Theories Are Caused By Government Secrecy

"The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria"
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/conspiracy-t…

As @LavenderNRed clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the CIA's activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

https://twitter.com/LavenderNRed/status/1360395782659186688?s=20

"In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for even greater scrutiny."

Calls to mind this Assange quote from before he was silenced:

The CIA's brazen collaboration with dangerous extremist factions seeking to topple Damascus, and its equally brazen refusal to provide the public with any information about that activity, will necessarily provide fodder for conspiracy theories.

Of course people will do this. Why wouldn't they? Why would anyone give the lying, torturing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering, CIA the benefit of the doubt and assume their actions in Syria were benevolent just because they were forbidden from seeing the hard facts?

Yet they will be expected to give the CIA the benefit of the doubt in this case. Anyone who doesn't will be attacked as a crazy conspiracy theorist by the narrative managers of the establishment media, with calls to deplatform, unemploy, and silence.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1350208940945010688?s=20

And such is the case with all the melodramatic garment rending about the dangers of conspiracy theories today. All the fixation on the way unregulated online speech has contributed to conspiracy theories conveniently ignores the real cause of those theories: government secrecy.

If the world's most powerful government weren't hiding a massive amount of its behavior behind increasingly opaque walls of secrecy, people wouldn't need to fill in the gaps with theories about what's happening, because there would be no gaps; they'd simply see what's happening.

"But Caitlin!" one might object. "How could America engage in all its military operations around the world if it didn't keep information about its behaviors a secret?"

Exactly, my smooth-brained friend. Exactly.

Protecting the lives of foreign military and intelligence personnel is the primary argument against government transparency in the United States, a premise which takes it for granted that there need to be foreign military and intelligence personnel at all.

The argument is essentially "Well we can't tell you the truth about what's happening in our government, because it would mean we'd have to stop doing extremely evil things."

That's the real underlying argument about online censorship. Should people have free access to information about what their own government is doing, or should their government be allowed to do evil things in secret while censoring those who form theories about what they're doing?

The powerful should not be permitted to keep secrets. They should not be permitted to jail journalists who reveal those secrets, and they should not be permitted to collaborate with monopolistic corporations to censor people who form theories about them.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1348815760936734720

The US government has powerful agencies whose literal job is to conspire. The fact that people are punished and condemned for forming theories about how that conspiring might take place, even while those agencies are completely lacking in transparency, is abusive.

If the government was not doing evil things in secret, then it wouldn't need secrecy. If the government didn't have secrecy, there would be no conspiracy theories.