Its not that Americans cant believe in any conspiracy theory. Witness the remarkably long shelf life of the International Communist Conspiracy. Its still a highly saleable commodity.

Conspiracy researcher and author Jonathan Vankin has observed:

Journalists like to think of themselves as a skeptical lot. This is a flawed self-image. The thickest pack of American journalists are all too credulous when dealing with government officials, technical experts, and other official sources. They save their vaunted skepticism for ideas that feel unfamiliar to them. Conspiracy theories are treated with the most rigorous skepticism.

Conspiracy theories should be approached skeptically. But theres no fairness. Skepticism should apply equally to official and unofficial information. To explain American conspiracy theories...Ive had to rectify this imbalance. Ive opened myself to conspiracy theories, and applied total skepticism to official stories.51

Like the cover up in Waco. In August 1999 we finally received official confirmation that the FBI had fired incendiary devices into the Branch Davidian sect compound in 1993, where 76 people died in a fire the same day. This, after six years of categorical official denials, while conspiracy theorists and conspiracy nuts , who insisted otherwise, were ridiculed, or-the more usual case-met by the medias most effective weapon: silence.

Can the truth about the October Surprise , TWA800, Jonestown, and Mena, Arkansas under Governor Clinton be far behind? Yes, far behind. Well likely never hear an official admission about those events until well into the new century.

The First Watergate Law of American Politics states: No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.

The Second Watergate Law of American Politics states: Dont believe anything until its been officially denied.

Both laws are still on the books.

Cold War continuum

Though the putative communist threat has disappeared, the taxpayers still fill tractor-trailers to the bursting with cash and send them off to what had once been known as the War Department, then humorously renamed the Defense Department...That departments research into yet more futuristic weapons and better ways to kill people en masse proceeds unabated, with nary a glance back at the body fragments littering the triumphant fields...Belief in an afterlife has been rekindled by the Clinton administrations new missile defense system, after universal certainty that Star Wars was dead and buried...NATO has also risen from the should-be-dead, more almighty than ever...Many

hundreds of US military installations, serving a vast panoply of specialized warfaring needs, still dot the global map, including Guantanamo base in Cuba, and for the first time bases in Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia...American armed forces and special operations forces, such as the Green Berets, are being deployed in well over 100 countries in every part of the world...Washington is supplying many of these nations with sizeable amounts of highly lethal military equipment, and training their armed forces and police in the brutal arts, regardless of how brutal they already are...American nuclear bombs are still stored in seven European countries, if not else where... And American officials retain their unshakable belief that they have a god-given right to do whatever they want, for as long as they want, to whomever they want, wherever they want.

In other words, whatever the diplomats and policymakers at the time thought they were doing, the Cold War skeptics have been vindicated-it was not about containing an evil, expansionist communism after all; it was about American imperialism, with communist merely the name given to those who stood in its way.

In sum total, all these post-Cold War non-changes engender a scenario out of the 1950s and 1960s. And the 1970s and 1980s. John Foster Dulles lives! Has Ronald Reagan been faking illness as he lurks behind the curtain of Oz? Why has all this continued into the 21st century?

American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a government, or a movement that might take power, that will not lie down and happily become an American client state, that will not look upon the free market or the privatization of the world known as globalization as the summum bonum, that will not change its laws to favor foreign investment, that will not be unconcerned about the effects of foreign investment upon the welfare of its own people, that will not produce primarily for export, that will not allow asbestos, banned pesticides and other products restricted in the developed world to be dumped onto their people, that will not easily tolerate the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the countrys social services or standard of living, that will not allow an American or NATO military installation upon its soiL.To the highly-sensitive nostrils of Washington foreign-policy veterans, Yugoslavia smelled a bit too much like one of these governments.

Given the proper pretext, such bad examples have to be reduced to basket cases, or, where feasible, simply overthrown, like Albania and Bulgaria in the early 1990s; failing that, life has to be made impossible for these renegades, as with Cuba, still. As Michael Parenti has observed: It has been noted that the cost of apprehending a bank robber may occasionally exceed the sum that is stolen. But if robbers were allowed to go their way, this would encourage others to follow suit and would put the entire banking system in jeopardy. 52

And this was the foundation-the sine qua non-of American foreign policy for the entire twentieth century, both before and after the existence of the Soviet Union, from the

Philippines, Panama and the Dominican Republic in the first decade of the century, to Peru, El Salvador and Colombia in the last decade.

Can we in fact say that the Cold War has actually ended? If the Cold War is defined as a worldwide contention between the United States and the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the Third World (for whatever motives), then certainly it is over. But if the Cold War is seen not as an East-West struggle, but rather a North-South struggle, as an American effort-as mentioned above-to prevent the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model, and to prevent the rise of any regional power that might challenge American supremacy, then that particular map with the pins stuck in it still hangs on the wall in the Pentagons War Room. (Said a Defense Department planning paper in 1992: Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rivaL.we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. 53 [emphasis added])

The current manifestation of this continuum, by whatever name, can be viewed as yet another chapter in the never-ending saga of the war of the rich upon the poor. And with the Soviet presence and influence gone, American interventions are more trouble-free than ever. (Consider that US friendliness toward Iraq and Yugoslavia lasted exactly as long as the Soviet Union and its bloc existed.)

Theres a word for such a continuum of policy. Empire. The American Empire. An appellation that does not roll easily off an American tongue. No American has any difficulty believing in the existence and driving passion for expansion, power, glory and wealth of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the British Empire. Its right there in their schoolbooks. But to the American mind, to American schoolbooks and to the American media, the history of empires has come to a grinding halt.

The American Empire? An oxymoron.

A compelling lust for political, economic and military hegemony over the rest of the world, divorced from moral considerations? Suggesting that to Americans is akin to telling them of ones UFO abduction, except that theyre more likely to believe the abduction story.

Earth is not enough

Previous empires could not even imagine it. The American Empire is making detailed plans for it. Control of outer space. Not only control, but planning for wars there. Let us mark the words of the gentlemen of the Pentagon:

US Space Command-dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict...During the early portion of the 21st century, space power will also evolve into a separate and equal medium of warfare...The emerging synergy of