10 Depraved Conspiracy Theories (That Turned Out To Be True)

1.  CIA prompted false testimony

In 1990, a woman named Nayirah al-Sabah spoke on the floor of Congress and testified that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators and leaving them to freeze to death. Her testimony created a public outcry against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and helped spur the United States to invade. It was later revealed that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and that her testimony was false. She even took acting classes at the behest of the CIA so she would be more believable.

2.  The FBI poisoned alcohol during Prohibition

Frustrated that the consumption of alcohol wasn't going away (shocking), the FBI decided to contaminate alcohol with fatal impurities. Some of these impurities included methane, formaldehyde, and ammonia. This denatured alcohol got into the hands of bootleggers and thousands of people would die from it.

3. The CIA has a 'heart attack gun'

Following the Watergate scandal, US Senator Frank Church held a committee to investigate the goings on of the US intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA, and NSA). One of the things that was revealed is that the CIA possessed a gun they claimed would give someone a heart attack and leave no identifiable trace. The gun worked by firing a small poison dart (made of frozen liquid) that would penetrate clothing and skin. The poison would melt inside the target's body and cause a heart attack.

4.  Gulf of Tonkin Incident

In August 1964, there were two highly publicized incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin off of the coast of North Vietnam. The USS Maddox was attacked by patrols of North Vietnamese patrol boats. These incidents were used as justification to increase US military involvement in Vietnam. In 2005, it was revealed that the second incident never actually involved North Vietnamese forces. The USS Maddox seems to have been firing at nothing in particular.

5.  Operation Snow White

Unhappy with the scrutiny that it was receiving by various international governments, the Church of Scientology began Operation Snow White, which infiltrated various governments with covert agents. The Church of Scientology placed 5,000 covert agents inside of the US Government alone. The Scientologists engaged in wiretapping, espionage, destroying and confiscating government files and much more. Eventually Operation Snow White was found out and 11 high ranking members of the Church of Scientology were convicted of various espionage charges.

6.  The Business Plot

The Business Plot was a conspiracy in 1934 to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt and replace him with a fascist military leader. The plot had the backing of many Wall Street bankers, the powerful DuPont family and Prescott Bush (the father of former President George H.W. Bush and grandfather of former president George W. Bush). The conspiracy was found out when the conspirators approached retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler about acquiring the military assistance to complete the coup. Gen. Butler immediately reported the incident. None of the conspirators were ever charged for the plot.

7.  COINTELPRO Against Activists in the 60s

COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and often illegal projects conducted by the FBI to disrupt, discredit and infiltrating domestic political organizations. 85% of COINTELPRO's operations focused on "subversive" groups, many of which were deemed to have communist or socialist leanings. Among those targeted include the NAACP, Martin Luther King Jr. and various other Civil Rights leaders. The other 15% of COINTELPRO's operations focused on disrupting white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.

8.  Operation Mockingbird

Operation Mockingbird was a secret campaign by the CIA to influence the media (both domestically and abroad). This was accomplished by recruiting American journalists to present the views of the CIA to the public. The CIA also funded student and cultural organizations and influenced foreign political campaigns. Operation Mockingbird helped influence American public opinion by restricting where journalists were allowed to report.

9.  Tuskegee Syphilis Study

In 1932 the Public Health Service began a study where they monitored 600 poor sharecroppers (mostly black). 400 of those studied had syphilis when the study began (but were unaware of it). The participants of the study believed that they were receiving free health care from the government. Unfortunately for them, the PHS was only monitoring their condition and even actively withheld penicillin (which is used to cure syphilis) from the participants. When the study was revealed to the public in 1972, many participants had died from syphilis, along with many sexual partners who had contracted the disease. In addition several children were born with life threatening congenital syphilis.

10.  MK Ultra

MK Ultra was an illegal program undertaken by the CIA to develop methods of mind control and various torture methods. The CIA used human subjects for experiments, often without their knowledge or consent. Some of these experiments included experimental chemical compounds such as LSD. Overall, the scope of the project was very broad with over 80 different institutions participating, including universities, hospital and mental institutes. When the project was outed to the American public, the director of the CIA ordered most of its documentation destroyed. So our knowledge of MK Ultra is limited. However we do know that the program has ties that include several Nazi scientists, (along with several other CIA projects).

Looking Back

Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. 

Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. 

The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.

