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They would have you believe that the United States Government perpetrated a gigantic fraud on its citizenry. Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that

They would have you believe that the United States Government perpetrated a gigantic fraud on its citizenry. Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened, by any government. The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago. Not defending the moon landing doubters, or conspiracy theorists in general, but: the proper response to these things isn’t to point and laugh. It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them. Edit: commenters seem to be focusing on a single example, which I presented as an illustrative point for a much deeper and more important phenomenon. You’re missing the forest for the trees.

mav3rick 6y ago
Oh and didn't the WMD fraud come out internally ? Tell me one NASA or JPL scientist officially on the mission who is claiming that it was fake ? Stop being contrarian for the sake of it .
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  As I said, I’m not defending the moon landing doubters. But it seems obvious to me that the recent increase in conspiracy theories is a direct result of unethical institutional and government actions coming to light.
  - tgv 6y ago
    Like flat earth and anti-vax? To me, it seems more obvious that that's the effect of attention and manipulation in media, both "classic" and social. A suspicious attitude institutions has always existed: from the government down to the grocer, who pushes the scales down while weighing. The more the attention is drawn towards it, the greater the suspicion gets, and I feel that especially divisive attention feeds suspicion. When behavior of an institution, such as the Trump administration, is not beyond reproach, it feeds the attention cycle.
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      The Flat Earth thing makes no sense to me, but regarding Anti-Vax: again, not defending them, but it’s trivially easy to find examples of governments (worldwide) deceptively giving people medicine which had a negative effect on their health, whether as experimentation, sterilization, or otherwise. The fact that vaccines are scientifically known to be safe is just lost in the noise. I attribute the rise of conspiracy theories to an overabundance of information; doing the research on each individual topic is just overwhelming to the average person and subsequently a simplistic conspiracy theory has appeal.
      - tgv 6y ago
        I mention flat earth and anti-vax, because they are conspiracy theories that are not obviously driven by the government's behavior.
        ceilingcorner 6y ago
        I am not too familiar with either, but in my view they are definitely associated with ‘authority’ whether then be mainstream media, government, institutions, etc.
        tgv 6y ago
        Sure, but where I live, these are still held in high regard, yet anti-vax and flat earth spread here too. I don't think the institutions are the direct drivers of conspiracies. Perhaps I should have made clearer that it was in particular the word "direct" that I was responding too, not the fact that unethical or shady behavior from a government can trigger long-lasting distrust.
      - api 6y ago
        My pet theory on the flat Earth is that it's been pushed in order to compile lists of extremely gullible people by scraping social media so that these lists can be used later. For what? Who knows. Targets of scams, marketing, propaganda...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    It's actually the result of a natural civilization cycle where falling living standards and increased intra-elite competition and conflict erodes the public trust in its institutions and leads to political unrest. America is now in the thick of it (starting around 1970 and culminating in the last decade), and so trust will remain low and conspiracy theories high for years to come yet (not to mention the riots). https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7ahqn/ https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7ahqn/
  - laumars 6y ago
    I think conspiracy theories fill the same void as religion does. It’s for people who want to believe in a higher truth, that someone more powerful is constantly pulling the proverbial strings and the universe isn’t just a chaotic series of random events. And I believe, like religion, that those who love conspiracy theories are less interested in researching those facts themselves because they’ve come to rely on their assumptions for comfort and their peers for unity. In short, it’s less about the actual conspiracy and more about the individual needing something more in life.
- kungato 6y ago
  Did it come internally? Didn't it just become obvious once they got there and nothing was there? Apologies, I'm not from the US so I didn't follow that closely
- seppin 6y ago
  > Stop being contrarian for the sake of it . That would eliminate the need for this website almost entirely.
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    Definitely applies to many threads.
    - krapp 6y ago
      No it doesn't.
      - seppin 6y ago
        Haha.
dyslexit 6y ago
The WMD claim had plenty of holes poked through it even at the time. There were constant stories making it clear the inspectors in Iraq were not finding anything, and whistle blowers like Valerie Plame who directly contradicted the White House claims. Today, less than twenty years later, it's no longer a question that there weren't any WMDs. The fraud Armstrong is pointing out isn't really comparable.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  It’s a single example. The list of governmental frauds is as long as recorded history.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    Again, you are conflating frauds and have't actually refuted the point in question: did we land on the moon or not?
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      I was making a meta point about institutions and conspiracy theories, not commenting on one in particular. I specifically said this in my initial comment.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Sure, but in a democracy it’s very difficult to defraud the public, because the government employees doing the defrauding are the public. At any given time, large swathes of those employees are politically opposed to whoever is in power. That’s why the WMD fiasco is so instructional. It failed immediately, for precisely the reasons we would expect any such fraud against the population to fail, and for precisely the reasons we would expect faked moon landings to be rapidly exposed.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > That’s why the WMD fiasco is so instructional. It failed immediately Maybe we have a different understanding of "failed" or "immediately", but it worked well enough to get the media on board to build a case for war and carry it for long enough until the actual war started. It was solid enough that even all the doubt coming from NATO partners (and the flat out refusal to be part of it with Chirac's utterance that "France is not a pacifist country" and it's not about war itself but that war and those reasons in particular that they wouldn't be a part of it) did not stop the war. So, to me at least, it didn't fail at all, it succeeded.
dnautics 6y ago
Wasn't the wmd not a fraud? It was just overselling a truth. IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of. The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake). The yellow cake was subsequently located in exactly the location where the un thought it was (Hussein hadn't bothered moving it) and it was likely that he was refusing to let UN inspectors in a misguided attempt to bluff the US into not invading due to deterrence?
