Un-American Activites?

[NatSec]

I read on the web site for the United States Institute of Peace that part of the problem in dealing with Iran is that there's alot of conspiracy theories which lead them to not trust Americans. I did a search on Google for "conspiracies" and found a jungle.

What I found leads me to believe there's quite a few people out there involved in un-American activites. Take the cottage industry of the JFK assassination as an example. Should there be a limit to "free speech" and what people say about the United States? Do these conspiracy theorists cause dissolution?

I recall James Trafficant from Ohio. He was a conspiracist. He also went to jail. Maybe he was a spy for a foriegn government.

Shouldn't we be concerned? Saying that Iran doesn't distrust America based on "conspiracies" leads me to think we have another battle to fight outside the conflict in Iraq. This fight is on the internet.

[Trooth]

What it says about the US is that people are free to have ideas and to share them. Sure some are total lunacy. Some are "all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order" and, bearing in mind that the US government has had plenty of covert operations and secret technologies whizzing around (Stealth Fighters for example) some are probably more fact than fiction.

That Iranians may wish to believe them is a combination of a lack of other information - how come they can access a wacky theory about September 11th 2001, but not research their own facts? Or that they are plausible to them - which comes from a culture of misinformation about the US - as well as some historical US dodgy dealings.

However if you are going to start clamping down on wacky fiction (which is what most conspiracy theories are) then you have to shut down childrens' imaginations, most novelists and Hollywood.

And when you do that, people in far off lands will start saying "So, the US government is afraid that the real truth will get out...."