The Gulf of Tonkin incident is usually cited as the immediate instigation for war between the United States and North Vietnam.

The general casus belli ("an act or event that provokes, or used to justify, war") was seen in the West as breaking the camel’s back was when, on 2 and 4 August 1964, in the waters between Vietnam and Hainan, China, U. S. naval vessels were attacked by Vietnamese naval vessels and defended themselves, killing some Vietnamese sailors. They were supposedly there to help protect the democracy of South Vietnam from the North’s communist aggression.

American public sentiment called for immediate retaliation, and the Congress resolved that Lyndon Johnson could defend any Southeast Asian nation from Communism. So, the war was on.

What the public was not told for a long time was that the incident on 4 August did not take place.  The first incident was a legitimate naval battle, in which the USS Maddox fought off three Vietnamese torpedo boats and killed 4 Vietnamese sailors. But two days later, the Vietnamese were engaged in salvaging their vessels and no hostilities erupted. Nevertheless, Johnson informed the public that the Maddox and the USS Turner Joy had been attacked in separate battles. The Turner Joy had not been attacked.

For the longest time, the general publics trust of the CIA had been lost. They were regarded as having deliberately spread this false information to promote the war against Communism.

Soon after the 'attacks' were announced, dozens of congressmen were calling invasions of North Vietnam, and then China, and/or Russia, if either of them dared retaliate. 

We've since learned that the misinformation was spread by the National Security Agency. Not for political reasons, but to cover up genuine mistakes they made during the second incident: their radar showed what they thought were approaching enemy warships, but which were, in truth, tricks of light that confused their equipment.

Nayirah al-Sabah was a woman in Kuwait who, in 1990, testified on the floor of the House of Representatives that she had personally witnessed Iraqi soldiers invade Kuwaiti hospitals and take newborn infants out of their incubators and throw them onto the cold floor to freeze to death.

Nayirah was invited primarily by Tom Lantos, who had made no secret of his desire that the U. S. retaliate against Iraq for its offenses against Kuwait.

It was Nayirah’s testimony that provided the largest part of the foundation for American public opinion in favor of military force against Iraq, and the CIA was responsible for organizing the funds and advertisements to disseminate Nayirah’s testimony. They enlisted the help of Hill & Knowlton, a global public relations corporation that specializes in marketing, to reach the masses.

It was not until 1992 that John MacArthur of the New York Times discovered Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador the U. S., and that her story had been utterly fabricated. Thus was it shown that the CIA assisted a few powers-that-were in America in waging war with Iraq for another purpose, and that purpose was oil.

The Iraqis did invade Kuwait and should not have done so, but they did not throw babies out of incubators. The nurses and doctors who supposedly witnessed this with Nayirah had already fled, and most of them stated that she was lying. The CIA had paid her to lie, and even paid for her to attend acting classes to appear convincing. It worked.

In 1951, the OSP (Office of Special Projects), renamed Office of Policy Coordination, soon merged with the CIA and became the agency’s covert paramilitary branch.

Its first and principle assignment was to influence national media toward the hatred and fear of Soviet Communism. The CIA funded the operation with money from the Marshall Plan, and bribed journalists and newspaper editors who grew wise to their ulterior motive.

Mockingbird led, directly and immediately, to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s rise to power.

The operation became so widespread that the CIA started influencing international media and even international politics. It was due in large part to Mockingbird that Guatemala staged a coup d’etat against Colonel Jacobo Guzman, whom the CIA deemed communist.

Mockingbird was responsible for $300,000 of the funding of the 1954 Animal Farm cartoon. They asked Walt Disney if he wanted to make the film, and he balked at the prospect. He was anti-Communist, but Disney wanted nothing to do with such a story.

Mockingbird also incited the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. David Bruce, appointed by Dwight Eisenhower to investigate this covert propaganda, stated that Mockingbird is responsible for over 50% of international politics over the last half of the 20th Century. 

The FBI referred to this as COINTELPRO, or Counter Intelligence Programs, specifically those targeted at activists of almost any organization from 1956 to 1971.

