OMG! Break Out The Tinfoil Hats! The Government Got To Them Too!

By ANN Senior Correspondent Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien

If you have to research any recent major air disaster on the internet, the signal to noise ratio of that global village is depressing. Nowhere is that more true than when you're trying to gather facts on the September 11th terrorist attacks. Despite the best-selling Commission Report, as well as the release of lavishly footnoted documents on the web, most of the sites on the net that address this cowardly crime purvey one barmy conspiracy theory or another.

Whether it's the dishonest maunderings of Thierry Meissen, the agenda-driven anti-Semitism of Justin Raimondo, or the rampant paranoia of Michael Rivero, you can expect that a bunch of glib, fanciful -- and false -- explanations of the events of that grim Tuesday are so readily at hand that they're practically unavoidable. Some are clearly the crude work of unhinged minds; others are slicker -- there are even books and videos. Any one of these sites would have been a delight to my Jesuit "Introduction to Logic" professor, because most of them display a panoply of logical fallacies.

There hasn't been any one place that gathers some sixteen of these curious arguments, ranging from "no plane hit the Pentagon" to "a mysterious white fighter shot down Flight 93" to "the evil ZOG dynamited the buildings,"  and gives them the dope-slap they've got coming -- a forehand-backhand of cold logic and hard truth. Now, thanks to... of all magazines... Popular Mechanics, there is.

"In the end, we were able to debunk each of these assertions with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense," the editors write.  "We learned that a few theories are based on something as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Others are the by-products of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate. Only by confronting such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what really happened..."

Conspiracy theories have a certain appeal because they apply a simple explanation that ties up complex, horrifying,  or even inexplicable events in a neat bow. Since the conspiratroids do not base their concepts on hard fact, they can easily twist and turn them to encompass any changes. One professor who was misquoted found that his demand for a correction did not make the conspiratroids understand that he did not say what they wanted him to say; instead, they concluded that -- cue creepy organ music -- "they" got to him.

"It's been an albatross on my neck," the professor complains. So no doubt this latest counterattack will soon be countered, ignored, or dismissed by the sort of minds who think the actual perpetrators were not a gang of terrorists who want us all to submit to their religion or die.

Kudos to the PM editors for taking on the distressingly large lunatic element, and for giving the rest of us ammo that we can use when well-meaning friends are seduced by these nutty ideas.

FMI: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1