- bsder 6y ago
  You are mostly correct, but the bluff wasn't really directed at the US. The bluff was meant for Iran, mostly, and Israel, possibly.
- jussij 6y ago
  They not only sold lie to the US they sold it to the world. Colin Powell stood up at the UN to present the world his Power Point of lies: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin-powell-knew-about-iraq-fifteen-years-ago-and-what-he-told-the-un/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin...
  - dnautics 6y ago
    I guess the question could hinge on if yellowcake is truly wmd or not, but regardless the administration openly claimed it was, and that's what they based their argument on, and iirc that yellowcake was found.
    - jussij 6y ago
      Don't let a few facts get in the way of that good story: The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a “secret” cache that was recently “discovered” by the U.S, nor had the yellowcake been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was the remnants of decades-old nuclear reactor projects that had put out of commission many years earlier: One reactor at Al Tuwaitha was bombed by Israel in 1981, and another was bombed and disabled during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Moreover, the fact that the yellowcake had been in Iraq since before the 1991 Gulf War was plainly stated in the Associated Press article cited in the example above: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/have-your-yellowcake/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/have-your-yellowcake/ No. Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada was left over from Saddam Hussein’s defunct nuclear weapons program and had been in sealed containers, under guard, since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Claims that this material is "vindication" for President Bush’s WMD claims in 2003 are completely false. https://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/uranium-in-iraq/#:~:text=%22It%E2%80%99s%20a%20little%20known%20fact%20that%2C%20after%20invading,the%20Iraqi%20government%20ship%20it%20all%20to%20Canada%2C https://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/uranium-in-iraq/#:~:text=%...
fchu 6y ago
This needs to be weighted though: while the US government had, is, and will be lying on some stuff to its citizenry, it's unlikely that it's constantly lying, and most of the time it's telling the truth. A massive lie, with no holes nor whistleblowers for decades, is even less likely. This is exactly Armstrong's main point: go and actually do real research and cross-reference
avmich 6y ago
> The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago. Yes, and not even twenty years since it happened we know a lot of details. Compare that to Moon landing, where conspiracy theorists can at best switch to another accusation after they've got the first one explained. > It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them. People should maintain healthy distrust of institutions and governments - after all, as you say, it's not the first time when such mistrust was justified. Too much distrust is however a problem. Similarly one can hardly expect to solve all origins of conspiracy theorists - some people are just bored and want to believe in unicorns, and even if you'd create a more interesting life to them - a big "if" - they could choose to believe what they want. History teaches that our understanding of history is lacking, sometimes sorely.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
> In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped. > And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted. Selected quotes from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
api 6y ago
Apollo looks nothing at all like the WMD lie. There is more evidence available today that the Apollo landings happened than there was at the time, such as photos of the landing sites taken by later Lunar probes. Lies generally degrade over time, not strengthen, and the WMD lie has collapsed. Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Even the Republicans are now admitting that. Many knew it was a lie back then. I remember as it was happening getting the impression that nobody believed it, that it was universally understood to be a straw man placeholder for the real reason for the Iraq invasion. Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why? The only even marginally plausible speculation I have is that some sizable contingent really believed the catastrophic collapse peak oil scenario that was popular back in the 2000s and that the invasion was rammed through damn-the-torpedoes to get exclusive access to that oil so America could weather the impending apocalypse.
- jussij 6y ago
  > Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Not many believed it at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2003/07/03/google_bombed_by_missing_wmds/ https://www.theregister.com/2003/07/03/google_bombed_by_miss... NOTE: Check the date off that page.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why? * 9/11 and the shock/bloodlust that stemmed from it * Powerful lobby groups, like the military-industrial complex and oil companies * the Saudis (local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and old friends of the Bush family) * the Israelis (also local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and capable exerting heavy influence on the W Bush administration) * Probably the Iranians (who bankrolled Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group, also not fans of Saddam) None of this should be new or surprising -- the interests of most/all of these groups were known at the time.
jussij 6y ago
> The 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago. Expect Hans Blix exposed that lie very shortly those words where uttered: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1 If the moon landing is also a fraud where is the Hans Blix of the moon landing program?
fredrik-j 6y ago
As other's have mentioned, the lies about WMD where rather quickly dispelled, and doesn't compare to moon landing conspiracy. As far as I understand the WMD fraud was successful insofar that the administration was able to use it as a pretext to go to war, but it was also quickly debunked. I think you're missing the point that Armstrong tries to make. While he indeed starts with your selective quote, he then goes on to say that it is rather unlikely that the government would get away with a fraud of that scale. If nothing else, then simply because of the amount of people involved in the moon landing, and third parties that then and still to this day are able to confirm that the moon landing actually happened. My experience is also that people who trust the tales of a conspiracy over a wide array of substantial counter arguments are simply not open to actual counterfacts from others. It's like fake news, the conspiracy supports their believe system, and rational arguments to the contrary simply isn't effective. Still I agree that conspiracy nuts need to be confronted. Perhaps though, not so much in an attempt to convert the believer as to stop them from spreading the conspiracy to others.
aaomidi 6y ago
Please keep in mind that Iraq did in fact have WMDs (chemical weapons are WMDs). The lie was specifically about nuclear weapons and the stockpiles of uranium Iraq supposedly was hiding (they weren't.) Saying they didn't have WMDs completely wipes out the history of Iraq using tons of chemical weapons against Iranians in the Iran Iraq war.

