9/11 history muddled by gibberish

The glut of 9/11 conspiracy theories being trumpeted (mostly on the Internet) is as stunning as it is disturbing. How can it be that there are so many with virtually zero faith in the U.S. government, the media, the obvious?

It's as if the conspiracy theorists believe most of the populace lives in a Matrix-like parallel universe, and only they have a "Chosen One" view of what's really happening.

A University of Wisconsin professor who will soon be teaching an introductory course on Islam is the latest to get mainstream media attention for his view that the 9/11 attacks were an "inside job" carried out by the U.S. government. But he's not alone. Just a quick cursory search for "9/11 conspiracy" on the Internet yields pages and pages of hits.

The problem with the proliferation of 9/11 conspiracy gibberish is that it obfuscates, confuses and muddles a history that should be crystal clear to the American public and the world: The United States was attacked by Islamic extremists, with a stunning 3,000 Americans killed.

Any diversion from this fact only distorts views of the central worldwide existential struggle of this age. The realities of New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., do not stand alone. Remember the earlier bombing of the Trade Center, the bombings of the U.S. embassy in Kenya, the bombings in Madrid, London, Bali, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, along with the beheadings and other gruesome executions carried out by Muslim extremists around the planet.

The 9/11 theories are typically bizarre, incoherent and paranoid ramblings, ranging from the Bush administration somehow ordering or being complicit in the attacks on up to the craziest theory of all, that the Twin Towers came down as a result of "controlled demolitions."

But it is the "controlled demolition" crowd that is the most serious.

Getting into the nitty-gritty of this theory is almost nauseating because of its schizophrenic string of logic, linking one piece of "evidence" with another. There's lots of blather about the heat produced by jet fuel and "residues" supposedly recovered from the wreckage of the twin towers.

Somehow it's easier to believe that the U.S. government is the Evil Behind It All. But that notion fails to account for The Obvious - the film footage, the eyewitnesses, the incredible stealth that would be involved with rigging the towers with explosives and then choreographing the demolitions with fuel-loaded planes cutting into the towers at exactly the right point. You don't have to "analyze the data" to intuitively understand that there would be nothing "controlled" about a demolition plan after the buildings had been pulverized by jets.

The University of Wisconsin professor believes this theory, and by God, he's a professor and he's teaching a class on Islam. He doubts the ability of hijackers armed with box cutters to take over planes. But what about the cell-phone calls from the hijacked planes? What about al-Qaida claiming responsibility, and the exhaustive investigations retracing the steps of the hijackers all the way through American flying schools? The laundry list of The Obvious goes on an on.

Then there's the accompanying list of unlikelihoods. Even if you suppose there are nefarious Dr. Evil type leaders willing to kill thousands of innocent civilians as pawns, a 9/11 conspiracy sponsored by the U.S. government would also have to involve a government populated with thousands of amoral henchmen setting the whole thing up and then somehow managing to conceal the conspiracy from the whole world. Now that would truly be amazing.

But to the conspiratorialists - most of them having strikingly similar leftist views - that's no more unlikely than the government planting charges on the New Orleans levees to coincide with the arrival of Hurricane Katrina (ahem!).

To these folks, it all makes sense, and anybody who doesn't see it that way is a dupe who just isn't examining "the evidence." To these folks, it all makes more sense than believing that a group of 19 Islamic extremists, operating under the financial and logistical support of al-Qaida, managed to do it all on Sept. 11, 2001.

But that's what happened, and if we can't open our eyes and see our real enemy, then heaven help us.