The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

by Jon E. Lewis

  Nearly fifty years later, the weight of evidence is that the “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin was a fabricated pretext for the US to step up its involvement in Vietnam. In the words of the US Navy Historical Center, “North Vietnamese naval forces did not attack Maddox and Turner Joy that night.’ The defense secretary at the time, Robert McNamara, admitted in a 2001 TV documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, that the US “initiated the action”. The same documentary revealed that five weeks before Tonkin, Johnson had told McNamara over the phone, “I want to be able to trap these people [the North Vietnamese].”

  Lyndon B. Johnson was gunning for war. By the tramlines of his morality, Johnson acted justifiably in escalating the conflict with a “white lie” because he hoped to keep the people of South Vietnam free of Communist totalitarianism. Less generously, Professor Peter Dale Scott has suggested that Johnson was encouraged by the oil corporations to intervene, since they wanted control of the “considerable offshore oil deposits in the South China Sea”. In this oily scenario President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated for his peacenik signing of National Security Action Memorandum 263, which reduced the number of military advisors in South Vietnam. The oil boys wanted more army boots on the ground, not less.

  Why exactly the Tonkin Gulf incident was faked up may never be known, but faked it was.

  Further Reading

  Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 1972

  DOCUMENT: TONKIN GULF RESOLUTION AND US SENTATE DEBATE

  Eighty-eighth Congress of the United States of America

  AT THE SECOND SESSION

  Begun and held at the City of Washington on Tuesday, the seventh day of January, one thousand nine hundred and sixty-four

  Joint Resolution

  To promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia.

  Whereas naval units of the Communist regime in Vietnam, in violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law, have deliberately and repeatedly attacked United States naval vessels lawfully present in international waters, and have thereby created a serious threat to international peace; and Whereas these attackers are part of deliberate and systematic campaign of aggression that the Communist regime in North Vietnam has been waging against its neighbors and the nations joined with them in the collective defense of their freedom; and Whereas the United States is assisting the peoples of southeast Asia to protect their freedom and has no territorial, military or political ambitions in that area, but desires only that these people should be left in peace to work out their destinies in their own way: Now, therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.

  Section 2. The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. Consonant with the Constitution of the United States and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.

  Section 3. This resolution shall expire when the President shall determine that the peace and security of the area is reasonably assured by international conditions created by action of the United Nations or otherwise, except that it may be terminated earlier by concurrent resolution of the Congress

  Senate Debate: [Extracts]

  MR. NELSON:

  [Gaylord Nelson, Dem.-Wis.] … Am I to understand that it is the sense of Congress that we are saying to the executive branch: “If it becomes necessary to prevent further aggression, we agree now, in advance, that you may land as many divisions as deemed necessary, and engage in a direct military assault on North Vietnam if it becomes the judgment of the Executive, the Commander in Chief, that this is the only way to prevent further aggression”?

  MR. FULBRIGHT:

  [William Fulbright, Dem.-Ark] As I stated, section 1 is intended to deal primarily with aggression against our forces … I do not know what the limits are. I do not think this resolution can be determinative of that fact. I think it would indicate that he [the President] would take reasonable means first to prevent any further aggression, or repel further aggression against our own forces … I do not know how to answer the Senator’s question and give him an absolute assurance that large numbers of troops would not be put ashore. I would deplore it …

  MR. NELSON: … My concern is that we in Congress could give the impression to the public that we are prepared at this time to change our mission and substantially expand our commitment. If that is what the sense of Congress is, I am opposed to the resolution. I therefore ask the distinguished Senator from Arkansas if he would consent to accept an amendment [that explicitly says Congress wants no extension of the present military conflict and no U.S. direct military involvement].

  MR. FULBRIGHT: … The Senator has put into his amendment a statement of policy that is unobjectionable. However, I cannot accept the amendment under the circumstances. I do not believe it is contrary to the joint resolution, but it is an enlargement. I am informed that the House is now voting on this resolution. The House joint resolution is about to be presented to us. I cannot accept the amendment and go to conference with it, and thus take responsibility for delaying matters .

