1. Joe was murdered.
2. Bob hated Joe.
3. If Joe would die, Bob could try to date Joe's girlfriend.
4. Bob murdered Joe.

Another problem, with the massive, elaborate theories, is a lack of common sense. One has to ask how the world's greatest secret societies have volumes of material written about their inner plans and workings. Or how many years the U.N. army is going to hide in Mexico before they are finally allowed to invade the U.S. Or why 13 rich white men who already rule the world behind the scenes would want to stage a military takeover of our country. The larger the conspiracy is, generally, the more holes and greater contrariness to common sense. A final problem with conspiracy theories is that they are too often used to justify racial and religious prejudice and hatred. When you hear somebody say that Jews have a plot to take over the world, the menace and hatred makes you wish conspiracy theories didn't exist at all.

Perhaps conspiracy theories are most valuable in the questions they ask, not always the answers they provide. A free society should be asking many of the questions raised by conspiracy theorists. And while conspiracy theories have a lot of problems, they should not be discounted lightly. History is rife with conspiracies of all shapes and sizes. People like to say that the government is too large, and too stupid, to keep secrets. And yet the government does keep secrets, even big ones, and it does so very well. In fact, the U.S. government spends about $3 billion a year protecting its secrets. The Freedom of Information Act let us peek behind the curtain at many conspiracies within the U.S. government. Those quick to believe that conspiracy theories are the product of insanity must first make a distinction between conspiracy history and theory. For example:

1. The CIA knocked off foreign leaders, conducted LSD research on unwitting Americans, recruited journalists to help them in foreign intelligence operations, and planted stories in the foreign press, hoping they would be picked up in the domestic press. Below is a brief excerpt of senate committee hearings on MKULTRA program, a CIA program in which LSD was distributed to unwitting Americans so as to study human behavior on LSD:

SENATOR INOYE: In February, 19954, and this was in the very early stages of MKULTRA, the Director of Central Intelligence wrote to the technical staff officials criticizing their judgment because they had participated in an experiment involving the administration of LSD on an unwitting basis to Dr. Frank Olson, who later committed suicide . . . Even though these individuals were clearly aware of the dangers of surreptitious administration and had been criticized by the Director of Central Intelligence, Subproject 3 was not terminated immediately after Dr. Olson's death. In fact, according to the documents, it continued for a number of years. Can you provide this committee with any explanation of how such testing could have continued under these circumstances?

ADMIRAL TURNER: No, sir, I really can't.

2. The Army conducted drug research on its own soldiers and sprayed San Francisco, the Pentagon and the New York City subway system with germs as part of its biological warfare testing program.

3. The FBI infiltrated and illegally harassed radical organizations in the 1960s as part of its COINTELPRO program; at one time, it even developed its own chapter of the KKK. Below is an excerpt of a FBI memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to one of the FBI's field offices, dated 7/5/68:

Bulet 5/10/68 requested suggestions for counterintelligence action against the New Left. The replies to the Bureau's request have been analyzed and it is felt that the following suggestions for counterintelligence action can be utilized by all offices:

1. Preparation of a leaflet designed to counteract the impression that Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other minority groups speak for the majority of students at universities. The leaflet should contain photographs of New Left leadership at the respective university. Naturally, the most obnoxious pictures should be used.

2. The instigating of or the taking advantage of personal conflicts or animosities existing between New Left leaders.

3. The creating of impressions that certain New Left leaders are informants for the Bureau or other law enforcement agencies.

4. The use of articles from student newspapers and/or the "underground press" to show the depravity of New Left leaders and members. In this connection, articles showing advocation of the use of narcotics and free sex are ideal to send to university officials, wealthy donors, members of the legislature and parents of students who are active in New Left matters.

The above list, complete, is 12 items long in just this one memo of several by the director of the FBI and other senior officials at the Bureau, advocating misinformation and disruption of New Left activities. Congressman Don Edwards (D-California) said of COINTELPRO in 1975 after a Congressional inquiry revealed its activities to the public:

Regardless of the unattractiveness or noisy militancy of some private citizens or organizations, the Constitution does not permit Federal interference with their activities except through the criminal justice system, armed with its ancient safeguards. There are no exceptions. No Federal agency, the CIA, the IRS, the FBI can be at the same time policeman, prosecutor, judge and jury. That is what constitutionally guaranteed due process is all about. It may sometimes be disorderly and unsatisfactory to some, but it is the essence of freedom . . . I suggest that the philosophy supporting COINTELPRO is the subversive notion that any public official, the President or a policeman, possesses a kind of inherent power to set aside the Constitution whenever he thinks the public interest, or "national security," warrants it. That notion is postulate to tyranny.

