On 3/31/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 23:42:54 +0200,
"MacGyverMagic/Mgm"
<macgyvermagic(a)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