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Conspiracy Investigation Done Right
In 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed into the ocean off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. After an extensive four-year investigation, the NTSB concluded the explosion was caused by a short circuit ignition within the center fuel tank. Or at least that's the official story.
Now normally when you encounter a disclaiming phrase like that it tends to be a klaxon warning to strap in because you're about to hear some crazy shit about what really happened. I'm not going to argue for some crazy shit though, instead I want to showcase a real-life illustration on how to properly investigate and litigate what otherwise would be dismissed and derided as some crazy shit.
Someone (thanks Jim!) brought to my attention this pending lawsuit that aims to challenge the TWA 800 official narrative.[1] The basic summary you need to know is that, in contrast to the official story, the "alternative" narrative claims the airplane was hit by an SM-2 surface-to-air missile launched by the United States government during a weapons testing exercise. You can read the 38-page lawsuit complaint yourself where they allege:
And humorously enough:
TO BE CLEAR: I find the overall claim to be extremely implausible based on Bayesian reasoning I'll get to later, but the focus here is less about delving into the specific allegations[2] and more about showcasing how one should go about uncovering a criminal conspiracy that otherwise sounds kooky on its face.
As far as I can tell, the law firm involved has a reputation for serious lawyers doing serious work. The complaint they filed directly addresses many procedural issues that would normally be a hindrance for these types of claims. For example, the major hurdle would be the statute of limitations given that the explosion took place in 1996 but the lawyers cite the fraudulent concealment exception based on some FOIA foot-dragging:
The legal system relies on attorneys as an (imperfect) screening mechanism to separate valid claims from the torrential garbage. Before an attorney can rouse a court into examining a claim, Rule 11 requires them to affirm that the attorney has made reasonable efforts to investigate it themselves to make sure they're not just re-shoveling whatever bullshit their client dropped on their lap. The lawsuit offers specific allegations about which government agencies were involved in the cover-up, when the cover-up took place, and how it took place. A sample:
They even pontificate on what might have prompted a rush towards testing live warheads over a populated area:
And they managed to track down evidence of missile testing right around the time and place of interest:
I've only picked a sample, there's a lot more details in the complaint. In contrast to the persistent and arguably intentional vagueness found in many disdained conspiracy theories, I'm genuinely impressed by how comprehensive the lawsuit's claims are regarding who/how/why. They explain exactly which organizations are involved in the cover-up and the evidence behind that belief, which missile system brought the plane down and the evidence behind that, specific reasons for why live warhead testing took place in a busy air traffic corridor, and explanations for why it took so long to uncover all this.
If (again, arguendo) TWA Flight 800 was indeed brought down by reckless missile testing involving a live warhead and this was covered-up by the government, then the way this lawsuit is conducted is the best opportunity for legal redress. The legal system has serious and persistent deficiencies with its inability to offer all petitioners the relief they're owed, but certain rules and expectations it has developed over time are worthy of replication.
As a foil, the strengths of how the TWA 800 complaints are presented become more obvious when it's contrasted against another lawsuit whose deficiencies resulted in Rule 11 sanctions for the lawyers that filed it. In 2020, two Colorado attorneys filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all registered voters in the country, and sought $160 billion in punitive damages, alleging the election was stolen from Trump.[3] Their 84-page complaint (plus a dozen affidavits) alleges that a wide roster of defendants (Dominion, Facebook, various state governors, and "1 to 10,000" as-of-yet unidentified co-conspirators) engaged in unspecified-but-definitely illegal conduct. For example, here's what one of the supporting affidavits claimed:
Contrast this "research and contemplation" with the straightforward allegation of "The Navy and various defense contractors caused an airline explosion by deciding to test live warheads in a highly-populated area". The magistrate who ordered sanctions against the Colorado attorneys noted their conspicuous aversion to investigation:
Pro-tip: don't decide to file a lawsuit after listening to a podcast.
Back to the TWA 800 case, the central claim involving the US accidentally shooting down a passenger airline isn't impossible because it happened once in 1988 with Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people on board. What's least plausible of all with TWA 800 is how the military, the defense contractors, and the law enforcement agencies involved managed a successful cover-up over so many people over such a long period of time.