His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood. When, in 2003, the Court ruled that gay people could no longer be thrown in prison for having consensual sex, Scalia dissented, and wrote, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” He went on, “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a life style that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”

But it was in his jurisprudence that Scalia most self-consciously looked to the past. He pioneered “originalism,” a theory holding that the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the beliefs of the white men, many of them slave owners, who ratified it in the late eighteenth century. During Scalia’s first two decades as a Justice, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist rarely gave him important constitutional cases to write for the Court; the Chief feared that Scalia’s extreme views would repel Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court’s swing vote, who had a toxic relationship with him during their early days as colleagues. (Scalia’s clashes with O’Connor were far more significant than his much chronicled friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) It was not until 2008, after John G. Roberts, Jr., had succeeded Rehnquist, that Scalia finally got a blockbuster: District of Columbia v. Heller, about the Second Amendment. Scalia spent thousands of words plumbing the psyches of the Framers, to conclude (wrongly, as John Paul Stevens pointed out in his dissent) that they had meant that individuals, not just members of “well-regulated” state militias, had the right to own handguns. Even Scalia’s ideological allies recognized the folly of trying to divine the “intent” of the authors of the Constitution concerning questions that those bewigged worthies could never have anticipated. During the oral argument of a challenge to a California law that required, among other things, warning labels on violent video games, Justice Samuel Alito interrupted Scalia’s harangue of a lawyer by quipping, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?”

Scalia described himself as an advocate of judicial restraint, who believed that the courts should defer to the democratically elected branches of government. In reality, he lunged at opportunities to overrule the work of Presidents and of legislators, especially Democrats. Scalia helped gut the Voting Rights Act, overturn McCain-Feingold and other campaign-finance rules, and, in his last official act, block President Obama’s climate-change regulations. Scalia’s reputation, like the Supreme Court’s, is also stained by his role in the majority in Bush v. Gore. His oft-repeated advice to critics of the decision was “Get over it.”

Not long ago, Scalia told an interviewer that he had cancelled his subscription to the Washington Post and received his news from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times (owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), and conservative talk radio. In this, as in his jurisprudence, he showed that he lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought. That bubble also helps explain the Republican response to the new vacancy on the Court. Within hours of Scalia’s death, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, announced that the Senate will refuse even to allow a vote on Obama’s nominee, regardless of who he or she turns out to be. Though other Republican senators have indicated that they might be a little more flexible, at least on hearing out a nominee, the chances of a confirmation before the end of Obama’s term appear to be close to nil.

This Republican intransigence is a sign of panic, not of power. The Court now consists of four liberals (Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) and three hard-core conservatives (Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Alito), plus Anthony Kennedy, who usually but not always sides with the conservatives. With Scalia’s death, there is a realistic possibility of a liberal majority for the first time in two generations, since the last days of the Warren Court. A Democratic victory in November will all but assure this transformation. Republicans are heading to the barricades; Democrats were apparently too blindsided to recognize good news when they got it.

Like Nick Carraway, Scalia “wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” The world didn’t coöperate. Scalia won a great deal more than he lost, and he and his allies succeeded in transforming American politics into a cash bazaar, with seats all but put up for bidding. But even though Scalia led a conservative majority on the Court for virtually his entire tenure, he never achieved his fondest hopes—thanks first to O’Connor and then to Kennedy. Roe v. Wade endures. Affirmative action survives. Obamacare lives. Gay rights are ascendant; the death penalty is not. (These positions are contingent, of course, and cases this year may weaken the Court’s resolve.) For all that Presidents shape the Court, the Justices rarely stray too far from public opinion. And, on the social issues where the Court has the final word, the real problem for Scalia’s heirs is that they are out of step with the rest of the nation. The public wants diversity, not intolerance; more marriages and fewer executions; less money in politics, not more. Justice Scalia’s views—passionately felt and pungently expressed though they were—now seem like so many boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. ♦

Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor

By MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN MARTINFEB. 17, 2016

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Carol Richardson, 61, a beauty salon owner in Hollywood, S.C., said President Obama had been disrespected “because of his skin color.” Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

CHARLESTON, S.C. — As he left Martha Lou’s Kitchen, a soul food institution here on Wednesday, Edward Gadsden expressed irritation about the Republican determination to block President Obama from selecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court.

