 |
| I Got The Picture From Google. It's Him ... Or Is It!? |
The Omnivore: Hello Professor Tracey!
James Tracey: Hello.
TO: I wanted to start with a question--I know the conventional narrative for the Boston Bombing or Sandy Hook shooting. But it seems there's two conflicting counter narratives. The first is that it's a False-Flag attack where the CIA with Navy SEALS special operators perpetrates the bombing and blames Islamic extremists. The Second is that there are these "crisis actors" and fake blood and that it's a drill or something.
This seems contradictory to me: if I have Navy SEALS and real bombs I don't need actors. If I have actors and fake blood and prosthesis I don't need real bombs. Can you set that straight for me? What do we think really happened?
 |
| Alleged Navy SEALS Compared to Alleged Boston Bombers. The Punisher Wants To SUE |
 |
| This is Only A Drill. Promise. |
I'm quite certain that the one at the finish line is not genuine and overall, even if you take both scenes the idea of there being 267 causalities is extremely inflated. If both of those bombs were real you might have causalities of 100 or less.
If you look at the immediate aftermath of the first bomb there aren't that many people involved and they aren't' that traumatized--they're merely reacting to the volume (sound) of the blast.
TO: Do you think anyone was actually killed?
JT: I don't think so.
TO: Do you think anyone was actually killed in Sandy Hook?
JT: That's harder because we don't really have photographs or video or the like. Who knows? There may have been children who turned up missing--taken away of their families in some way shape or form ... it's difficult to say.
TO: If you took children away from their families I would expect them to want to see the bodies and stuff. I'd expect that to be all over the place. Do you think people were hurt in Boston?
JT: I Think there were some injuries. If you look at the website of the Forum Restaurant they have a notice up saying they are under repairs and there were several injuries. But what is "several"? Six? Eight? It's not 100.
TO: I don't think that 200 number is legs blown off--that's like any sort of injury from any source.
JT: The newspaper accounts don't distinguish how many people were injured in which bombing.
TO: True. I have seen a graph of people crossing the finish line and it seems there were a lot of people there.
JT: No athletes and no one in the race were hit. Shrapnel didn't penetrate the scaffolding--which seems unusual.
TO: Okay--let's do evidence in a moment--For now I want to talk about the scenario Who is behind this? The CIA? FEMA? The White House?
JT: I think it's Homeland Security and the FBI at least. The FBI is largely in the business of creating terror: They have to create the terror to perpetuate the war on terror both at home and abroad (We have other agencies working abroad). This is an instance of manufactured terror.
We see a lot of talk about the use of actors in these drills--in their literature and stuff.
TO: I was actually in a drill for a mock accident with makeup and stuff. It was a school bus being hit by a truck or something.
JT: I have a video of a scenario like that from north Florida.
TO This was like forty years ago or so. I was in second grade--but it was a real drill--with semi-professional makeup and burnt clothing and stuff. So certainly those drills do happen as drills.
JT: The duck-and-cover excises from the 50's were like that too--much simpler--but real drills.
TO: Do you think President Obama is aware of the conspiracy?
JT: I think that he's generally somewhat removed from these operations. I think that there is an expressed intent to create an environment of increased gun control and increased police state measures so they're involved in a fairly round about way.
TO: But if we start with the Oklahoma bombing and we go through 9/11 in 2001 and then to 2012 and today that's three presidential administrations with very different guys. If we put Obama, Bush, and Clinton in a room together, I don't think they'd agree on too much.
JT: I think on larger issues like economic policy and the military industrial complex there's that much disagreement. Other issues like abortion or gay marriage--
TO: But in terms of gun rights, I think Bush is a hunter--
JT: I'm doing some research on the Oklahoma city bombing. I think it's very important--a very important event. If you look at that more closely in a historical context you'll realize that the patriot movement was gaining traction at the time and there was a move to appeal the assault weapons ban and that was about to be voted on and it was knocked off the rails.