There's an oft-utilized but facile heuristic that claims that if there was a cover-up, then someone would've leaked it, and so therefore no leak = no cover-up. This is unreliable because there plenty of government cover-ups that were successful, at least for a while. The Tuskegee Syphilis study went on for 40 years until an AP story in 1972. Operation Mockingbird, MKUltra, and COINTELPRO all took place in the 1950s but weren't exposed until the 1970s. Project SUNSHINE which involved collecting body parts from dead children to study radioactive fallout started in 1953, didn't become publicly known until 1956, and the full extent wasn't fully exposed until the 1990s.
However, the common elements with these schemes is that they all involved either a small number of conspirators, or had victims that no one really gave a shit about. None of this is reflected in Flight 800, its 230 dead, and the multiple entities implicated.
The incentive behind the cover-up doesn't make much sense either, because anyone helping with the cover-up has no way of knowing ahead of time whether it will remain under wraps, especially if perpetual silence relies on the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people. You only need one leak and if the whole thing blows open, no one wants to be left holding the proverbial gun while everyone is pointing fingers at each other. Anyone at the decision fulcrum faces an obvious pay-off from defection that needs a serious countervailing cooperation pay-off to convince them into shouldering that level of culpability.
The lawsuit allegations also rely heavily on eyewitness testimony (though with some video corroboration), which is particularly unreliable and prone to suggestion when it involves widely publicized events like an airline crash. Lay witnesses who lack the appropriate specialized training and background are vulnerable to misinterpreting what they see or hear.
Implausible is still not the same as impossible, and crazier shit has happened before. If there's any validity to these wild claims at all, this lawsuit tees up a stellar attempt at uncovering the truth.
[1] I've long had an aversion to describing anything as a 'conspiracy theory' because it's often wielded as a discussion-terminating cudgel. Once the label is affixed, the very notion of scrutinizing, investigating, or grappling with the underlying claims is dismissed as a waste of time.
[2] The Flight 800 Wikipedia page has lots more of the technical details if you're so inclined.
[3] The two lawyers, Gary Fielder and Ernest Walker, were acting on their own and had no connection to Donald Trump or his campaign.
The idea that big conspiracies can't happen because one leak is enough to stop the conspiracy in it's tracks and get everyone involved busted relies on, well, that axiom. That one leak stops it. There's even mathematical modelling of whether conspiracies are viable with this premise baked in. But in the real world, there are plenty of conspiracies where a single leak doesn't stop it from proceeding. In fact there are plenty of conspiracies where tens of thousands of leaks doesn't do anything to stop it. Obvious examples of such could fill a book so I'll just provide a few dissimilar examples.
A political example is the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart in East Germany. That this was actually being used not to protect East Germany from Fascists, but instead to stop East Germans from fleeing to the West, is a conspiracy theory involving something of great importance and implicating tens of thousands of military and political figures in a secret plot to prevent emmigration. And basically everyone knew it. Yet this did nothing to stop the conspiracy until the eve of the fall of the regime engaged in it anyway.
A military example is the Little Green Men that occupied Crimea. That these were actually Russian troops engaged in a plot to annex Crimea is a conspiracy theory involving something of great importance and implicating tens of thousands of military figures in a secret plot to invade and seize territory from another country. And basically everyone knew it. Yet this did nothing to stop the conspiracy, which proceeded to it's completion anyway.
And a medical example is Flibanserin, a drug that almost certainly doesn't work to treat a disorder that almost certainly was made to fit the drug than the other way around. That this was actually just a plot to make money off women in shitty marriages is a conspiracy theory involving something of... admittedly modest importance, and implicating thousands of researchers and clinical workers. As part of the conspiracy, the owner of the drug's IP even set up astroturfed advocacy groups insisting that the FDA needs to approve it, and that if they don't, it's because of sexism against the "female Viagra". And it's very much an open secret. Yet this did nothing to stop the FDA from approving it and it's ongoing albeit limited use.
Yes, the examples you cite are valid. I could've phrased it better but when I said you only need one leak, I meant one that provided substantive evidence and in the context of a hypothetical TWA 800 cover-up. You're absolutely right that leaks do not necessarily guarantee exposing a conspiracy.
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You’re conflating difference senses of the word “stop” here I think.
There’s “stopping it from being hidden” and there’s “stopping it from continuing” and there’s “stopping it from being effective” at a minimum.
The quote you cite is focusing on the “hidden” aspect.
