The Need to Question Conventional Wisdom and “Official” Version of Events - Some Personal Experience

[Time for change]

History is full of examples of powerful people conspiring to increase their wealth and power at the expense of the masses. When they do that, they almost invariably try to cover up their misdeeds by establishing “official” stories to hide the truth. And our country has by no means been immune to this phenomenon, as I have discussed in several previous posts.

Because DUers are in general much more informed and open minded about these things than most Americans, they are usually much more inclined than most Americans to be skeptical of “official” stories propagated by their government, corporate news media, or other sources of elite opinion.

Given both the motive and capacity of the powerful to increase their own power at the expense of everyone else, our country and the world need people who have the capability of being skeptical of “official” government accounts. Indeed, that is the main reason why our Founding Fathers created the First Amendment to our Constitution. We need a free and independent press who refuse to take government (or any powerful institution or corporation) at its word, but rather that will routinely take what the powerful say with a grain of salt and investigate their claims in an attempt to find the truth.

William Rivers Pitt made a similar point in his book, “The Greatest Sedition Is Silence”. In that book he discusses a grave conspiracy theory (not to be discussed in this post) that involves the U.S. government. He notes that people who voice ideas like that tend to be excoriated as “unpatriotic”. But in reality it is those who are willing to question our government when it is wrong who care most about our country and constitute some of the most valuable resources that our nation has.

These are some of the reasons why it is very frustrating to me when those of us who challenge the accepted, “official” view of events are excoriated as “conspiracy theorists” in the most pejorative sense of the word. Those who excoriate us in this way define “conspiracy theorist” as those who are exceptionally inclined to believe alternative accounts of the “official story”, in the absence of any credible evidence to support those beliefs, because they are paranoid, gullible, or stupid.

In support of the pejorative definition of a “conspiracy theorist”, some have said that our exceptional beliefs or claims demand exceptional proof. But my contention is that many of our “exceptional” beliefs or claims for which we are labeled “conspiracy theorists” are in reality not so exceptional. In the lead up to the Iraq War, the claim that the Bush administration lied to the American people to justify that war was deemed an exceptional claim (and unpatriotic or treasonous). And many people today still feel that a belief that our government was complicit in President Kennedy’s assassination is an exceptional belief. But why should such beliefs be considered exceptional – and therefore demanding of substantially more proof than the “official” story? Given a good familiarity with history, it seems to me that a benign motive for the invasion of a sovereign country, or a lone assassin of a popular leader should be considered the more exceptional beliefs.


Some of my personal experiences in challenging “official” positions, etc

My 32 year career as a public health worker has perhaps been characterized more than anything else by my tendency to question and investigate “official” positions, “conventional wisdom”, or standard ways of operating when I believed it was warranted to do so. Had I never done this, probably nobody would have noticed. But then my career would have been much less successful in the ways that I consider to be most important.

The personality trait that led me to do these things in my public health work is the same personality trait that has led me to question my government’s actions in ways that cause some people to deem me a “conspiracy theorist”. For that reason, I offer some examples from my public health career, in the hope of showing that questioning and investigation of the “official” story or way of doing things is not a bad thing. Of course these examples in no way compare in magnitude with the important and well known events in American history that have created such great controversy and most of the “conspiracy theory” charges. But I think that the general principles are similar.

I have been fortunate in that when I have been involved in these events my supervisors have been generally supportive of my attempts to investigate them. That is to be expected, since public health personnel tend to be some of the most progressive people in our country (I don’t doubt that 90% of public health personnel in our country vote Democratic or for more liberal/progressive alternatives in presidential elections). Training in public health begins with the presumption that one of the major purposes of government is to protect the health and life of all of our citizens – the vulnerable and the powerful alike. With that as a starting point, no wonder we public health workers are so progressive.

Over the course of my public health career, the investigation and challenging of “official” story lines or “conventional wisdom” have been the most interesting, enjoyable, and important work that I have performed, as well as the work that I have been most proud of. The times when I have been involved in this kind of work are the times when I was most excited about coming to work every day, whereas at some other times it has been hard to drag myself out of bed in the morning.

I am aware that some may take that statement to indicate a bias towards belief in alternative realities. But I don’t see it like that. I see this kind of thing as my job. I believe that challenging existing beliefs, paradigms, and “official” stories is how progress is made. As a public health worker, I have always considered ordinary American citizens as the people whom I work for. I work for the government, but ultimately my purpose is to serve ordinary citizens, not my fellow government workers.

With all that as background, here are some examples:

Research on the low carbohydrate diet
When I was a resident in Preventive Medicine and Public Health, I became interested in the use of the low carbohydrate diet in the treatment of obesity. So I did a lot of reading on that subject. The diet had become popularized through Dr. Robert Atkins and his books. However, highly “prestigious” medical journals either ignored the subject or had nothing but negative things to say about it.