mav3rick 6y ago

Oh and didn't the WMD fraud come out internally ? Tell me one NASA or JPL scientist officially on the mission who is claiming that it was fake ? Stop being contrarian for the sake of it .

ceilingcorner 6y ago
As I said, I’m not defending the moon landing doubters. But it seems obvious to me that the recent increase in conspiracy theories is a direct result of unethical institutional and government actions coming to light.
- tgv 6y ago
  Like flat earth and anti-vax? To me, it seems more obvious that that's the effect of attention and manipulation in media, both "classic" and social. A suspicious attitude institutions has always existed: from the government down to the grocer, who pushes the scales down while weighing. The more the attention is drawn towards it, the greater the suspicion gets, and I feel that especially divisive attention feeds suspicion. When behavior of an institution, such as the Trump administration, is not beyond reproach, it feeds the attention cycle.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    The Flat Earth thing makes no sense to me, but regarding Anti-Vax: again, not defending them, but it’s trivially easy to find examples of governments (worldwide) deceptively giving people medicine which had a negative effect on their health, whether as experimentation, sterilization, or otherwise. The fact that vaccines are scientifically known to be safe is just lost in the noise. I attribute the rise of conspiracy theories to an overabundance of information; doing the research on each individual topic is just overwhelming to the average person and subsequently a simplistic conspiracy theory has appeal.
    - tgv 6y ago
      I mention flat earth and anti-vax, because they are conspiracy theories that are not obviously driven by the government's behavior.
      - ceilingcorner 6y ago
        I am not too familiar with either, but in my view they are definitely associated with ‘authority’ whether then be mainstream media, government, institutions, etc.
        tgv 6y ago
        Sure, but where I live, these are still held in high regard, yet anti-vax and flat earth spread here too. I don't think the institutions are the direct drivers of conspiracies. Perhaps I should have made clearer that it was in particular the word "direct" that I was responding too, not the fact that unethical or shady behavior from a government can trigger long-lasting distrust.
    - api 6y ago
      My pet theory on the flat Earth is that it's been pushed in order to compile lists of extremely gullible people by scraping social media so that these lists can be used later. For what? Who knows. Targets of scams, marketing, propaganda...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kstenerud 6y ago
  It's actually the result of a natural civilization cycle where falling living standards and increased intra-elite competition and conflict erodes the public trust in its institutions and leads to political unrest. America is now in the thick of it (starting around 1970 and culminating in the last decade), and so trust will remain low and conspiracy theories high for years to come yet (not to mention the riots). https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7ahqn/ https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7ahqn/
- laumars 6y ago
  I think conspiracy theories fill the same void as religion does. It’s for people who want to believe in a higher truth, that someone more powerful is constantly pulling the proverbial strings and the universe isn’t just a chaotic series of random events. And I believe, like religion, that those who love conspiracy theories are less interested in researching those facts themselves because they’ve come to rely on their assumptions for comfort and their peers for unity. In short, it’s less about the actual conspiracy and more about the individual needing something more in life.
kungato 6y ago
Did it come internally? Didn't it just become obvious once they got there and nothing was there? Apologies, I'm not from the US so I didn't follow that closely
seppin 6y ago
> Stop being contrarian for the sake of it . That would eliminate the need for this website almost entirely.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  Definitely applies to many threads.
  - krapp 6y ago
    No it doesn't.
    - seppin 6y ago
      Haha.