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Unsubstantiated leaks become rumours, which is how a lot of conspiracy theories are created in the first place. I would think that several conspiracy theories just never gained enough traction and evidence to prove them. I'm not saying we should lean towards believing conspiracy theories, but "Where there is smoke, there's fire" as a saying came from somewhere.
Ironically sometimes that smoke is itself the product of a conspiracy. For instance, my understanding is that the KGB spread, uh, speculation that the United States created AIDS in a lab.
Many claims that something is a conspiracy theory imply the equal and opposite claim that someone's conspiring to spread a conspiracy theory.
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"However, the common elements with these schemes is that they all involved either a small number of conspirators, or had victims that no one really gave a shit about. None of this is reflected in Flight 800, its 230 dead, and the multiple entities implicated."
The United States government performed unethical human experimentations on many, many people. It wasn't all black people, or foreigners, or people in mental hospitals or whatever. Random people from ordinary hospitals were selected to be irradiated. The victims were selected on the basis of convenience. If "a large number of random Americans belonging to no particular group" counts as "victims that no one really gave a shit about", why shouldn't the 230 people on Flight 800?
I'm not familiar with what you're referring to. As best as I can parse, victims distributed across different places and time is much easier to ignore than a dramatic single event where hundreds perish at once.
Subjectively, that response seems post-hoc to me. Or special pleading might be a better term for it.
I outlined several examples and drew common elements between the examples I cited. I apologize if what I said came off as either a comprehensive list of elements, or that it should apply to incidents I wasn't even aware of.
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... I think your perspective is rather badly turned into word games, in a way that is only persuasive to lawyers.
((I also have some big rants about the extreme rarity of sanctions against prosecutors, even in view of high-profile and serious misconduct, but they're often not operating under civil procedures and I expect you have bigger complaints given your vocation.))
As a metaphor, have you ever heard of the Subway Tuna lawsuit? If not, the complaint is here. It's an absolutely fascinating read, filled with bombshell allegations where genetic testing revealed 'tuna' products containing not only no tuna but not even fish...
And which were fake. At best, the plaintiffs depended on a claim of this genetic testing's relevance for this sort of food authentication from some citation laundering out of context; more likely, they had to actively shop (as the New York Times did) to find a lab willing to take their money for a test that they'd have to disclaim was meaningless. And the plaintiffs (or at least their lawyers, did the whole monty of other trumpy behaviors, such that the eventual order about sanctions read:
Of course, there's a punchline:
By any reasonable colloquial (or normal human) use of the terms, they absolutely did. I'll be exceptionally charitable, and perhaps rather than trying to shakedown or embarrass a sandwich shop with false claims, Amin was merely incredibly go-focused and managed to find an unscrupulous lab on the very first try. When this returned chicken in most samples (for those in the audience, American tuna salad is made using mayonnaise, which in turn is made using chicken egg) in a substance that was not chicken to the naked eye, they perhaps genuinely believed Subway somehow had developed secret technology. The inappropriateness of DNA barcoding as a technique in many conditions is not hugely obvious; Derek Lowe rather famously let his preconceptions hit an industry he already (if reasonably) didn't like.
But two years in, faced with masses of documentation consistent with tuna sourcing, the plaintiffs had nothing but a single set of genetic tests. They did not investigate; academic discussion of the inappropriateness of DNA barcoding for canned or vacuum-packed pre-cooked tuna was well-established as early as 2015. They found (laundered) citations offering what they wanted to believe, and fought as hard as possible to obfuscate that.
There's some meaningful difference there, to judges and lawyers. To anyone else, it looks like the plaintiffs just carefully split off the people making hilariously false claims from the people making the lawsuit, despite clear connection in focus and interest.
I don't know what actually happened for TWA800. The official story is far more reasonable than the conspiracy theory, but I'd have said the same for Ted Stevens, Waco, etc. Shootdowns have happened, although the timeline
But I can tell you that this complaint stinks in the same way.
The complaint depends heavily -- in many ways, near-entirely -- on claims made by Thomas Stalcup of private conversations or interpretations of long-public knowledge in implausible ways. Nearly a page (76-82) consists of unnamed persons who supposedly encountered missiles after TWA 800 (and, perhaps more importantly, after the missile theory had been publicized). The named sources are often paraphrased aggressively, in exactly the sort of ways that would be done if attempting to mislead (most critically, "personally aware of at least a dozen Aegis missile tests off the East Coast of the United States around this same overall time period" would be absolutely critical evidence if it meant a dozen live tests near New York City in early 1996, and absolutely meaningless if it was the well-disclosed Wallops Island, VA testing center that the public knew about in September 1996).