“They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there,” Mr. Gadsden, who is African-American, said of Mr. Obama, before pointing at his forearm to explain what he said was driving the Republican opposition: “The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.”

When Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after Mr. Scalia’s death on Saturday that the next president, rather than Mr. Obama, should select a successor, the senator’s words struck a familiar and painful chord with many black voters.

After years of watching political opponents question the president’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout “You lie!” at him from the House floor, some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. And they call it increasingly infuriating after Mr. Obama has spent seven years in the White House and won two resounding election victories.

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Stacey Abrams, a lawmaker in Georgia, said the fight over replacing Justice Antonin Scalia could “animate” black Democrats to vote in November. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press

“Our president, the president of the United States, has been disrespected from Day 1,” Carol Richardson, 61, said on Wednesday as she colored a customer’s hair at Ultra Beauty Salon in Hollywood, S.C., a mostly black town near Charleston. “The words that have been said, the things the Republicans have done they’d have never have done to another president. Let’s talk like it is, it’s because of his skin color.”

Reflecting on the Supreme Court vacancy, Bakari Sellers, a former state representative from Denmark, S.C., likened the Senate treatment of the president to the 18th century constitutional compromise that counted black men as equivalent to three-fifths of a person.

“I guess many of them are using this in the strictest construction that Barack Obama’s serving three-fifths of a term or he’s three-fifths of a human being, so he doesn’t get to make this choice,” Mr. Sellers said. “It’s infuriating.”

The anger and outrage that Mr. McConnell’s position has touched off among African-Americans could have implications for the presidential election. Leading African-American Democrats are trying to use it to motivate rank-and-file blacks to vote in November, the first presidential election in a decade in which Mr. Obama will not be on the ballot and in which Democrats fear black participation could drop.

“Anger becomes action when it’s directly tied to a moment, and the moment now is the election on Nov. 8,” said Stacey Abrams, a Democratic state representative from Georgia and the House minority leader there, adding that Mr. Scalia’s death meant that this presidential campaign could no longer be construed as a mere “thought exercise.”

For Hillary Clinton, who is increasingly relying on nonwhite voters to ensure her success against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the court issue could be especially crucial. Should she defeat Mr. Sanders, who has electrified many liberals, she will need a motivating issue to bring Mr. Obama’s loyalists to the polls. She moved swiftly Tuesday to tap into the anger of blacks over the opposition of Senate Republicans to Mr. Obama’s naming a replacement for Justice Scalia.

 “Now the Republicans say they’ll reject anyone President Obama nominates no matter how qualified,” Mrs. Clinton said in remarks before a predominantly black audience in Harlem. “Some are even saying he doesn’t have the right to nominate anyone! As if somehow he’s not the real president.”

Doing so, Mrs. Clinton added, is in keeping with a longstanding pattern of mistreatment.

“They demonize President Obama and encourage the ugliest impulses of the paranoid fringe,” she said. “This kind of hatred and bigotry has no place in our politics or our country.”

Supreme Court Nominees Considered in Election Years Are Usually Confirmed

Since 1900, the Senate has voted on eight Supreme Court nominees during an election year. Six were confirmed.

Republicans are especially sensitive about the notion that they are diminishing Mr. Obama because of his race, and spokesmen for several Republican senators, including Mr. McConnell and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, declined to comment or would not make the senators available for comment.

The suggestion that racism is playing a role angers Mr. McConnell’s friends, who point out that his formative political experience was working for a Republican senator who supported civil rights, that he helped override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of sanctions against the apartheid government in South Africa and that he is married to an Asian-American woman.

But in the aftermath of Mr. McConnell’s statement on Saturday, a growing chorus of black voices is complaining that such a refusal to even consider a Supreme Court nominee would never occur with a white president.

“It’s more than a political motive — it has a smell of racism,” said Representative G. K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

“I can tick instance after instance over the last seven years where Republicans have purposely tried to diminish the president’s authority,” Mr. Butterfield said. “This is just really extreme, and leads me to the conclusion that if this was any other president who was not African-American, it would not have been handled this way.”

Even as Mr. Obama’s popularity has risen and fallen, his base of support among black voters has been unshakable. A Gallup tracking poll this month showed that some 85 percent of African-Americans approved of the president’s performance compared with only 36 percent of whites. And many African-Americans strongly identify personally with Mr. Obama, and have watched his tenure with pride.