  MR. GRUENING: [Ernest Gruening, Dem.-Alaska] … Regrettably, I find myself in disagreement with the President’s Southeast Asian policy … The serious events of the past few days, the attack by North Vietnamese vessels on American warships and our reprisal, strikes me as the inevitable and foreseeable concomitant and consequence of U.S. unilateral military aggressive policy in Southeast Asia … We now are about to authorize the President if he sees fit to move our Armed Forces … not only into South Vietnam, but also into North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and of course the authorization includes all the rest of the SEATO nations. That means sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business. which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is steadily being escalated. This resolution is a further authorization for escalation unlimited. I am opposed to sacrificing a single American boy in this venture. We have lost far too many already …

  MR. MORSE: [Wayne Morse, Dem.-Ore.] … I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States … I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.

  SOURCE: Congressional Record. August 6–7, 1964. Pp. 18132–33, 18406–7, 18458–59, and 18470–71.

  TURIN SHROUD

  The Turin Shroud is a 14-feet long strip of linen that carries the faint image of a long-haired man with a beard. A man with wounds consistent with crucifixion. A man with the mark of a lance wound in his side. A man with cuts along his forehead as though he had worn a crown of thorns.

  Jesus Christ! (As it were.) The Shroud of Turin is the shroud in which the Saviour was buried, his image being transferred onto the cloth!

  Well, maybe.

  Ever since the shroud appeared in northern France around 1350, there have been doubts about its authenticity. One of its first caretakers, local Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, was convinced it was a fraud, just one of the forty or so doing the round of medieval cathedrals to entice the pilgrim trade. A papal edict even banned its owners from calling it the real shroud of Jesus.

  Not until the 1960s
did anyone much care about the shroud, when the Catholic Church set up a commission to determine the relic’s authenticity. The commission’s report, issued in 1976, found that pollen in the shroud suggested that the relic might have come from Palestine but the red on the cloth was paint not blood. In 1988, radiocarbon dating of small samples of the relic by three different teams of researchers (viz. Oxford University, Arizona University, Swiss Institute of Technology) all concluded that the cloth was woven between AD 1260 and 1390. Case for it’s-a-fake closed? Not quite. Other scientists assert that the carbon14-dating was thrown off course by 1,300 years because of the use of a bioplastic coating. And the red paint is from pilgrims holding pictures against the cloth in the hope of miraculous powers being transferred. Historian Ian Wilson, author of The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World’s Most Sacred Relic is Real, accounts for the gaping lack of mentions of the shroud before 1389 by claiming it was the Edessan icon relocated. Meanwhile, Richard Levi-Setti of the Enrico Fermi Institute and Joseph Kohlbeck from the Hercules Aerospace Company in Utah found tiny particles of travertine aragonite limestone on the relic; the chemical signatures of the Shroud samples and the limestone from ancient tombs around Jerusalem were identical.

  Muddying the matter are alternative historians who mate the Turin Shroud mystery with their own pet conspiracy. Here Kersten and Gruber take the prize with The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the Resurrection. According to Kersten and Gruber science proves that the Shroud is real and that Jesus was wrapped in it whilst … alive. After three days of rest and recuperation Jesus then went off with Mary Magdalene. Second prize for conspiracy crossbreeding goes to Knights Templar occultists who claim that the shroud is that of Grand Master Jacques de Molya, burned at the stake in 1314 by the Inquisition.

  The Turin Shroud is a riddle wrapped in a mystery. Even if it was forged in the fourteenth century, the maker’s method befuddles contemporary scientists because the image looks like a photographic negative.

  On this one, the jury is still out.

  Further Reading

  Holger Kersten and Elmar R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the Resurrection, 1992

  Joe Nickell, Inquest on the Shroud of Turin: Latest Scientific Findings, 1998

  Brendan Whiting, The Shroud Story, 2006

  Ian Wilson, The Shroud: The 2000-Year-Old Mystery Solved, 2010

  TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY

  There are conspiracies that make you nervous, there are conspiracies that make you mad. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is the conspiracy that will make you weep with grief.

  Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease which, if untreated, can lead to blindness, crippling loss of muscle control, devastating internal damage, followed by an excruciatingly painful death.

  In 1932, a clinical study by the Public Health Department began in Tuskegee, Alabama, on 399 syphilitic black men. Mostly poor, illiterate sharecroppers, the men were informed that they were being treated for “bad blood”, and were enticed into participation by free meals, a “Thank You” certificate from the surgeon general’s office, and a $50 insurance payment to cover their funeral fees. The research programme, properly the “Tuskagee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”, was modelled on a study of white men in Norway, and started off with at least some legitimate intentions: at the time there was no viable cure for syphilis and proper questions were asked about treatments, some of which were likely doing more harm than good. Arsenic, for instance, was a popular “cure”. A sponsor of the study was the prestigious black college the Tuskagee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington.