Edit: to be clear, this is not a defense of the standard theory for twa800, or of your electionisy lawyers. And I do recognize there are reasons these symptoms are this way. But it looks a lot less like clear duty of candor to the court, or even focus on the dignity of the court; given your two examples, it seems more a matter of the dignity of the judge.
I'm not sure what your criticism is or what word games I'm playing. My post was addressing what is admittedly a very low bar to clear, namely how to present allegations of a conspiracy competently. I'm not denying that lawyers lie or conduct sloppy investigations or do some expert-shopping, but all that is collateral to whether or not the allegations are described coherently and with sufficient detail. Even knowing that the Subway Tuna lawyers shopped around and misrepresented their DNA findings, that doesn't change the fact that their theory was coherent and had enough details. The falsification of my argument would be if the Subway Tuna lawsuit didn't bother with any testing at all and instead filed an affidavit from some rando who said "I have come to believe that Subway Tuna is not in fact tuna" without explaining foundation.
I don't think you're playing word games, so much as you're getting played by word games.
At the trivial level, I think the Krick complaint has a pretty sizable amount of what O'Rouke's final order on sanctions on calls out as :
There's some sunlight between it and O'Rouke, but not much. Quite a lot of the 'specific' citations have nothing to do with the actual legal theory, and even some of the ones you highlight are just pulling statements by randos out of their original context, or taking routine actions as evidence of a dire conspiracy. And while you emphasize affidavits with a lot of padding, there's a number of specific and actual (though false!) claims with connections to violations of law (that the plaintiffs misunderstood or had no standing to challenge).
My deeper objection is that this distinction is pretty uncompelling to normal people, and in ways that undermine your point. The precise legal theory and the relevance of specific claims to it is interesting, and it does genuinely matter when someone submits unmoored claims or specious legal theories to the court, and hurt when people aim pants-on-head-crazy ones at you. There's reason that courts are more likely to assign sanctions for 11(b)2 than 11(b)3 for reason, and it's not just that judges can evaluate those questions more easily and review them more reliably, or even that lawyers can.
But it would be kinda nice to know that the lawyers in question had checked if a Pakistani Airlines pilot had actually seen a missile anywhere near an SM-2 (or even what his or her name was) or what if any conclusion the FBI had pronounced after investigation, or what the relevance of PCR for canned tuna would be, or if Wisconsin drop boxes were operated in violation of state law, in addition to whether this mattered for the underlying question of law and whether they are sufficiently specific. That's the more conventional read of "the attorney has made reasonable efforts to investigate it themselves to make sure they're not just re-shoveling whatever bullshit their client dropped on their lap". This is part of Rule 11 (b3, to be precise), and it's possible to get sanctioned for failing this test, but it's extraordinarily uncommon and the standard is extremely forgiving. (see discussion here under "Reasonable Inquiry").
There are reasons this stance is so forgiving, and I can be persuaded that fair and open access to the courts is worth the costs of spurious lawsuits. But if your selected example of one includes a full pepe silvia of questionable newspaper clippings and depends heavily on a couple bullet points that are little more than "Trust This Rando Pro Se Litigant, he totally has retired navy and FBI people dropping hot tips, bro," it runs into problems. Or where the complaint, across three amendments, launders claims because the PhD biologist must have missed the people citing him.
You're probably even right in the sense that the people with their names on the complaint are totally hands-clear. Krick doesn't have Stalcup on the complaint or submitting an affidavit; Amin merely hired rather than submitted as an honest expert witness Dr. Barber. But it's not like the behavior in O'Rouke was better where it followed that trick: the initial complaint launders several specific factual complaints originating from Johnson v. Benson in Detroit. But we recognize that the plaintiffs were on notice for O'Rouke when we seldom do the same for people with comparably bad factual allegations.
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In summary:
step1 : - spend a couple decades going to law school, join a successful law firm
step2 : - set up a bunch of CCTV in places where people might be committing bad stuff
step3 : - spend years suing people over this stuff
step4: - ???
step5: - some dude on some random website congratulates you for doing a good job
Gee-whiz, I wonder how people ever got anything done before lawyers were invented. Perhaps the Trojans would have believed Laocoön if he had been to law school.