TO: Why do you think these people care about assault weapons. If I'm willing to kill American children--I'm going all out black helicopters or FEMA concentration camps--or ecological control (which I don't think Bush would agree to) that's pretty extreme. What end game that justifies blowing up the world trade center? It has to be more than banning assault rifles.
JT: I think the World Trade Centers was an attempt to justify this expensive attack into the Middle East.
TO: We went into Afghanistan first--I'd think if we planned on going in somewhere we'd go somewhere with oil--like Saudi Arabia.
JT: Saudi Arabia is very close with the Bush family.
TO: Okay--how about Iraq or Iran?
JT: I think it was supposed to get us to Iraq.
TO: But Iraq was a disaster. If I planned to go in and staged an attack to justify it, wouldn't I also plan to plant some WMD? Make sure we found it on like day 3. But--back to assault weapons: are the conspirators planning to subjugate the US and they have to get rid of assault weapons to do that?
JT: I think so. I think that may have something to do with that.
TO: But there are millions of assault weapons already sold in the US. Tons of ammunition. It'll be good for 100 years. What will banning them do?
JT: It'll make it more difficult for law abiding citizens to own them.
TO: But these are already out there. If I went to gun owners I know and said "start handing them out"--there are a lot of them already out there. I think the horse left the barn. Also, no one is trying to ban hand guns. There was this gun called the Liberator--ultra cheap, one shot--and it came with a comic strip that showed using the gun to kill a soldier and take his rifle.
So how does this take over work? The TSA? Half of them are going to quit--they won't fight. They're doofuses. The army is also more ideologically diverse--you're going to lose a lot of them--and you're dealing with a heavily armed populace.
So what does this look like? I do my stuff and I make it illegal to sell assault weapons and I'm decades away from seizing power. No one in charge will ever see this happen in their administration.
JT: That's true--the elected leaders won't see it happen. That's probably true.
TO: The average CIA director lasts 3.09 years. The average FEMA director is 2.40. Presidents get two terms. Is their end-game 50 or 100 years out?
JT: I Think they're generally fulfilling roles--positions. I don't think they're in charge--I don't think Obama is either.
TO: Do you think it's the Illuminati--a power beyond America? Do you think it's bad-actors in middle management?
JT: I think it's a select number of individuals who are influential in the corporate sector and the financial sector--banking and what-not.
TO: Banking?
JT: That's part of it.
TO: I know some banking guys--that's my day job. It's not like I'm having lunch of the president of Bank of America or anything but I've seen what their days are like--these are guys at the top or near it. Their days are like slices of five minute meetings where they are slammed with work, trying desperately to make an informed decision with minimal information. You can't get on their calendars for months.
I don't see them having an extra week of the week to be plotting insurrection.
JT: Like CEOs?
TO: CEOs, COOs--CTOs. Pretty up-there guys. Guys you'd need.
JT: They're just filling a function as well because they're good at what they do. But there are guys above that. Owners.
TO: The board of directors. That's true--but come on: if the Board of Directors orders Vickram Pandit--ex-CEO of Citi--who they later kicked out--and they order him to capitalize on this "thing that is going to happen"--there's a chance it'll explode on contact.
If he realizes that he's being asked to make money or something off 20 dead kids there's no guarantee he'll go along with that. Same with the army guys. I know plenty of army guys--and there are so many diverse people there. I don't think these people will go along with "Operation Seize America."
One last thing on the plan: We have total control over the CIA, FEMA, Navy SEALS, Obama--they can't control House Republicans? Is the solution then to vote Tea Party forever more because they're beyond control?
The assault weapons ban totally failed. They defeated background checks.
JT: They didn't move as quickly as they needed to. The window of time when Sandy Hook took place was like 2-3 weeks.
TO: I listened to the Slate political podcast and they said that if Obama had moved in the first month we'd all be talking about how crass it was for him to be using the tragedy to push his agenda. So now we'd be talking about how it failed because he was tasteless.
If these guys are good at demolitions, maybe they're not so good at mass manipulation.