4. The U.S. government performed radiation experiments on people and kept it a secret for decades; in these experiments, Americans were fed, injected or otherwise exposed to radioactive materials. It also knew that atom bomb testing in Nevada and Utah in the 1950s was giving its own citizens cancer and kept that secret, too. Below is an excerpt of a letter from Congressman Edward Markey, chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, to the Secretary of Energy, dated October 24, 1986:

The report reviewed Department of Energy documents, which revealed the frequent and systematic use of human subjects as guinea pigs for radiation experiments sponsored by the Department's predecessor agencies. Some of these experiments were conducted in the 1940s and 1950s, and others were performed during the supposedly more enlightened 1960s and 1970s. The report describes in detail 31 experiments during which about 695 persons were exposed. In many of these experiments, individuals were exposed to radiation which provided little or no medical benefit to the subjects. The purpose of several of these experiments was actually to cause injury to the participants. Many others sought simply to measure the effects of radiation on humans. American citizens thus became nuclear calibration devices for experimenters run amok . . . These experiments, and others described in the Subcommittee staff report, shock the conscience and represent a black mark on the history of nuclear medical research. They raise one major horrifying question: Did the intense desire to know the consequences of radioactive exposure after the dawn of the atomic age lead American scientists to mimic the kind of demented human experiments conducted by the Nazis?

5. Between 1932 and 1972, the Public Health Service held some 400 poor black sharecroppers who had syphilis but denied them treatment, even after a cure was discovered, so as to study the effects of syphilis. Below is an excerpt of the official apology for the infamous Tuskegee, AL syphilis study, delivered by President Clinton in the East Room on May 16, 1997:

PRESIDENT CLINTON: The eight men who are survivors of the syphilis study at Tuskegee are a living link to a time not so very long ago that many Americans would prefer not to remember, but we dare not forget. It was a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideas, when our nation broke the trust with our people that is the very foundation of our democracy. It is not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation, but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future. And without remembering it, we cannot make amends and we cannot go forward. So America does remember the hundreds of men used in research without their knowledge and consent. We remember them and their family members. Men who were poor and African-American, without resources and with few alternatives, they believed they had found hope when they were offered free medical care by the United States Public Health Service. They were betrayed . . . The United States did something that was wrong--deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens . . . The American people are sorry--for the loss, the years of hurt . . . I apologize and I am sorry that this apology took so long in coming . . .

These are just some examples of roads to hell paved by good intentions--crimes planned and committed by members of the U.S. government and kept secret, sometimes for decades. Other examples include Watergate and the Iran Contra arms-for-hostages deals. (In both situations, the major players got pardoned, which makes Bill Clinton's last-minute pardons while in office sound pretty trivial in comparison.)

The point is that conspiracies do happen, are likely happening right now, and will in all probability go on happening. Conspiracy theorists will be racing to keep up. They don't assume that somebody's out there taking care of every good cause they believe in. They don't trust the government, and they have a right not to since the government abused that trust in the past too many times. Many have learned also not to trust corporations, which have committed their own share of conspiracies, from pollution to big tobacco, that are too numerous to describe here. Conspiracy theorists remind us all to be vigilant about our civil liberties, not to take anything for granted, and that a little Paranoia is healthy--encouraging us to realize that liberty in America is a personal responsibility, not a constant in physics. Conspiracy theorists, for example, are alarmed at the Justice Department for chipping away at civil liberties in the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1995 and current anti-terrorist legislation in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, finding a strange ally in the ACLU. While most Americans would not argue with any new laws that would help them feel more secure against the still unbelievable tragedy of large-scale terrorism, some reasonably question how these laws might be used in the future when the immediate threat is gone. Said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington National Office:

"This bill [new 2001 anti-terrorism 'USA Act' legislation] has simply missed the mark of maximizing security and, at the same time, minimizing any adverse effects on America's freedoms. Most Americans do not recognize that Congress has just passed a bill that would give the government expanded power to invade our privacy, imprison people without due process and punish dissent."

The legislation was rammed through Congress despite tough opposition from some Democrats. With Anthrax cropping up and grabbing a huge share of media attention, hardly anybody noticed. As an American, on one hand, I want the government to act quickly to protect the country from foreign attack, and yet as an American I also love the Constitution and become concerned when legislation is worded that could lead to violating its purpose. During the Cold War, excesses for a good cause resulted in an internal assault on American democracy; during the future tensions of a prolonged struggle against implacable terrorist organizations, will similar excesses, enabled by new legislation, be coming?