dyslexit 6y ago

The WMD claim had plenty of holes poked through it even at the time. There were constant stories making it clear the inspectors in Iraq were not finding anything, and whistle blowers like Valerie Plame who directly contradicted the White House claims. Today, less than twenty years later, it's no longer a question that there weren't any WMDs. The fraud Armstrong is pointing out isn't really comparable.

ceilingcorner 6y ago
It’s a single example. The list of governmental frauds is as long as recorded history.
- pstuart 6y ago
  Again, you are conflating frauds and have't actually refuted the point in question: did we land on the moon or not?
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    I was making a meta point about institutions and conspiracy theories, not commenting on one in particular. I specifically said this in my initial comment.
- simonh 6y ago
  Sure, but in a democracy it’s very difficult to defraud the public, because the government employees doing the defrauding are the public. At any given time, large swathes of those employees are politically opposed to whoever is in power. That’s why the WMD fiasco is so instructional. It failed immediately, for precisely the reasons we would expect any such fraud against the population to fail, and for precisely the reasons we would expect faked moon landings to be rapidly exposed.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > That’s why the WMD fiasco is so instructional. It failed immediately Maybe we have a different understanding of "failed" or "immediately", but it worked well enough to get the media on board to build a case for war and carry it for long enough until the actual war started. It was solid enough that even all the doubt coming from NATO partners (and the flat out refusal to be part of it with Chirac's utterance that "France is not a pacifist country" and it's not about war itself but that war and those reasons in particular that they wouldn't be a part of it) did not stop the war. So, to me at least, it didn't fail at all, it succeeded.

dnautics 6y ago

Wasn't the wmd not a fraud? It was just overselling a truth. IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of. The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake). The yellow cake was subsequently located in exactly the location where the un thought it was (Hussein hadn't bothered moving it) and it was likely that he was refusing to let UN inspectors in a misguided attempt to bluff the US into not invading due to deterrence?

bsder 6y ago
You are mostly correct, but the bluff wasn't really directed at the US. The bluff was meant for Iran, mostly, and Israel, possibly.
jussij 6y ago
They not only sold lie to the US they sold it to the world. Colin Powell stood up at the UN to present the world his Power Point of lies: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin-powell-knew-about-iraq-fifteen-years-ago-and-what-he-told-the-un/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin...
- dnautics 6y ago
  I guess the question could hinge on if yellowcake is truly wmd or not, but regardless the administration openly claimed it was, and that's what they based their argument on, and iirc that yellowcake was found.
  - jussij 6y ago
    Don't let a few facts get in the way of that good story: The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a “secret” cache that was recently “discovered” by the U.S, nor had the yellowcake been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was the remnants of decades-old nuclear reactor projects that had put out of commission many years earlier: One reactor at Al Tuwaitha was bombed by Israel in 1981, and another was bombed and disabled during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Moreover, the fact that the yellowcake had been in Iraq since before the 1991 Gulf War was plainly stated in the Associated Press article cited in the example above: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/have-your-yellowcake/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/have-your-yellowcake/ No. Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada was left over from Saddam Hussein’s defunct nuclear weapons program and had been in sealed containers, under guard, since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Claims that this material is "vindication" for President Bush’s WMD claims in 2003 are completely false. https://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/uranium-in-iraq/#:~:text=%22It%E2%80%99s%20a%20little%20known%20fact%20that%2C%20after%20invading,the%20Iraqi%20government%20ship%20it%20all%20to%20Canada%2C https://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/uranium-in-iraq/#:~:text=%...