JT: They got us to sign onto the UN Assault Weapons ban.
TO: That's so we don't sell those to other regimes. As an American citizen I'm not real fired up about people in other countries having weapons. I'd prefer we not be selling them.
JT: Well, it could be the basis for disarming civilians inside the US at home.
TO: Isn't that kind of slippery-slope? There's nothing in that bill that suggests it could be used here. Wouldn't even trying that cause an insurrection?
JT: It was done in Australia and not the UK.
TO: Yeah--and the Australia hasn't exactly slid into dystopia.
JT: The weapon bans came off of indignation over events like this.
TO: Yeah but come on--door-to-door weapon searches would be cause for revolution here.
JT: They were doing door-to-door searches in Boston.
TO: True--but they weren't seizing things. We haven't read about coincident mass arrests for pirated software and cocaine they found. People believed those guys were dangerous. Was there actual damage from this? No one said "you can't come in."
JT: Why should they. We don't know if these guys even did anything. Or if these bombs were as deadly as the media claimed they are. As far as I'm concerned it's just smoke and mirrors.
TO: Okay--but back to the Senate. Once the conspirators realized the bill would die why not just seize a Senator's families and forcing them to pass the bill? If I have total control over the media and the CIA or whatever--why can a Senator hold out?
JT: I Don't think power is being exerted in that way. I don't think one could be that blatant. I think it's more furtive. Look at Senator Paul Wellstone. He would've been a strong opponent of the invasion of Iraq and his plane went down in very suspicious circumstances in 2002. But I don't think it'll be done in a whole-hog kind of way to push a bill through.
I think Congress leaves a lot to be desired but I think it requires popular opinion to act.
I think 9/11 was an event that traumatize the country and galvanized public opinion in such a way that the Bush administration was actually pushed to go into Afghanistan which they wanted to anyway (if you look at the documents).
TO: Okay--let's talk about the evidence. My problem with the pictures that we've seen is that none of us are photo-analysts. There's this site where a blog author posted a picture of one of the bomb sites. I looked at it and I saw chairs standing up and glass windows in one piece and stuff and I said "this doesn't look like a bomb site to me."
The blog author was apparently in the CIA and stuff and said "No, that's exactly what an IED site looks like. I concluded: I was not an expert and I was not qualified to judge. So I don't really know. but I do know this: when Reddit went on the case they examined lots of photographic evidence and it was compelling, but it turns out it was wrong.
 |
| Not the Bombers. |
So I pulled up a bunch of photographic evidence as a test and using your pictures I find that if I believe the photos then I also believe in:
- Bigfoot
- UFOs
- And they faked the moon landings.
 |
| Does Bigfoot Have a Backpack? |
- And that Obama faked his birth certificate--well, not that--but I have some expertise.
Do you think Obama faked his birth certificate?
JT: The one he released later? Yes I do.
TO: Why?
JT: Because it has multiple layers.
TO: If you take your birth certificate and you scan it and you don't turn off Optical Character Recognition it'll have layers too. Because the scanner software tries to make sense of the writing as other layers so you can do searches and stuff.
JT: Okay.
TO: That's my little piece of document analysis expertise.
JT: His alleged autobiography isn't very believable also.
TO: Okay--but ... do you believe Bigfoot exists?
JT: I don't know I--
TO: UFOs? Fake Moon-Landing? They say there can't be a moon landing--the same techniques that I'd use to conclude that the bombing was fake would prove the Moon Landing was fake. Do you think that might be true?
 |
| Fake Rock 'C-Series.' C is for Capricorn One. |
TO: Do you believe the Holocaust happened?
JT: I'm not an expert or a scholar of the Holocaust. One would have to look at it more closely. But there are some beliefs that we as a culture have that have to be interrogated more closely.
TO: Have you ever been to the state of Hawaii?
JT: Yes.
TO: Washington State?
JT: Yes.
TO: Any state you haven't been to?
JT: Many.
TO: Do you believe they exist?
JT: Yes.
