Free Republic

Successful conspiracy against power can only happen one of two ways: Either the conspiracists are so closed-lipped that no one ever finds out about the conspiracy until it is too late, or else the conspiracy is so absurd and ill-considered that no one takes it seriously in the first place. There appear to be relatively few successful conspiracies of the first sort, probably because it violates human nature too much. The larger the conspiracy, the more likely that someone will tell the wrong person too much and lead the authorities to the truth before the conspiracy can reach fruition... ...On...

<p>Last July 17, the major media made no comment that seven years prior, on July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board.</p> <p>If the media took note of the date "July 17" at all last year, it was only to observe that American soldiers had found it scrawled on walls throughout Iraq. July 17, after all, was Iraq's national liberation day, the day Saddam helped lead the Baath Party to power in 1968, the day he seized the presidency in 1979, and not impossibly, the day he took his revenge on the United States in 1996.</p>