It’s one thing to make it clear that you don’t like lawyers. Dressing it up in sarcasm, though, moves it firmly into sneering territory.
Every month or so, you get a warning for this. Every time, you come back and alternate between actual engagement and this sort of sneer. Take three days off this time.
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I think the real thing that differentiates this kind of coverup from something like the Tuskegee case or MKULTRA or COINTELPRO or whatever is that none of those involved a specific event; they were just government programs that happened to be going on at the time. I remember when that crash happened and the highly publicized investigation. Before the official report came out, there was a lot of suggestion in the media that it was caused by an explosion, though, IIRC, it centered more around terrorists planting a bomb in the cargo hold than an errant missile. Hell, I remember it being news when the investigation revealed that it wasn't a bomb. So here we have a situation where there's a newsworthy plane crash and a lot of people suspect it was a bomb, and people are looking for evidence of such before the investigation is even completed. If you're in a position to know what really happened then you're on notice that this is something of public interest in a way that you wouldn't be if you're a participant in a government program that you don't find particularly controversial and that no one is even suspecting exists.
Perhaps relevant to your interests, Scott Greenfield commented on my substack and has previously posted about seeing a missile that day.
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Witness statements claiming to have seen a missile of some kind were first proposed days after the crash, and the FBI pushed it fairly hard as a possible terrorist act for quite some time. A handful of witnesses took out newspaper ads, encouraged when a few early tests of wreckage turned positive for trace amounts of RDX and PETN in late August. (The official story is that these traces were left over by Gulf War transport runs.) By November, a retired federal Senator had endorsed the theory of a Navy blue-on-green incident.
Some of this was serious belief, and some of it was just an accident of different and conflicting approaches to community relations. The NTSB is famously resistant to publishing information before a final report, excepting where (a partner) orders regulatory or emergency shutdowns; the FBI held press conferences when they found information, in the theory that they should be asking both partner agencies and the public to report any unusual observations.
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I remember TWA800, and there was a missile theory at the time. Complete with fuzzy video. This isn't new.
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Yes this is true, a TWA 800 cover-up is materially much more difficult on a dimension beyond just the number of conspirators you'd have to pay off or cajole.
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One of the interesting things about MKULTRA is that it was revealed because a small cache of documents survived a document destruction order by the Director of the CIA. It seems to me we can logically infer the possibility (perhaps even the probability) of similarly audacious programs that have been successfully concealed simply because the relevant documents were successfully destroyed.
I agree with your point that government cover-ups can work, and obviously if some can work for some time it implies some can work permanently, or at least still can be working today. But I also think that leaks, frankly, are not that as damaging to the integrity of a cover-up as one might believe.
The problem is that from the outside leaks just look like random baseless rumor. There is a process for laundering such leaks or rumors into consensus reality, often quite literally via the New York Times. The reason Watergate became a scandal was because the leaker respected the process and got the Times on his side. Amusingly, this is also the exact same reason that everyone is talking about UFOs right now: a small group of media-savvy people made a coordinated effort to get it into the Times. I was aware of the "Tic-Tac" incident long before the Times published it (partially via personal connections that alerted me when it "leaked" all the way into a niche publication) but it was not taken seriously by e.g. Congress until it was laundered into mainstream respectability.
You can sort-of map this on to MeToo. My hazy recollection at least was that part of the premise or background of the movement was that there were a number of predatory people, who were known to be predatory (this certainly, at a minimum, seems to be the case for Harvey Weinstein). It was quite literally an open secret that the guy was engaging in harassment at best and outright rape at worst. But until the open secret was laundered into a mainstream narrative Weinstein went unpunished. I am of course fingering the Times as the standard-bearer of this narrative, but I imagine many similar dramas have played out on smaller scales, even within a family.
Another conspiracy I am curious about is the drug-running out of Afghanistan. Rumors have reached me, both online and in-person, that US military aircraft were used to move large amounts of drugs out of Afghanistan during our occupation of the country. (Similar rumors sprung up and were even published regarding the Vietnam war.) I don't know if these rumors are true (I guess I'll believe them when I read them in the Times) but I frankly would be a bit surprised if anyone in the Times was aware of them, and very surprised if they were investigating such a story, even though I imagine they would concede it was possible. I am not sure I can exactly articulate why, but I think everyone has a sense of what I am saying. Somehow it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should come out now. Perhaps in 20 years, when it will be long too late to change anything that happened.
