Part 3

Lars Schall: I wanted to ask you about this specifically: How would you respond if our listeners / readers dismiss your research as just another whacky conspiracy theory?

Graeme MacQueen: The term “conspiracy theory” is what I refer to as a “thought stopper.” It doesn’t provoke us to think, it doesn’t stimulate thought, it doesn’t open up a discussion, it doesn’t encourage us to have a debate. What it tries to do is to stop the discussion. It’s an anti-intellectual move. It basically says, here is a person who is either immoral or stupid or insane – they’re “conspiracy theorists”, we’re not going to engage in dialogue with them. We are just going to paint them with a brush, they’re tainted, they’re spoiled, they’re taboo, somehow they are outside of the circle of respectable society, and therefore we don’t have listen to them, we don’t have to look at their evidence, we don’t have to read their books, we can just push them outside the circle. That is what the term “conspiracy theorist” does and that what I think it was mainly designed to do. It came into popularity after the JFK assassination, and it has been very useful for governments and intelligence agencies ever since then.

The sad thing is that even people that I personally respect a great deal, especially people on the left, often buy into this whole way of thinking. Where is Mr. Chomsky on 9/11, where is wonderful Chris Hedges, and Glenn Greenwald, and Amy Goodman, all these people who are so important in North America right now and whom I do not demonize by the way, I respect them all, I think they’re doing good work, but where are they on 9/11, where are they on the anthrax attacks? Well, they’re missing. They seem to have accepted the idea that those of us who question the official story on this are somehow radically wrong, we’re somehow tainted, we’re outside the boundaries of thinkable thought, and that’s too bad.

What I did in my book, I thought I could run away from this term, or I could run directly toward it, I could embrace it, and that’s what I decided to do, and that’s why the subtitle of the book is deliberately “The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy”. I define conspiracy in my introduction. It’s simply a plan made in secret by two or more people to commit an immoral or illegal act. Now, conspiracies in that sense happen all the time. That’s why laws are designed to deal with them. There is nothing weird about the fact that I’m claiming there was a conspiracy. What it comes down to is evidence. Do I have the evidence to support my argument? And if a person wants to know, they’ll have to read the book because the devil is in the details.

Lars Schall: If our listeners are interested in what you were referring, I think there was a memo in 1967 related to the case of Jim Garrison in New Orleans, where the CIA said, we should use the term “Conspiracy Theory” instead of “Assassination Theory”. Anyway, you conclude your book with the chapter “The Unthinkable.“ What do you mean with that?

Graeme MacQueen: This is how a part of the investigation proceeded. I noticed when I read the newspapers of the time – that is, the newspapers that were dealing with the anthrax attacks back in the Fall of 2001 –, that the term “The Unthinkable” kept coming up again and again. People would say, is it really true that the unthinkable is happening in the United States? Or they would say, it seems like a bioweapon attack is finally happening, we must now think the unthinkable. If you bump into one or two references like that, it’s no big deal, but I kept coming up with it again and again. And it wasn’t just journalists, because of course journalists borrow from other journalists. If it was just journalists, you could say, well, the guy in the New York Times likes the way the Washington Post did that, so he kind of borrowed it. But it wasn’t that simple. There were also scientists and government leaders, everybody seemed to be joining into the chorus. So I thought I would look a little more deeply into it.

I was aware that the term “The Unthinkable” has been a kind of a code word for decades among those who are concerned with nuclear weapons. It was used for a long time, it referred to nuclear warfare – The Unthinkable. This use of the term was probably pioneered, as far as I know, by Herman Kahn, who was an American strategic thinker, a guy who used game theory and so on to figure out how the US could best play this game most fruitfully with the Soviet Union.