TO: Good. Global Warming?
JT: No. There's a huge amount of money in foundations and research.
TO: But there's huge money in oil too.
JT: It's whether or not CO2 emissions are causing a greenhouse effect. It's about why. I think the true science disproves their theories. I'd point to their methods--the idea that the earth is heating to such and such temperature and it's linked to carbon dioxide is valid.
TO: Well, okay--back to Bigfoot. As far as I can tell the photo-evidence for Bigfoot is great if the story doesn't otherwise not make too much sense: one has never been found. For the actors and fake legs story I would say that the photos may or may not show something--but the story doesn't seem to make sense.
If someone sees people taking off a fake leg the whole thing is blown. The plan of faking mass casualties seems so risky--so fraught with error that it damages my ability to believe it. What would we do about about the many people in emergency rooms all over the city.
JT: I'm not sure. It's a bigger question. Boston is much more finite.
TO: Yeah but isn't the same thing. If there's multitudes of people saying the same thing whether it's about Boston or Global Warming isn't that the same question? Isn't it more likely that if scores of independent people are telling the same story that they're telling the truth?
JT: I think there is an impulse amongst most of us, highly educated or not, to defer to the system. To believe that if most people are saying "it happened" to believe that it happened. To believe that the media would not lie to us. That experts would not lie to us. That governments would not lie to us. But Governments do lie and our government is one of the biggest liars.
The media are, to a large degree, controlled. I do not believe they are truth-tellers and if they could do what they did to sell us 9/11 and this war on terror, then this is really small potatoes.
TO: I knew who Bin Laden was prior to 9/11--I read Messages To The World which is his manifestos, all annotated to explain what he was talking about. Unless those are all totally made up, 9/11 isn't out of character at all. What's implausible about 9/11? Did Bin Laden exist?
JT: He existed. He worked for America for most of his career.
TO: We armed the Taliban in the context of the cold war. But Bin Laden was no fan of our form of government.
JT: Yeah, that's probably true. But he's not capable of doing what took place on 9/11. He couldn't wire the towers and building 7 to explode.
TO: I've seen those arguments--but the majority of the scientists I've seen come down on the side that a fully fueled airplane could bring down the towers by weakening the steel.
JT: I can't accept that. I don't think it's scientifically--
TO: Why not? We're not material scientists.
JT: It was a controlled demolition. In every building collapse they could recover almost all of the bodies. In that case over 1100 bodies were turned into dust.
TO: Those were two of the biggest buildings in the world and I'm not aware of any other buildings hit by fully fueled jumbo-jets.
JT: They were designed to withstand being hit by jet-liners.
TO: They were designed to withstand being hit by airplanes--but a fully fueled jet? I don't know about that--and the plane hit it at speed ... I could see saying "Are you sure?" But I gotta defer to the experts. I can't be 100% sure but I see no compelling reason to say it couldn't have worked.
JT: There's over 1000 engineers for 9/11 truth. That's over 1000 people--maybe more. I think they put together a very compelling argument.
[ NOTE: You can read some criticism / analysis here. ]
TO: We do agree that planes hit the buildings? Yes?
JT: Yes. But we're not sure that all the alleged people are really dead. Some of them have been found alive since then. [ This is true. Although cases of mistaken identities were resolved fairly quickly. ] Which brings up a Sandy Hook question: who were these children whose pictures we have here. Have they all been identified?
There should be autopsies and death certificates and the like and journalists don't even have that. They don't even have a death certificate for Adam Lanza [ Also True. The Certificate will be released when complete--Huffington Post has requested one on as of Feb 11th and apparently it has not been released yet. ] bringing into question that he was the perpetrator.
It reminds me of the same questions around the 19 hijackers or however many there were. These people had their pictures produced--and this was them--and yet some of them still showed up alive. Some were pilots and such--but they're alive and well in other countries.