Which is part of what makes the timing of this lawsuit interesting. It's based on FOIA documents that were extracted from the bowels of the bureaucracy after a few decades. If the allegations are true (and I am not arguing that they are or aren't, I haven't even read the complaint) it seems like a very plausible outcome is a settlement and no jail time for people who negligently killed hundreds of people at random. But then again, that's exactly what happened on Iran Air 655: a settlement was paid, and nobody was disciplined, despite the fact that the missile was fired under verifiably faulty pretenses (I don't think there was a conspiracy here, just a very, very big mistake).
This is a little meandering, so let me come to a point. I think people believe that if there's a "leak," if a single person talks, then somehow magically the truth will out and we'll all read about it in the papers tomorrow. But that's not how these things work. I think it's something like a preference cascade, where the problem isn't what is true and what isn't. Rather, it is a coordination problem. And if the people in charge of the covert endeavor (whether it's Harvey Weinstein and his PR/legal team, or "the CIA," or the people in charge of ensuring that my medical and legal records remain confidential, or what have you) are better at coordinating than the leakers, the leakers can "leak" all they want, but it won't make its way into the collective consciousness whether that's of a single family or an entire nation. Or sometimes, even if it does make its way into the collective consciousness, it can be too awkward to openly acknowledge. You see this at the level of a family or community, but I think sometimes it happens at the national one as well.
I'd propose that when evaluating the plausibly of keeping something secret, then, we shouldn't evaluate the odds of one person blabbing. Rather, we should evaluate the coordination problem at play, and the incentive structures involved. I think that viewing things through this lens has some good explanatory power as to why some covert endeavors fail, some succeed, and many come out several decades later. After many years, the power balance in coordination shifts. Criminal underlings have less of a desire to protect their pals long after the statutes of limitations have expired; victims of abusers accumulate in number, grow in power, and begin to coordinate effectively; people in office lose their allies due to chance and time.
Yes you bring up many excellent points. I did not intend to imply that exposing conspiracies is as simple as one person babbling, it depends on a lot more factors than just that.
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I’ll take issue with this bit because I encounter it a lot:
This is actually a very reliable heuristic regarding supposed US government plots in more recent times. The examples you cite regarding the CIA/IC/DoD are the classics in the genre. But the key context to keep in mind is that the Cold War was a very different time, with very different norms and processes. Significant changes for oversight were made in the 1970s and the Overton Window for acceptable behavior shifted a fair bit the last few decades. So when evaluating present claims of a plot you can’t over index on what took place so long ago. (The same dynamic goes for the medical study example you cite; it was a different era and if anything we’ve overcorrected on medical ethics.)
In other words, the half life of cover ups is shorter and the big crazy stuff is just not going to fly. Things like the Bush torture and warrantless wiretapping programs come to mind. Or the cover up around Pat Tillman’s death. Or the shoddy justification for the invasion of Iraq (the IC takes major efforts to avoid repeating the mistake of politically influenced/misused assessments after that). We had multiple broad, sensitive leaks under the Obama administration and the Trump administration was chock full of leaks and tell alls. And investigations of investigations.
If there are public allegations of some plot, then it’s already past the point where the plot, if true, managed to avoid being detected.
Everybody knows how easy it is for a leak or an investigation to happen and intelligence bureaucrats are strongly incentivized to avoid the very appearance of evil, or anything sensational.
The IC is a big place and mistakes and shenanigans happen, but it’s very different from the Wild West days of the earlier part of the Cold War and grand plots and cover ups are very, very hard.
This is false. As others pointed out MKUltra got exposed by a lucky coincidence. The full extent of the program is still not known, and an alternative version of events were all the documents were properly disposed of, and we never hear of it outside of the testimony of a few traumatized kooks, is hardly implausible.
You can’t call my theory about hypothetical modern day plots being far more unlikely false by citing an ancient one as you have because you aren’t addressing any of the points I made about why the past was different.
You’re simply not engaging the points I made by describing the particulars of MKUltra.