Nevertheless, I found some very good research on the subject in some relatively obscure medical journals. The methodology used and the depth of knowledge demonstrated in explaining the subject in some of those journals was very impressive in my opinion. I therefore came to the conclusion that the low carbohydrate diet should be given a lot more attention than it was then given. I gave very little credence to the fact that it was mainly ignored or mocked in the most highly “prestigious” circles.

Why is that? Whereas it is true that the more prestigious medical journals tend to have a more stringent peer review process than the more obscure journals, that does not by any means mean that excellent research doesn’t sometimes appear in obscure journals. There are many different criteria that journals use in determining what articles to publish, including, often, whether or not the research results fit in with current paradigms. If they don’t, they’re unlikely to be published in the most prestigious journals.

So I did some of my own clinical research on the subject, had some very successful results, published a manuscript in a very obscure medical journal, finished my residency, and then forgot about the subject. Many years later (I can’t remember exactly when, but here’s one study), favorable research on the diet did begin to become published in highly prestigious medical journals, which of course caused a resurgence of the use of the diet by the American public.

Illness caused by fluorescent lights
In the early 1980s, as the epidemiologist for the Palm Beach County (Florida) Health Department, I received a call from a Visiting Nurse Association (VNA) regarding symptoms which their members had been experiencing. The main symptoms were headache, eye irritation, sore throat, nasal congestion, nausea and dizziness, which the nurses believed were related to the building in which they worked.

I interviewed all 16 nurses who worked in the building and found that 15 of the 16 exhibited the typical symptoms. A relationship of the symptoms to the building was demonstrated by the fact that the good majority of the nurses routinely developed the symptoms within three hours of entering the building, and the symptoms disappeared within four hours of leaving. The nurses’ symptoms were increasing over time, suggesting cumulative effects as whatever it was that caused their symptoms built up in their bodies over time.

But despite my interviews, examination of the building, and review of the physician and laboratory reports, no cause for the symptoms was found. Nor did investigation of the building by environmental health experts and testing for airborne chemicals reveal a cause.

The owners of the building held that there was nothing in their building that could cause the symptoms, and that the symptoms were psychological in origin or caused by “suggestibility” in some of the nurses after they noticed their co-workers complain of symptoms. This is a typical reaction when no provable cause of an illness is discernable, and much too often it is accepted as an excuse to cease further investigation or action.

But I felt reasonably certain that there was something in the building causing the symptoms. So I asked the environmental health experts to go back and look again, even though I couldn’t tell them what to look for. This time we got lucky. One of the environmental health experts noticed that one of the fluorescent light fixtures looked a little suspicious, so she removed the glass covering to take a closer look, following which she immediately experienced virtually all the symptoms which the VNA nurses had been complaining about. She also noticed that melted asphalt covered the fixture. Consultation with an electrician and an engineer revealed that the ballast of the light, which was over ten years old, had overheated, causing the asphalt to melt – and then probably volatilize. Inspection of the other fluorescent lights in the building revealed that many of them were affected by the same process.

We ordered the building owner to replace all the malfunctioning fluorescent lights. Two weeks later, I came back to re-interview the VNA personnel. Almost all the symptoms had diminished, and most had resolved completely.

Illness resulting from volatized asphalt from malfunctioning fluorescent lights had never previously been reported in the medical or public health literature. So I wrote up our findings and published them in the American Journal of Public Health.

Illness from a mushroom compost operation in Southeastern Pennsylvania
In the early 1990s, as the Pennsylvania State Epidemiologist I received reports of various symptoms including headache, nausea (with some vomiting) and fatigue in residents of Chester County, PA. The symptoms were said to be associated with proximity to a mushroom compost operation.

These complaints had long been ignored by the Chester County Health Department and other government agencies, which claimed that no further investigation of the matter was indicated, for various reasons: though many of the residents had seen a doctor for their symptoms, there were no consistent diagnoses made which suggested a pattern; there were no laboratory test results that suggested a specific exposure; and, they believed the symptoms to be of psychological origin, due to the wish of those complaining of them to be rid of the mushroom compost operation.

These rationalizations are indicative of some common misunderstandings of environmental health problems. The mushroom compost operation emitted hundreds of different chemicals, so if it was indeed responsible for the symptoms there would be no way of knowing what to test for. Non-specific symptoms such as nausea, headache and fatigue are very often not associated with any specific laboratory tests. Rather, usually the only way to determine the presence of such symptoms is to interview those who complain of them. There are many kinds of illnesses that are extremely difficult or impossible to diagnose because medical science is unaware of them. And, it is a common but unfortunate occurrence for symptomatic complaints that remain undiagnosed to be reflexively attributed to “psychological” causes or “suggestibility” factors.