TO: Okay. So even if some data isn't correct it still takes a massive amount of proof to overturn something as big as the Holocaust or similar. I've seen all these Bigfoot pictures. I've seen the analysis of the Boston pictures--nothing there is compelling enough to make me decide the conspiracy theories suddenly make more sense than the conventional narrative.
JT: Did you see pictures of severed limbs in the Boston pictures?
TO: No--generally not.
JT: I couldn't see any of that.
TO: But we're seeing a select group of pictures well away from the fact. If 'Joe the medic' shows up and he's not part of the conspiracy and there are tons of problems [ such as people without limbs--but no sign of the limb or enough blood ] he's going to know something is very, very wrong. There has to be, like, hundreds of those people.
JT: Not if it's a controlled drill.
TO: How do you control a drill at the finish line? As soon as the noise-maker goes off, some people are going to go in the direction of the blast.
JT: It was cordoned off by police.
TO: But in the immediate aftermath there are going to be people coming out of shops or going to windows to look ...
JT: People won't run towards the explosion.
TO: What if someone exits the shop into the "blast area."
JT: I think most people would be terrified.
TO: Yeah--but everyone? People with cell phone cameras are taking pictures right away and on twitter instantly. It seems like a terrible risk to stage something that I want to keep secret in a place with more cameras than anywhere else in the city.
JT: The Boston Police department was having drills that day anyway.
TO: I've heard that said. That there were claims of drills. But if I were going to set off an explosion I'm not sure I'd want a drill there that day--and published on my website--and then have a terror event go off. If I were going to do that I might not want a drill there at all. I need all those people to keep the secret.
JT: But the event is the drill.
TO: But then they'll go "it's a drill." Doctors in hospitals won't see people come in. People will say "I was on that drill group." There'd be scores if these were just innocent actors. There's like 15 to 30 people there. Unless they're in on it, they'll be talking immediately to the press.
JT: Perhaps they signed non-disclosure forms.
TO: I've signed a billion NDA's. Nothing that would keep me quiet about a massacre / conspiracy I was a part of as a drill. If I thought the people had killed someone - or even MAYBE killed somene - it wouldn't stop me: let them come after me.
JT: Right ... Well, the media was there and they just made this a reality.
TO: So Joe-Cub-Reporter runs over there ... and sees stuff that doesn't add up. Joe is newly hired and not part of the conspiracy. Are all reporters in on it? Do they have a meeting in the morning to set this up?
JT: Not necessarily because they create the impression the event is real. The drills are very lifelike.
TO: But this is the story of the decade and Joe thinks he'll win a Pulitzer for this. My mother did some reporting a long time ago--she'd have killed for that.
JT: I read the NYT report on this and the story they told--the body parts on the ground--it wasn't there. It's not in the photos. There was a video circulated on the Boston Globe. The pictures we've seen and the story on the cover don't match.
TO: Remember that picture that the NY Post put on their front page [ Warning: Guy About To Die. You don't need to see it. ] of the guy who was seconds away from getting killed by a subway car? They took tons of abuse for that. Maybe the media is intentionally not showing severed limbs?
JT: Well they did show the blown off limb of Jeff Bauman.
TO: In the context of a heroic story.
JT: If someone had wounds like that, why would anyone transport them in a wheelchair.
TO: In the army we were taught to, like, fireman's carry guys who were missing limbs or whatever if we had to.
JT: If a limb had sustained that much injury--that's not what it looks like. I got photographs last week of shark bite injuries. The complexity of the leg and muscle tissue is great--it's illustrated in these photos and the Boston photos don't look anything like that. I was skeptical of the Bauman photos and after seeing these other injuries I'm even more skeptical.
TO: Yeah--but neither of us are capable of doing the analysis of what limb-loss looks like from an IED. But some people--a lot of people do know because of the wars. I suspect a shark bite looks different.
JT: But aren't there numerous others--not just Bauman?
TO: Well--let's be careful. In the early hours there's terrible reporting. If someone reported blown-off limbs early on but maybe most injuries weren't anything like that. If the emergency rooms in Boston had a quiet night on the 15th all these doctors would know. There would be huge medical staffs who would be raising questions.
