you to a common set of rules regardless of power position where person so you can look at for example contemporary legal scholars who write about the rule of law what they will over and over emphasize is that the rule of law requires the defining beauty of it is that nobody is above the law or nobody is below the law and nobody means nobody nobody is above the law nobody is below the law and you can more interestingly look at literature from the one nine hundred eighty s and one nine hundred ninety s this was during the time when western institutions led by the united states began lecturing the third world in the developing world a bout what it was that they had to do in order to comport with the rule of law are lots of journal articles written about what this term was supposed to mean in the seminal article the most influential article was written by thomas carruthers who was an official at the world bank and in one thousand nine hundred eight he published in the journal foreign affairs this article entitled the requirements of the rule of law it was intended to sermonize to third world countries what they ought to do and what he warned was that the way that you become a country not living under the rule of law the whole mark of a country that fails to live under the rule of law that is all this is that quote the ruling elites tendency to act extra legally where ever legal systems remain captives of the powers that be and he said that the most crucial challenge for a country that is of all is to become one that lives under the rule of laws that quote elites in the country must give up the habit of placing themselves above the law that was the defining requirement the idea that there is nobody above the law or below the law that even when our highest ranking political officials get caught breaking the law that they are subject to the same set of punishments and investigations and scrutiny and accountability as the most powerless american but that is literally not the principle that we apply any longer to the leading members of our political class the idea that people should be prosecuted when they commit crimes using th power that we basked them in office is the idea that is considered radical in french not the other way around it's the immunity that is truly radical but it's the idea that we should hold them accountable on equal terms that is now considered to be the explain most position you know in essence the since the story about a gangster and gangsters are out there taking their kids to college and taking their kids to school and putting food on the table and hell let's face it if the world in this nation was run by gangster in the name of anticommunism the proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the american public into supporting an ill conceived war they intended to night against cuba bombs would be blown up and again all the evidence was laid to point the finger at castro behaviors and entire society alexander the great is credited with one of the earliest recorded examples of the military side he was forced to retreat from conquered lands  agents of influence disguised as villagers from an already conquered region would be dispatched into enemy territory to warn the people of the horrors of waiting and to further intimidate earnings kind of ised a trick of light as darkness president eisenhower defined psychological warfare as anything from the singing of the beautiful and up to the most extraordinary kind black propaganda well let's start with the white propaganda what propaganda is propaganda persuasion new media operations of one sort or another that are openly acknowledged by their sponsors which in this particular case is the u s government so the voice of america except was white propaganda black propaganda on the other hand is disavowed by the agency that's sponsoring it operates on the basis of plausible to ny ability so that if something goes solid work or the the true goals of the true nature of the propaganda is revealed then the actual sponsor can say no that's we didn't do that we didn't have anything to do with that the accusation so we had something to do with it are just completely wrong there are fantasy and so on so black propaganda involves both media operations on the one hand persuasion publicity but typically it will be media that poses as opposed to the sponsor in order to comparatively of black propaganda there's a radio battle between east and west and one side or the other creates a radio station that poses as being the other side's voice and then says outlandish stupid provably false or very hostile things about the first side ok well then the first side can use that as it's all propaganda by saying see this is this is the people that we're dealing with they're completely nots or they're completely corrupt or they have no integrity or a whole range of other types of accusation in times past lax perpetrated by what lawrence kind of the u s army war college called a pseudo team individuals who are organized to impersonate enemy forces citing kermit roosevelt explicitly referred in his memoirs to the use of violence flag operations in the year two thousand new york times reporter james rising obtained a previously secret account of the coup written  the rise and explains in early august the c i eighty seeking to stir up anti communist sentiment in the villages community stepped up the pressure iranian operatives pretending to be demonstrations and finally the intervention by military leaders in the name of the restoration of order and national unity is  and british businesses were to be blamed on the muslim brotherhood according to israeli historian shuteye to that assignment was to undermine western confidence in the existing egypt by generating public insecurity support for the coup government we know that the action encouraged by the chavez government provoked this crisis the chavez government suppressed peaceful demonstrations fire on unarmed peaceful protesters resulting in ten killed and one hundred wounded  for forty years secret terrorist organizations many trained by western intelligence agencies have been appealing to the political control of european sovereign states by a campaign of terror and murder originally part of a secret network these groups changed from being defenders of state security into attackers of the established political order until two years ago that secret network was generally known by the single wo churchill intended to set up a secret european wide cell of military units that would basically be able to mobilize in response to a potential invasion of western europe of many western european countries and over time it evolved into a highly kind of disturbing form of covert action i  became much more than what churchill had originally described it was intended to be and in the end we have a situation where these are two cells were given the task of actually carrying out various kind of actions including terrorist activity in different parts of western europe in order to projected blame on to left wing no soviet army to repel the fashions increasingly focused on what they regarded as the  operation gladio and related programs in other european nations were kept secret for decades but eventually revealed in a series of judicial in congressional investigation every level that will create a feeling of hostility at the same time we must rise up as defender of the citizenry against the disintegration brought about by terrorism incident even more explicit and my wife screamed and we had basically waves of terrorist bombings and atrocities carried out in turkey in italy in greece spain in many parts of western europe and in all of these cases we have strong evidence that these these instances were asked immobilized by these secret cells that were caught by nato y c did happen in subsequently is that the civilian governments of these countries did respond to these atrocities believing them to have been conducted by left wing groups and it did create a massive kind of drive against left wing movements to encroach on civil liberties too to