I discussed the matter with some local activists who were concerned about the problem, and I took their complaints seriously. Another event that led me to believe that the symptoms weren’t merely “psychological” was that an Environmental Resources employee who went on-site to investigate the problem developed similar symptoms that were so severe that she passed out at the site. So I designed an epidemiologic study that involved interviewing a random sample of subjects who lived within a mile of the mushroom compost operation and making various statistical comparisons.

Five of us went out to do the interviews. The analysis of the interview results demonstrated what I considered to be a serious problem, with much evidence that exposure to the mushroom compost operation was the cause of the symptoms. About two thirds of the interviewees exhibited the typical symptoms. Symptoms were much more common in those who lived within a half mile of the operation and those who lived downwind of it. They were intensified when people left their home windows open, and they tended to disappear when people left town.

We never did identify a specific responsible chemical – thus eliciting criticism from the owners and management of the mushroom compost operation, the Chester County Health Department and others. Nevertheless, we held a town meeting at which I passed out a report of our findings to community residents and to the press. The mushroom compost operation was forced to make some changes to reduce exposure of community residents. This resulted in a marked reduction of symptoms and the gratitude of the residents.

Ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms
Over approximately a three year period in my work at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) I evaluated the performance of a medical device whose purpose it is to prevent ruptures of abdominal aortic aneurysms. This is done by placing the device over the aneurysm (from inside the aorta) so as to prevent blood getting into the aneurysm, which could otherwise cause the aneurysm to enlarge and rupture. Rupture of an aortic aneurysm is usually fatal because it is followed by internal bleeding which can only be stopped surgically, and because the aorta is the largest blood vessel in the human body. The device in question provides an alternative to full surgical repair of the aneurysm.

The problem was (and is) that sometimes the device slips out of place, thus allowing blood to seep into the aneurysm, with the possibility of subsequent rupture and death. Because of my concerns about the performance of the device, following the completion of my analysis I proposed putting out a Public Health Notification to warn physicians and patients of the problem. The manufacturer demanded a meeting to argue against this, and they brought along a team of lawyers and physicians to dispute my analysis. However, with all the thousands of dollars worth of hired guns that they brought to the meeting, they neglected to bring along anyone who actually knew how to analyze data (perhaps because they realized that they didn’t have a case worth arguing). So they lost their argument, and the Public Health Notification was published.

Then I wrote a scientific article which describing my analysis, and I submitted it to Vascular surgery (the primary journal read by vascular surgeons in the United States). My article was eventually accepted for publication, and it was about to be published.

But then the manufacturer of the device found out about the article and they went directly to the highest levels of the FDA to complain about it. To make a long story shorter, the FDA complied with the request of the manufacturer by withdrawing the article.

What this story demonstrates is the way that life and death decisions are often made in our country. They should be based on scientific considerations, but in fact are often based instead on the need of politicians to placate their corporate masters. Anyhow, that’s the only interpretation that I can put on this story.

I would not even be legally allowed to discuss this story publicly (because of the FDA’s rules regarding the privacy of manufacturers) if not for the fact that it is already in the public domain because someone leaked it to a conscientious reporter for the Wall Street Journal, which then published it. Here is the WSJ article that published the story.


Vincent Bugliosi as an archetypical example of anti-“conspiracy theorist” bias

I have a great deal of respect for Vincent Bugliosi because of his stands on both the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, which made George W. Bush president in 2000, and on Bush’s lies that got us into the Iraq War. Bugliosi is more outspoken on those issues than any other prominent writer, going so far a to advise that the Supreme Court justices responsible for the Bush v. Gore decision be tried for treason and that Bush himself be tried for murder for leading us into a fraudulently based and completely unnecessary war.

Bugliosi’s excellent book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder”, drips with contempt for Bush on almost every page, as he argues vehemently that George W. Bush should be prosecuted for murder, for purposely and with malice aforethought, lying our country into a needless war against a nation that posed no danger to us whatsoever.

Bugliosi’s disparaging of those who question the official 9/11 story
Yet, surprisingly, Bugliosi disparages those whose opinion of Bush is just a teeny bit worse than his own. Referring to George W. Bush’s statement that “Had I known that there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack”, Bugliosi writes:

But other than some nuts on the far left who were loony enough to actually believe that Bush was complicit in 9/11, shouldn’t this go without saying?

I find it so weird that he should toss out a gratuitous insult at us on the “loony left” in the midst of his accusations of mass murder against George Bush. On the one hand he accuses Bush of the murder of thousands of American soldiers in his effort to advance his fraudulently based war, and yet at the same time he says that it should “go without saying” that Bush “would have moved mountains” to stop an attack that served to justify his war. Why should that “go without saying”? Because the attack killed thousands of Americans? Bugliosi already accused Bush of maliciously murdering thousands of Americans. Yet, so certain is he that Bush wouldn’t purposely allow a few thousand additional Americans to die, that anyone who disagrees with him on that point is “loony”.