This government program was a systematic and organized effort by the US Federal government to investigate, infiltrate, discredit, and even sometimes destroy political groups deemed hostile to the US. During the years this program was known to operate, Martin Luther King was the primary spokesperson for civil rights in America, and the FBI considered him and his movement equivalent to the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the NAACP, the Congress for Racial Equality, and dozens of others all striving to attain equal rights for all races. Among the groups illegally infiltrated and damaged by COINTELPRO were communist organizations, others in the Civil Rights Movement, the Rainbow Coalition, the anti-war left, and women’s rights organizations.

COINTELPRO referred to all of these groups and movements as “black hate groups,” even the American Indian Movement, and spent 85% of its money on attempts to subvert them; the remaining 15% it spent on the subversion of “white hate groups” like the KKK.

All these domestic political organizations and movements, as the FBI labeled them, were deemed threats to national security. If Jesus would had shown up in America in the 20th Century, it is probable that the FBI would have considered him guilty of the same kind of sedition.

In general, COINTELPRO targeted the entire left wing of political thought; anyone liberal was seen as a danger to American society and slandered in print, sued or threatened with imprisonment, imprisoned, and illegally wiretapped.

What may well be the FBI’s most shocking atrocity occurred on 4 December 1969, when the home of Fred Hampton, a Black Panther Party officer, was invaded by the Chicago Police, who used deadly force against him and Mark Clark. Clark was shot first, and Hampton was unable to wake to the sound of gunfire because FBI agent William O’Neal had infiltrated their organization and spiked Hampton’s supper with barbiturates. The police shot him to death while he slept unarmed in bed.

A 1971 burglary of an FBI field office finally exposed the conspiracy, and it fell apart soon after.

In 1962, the entire board of the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed, drafted, and agreed on a plan to concoct a casus belli for war against Communist Cuba, under Fidel Castro. Their collective motive was to reduce the constant threat of Communist encroachment into the Western Hemisphere, per the Monroe Doctrine.

The Joint Chiefs are the 5 generals and admirals in charge of the 5 branches of the U. S military. In 1962, those men were George Decker (Army), David Shoup (Marines), Georg Anderson, Jr. (Navy), Curtis LeMay (Air Force), and Edwin Roland (Coast Guard), along with a few others, all chaired by Lyman Lemnitzer (Army). 

This plan, named "Operation Northwoods" entailed the most impossibly indifferent cruelty ever envisioned by a government against its own people.

In order to sway public sentiment in favor of the war, the Joint Chiefs planned to bomb high pedestrian-traffic areas in major American cities, including Miami, New York, Washington, D. C., and possibly Chicago and Los Angeles; to frame U. S. citizens for these bombings; to shoot innocent, unarmed civilians on the streets in full view of hundreds of witnesses; to napalm military and merchant vessels in port, while people were aboard; to sink vessels carrying Cuban refugees bound for Florida; to hijack planes for ransom.

Not only did every single member of the Joint Chiefs sign his approval of this plan, they then sent it to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for his approval, and then to President Kennedy. McNamara claimed years later never to have seen it, but that he would have rejected it (if he did actually see it). Kennedy, however, did receive it, and promptly called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, in which he threatened, with severe profanity, to court martial and incarcerate every one of them. The President cannot actually do this, but can order the Congress and military branches to do so, and in these circumstances, they most certainly would have. But Kennedy decided that it would cause irreparable disrespect around the world for the U. S. military. He did remove Lemnitzer from his position as Chairman and assign him as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, not much of a demotion.

Theorists claim that the military may have had a hand in Kennedy’s assassination because of his blistering rebuke of the Joint Chiefs, stance against the Federal Reserve, and compassion for the civil rights movement. Any 'official' involvement in his assassination, however, remains unproven.

Up until the trust-busting presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a small group of powerful and wealthy business owners conspired to monopolize their various business interests, and certain industries.

This was done through price-fixing, bribery, intimidation, union busting, and running small business into the ground through unfair competition. An enormous amount of wealth was eventually concentrated in a few giant combinations, called trusts, which were almost as powerful as the government.

These trusts (and monopolies) were eventually broken up through lawsuits and legislation, but many of their successor companies still corner the market today in oil, mining, manufacturing, and food production.

