On 3/31/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 23:42:54 +0200, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Basically, it said that it's impossible for such a conspiracy to be going on without even one person involved in it telling about it before they died.
This is the Achilles' heel of most of the big conspiracy theories, from Roswell to 9/11.
Anybody who considers that a conspiracy involving more than a handful of people will remain leak free when it goes public is delusional.
Though there have been a few instances of big things being kept secret for long periods of time on account of various organizational practices. The South African nuclear weapons program, for example, involved hundreds of people, but only a small few really knew what was truly going on with it. One of the reasons the CIA didn't find out about the 1974 Indian nuclear test was because they purposefully used a small number of people to prepare it -- i.e. they cut out almost all of the low-grade technicians and only used people who were deeply invested in the project, forcing top-grade physicists to do the work normally regulated to lesser specialists. During the US project to build the atomic bomb, most of the thousands of factory workers required to create the fissile material had no idea what the ultimate goal of their efforts were -- they just knew to do their job and to not ask questions -- and if they had been told in the end that their work was just to develop some sort of new tank armor they'd probably have believed it.
I'm not defending conspiracy theorists in the slightest; I'm just saying that there are organizational arrangements (chiefly compartmentalization, but others too) which allow for things requiring great numbers of people to be more-or-less in the dark on what they are doing, and there are also ways to reduce the number of people working on a secret project to very low numbers even if they would be traditionally seen as wasteful or impractical. The idea of having big secrets has not been historically implausible, though of course such things always fail Occam's Razor (which is just a heuristic, anyway).
Just musing along... (and not a conspiracy theorist) FF