29 March 2002 - The weakness of those who conspire

Conspiracies happen, don't kid yourself. People have secrets they don't want others to know about. Many  people do. And there are organisations that thrive off taking advantage of these problems. Organised crime is a fact. The only question is how far do the tentacles of such organisations go. 

We may never know fully, but there are organisations such as the law enforcement agencies and  the intelligence agencies that are tasked with the job of defeating organised crime and all its participants and collaborators. It is their job to know. 

Such agencies, are therefore obviously direct targets of organised crime. How do we know that they are not themselves compromised? How do we know that the guy in charge is not himself being blackmailed by someone? 

When things go badly wrong and some great crime comes to light, the question is put to these organisations "Why didn't you prevent it?". Often we are asked to believe in the sheer incompetence of the organisation. The bigger the crime, the bigger the incompetence has to have been, to make us believe that the alternative explanation is not the answer. The alternative is that the crime fighting organisation has itself become compromised by rogue elements and that key people in the organisation "arranged the incompetence", because they are corrupt. Perhaps they are being bribed or blackmailed so that their corruption doesn't reach the light of day.

The bigger the conspiracy, the greater the corruption that needs to be hidden, the greater the incompetence that has to be claimed to make us accept that these organisations have not been compromised.

This lies at the core of the weakness of those who conspire. Their greatest strength is our willingness to see them as stupid incompetent fools.

How do we take advantage of this weakness to defeat these organised criminals? 

Do a bit of digging yourself and you will soon find out numerous facts which these alleged bastions of criminal investigation, for some reason, have never bothered to dig up. When law enforcement organisations fail to find the facts, we can find them ourselves and thereby hold the organisation to account - challenging them to be competent on clear technical grounds.

We have to recognise in all this, that organisations which live off fighting crime have a clear symbiosis with the criminal. Without the criminal what would the crime fighter do? If crime rates were to drop dramatically, if wars were to cease then where would all the weapons makers go, where would all the police go? If the police are too good at there job they would be out of a job.

If the police are the immune system, society is the body. If the body is suffering badly from various attacks, we may find that the attacks are not the problem but that we have autoimmune deficiency syndrome - AIDS. Though this disease of society may not be curable we can make efforts to stop the corruption killing us. We need to understand its nature and how it spreads and how to block the processes.

The best way to defeat conspiracies is to encourage a culture of real knowledge and demonstrable technical excellence. People in power should get there because they are technically good at the job, not because of their ability to spend money to buy our votes. 

We need to challenge these organisations, why for example is it that all the bogeymen that America now has in the world were one big recipients of CIA assistance? Sadam Hussein is a prime example, Usama bin Laden is another.