  Fast forward to 1947. By then, the wonder drug penicillin was widely available, and was extremely effective in treating syphilis. Obviously, the Tuskagee researchers offered penicillin – in effect, life – to the black subjects of the study. Didn’t they?

  No, they did not. Instead the “doctors” allowed the disease to run its course in the affected men, so they could record what would happen. There is also evidence that the doctors contacted the personal physicians of the men to ensure that they did not administer antibiotics.

  Eventually, in 1966, Peter Buxtun, a PHS venereal-disease investigator from San Francisco discovered what was going down in Tuskegee and sent a letter to the director of the Division of Venereal Diseases to express his concerns about the morality of the study. The Center for Disease Control (CDC), which by then controlled the study, reaffirmed the necessity of continuing the study until all the subjects were dead. When he failed to alter the CDC’s mind, Buxtun blew the whistle, and in July 1972 the story broke in the Washington Star. It became front page news in the New York Times, which called the Tuskegee Syphilis Study “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history”.

  A public outcry ensured that the “research” ceased, and in time laws were passed governing medical experiments. Of the original 399 Tuskagee men, there were seventy-four survivors; twenty-eight had died of syphilis and a hundred of syphilis-related illnesses; over forty of their wives were infected, and nineteen children were born with congenital syphilis. A compensation package of $9 million was awarded to the Tuskagee men and their families. It was agreed to provide free medical treatment to surviving participants and to surviving family members infected as a consequence of the study. On 16 May 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized and held a ceremony for the survivors in the White House.

  DOCUMENT: THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS RELEASE, MAY 16, 1997 [EXTRACTS]

  REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT IN APOLOGY FOR STUDY DONE IN TUSKEGEE

  The East Room 2.26 P.M. EDT

  THE PRESIDENT: Ladies and gentlemen, on Sunday, Mr. Shaw will celebrate his 95th birthday. (Applause.) I would like to recognize the other survivors who are here today and their families: Mr. Charlie Pollard is here. (Applause.) Mr. Carter Howard. (Applause.) Mr. Fred Simmons. (Applause.) Mr. Simmons just took his first airplane ride, and he reckons he’s about 110 years old, so I think it’s time for him to take a chance or two. (Laughter.) I’m glad he did. And Mr. Frederick Moss, thank you, sir. (Applause.)

  I would also like to ask three family representatives who are here – Sam Doner is represented by his daughter, Gwendolyn Cox. Thank you, Gwendolyn. (Applause.) Ernest Hendon, who is watching in Tuskegee, is represented by his brother, North Hendon. Thank you, sir, for being here. (Applause.) And George Key is represented by his grandson, Christopher Monroe. Thank you, Chris. (Applause.)

  I also acknowledge the families, community leaders, teachers and students watching today by satellite from Tuskegee. The White House is the people’s house; we are glad to have all of you here today. I thank Dr. David Satcher for his role in this. I thank Congresswoman Waters and Congressman Hilliard, Congressman Stokes, the entire Congressional Black Caucus. Dr. Satcher, members of the Cabinet who are here, Secretary Herman, Secretary Slater, members of the Cabinet who are here, Secretary Herman, Secretary Slater. A great friend of freedom, Fred Gray, thank you for fighting this long battle all these long years.

  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 ideals, 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 today 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.

  Medical pe
ople are supposed to help when we need care, but even once a cure was discovered, they were denied help, and they were lied to by their government. Our government is supposed to protect the rights of its citizens; their rights were trampled upon. Forty years, hundreds of men betrayed, along with their wives and children, along with the community in Macon County, Alabama, the City of Tuskegee, the fine university there, and the larger African American community.

  The United States government did something that was wrong – deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. To the survivors, to the wives and family members, the children and the grandchildren, I say what you know: No power on Earth can give you back the lives lost, the pain suffered, the years of internal torment and anguish. What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry. (Applause.)

  The American people are sorry – for the loss, for the years of hurt. You did nothing wrong, but you were grievously wronged. I apologize and I am sorry that this apology has been so long in coming. (Applause.)

  To Macon County, to Tuskegee, to the doctors who have been wrongly associated with the events there, you have our apology, as well. To our African American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist. That can never be allowed to happen again. It is against everything our country stands for and what we must stand against is what it was.