clearly something which is routinely conducted under the radar it's often conducted in such a way that civilian administrations on not fully aware of what is going on and to be honest with you i think this is not recently come to russia i mean anyone who is genuinely studied covert operations and the deed the nature of structure of intelligence agencies will be aware that the whole point of  is precisely to conceal it from public awareness the danger is clearly that when you have a case like operation gladio or the strategy of tension documented during the cold war this really reveals how chinese region of manchuria the attacks were blamed on chinese men reviving a pretext for the japanese to in then left his body at the crime scene in order to keep the in this case the result was nothing less than world war two most likely not necessary to start wars but they serve an important function they allow the aggressor state to p demonstration of the unity of the country behind the policies that are being followed by the president in south vietnam and more specifically of the action that was taken in response to the attack upon our destroye to relay whatever the government says happened rather than in first think gaden and greater depth the circumstances surrounding these are false flag operations so they're successful to the good to greedy and which they monopolize the government and them and the mass media conform to the message which has been sort of sent out remain one of the biggest taboos in journalism there has been an explosion of conspiracy theories flying fast and furious over the internet those conspiracy people a lot of the conspiracy theories of course not a lot of conspiracy theory goes back to the bush era  conspiracy mongering fringe conspiracy theorists here in spears the people who foment conspiracy theories raising conspiracy theories full blown american conspiracy theories conspiracy theories are a great american pastime and not all of them are on the right despite the on the left as well never told a soul about in fact being gaijin a vast conspiracy you get accused of being conspiracy theories and speculation and conspiracy theories let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories parroting this type of picture only or have some around their house you know there have always been crazy people who gravitate if they have schizophrenia gravitate toward conspiracy theories always true believers in the mystic power of new age crystals spirit channeling of people who talk to trees and i don't consider myself a conspiracy buff at all but when they get a lot of when students as i get a little suspicious and how does this term conspiracy theory used and what are what are the purposes that it's use for it conspiracy theories a little bit like the word propaganda and it's you specifically to discredit someone and to say you know fact you're nuts you're making it up or you don't know when you know you don't have knowledge about this or that you're irrational that's that's the description of a conspiracy theory so that is a very effective way and frequently used in the mass media and by media commentators and reporters as a means of discrediting points of view that say they don't agree with a conspiracy theory is a term that's used when ever anybody ascribes conscious intent to people with power so i can say to you that school teaches but concerned about this salaries and they're organizing and they're threatening a strike in the pressuring i can say to you that farmers are doing this and looking for subsidies and and facing certain policies but the minute i say to you that the very people at the top of the plutocracy the very rich and powerful the ones who own most of america that they are consciously pursuing power and wealth someone will come along and say what you have a conspiracy theory or that say oh you're cynical or you're paranoid their view is that stuff just happens things just happen unintended consequences for our leaders are stupid and they're jerks or they're confused and they don't know any better and of course the critic knows much better than everybody else people who operate in this world operate with intent and that there's no such thing as imperialism without imperialist is no such thing as capitalism without capitalists there's no such thing as rulers who are some nebulous who walk around in their sleep you watch out for your interests you watch out you make a calculation what makes you think that david rockefeller doesn't what makes you think that the the people of top don't do it and what makes you think they don't collude in organize or what do you think you have a group of people who sit around in a room and they plan this and i always say oh no god they don't sit around the room they meet on carousel  become the primary scapegoat two thousand and eight the john mccain presidential campaign twenty eight million copies documentary obsession jesting that muslims are these are the big players in the world right now on the things that are happening big education is fundamentally involved in everything that is happening sorrels the tides foundation open society anonymous is now starting to occupy wall street islamic extremism or ran the white house and the media these are all the real players that are causing so many problems right now what's a conspiracy and was to what's every thing that somebody says happened does that mean that that's actually happened some of the stuff that people believe about the c or the national security state or jews or black people or wall street or you know you name it liberal media and right wing media some of the things that people believe about all of those controversies these are not true and so we get into a situation in which the accusation that a conspiracy exists or that there's a plan afoot to do something becomes a powerful political tool one of the most powerful tools of propaganda is rumors rumor mongering and  elections you can see it in the international affairs and so forth rumors appeal to people's primal fears fears about race fears about gender fears about the relationship between themselves and an authority those sorts of things and there are plenty of people out there who will exploit those fears and it's quite difficult for ordinary people who are living their lives to card out what is just nonsense from what is incredible yet real this no simple solution to this problem present to the media tends to encourage people to believe in knots by giving credibility to it on the one hand and on the other hand often times not always denying the reality of evidence that is substantial i think that the way to get  social scene is to keep it open lawyer investigate carefully not to believe in stuff that you don't understand we as scholars teachers media people just ordinary citizens should know propagate stuff that they don't understand or that they don't have factual support for you know the term conspiracy theory is a very interesting one  is of course applied to almost anything that's perceived as threatening any kind of broader attempt to exploit it explains specific events there certainly are people and elements out there that create these explanations for everything and those are potentially dangerous because they duly discreet goading on the other hand there are actual people actual covert operations actual things happening that we don't know about and it's very very important to understand them i mean they are fundamentally conspiracies which simply means several people colluding in a secret and illegal operation conspiracies are prosecuted every day in the courtrooms of this country and is what we used to try to understand things so i find the term conspiracy theory a broad brush pejorative which i think is designed to suppress discussion i do think we need to distinguish between those who see a bogeyman everywhere and those who do careful research and come to the conclusion in particular cases that there was some sort of an organized effort to do something perhaps to remove a president or to achieve some other change which the