And then, Bugliosi goes on to rant about how “unbelievable” the official story of 9/11 is, while at the same time giving no indication that he doesn’t believe it. After using the word “unbelievable” several times to describe Bush’s lack of effort to prevent or respond to the 9/11 attacks, Bugliosi says:

It wouldn’t have been possible for Bush to have been more remiss, negligent, lazy, and irresponsible. Not possible… So these points I have mentioned reflect the policy of Bush and his administration to almost look the other way when it came to fighting terrorism…

Why can’t there be more powerful words in our lexicon to describe special, yes, unique situations like this other than this tired terribly overused adverb (unbelievable)?

But why complain that “unbelievable” isn’t a strong enough word to describe the official story if he actually believes it? And if unbelievable is too weak a word to describe the situation, then why show contempt to those of us who actually don’t believe it? Like Bugliosi, many of us on the “loony left” think that the official 9/11 story is “unbelievable”. But unlike him, many of us actually don’t believe it.

Bugliosi’s anti-“conspiracy theorist” bias regarding the JFK assassination
I have been attacked on DU for discussing the assassination of JFK without having read Bugliosi’s supposedly definitive debunking of the alternative versions to the official story. Here again we run up against the double standard that the official story adherents wish to impose on those who hold alternative views. I’ve read five and a half books on the JFK assassination and have formed a pretty solid conclusion (discussed in some other posts) that the bullet that killed him came from the area of the grassy knoll in front of him, rather than the Texas School Book Depository behind him, from where Oswald presumably shot him. Why should not having read Bugliosi’s book disqualify me from discussing the issue, when those same people, who vigorously support the Warren Commission version of the events, haven’t read David Lifton’s book, “Best Evidence”, and are unable to counter his arguments? And anyhow, Bugliosi has given plenty of evidence of bias against alternative versions of the event. For example, here is a quote of his from a recent interview on the subject:

The principle argument that the conspiracy theorists use is that such-and-such a group had a motive, ergo they must have killed the president. That’s a child-like non sequitur, because if you buy into that, then in our society if the president is doing something that some particular group doesn’t like – like Wall Street or the unions or the CIA – then they simply kill him.

That is such a gross over-simplification and so off-target as to be ridiculous. If there are any books on alternative versions to the official story that argue what Bugliosi says they do – let alone use that as their principle argument – I certainly haven’t seen them. If those are the only arguments for alternative versions that Bugliosi has seen, then he certainly has no business writing a book on the subject.

There are other statements in his interview that I find almost as bad, but I won’t go into them here. Suffice it to say that Bugliosi has done plenty enough to show his bias against those who hold views that deviate from the official line. In light of his outspoken views of the Bush v. Gore decision and George Bush’s Iraq War, the only sense I can make of his disparaging of so-called “conspiracy theorists” is that he feels he needs some cover in order to make himself appear somewhat mainstream.


Truth seekers do not automatically reject official views and policies

Contrary to the accusations of the anti-“conspiracy theorist” crowd, most of us who have a tendency to question the “official” story line do so selectively when we believe the evidence warrants it – not automatically on all occasions. I’ll give one example from my public health career. When I was responsible for the immunization program in Pennsylvania and a popular TV host came out with an anti-vaccine show, which threatened to pave the way for a measles epidemic, I was pretty mad about that. From my book on the subject:

The use of vaccines to protect against these childhood diseases is a very uncontroversial subject among public health professionals… Yet, somehow this TV talk show host managed to find four or five so-called experts to appear on his show and scare as many people as they could into not using these vaccines. In order to give the appearance of some “balance”, he allowed one person on the panel who acted in defense of the vaccines.

How many parents were thereby scared into refraining from having their children vaccinated, and how many cases of disease and death resulted from this is something which we will never know. We do know that public hysteria over the use of these vaccines resulted in epidemics of whooping cough with several consequent deaths in England and Japan at different times. Fortunately, as a result of a massive public health response to this TV show, there were no obvious epidemics of disease which were a direct result of it…

The marginalization of those who seek the truth

I’ve said it before: I believe the major reason for the marginalization of those who refuse to accept the “official” version of events is that if people knew more about the reality of those events, the seeds of rebellion to the agenda of the wealthy and the powerful would be sown. In the run-up to the Iraq War, our corporate news media utterly failed to expose it for the fraud that it was because powerful interests in our country wanted that war. The U.S. Senate rejected the proposed National Standards for United States History by a vote of 99-1 because, as Lynn Cheney put it, the document contained “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, and a disparaging of the West. And how much faith in their government would Americans lose if they knew that it was complicit in the assassination of President Kennedy – or worse?

But it’s not just the powers that be who insist on disparaging those who disagree with them. Through their never-ending propaganda they spread their attitudes throughout our country. The example of Vincent Bugliosi, discussed above, is a good example of that.