JT: Well, I disagree. I think that allopathic physicians are probably the easiest to buy off. Pharmaceutical companies do it every day. It wouldn't surprise me.
TO: My wife's a doctor. The way that the drug guys work really isn't like paying for a cover-up. They don't just mysteriously show up and give them money. Some mysterious guy showing up would have to pay off not the doctors--but nurses, orderlies, secretaries--scores of people who might not "take the money." You'd have to do this before your plan--and any given person could "explode on contact" and go public right there.
JT: That's assuming people are honest.
TO: You have to assume that 1 in a hundred isn't honest.
JT: Well, several dozen medical staff.
TO: But it's not just the doctors. What about the nurses?
JT: They say there are 264 injuries. It started at 170 -- and went up. It seems really inflated. Are those figures coming from the hospitals. But look at the EMT reaction on that day. There's closed-circuit footage. It seems really unusual for an alleged event of that scale.
Why didn't the ambulances go right to the scene? There were police cars down there.
TO: I don't know.
JT: You want to wheel people up the street for a photo-op. In a wheelchair.
TO: Maybe--but I think it's more likely that I just don't know enough about what the protocol is with this kind of event.
JT: They have wheels just like police cars.
TO: Yeah, but maybe they don't maneuver as well. Maybe there are security concerns or safety concerns like secondary bombs? Just because I don't know why they set it up that way doesn't mean it's for a photo-op.
JT: Well I didn't see any triage there. It's typical, as you probably know, for EMTs to do triage on the victims to sort on the degree of severity of their wounds.
TO: On the Slate podcast they talked about this. They said there were tents set up for runners for extreme dehydration and stuff and they were converted to triage tents.
JT: But the nurses we've seen--their actions and demeanor didn't match. I noticed that with the Sandy Hook reportage too. These individuals didn't look that disturbed in their body language and tenor of their voices.
TO: I saw people saying one of the Sandy Hook fathers was a fake because he was laughing one minute and crying the next. That's like every funeral I've ever been to.
JT: I wasn't even thinking about that one. But there was hardly a tear there in town that I could see. It was a matter of the anxiety and panic--the adrenaline -that one would have after those events. I didn't see that over-all. I wasn't there, of course.
TO: Isn't this like the "Ref must be blind" things from sports fans? I mean we're not there. So we're at a distance. I think we've gone over a lot of this. I have a place to close this. You have a post of questions you'd like people to answer. I really liked that. I'm going to do a post where I answer those questions. But one of them I want to talk to you about here. "What is a conspiracy theory?" I really liked that and I'd like to answer it here. I think a conspiracy theory has two elements:
- It violates risk-to-benefit planning like "I want to invade Iraq so I will knock down the world trade-towers and, if caught, die and possibly destroy the US economy."
- They require large numbers of people to keep deadly secrets--secrets that would get them killed if they came out.
TO: I don't agree with Chomsky on too many things--but I guess we agree on that. Professor Tracey, thank you for a great interview. This went on far longer than I expected.
JT: I'd like to see that post. Thank you!
What Do I Think?
Professor James Tracey was friendly and articulate. I have a very poor reaction to doubting (and worse for denying) the Holocaust--but I'm pretty certain James Tracey is no Nazi. Here's what I think is going on: all of us carry around axioms that we use to build our narratives of events. For example, I think any large conspiracy will leak so I don't see effective large intricate conspiracies anywhere.
In Professor James Tracey's case, I think the axiom is that "most people are not honest" (or, at least, many people)--this is made clear when we talk about the possible bribing of doctors to keep quiet about not seeing a massive influx of causalities.
If this is your axiom--and, perhaps, another is that everyone is using whatever power they have in the ruthless pursuit of more power--then you do see massive conspiracies everywhere.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader which axioms make more sense.