Mr. Butterfield said that he believed that the effort to undermine, and even delegitimize, Mr. Obama began soon after he was sworn in, and that Congressional Republicans had blocked Mr. Obama’s agenda wherever they could. Even more stinging were the suggestions from some on the right that Mr. Obama, a Christian, is actually a Muslim and that he was not born in the United States.

In interviews, members of the Congressional Black Caucus also bitterly recounted indignities, such as demands — most pointedly from the current Republican front-runner in the polls, Donald J. Trump, in 2011 — that Mr. Obama prove he was born in Hawaii, and not in Kenya, as some critics claimed. Others recalled the calls to impeach Mr. Obama over his use of executive authority.

“You hear the thing about: ‘He’s not a citizen. He oversteps his bounds. He’s divisive.’ One thing after another,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge, Democrat of Ohio. “This has been going on since the day he was elected in 2008.”

Republicans have had more success than Democrats in recent decades galvanizing their voters over who should control the courts. But Jennifer McClellan, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and the Democratic National Committee, said the dispute over how to replace Justice Scalia could now become “an issue for the average citizen.”

Ms. Abrams agreed, saying the Supreme Court and its powerful influence on people’s lives is especially resonant with blacks. “Congress is denying our president his rights as a president, but, more than that, they’re denying the legacy of his presidency,” she said. “That will animate Democratic voters across the board but especially African-Americans, who realize more than many voters how great an impact the Supreme Court can have on freedom.”

Black state lawmaker shares deep frustrations with her own party

State Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) works at her desk on the floor of the Senate at the Capitol in Richmond. (Steve Helber/AP)

By Laura Vozzella February 11 at 12:13 PM

RICHMOND — The Democratic state senator who almost helped Republicans win a bitter judicial-nomination battle this week said she rebelled against Gov. Terry McAuliffe and his allies because she believes that leaders of her party have ignored black lawmakers’ concerns.  Sen. L. Louise Lucas (Portsmouth) said her short-lived alliance with the GOP had little to do with who sits on the bench.

Instead, she said, her move grew out of long-simmering grievances with fellow Senate Democrats, who she said have passed over black senators for key committee slots, taken their votes for granted, and left them to fend for themselves in partisan and personal battles with Republicans.

“I’m getting tired of being treated like I’m invisible,” Lucas said in an emotional interview with The Washington Post and the Vir­ginian-Pilot. “It’s always just, ‘You sit there and you be good, and just vote with us and we’ll take care of you.’ Well, I didn’t get elected to do that.”

Senate Minority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax) said he has pushed hard for Lucas and the rest of the black caucus while juggling many other responsibilities. 

“It’s no state secret — I can be a little insensitive from time to time,” Saslaw said. “Sometimes people feel ignored. . . . [But] I have an impeccable civil rights voting record. I’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes, prevented a lot of bad things from happening. Sometimes, people don’t see that.”

Lucas’s brief break from the Democrats ultimately did not affect Richmond’s protracted tug of war over a Supreme Court slot, which is back to a stalemate. But the incident exposed a painful racial fissure within the Democratic caucus. The rift comes at a particularly awkward time for McAuliffe (D), who is trying to persuade the same minority-heavy coalition that twice played a key role in electing President Obama to back the governor’s close friend Hillary Clinton in the March 1 presidential primary.

Yet there was some upside for McAuliffe, too. Lucas credited him for taking her complaints seriously and summoning party leaders to his office Wednesday in an attempt to work them out. He also talked Lucas out of helping the GOP replace his pick for the high court, at least temporarily heading off a humiliating loss.

Part of her frustration with Saslaw, Lucas said, comes from what she called an unwillingness to help resolve a long-running battle between her and Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr. (R-James City). She described Saslaw’s relationship with Norment as “cozy, cozy.”

In explaining the underlying beef with Norment, Lucas described a profane verbal clash that took place three years ago in a private lounge just off the ornate Senate floor. She also recalled a fight in another Senate anteroom between herself and another female Democrat, which she said nearly turned physical.

Both accounts present a sharp break from the seemingly genteel operations of Richmond’s upper chamber, where senators observe strict protocol even during fiercely partisan debates. Norment, in particular, usually stands as a symbol of that gentility, enforcing arcane rules and speaking old-fashioned flourishes. He is known for sporting formal three-piece suits and bright-pink ties.