This shameful and racist conspiracy unfolded over decades, as the CDC knowingly withheld potentially lifesaving treatments from black men with syphilis under the guise of a medical experiment. Once the conspiracy became public, hearings were held and a $10 million settlement was reached for its victims – along with lifetime medical care for their families and no-cost burials.

The so-called “General Motors streetcar conspiracy” involved a pair of transportation companies buying up and dismantling electric trolley car lines in dozens of American cities. These two companies, which later merged into one trust, were heavily financed by car and truck producers, tire manufacturers, oil companies, and the monolithic Standard Oil.

While the government also had a role in destroying the burgeoning electric train industry, as well as the deep debt the trolley companies were in, it’s clear that there was some kind of conspiracy to knock out GM’s competition and monopolize the transportation industry.

The infamous MKULTRA experiment ran for 20 years starting in 1953, and involved citizens unknowingly being dosed with mind-altering LSD by CIA doctors to study effective ways to carry out mind control.

While the goal was to advance US intelligence and special operations capabilities, it failed miserably and violated every ethical code in any medical book anywhere. At one point, half a dozen unknowing subjects were given LSD for 77 days straight.

Hotel break in was a massive conspiracy at multiple levels of the Nixon administration to discredit the President’s opponents, steal secret documents, wiretap conversations and ensure Nixon’s reelection. Once it came to light, the revelation of the President of the United States either knowing about or actively being involved in a massive cover-up led to the beginning of articles of impeachment, arrests of major political figures, and soon thereafter, Nixon’s resignation. 

In the mid '90s, multiple conglomerates, including American industrial giant Archer Daniels Midland, conspired to fix prices of the animal feed additive lysine. The plot was uncovered by a whistle-blower and the FBI prosecuted the companies as an international cartel. ADM was fined $100 million for this and another conspiracy to fix the price of the chemical citric acid. The entire affair was dramatized in the 2011 Matt Damon film The Informant!

Dozens of baseball players and their clinicians were involved in a conspiracy to take steroids, obtain fraudulent prescriptions, and hide the effects of the drugs they were taking. Major League Baseball, at least to some extent, knew what was going on and looked the other way, as long as the players involved kept making money for the game and the league.

It finally fell apart when a 20 month Congressional investigation led to a long list of players who had taken illegal substances, and baseball instituted a new drug testing policy – under enormous fan and government pressure.

Executives at the pharmaceutical giant conspired to, among other things, illegally promote certain products to treat diseases off label, hide incriminating safety data that questioned the efficacy of these drugs, fix prices, and pay kickbacks to doctors in exchange for promoting their drugs. A massive criminal investigation followed, and GSK was fined $3 billion, the largest fine ever levied against any pharma company by any government. 

In July 2013, Apple agreed to settle a class action lawsuit for over $450 million, alleging that the computing monolith had conspired with five publishing companies to drive up e-book prices, in an effort to thwart Amazon. A Federal judge in New York agreed that the plot constituted a conspiracy to drive Amazon out of business and hurt competitive practices.

However, even after the decision, Amazon still controlled close to two-thirds of the e-book market, often fixing prices themselves, selling e-books at a loss to get customers to buy other products. 

Judge Tosses Court Case Against President Obama, referencing "A Miracle on 34th Street" as reason

Obama guts 'anti-insider trading bill'

When you can't generate propaganda organically, just get out your wallet and pay for it with someone else's money. That's the lesson behind a November 2015 press conference by Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain. They revealed that the Pentagon had spent nearly $9 million paying professional sports leagues to promote America.

Those big on-field displays of the American flag, heartfelt reunions with returning soldiers, and honoring veterans? All paid for by the Department of Defense to boost recruiting - an Orwellian nightmare combining our love of sports with our desire to let everyone know we "support the troops." And the worst part of it is that the study that the two Senators were quoting revealed the displays had no effect on recruitment numbers, only fattening the wallets of teams in the NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball.

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Illegal Alien Criminals Released BACK INTO SOCIETY (36,007 - in 2013 really... and then, despite the public fall out, the GOP speaking out against it and using some of the repeat offenders as examples, the obama administration turns around and dumps another 19,723 back into the American Society in 2014)

What TRUE conspiracies do you know of?? Which are Suspected... and DISPROVEN?? Send us a message, and maybe we'll add them to the appropriate list(s).