As To The Conspiracy Itself
The conspiracy looks something like this:
- Ag group of military/industrial leaders wish to turn the US into a police state for [ reasons ]. They have co-opted the president and Homeland Security and the FBI and the CIA and FEMA but not individual congressmen (jury still out on the Supreme Court*)
- They decide the way to do this is to make assault weapons illegal as a sort of part-1 to forcibly seizing power and crushing the resistance. I will note that there are an estimated 1.5 million assault weapons and over 100 million handguns in the US today. These weapons and their ammunition will remain good for a century if kept in reasonable storage. Regardless, first they have to limit people from buying more.
- They start staging "events" based on the idea that pubic outrage will lead to gun-reduction the same way it worked in Australia. These events are a strange fusion of real killings or abductions and staged "drills."
- The drill-elements (which sometimes are presented to the press as the actual event) use people recruited off the internet but kept quiet somehow--possibly NDAs. Deaths are claimed--but instead of really killing people (save for some few public figures who might cause problems) they only pretend to and therefore cannot produce death certificates or autopsy reports--and cannot fake them. They are forced to suppress any possible questions from, for example, area hospitals, law enforcement that is not "in on it," and EMTs who are not part of the drill and arrive after. That is okay: they have staff to do this--and time--and planning to make it go smoothly. But even if someone leaks ...
- It does not matter because the media--all major elements--network and cable news, radio, talk radio, small press, and local press unquestioningly or intentionally accepts their story and will shout down anyone who disagrees. People are, surprisingly, allowed to disagree: they are not killed or disappeared but rather "discredited" (to the limits of the media's ability--these people do not always lose their jobs).
- The plan is not working well: despite successfully managing the events (including tricky ones like demolishing two of the largest buildings in the US with, at least, some people inside them) we have been involved in the required wars with little to show for it and gun control has been taken off the table without even a vote. Their operations have also, predictably, produced a massive video record where their operatives are caught plainly by amateur camera operators. The copious publicly available data presents a clear story that, if it were to be accepted, would destabilize the entire conspiracy.
I do not believe it would be likely to control the heads of numerous public organizations over more than a decade (3 presidents, 7 CIA Directors, 5 FEMA Directors, various FBI agents, and so on from 1996 to 2013) who would be necessary for success over the span of Oklahoma to Boston.
I believe the use of actors and drills, at all, would be a non-starter: people seeing their names and images in the paper and being heralded as heroes when they knew they were just part of a drill would collapse instantly. No NDA in the world will protect in the case of a criminal act. All the actors--recruited, we are led to believe, from the Internet (rather than internal sources to various agencies where they could, at least, be screened for psychological suitability)--would be required to maintain character when a story that it was real was breaking on TV and they were on the scene.
I don't believe the presumed cabal could exist for decades without devouring itself.
Finally
The problem with believing in Bigfoot is not the presented photographic evidence: I can't--and most of us can't--properly analyze it. The problem is with the larger narrative itself. Are there giant, very intelligent--but utterly undiscovered hominids living in North America? It's not impossible--but it strains credibility badly. So long as we stick to pictures and questions about them we, without expertise, cannot answer, the conspiracy narrative lives--it makes sense of that 'C' on the moon rock, the lack of stars above the lunar lander, the fact that mountains in the distance are "too close."
So long as we keep data out of context (reports from the first 72 hours around a major event) we can find pieces that don't fit (reports that Lanza had four hand guns, for example).
When we see pictures we instantly and innately build stories around them--two high school guys were the bombers ... or "don't those look like Navy SEALS?"
But when we add expertise and personal experience a lot of this collapses. Scanning a document creates layers if OCR is active. There were triage tents for runners. Doctors--even allopathic ones--would question taking bribes or threats from mysterious individuals however cozy they are with their drug reps.
I think it's very human to use our own beliefs and pictures with elements we don't understand to scaffold up various theories--but they are still faces we're seeing in clouds. They're just pattern-matching to our own internal axioms.
In the end, I guess, we'll all have to decide what levels of proof we need to accept anything.
I'm not real sure Minnesota exists myself.
* See what I did there?
