Scientific American Takes on the 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts

http://www.chronwatch.com/content/co....asp?aid=14972

Written by Steven Plaut
Monday, June 06, 2005

While there are many reasons to believe that the political arena is in fact a circle and not a straight line, with the extremist Left sitting alongside the lunatic neonazi Right and sharing many of the same ideas and positions, nothing so clearly illustrates the "political circle" concept as well as the chasing by extremists of both the Right and Left after conspiracy theories related to 9-11.

The web is crawling with web sites that insist that bin Laden was a patsy and that al-Qaeda did NOT knock down the WTC and attack the Pentagon. So who then did? Usually it is some mix of the CIA, the Republicans, the "Illuminati", the Council on Foreign Relations (a favorite bugaboo of conspiracy nuts), and of course the Jews (and the Israelis).

Some of these "theories" are on the web sites of Holocaust Deniers (like Rense.com) and Stormtrooper-wannabes, while others are on the web sites of Far-Leftist marxies and "anarchists."

Among the leftwing lunatics who promote such nonsense is neofascist Dennis "Justin" Raimondo, editor of antiwar.com, who "proved" that Dem Joos knocked down the WTC because, on the day of the attack, some Israeli moving men were picked up for visa violations and one was found to have some cash in a dirty sock. Raimondo is convinced that no one could possibly have cash in a sock unless they were responsible for the 9-11 attack! Chronically-unemployed Counterpunch neonazi columnist and Ba'athist Uruknet spokesman Kurt Nimmo agrees. If you type "World Trade Center" and "conspiracy" into Google, you'll get more than 250,000 hits.

Now Scientific American has devoted a part of its newest issue to debunking conspiracy nonsense related to 9-11. The Scientific American piece was motived in part by the success of a lunabat book crayoned by a French left-wing activist, Thierry Meyssan's, about yet another 9-11 conspiracy "theory", L'Effroyable Imposture, which became an amphibian best-seller in 2002.

After noting some of the ludicrous pseudo-facts trotted out by the conspiracist fruitcakes, Scientific American sums things up thus:

'All the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted. On the Pentagon "missile strike," for example, I queried the would-be filmmaker about what happened to Flight 77, which disappeared at the same time. "The plane was destroyed, and the passengers were murdered by Bush operatives," he solemnly revealed. "Do you mean to tell me that not one of the thousands of conspirators needed to pull all this off," I retorted, "is a whistle-blower who would go on TV or write a tell-all book?" My rejoinder was met with the same grim response I get from UFOlogists when I ask them for concrete evidence: Men in Black silence witnesses, and dead men tell no tales. '

About the Writer: Dr. Plaut is a professor of business administration at the University of Haifa, and the author of "The Scout," available from Gefen Publishing House at: http://www.israelbooks.com/bookDetails.asp?book=43.