I disagree. The point I'm making is that MKUltra got exposed not due to a "half-life on cover ups", but because of a fluke, where an alternative version of events could result in it always remaining a rumor (a.k.a. crazy conspiracy theory) at most. A shorter half-life cannot fix the issue, because that was not the source of it.
Now you might say that whatever changes were implemented after the cold war would not have allowed it to go undetected (rather than merely catching it sooner), but you haven't really backed your claim, if it is the claim you are making.
I’m using “half life” metaphorically. I’m not literally saying there is a causal mechanism directly affecting every plot the way it works in chemistry.
An MKUltra today would be far less likely to either get off the ground or remain covert for the reasons I outlined. That the actual MKUltra was exposed by the dint of luck back in the day does not challenge what I am trying to relate.
This is probabilistic thinking applied to evaluating incomplete evidence. The environment has changed a lot in 50+ years and so directly mapping plots of yore onto potential plots today is a faulty model because the priors are not updated sufficiently.
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What about Epstein's "suicide"?
He probably just killed himself. God knows he had plenty of reason to; his life was basically over. He had already tried to strangle himself two weeks earlier. I get that it looks sus what with all the video cameras not working etc but there is a very parsimonious explanation: jails are often run like shit. Fuckups are the rule, not the exception.
I don't really see what an assassination would accomplish either. The theory goes that some powerful somebody wanted to cover up their sex crimes, but between Ghislaine Maxwell, the victims, and the staff, surely there were and still are plenty of witnesses to whatever (and whoever) was going on.
Yes, the great likelihood is that Epstein did in fact kill himself. If there was a ‘conspiracy’ it’s that he got his lawyers to bribe prison staff to make it easier for him to kill himself, not that he was murdered. He was 100% going to be convicted and spend the rest of his life in jail as a sex offender, alternating between getting shanked like Chauvin and being locked up in solitary confinement with no hope of ever being released.
The theory that Epstein would talk has no substance. He was already old, there’s no way public pressure would allow for a sweetheart deal where he got out after 5 years in exchange for ratting out everyone else, especially with the victims on TV discussing his crimes.
By the same token, why wouldn't he talk? What does he have to lose? If I were going down with my criminal empire, I wouldn't want to go down alone.
Because Epstein’s whole thing (in addition to teenage girls) was being a rich socialite who enjoyed the company of powerful and brilliant people, that’s why he donated money to STEM college faculties (unlike most donors, he had no children he was trying to buy admission for) and liked associating with scientists and professors. Epstein wasn’t betrayed by Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton, he was ‘got’ because public and journalistic pressure mounted and prosecutors built up a lot of evidence. His friends didn’t betray him per se, even if they were unable to protect him.
If you and your friend are both involved in a criminal conspiracy, but you make a series of dumb mistakes and get caught, why rat them out, especially if it won’t reduce your punishment in any appreciable way? The most obvious theory is that Epstein didn’t feel betrayed by his associates and so had no reason to turn on them for zero benefit other than ‘revenge’, which probably wasn’t applicable in this case.
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One guy dying, very possibly due to foul play and government involvement is not a major plot, and obviously, it was an extremely poorly done cover up because here you are talking about it.
The more scrutiny there is and the longer it goes without conclusive evidence emerging, the more I would adjust to “not a plot.”
If taken seriously, this makes your claim unfalsifiable. Nobody can ever prove a coverup is successful because if they're even able to talk about it, it's not successful.
It's a well-done coverup because nobody's going to be jailed or even arrested for killing Epstein. And it's a "well-done" coverup in the sense that ymeskhout's standards would imply that he shouldn't believe it's a coverup, even though it obviously is. The fact that everyone else can say "hey, Bayseian probability, this wouldn't have happened by chance" and figure it out won't change that.
I think the most likely explanation is that Epstein did indeed kill himself, but I also don't consider it unreasonable to doubt that explanation even without any conclusive evidence in favor of the murder theory. If someone wants to hold the murder theory with confidence greater than "hmm, looks sus" then ideally I'd want to see some attempts to shore up the specifics.
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We can prove with the benefit of hindsight a coverup was successful for some amount of time.
Sometimes, extremely successful intelligence operations get declassified after some decades and we get to look at what success looks like.
Epstein has had a lot of theories floating around him for a while. Other commenters here have described why suicide is still a very plausible explanation and so you can read them for counter theories.