But Lucas said he was far from courtly three years ago, when she asked him why he would not appoint her to a panel studying Hampton Roads transportation, a top concern in her traffic-choked district.

“Tommy said, ‘The reason why I don’t want to vote for you is because you ain’t gonna do s---,’ ” Lucas said. “And I said, ‘Just watch my black ass.’ . . . And he says, ‘I don’t want to watch your black ass.’ And I said, ‘Well, then: You keep your little, narrow white ass, little J.C. Penney-little-boys’-department-wearing-suits out of my [expletive] face.’ ” 

Lucas said that Saslaw walked in on the argument, and she called him over. Instead of getting involved, she said, “he makes a beeline out.”

Through a spokesman, Norment called Lucas’s account “a prevarication.” He said that he put himself on the transportation panel, instead of Lucas, because it lacked representation from the area he serves.

Lucas also described nearly coming to blows years ago with Sen. Janet D. Howell after the Fairfax Democrat chastised her. “She said, ‘Where were you when I needed your vote?’ ” Lucas recalled. “And I said, ‘When did I become your [expletive] servant?’ ” The argument, which began in the chamber, grew so loud that the Senate clerk shooed them into a back room, Lucas said.  Howell did not respond to a request for comment about the incident.

Such clashes, Lucas said, added to the frustration she feels as a result of a succession of perceived slights by other lawmakers. She noted, for example, that she and Howell joined the Senate the same day in 1992 but that Howell, who is white, landed a seat on the prestigious finance committee many years before Lucas did.

On Tuesday, Lucas heard a rumor that another Senate Democrat was going to back the GOP’s pick for the Supreme Court — Appeals Court Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. — in exchange for getting to elevate a judge from that lawmaker’s district to Alston’s current slot. McAuliffe and the GOP had been battling for weeks over the court seat, and the defection of a single Democratic senator meant the Republicans would win.

Lucas wondered why deals like that never seemed to come her way. She found herself talking to Norment, her old GOP nemesis. In the end, she said, she agreed to give her own vote to the GOP, as long as a judge she supported from Portsmouth — Circuit Court Judge Kenneth R. Melvin — would get to replace Alston.

As news of her defection spread, McAuliffe called Lucas in for a meeting. Soon afterward, the senator issued a statement saying that Melvin was not interested in a promotion. She was back in the Democratic fold.

On Wednesday morning, McAuliffe brought in Howell, Saslaw and the Democratic caucus chairman, Sen. A. Donald McEachin (D-Henrico), to meet with Lucas and Sen. Mamie E. Locke (D-Hampton), an ally of Lucas’s who is also in the Senate’s five-member black caucus.

“I said [to Saslaw], ‘If I’ve got to work my own deals because I can’t get you to resolve the differences between us . . . ,’ ” Lucas recalled in the interview, her voice trailing off, eyes welling. 

“But it was the wrong time, wasn’t it? I picked the wrong thing.”

Lucas said she has complained over the years not just to Saslaw but also to McEachin, who is black. She said that McEachin has listened but, working through Saslaw, has been unable to help. Through an aide, McEachin declined to comment on internal caucus matters.

Saslaw said he had tried to help Lucas advance in a chamber where party control has switched back and forth in recent years. “The only time we’ve had committee assignments since I’ve been in leadership was in January 2008, and she got put on Finance then,” he said. “I made things happen for her.”

Sen. Barbara A. Favola (D-Arlington) called Saslaw “a very decent and fair leader. His values are in the right place. . . . You don’t want to be in a foxhole with anybody else but Dick Saslaw.”

BLOGGER'S NOTE:

THIS, in a nutshell, explains why we should not vote for Hillary Clinton.  No matter the time, the place or the face - the story is always the same.  The Democrats seek us out, when they want our vote and then conveniently forget about us when it's over.  

I am celebrating VA Sen. L. Louise Lucas.  I like the way she talks back.  I DELIGHT in her refusal to roll over.  Look at her!  Can you imagine that "genteel white Southerner" talking to her like that?  OF COURSE YOU CAN.  It's what they've always done. 

If I were her I would have gone a step further and voted with the Republicans.  I would have left those - just as racist, just as bigoted - Democrats with their mouths open and their drawers down.  Count on my vote again MF; I'll give you something for lunch.  You can eat that Bullshit you've been dishing out.*

... excepting of course Elijah Cummings and Steny Hoyer