G20 riots were an 'inside job'

To be kept a secret -- as opposed to being sussed out by connecting dots -- a conspiracy of any size needs to be carried out by a group with total self-discipline and commitment.

Such conspiracies are possible -- the Soviet Union and the Nazis provide numerous examples -- but, leaving aside the broader implausibility of Canadian police becoming vandals -- are the police of various services who worked at the G20 such a group? None of them would leak the story to the mainstream media? No one, out of all the media, took a picture of the police getting ready to torch their own cars?

I am sure there were some undercover police. And perhaps some of them behaved badly - perhaps -- but the idea of a conspiracy is overwrought.

http://tinyurl.com/28xk6zc

Joe O'Connor, National Post
Saturday, Jul. 10, 2010



In the video, we see a skinny young man with shaggy hair and a well-kept beard. He is wearing a hooded sweatshirt. His eyes are sunken. He looks like he needs a good night's sleep.

The man fidgets with a rubber band while he speaks, telling the story about what he witnessed that day in Toronto when the storefront windows were smashed and the police cars burned, telling a camera what he believes to be the truth.

"There were two textbook, scrawny, meth-head-anarchists, but with them were two huge, 'roided-out cops — agent provocateurs — with their police boots on and all wearing masks and stuff," he says. "They led the charge and we heard explosions. I don't know if it was them, but odds are, they lit a cop car on fire."

Others are making similar claims in assorted corners of the Web, via YouTube clips with damning titles, such as "G20 Police Provocateur Wrecks Cruiser," on blogs and message boards and in articles often linked to sites that promise to reveal the unspoken "truth."

Questions are posed, ''evidence'' proffered, conclusions tidily reached. The conspiracy is obvious, they say. It is right there for all to see, if only we would dare to look. The G20 riots were an inside job. It was police, posing as agent provocateurs, who trashed downtown Toronto to muzzle legitimate protest and justify the summit's billion-plus-dollar price tag.

Dr. Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, a publication dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories, urban legends and other fictions some individuals embrace as fact, is, as you might imagine, mostly skeptical.

"If we go back to Roman, Machiavellian times, you see political manipulations that happen high up and so conspiracies really do happen. People really do plot and conspire, and so we can't dismiss these things out of hand," Dr. Shermer says.

"It is like when people say: The government lies. Well, no kidding they lie. But the fact that they lie about some things doesn't mean everything they say is a lie."

For the skinny young man in the video, and for a cacophony of voices on the Internet, preconceptions are brandished as proofs. A burly member of the Black Bloc becomes a "roided-out" cop bent on destruction; the thick-soled shoes of a protester become the jackboots of a government provocateur (more on that later); police cars abandoned on Toronto's streets by officers fearing for their safety become sacrificial lambs conveniently parked in the path of the mob to provide a "controlled and complicit" mainstream media with fiery photo opportunities.

To the conspiracy-minded, there are monsters under every bed. And if you can't see them, then you are simply one of the sheep. Conspiracy theorists operate under a "confirmation bias," meaning they look for evidence supporting what they already believe to be true while ignoring any evidence proving it isn't.

"In other words," Dr. Shermer says, "you remember the hits and you forget the misses. You notice the connections and ignore the non-connections and then, once you have it in mind that, 'OK, I think there is a conspiracy theory here,' then all you have to do is open the newspaper and start connecting the dots."