But I’ll reemphasize that the framework I was describing about cover ups and maintained secrecy applies mainly to large plots, not necessarily the death of a single guy in prison where at least theoretically a small group of rogue actors could have taken action.
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You bring up a good point that I hadn't considered before. It's potentially inappropriate to over index on norms and plots from half a century ago, and that we should instead use more recent cover-ups as the template. That's reasonable, though I'm reluctant to draw too definitive of a conclusion because I don't want to assume that something doesn't exist just because we haven't heard about it.
It’s more about tweaking one’s priors a bit than making any definitive conclusions.
Things we haven’t heard of that at least someone would find controversial certainly exist in the shadows. But the really sensational stuff like QAnon had going is just incredibly unlikely in today’s more politically correct, partisan, and digital US environment.
Though I will say this method won me a good chunk of change with a smart guy willing to put money on the line that Trump was going to expose a number of plots along QAnon and RussiaGate lines.
Or look at this modern plot from Taibbi about some supposed binder of CIA misdeeds about Trump. Why the hell is this binder allowed to exist by the Deep State, or, why wasn’t this dealt with when Trump was in office? In the opening paras of the actual Substack article he says his sources say Trump ordered it declassified at the end of his term. So why didn’t that happen? Why is this breaking news three years later?
The most likely story is Taibbi is listening to dumb people describe things they don’t understand.
Not to completely dismiss your talents but I think the biggest factor that made you money was being lucky enough to find someone willing to put up cash on something so bonkers.
Taibbi has no credibility with me. His reporting on the Twitter Files appears accurate enough but he gets indignant when you point out the obvious conflicts of interest of him tailoring his criticism of Twitter to avoid saying anything bad about its new owner. My conclusion from back then was "Taibbi feels constrained from criticizing Musk because Musk is too valuable a source" and the dude just voluntarily tweets out his text message to Musk admitting this. He exhibits very selective curiosity about the stories he covers, stopping short of what becomes inconvenient to his narrative. If his sources are accurate about the declassification of this surveillance report, why doesn't he just get the report itself instead of bizarrely reporting on the number of inches of the binder it's contained in.
He was a very early member of the rationality community and liked the practice of making bets.
Plus a tendency for conspiratorial thinking.
The election stealing and RussiaGate theories are likely going to be popular for decades, annoyingly. At least classic conspiracy theories weren’t so partisan.
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If by "done right" you mean ignoring the obvious elephant in the room to focus on largely irellvant legal details i suppose that explains a lot.
The elephant in this case being how do you launch an SM2 in Long Island sound without anybody noticing? At the very least you're talking about buying the silence of 250 or so sailors plus everyone on duty at New York approach that night. Though i suppose you'll dismiss such an observation as mere "vibes" rather than "evidence". After all "the law firm involved has a reputation for serious lawyers doing serious work."
Why would I dismiss something as mere "vibes" if I've already brought it up to explain why the overall theory is extremely implausible? I've specifically outlined that the number of people you'd have to pay off for this conspiracy to work is implausibly high. You have a history of making up positions I do not hold and then criticizing me for holding the positions you just made up, why?
I don't think the US Navy has to pay people off to conceal things; that happens routinely. However, I am skeptical that fudging paperwork translates over well into "OK guys we're gonna cover up the deaths of a few hundred people."
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To be fair, TWA 800 exploded over the Atlantic, south of Long Island and outside of Long Island Sound; most of the friendly-fire theories involve the "30-knot" track that was a further 3nm south of TWA800's last known position at the time of explosion.
Which is still really close to have this sort of report. Which is... a good part of the problem for almost all the Krick's second-hand reports of alleged rocket 'near-misses' being an SM2, rather than other object; this does not look like the behavior any of the witnesses describe.
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That's a decent amount of people, but it's not like the US Navy hasn't infamously bought the silence of sailors about fuckups before. And it was 1996 so people weren't constantly videotaping their surroundings.
This isn't a situation like the Iowa where pretty much everyone with direct knowledge was already dead or the Bonnie Dick where it was basically one guy's word against the CoC's. Forget subpoenaing the radar tapes (those are going to be classified anyway) subpoena the deck department, heck subpoena the cooks, if a missile was launched, they would know.
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I think you bring up a good point but you could afford a bit more charity to @ymeskhout, even if he is a lawyer.
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