fchu 6y ago

This needs to be weighted though: while the US government had, is, and will be lying on some stuff to its citizenry, it's unlikely that it's constantly lying, and most of the time it's telling the truth. A massive lie, with no holes nor whistleblowers for decades, is even less likely. This is exactly Armstrong's main point: go and actually do real research and cross-reference

avmich 6y ago

> The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago. Yes, and not even twenty years since it happened we know a lot of details. Compare that to Moon landing, where conspiracy theorists can at best switch to another accusation after they've got the first one explained. > It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them. People should maintain healthy distrust of institutions and governments - after all, as you say, it's not the first time when such mistrust was justified. Too much distrust is however a problem. Similarly one can hardly expect to solve all origins of conspiracy theorists - some people are just bored and want to believe in unicorns, and even if you'd create a more interesting life to them - a big "if" - they could choose to believe what they want. History teaches that our understanding of history is lacking, sometimes sorely.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

> In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped. > And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted. Selected quotes from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

api 6y ago

Apollo looks nothing at all like the WMD lie. There is more evidence available today that the Apollo landings happened than there was at the time, such as photos of the landing sites taken by later Lunar probes. Lies generally degrade over time, not strengthen, and the WMD lie has collapsed. Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Even the Republicans are now admitting that. Many knew it was a lie back then. I remember as it was happening getting the impression that nobody believed it, that it was universally understood to be a straw man placeholder for the real reason for the Iraq invasion. Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why? The only even marginally plausible speculation I have is that some sizable contingent really believed the catastrophic collapse peak oil scenario that was popular back in the 2000s and that the invasion was rammed through damn-the-torpedoes to get exclusive access to that oil so America could weather the impending apocalypse.

jussij 6y ago
> Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Not many believed it at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2003/07/03/google_bombed_by_missing_wmds/ https://www.theregister.com/2003/07/03/google_bombed_by_miss... NOTE: Check the date off that page.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
> Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why? * 9/11 and the shock/bloodlust that stemmed from it * Powerful lobby groups, like the military-industrial complex and oil companies * the Saudis (local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and old friends of the Bush family) * the Israelis (also local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and capable exerting heavy influence on the W Bush administration) * Probably the Iranians (who bankrolled Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group, also not fans of Saddam) None of this should be new or surprising -- the interests of most/all of these groups were known at the time.

jussij 6y ago

> The 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago. Expect Hans Blix exposed that lie very shortly those words where uttered: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1 If the moon landing is also a fraud where is the Hans Blix of the moon landing program?

fredrik-j 6y ago

As other's have mentioned, the lies about WMD where rather quickly dispelled, and doesn't compare to moon landing conspiracy. As far as I understand the WMD fraud was successful insofar that the administration was able to use it as a pretext to go to war, but it was also quickly debunked. I think you're missing the point that Armstrong tries to make. While he indeed starts with your selective quote, he then goes on to say that it is rather unlikely that the government would get away with a fraud of that scale. If nothing else, then simply because of the amount of people involved in the moon landing, and third parties that then and still to this day are able to confirm that the moon landing actually happened. My experience is also that people who trust the tales of a conspiracy over a wide array of substantial counter arguments are simply not open to actual counterfacts from others. It's like fake news, the conspiracy supports their believe system, and rational arguments to the contrary simply isn't effective. Still I agree that conspiracy nuts need to be confronted. Perhaps though, not so much in an attempt to convert the believer as to stop them from spreading the conspiracy to others.

aaomidi 6y ago

Please keep in mind that Iraq did in fact have WMDs (chemical weapons are WMDs). The lie was specifically about nuclear weapons and the stockpiles of uranium Iraq supposedly was hiding (they weren't.) Saying they didn't have WMDs completely wipes out the history of Iraq using tons of chemical weapons against Iranians in the Iran Iraq war.