Is it time to repeat a point that has been made before? Hell, this is a busy email list; nothing gets notices if it is not repeated occasionly. What most (not all of course, but most) real conspiracies are "open secrets". Either as in the case of shelf space or water rights not secret at all - out in the public for anyone to see, but not usually discussed in corporate media, or officially denied, but well known; think about U.S. funding of the contras - the official media denied it, but it was well known enough at the time for Miami Vice to use it as a plot point.
I always remember the ending to Gore Vidal's Kalki - which I always considered a perfect comment on conspiracy theory. At the end of the story the only survivors of the destruction of the human race are a few men, and two sterile women. So even though there are a few living humans, the human race is extinct. They are in Washington, D.C. so one of the men makes his way over to Langley, Virginia, enters CIA headquarters, and finds out the real story of both Kennedy assassinations, and so on. When he gets back the other survivors refuse to listen to him; the reader never finds out even the fiction answer either.
One thing to be aware of: the term "conspiracy theory" is also used as dismissal for things that are nothing of the sort. For instance just about everything Noam Chomsky writes has been dismissed as conspiracy theory on occasion. Any criticism of U.S. action not based on the idea that angelic nobility of motive led to bumbling, well intentioned misjudgements is so dismissed.