I wonder if any British Sluggites might be able to shed light on this. Lately I've run into a couple of British guys who believed that the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated by the US government as a pretext for invading Iraq. One of them also believed that Osama bin Laden's death was faked. Their political views seemed to be generally left-leaning and liberal. Did I just happen to run into a couple of weirdos, or are there circles in UK politics where 9-11 conspiracy theories still have currency?

I feel like some people find it almost comforting to believe in a world where everything is orchestrated by an evil mastermind in the White House, instead of it being a chaotic place where various greedy, corrupt, deranged, angry, misguided and incompetent people blow up buildings and wage foolish wars for no good reason.

I don't think a lot of people have changed their opinion on 9 11 since quite a while, just most got bored at reiterating their position, so there is less debate.

My own 9-11 pet theory is, that the Iraqi goverment was behind it, the US goverment blamed al quaida, because they figured they needed someone to attack sooner then a thorough investigation would be finished and they wanted to attack them anyway and invaded Afghanistan. After they learned the truth, they had to come up with an other reason for attacking Iraq

I think every major event has its conspiracy theories. I remember reading or listening to something by a woman who was in the London tube bombings, a woman who kept a blog about the after effects and the survivors. She had to deal with conspiracy nuts essentially telling her that she didn't exist - she was a front actress paid by the English government, and the blog actually had many writers. If she fought them on their boards, it was seen as proof that she was fake. If she ignored them, proof. If she laughed about them to reporters, proof. If she didn't post on her blog for a while, proof. There was no getting through these people.

I agree, people like to believe that the world is easy - that people need to plan big to cause great destruction. It's more comforting to think some shadowy organization is behind everything. And I have to believe it's merely for the comfort, because all I ever hear is people talking about KNOWING THE TRUTH, but I've rarely heard anyone talk about what to do after the truth gets out. Gather in the streets with thumbs pointed down crying boo? Ending civilization and going back to some sort of hunter/gatherer or barter economy? Overthrowing the government and replacing it with something more like what we were told was the real government but wasn't, even though the shadowy organization was put in place to keep things ticking since the front government obviously didn't work the way it was supposed to and therefore was inefficient or inadequate? How on earth would knowing that the, I don't know, Illuminati, runs things change my day to day besides knowing not to upset the Illuminati?*

Anyway, yeah. 9/11 truthers are still out there, but at this point they're in the same bin as the grassy knoll guys. It's been 11 years, and the more years that pass, the less any underlying Truth (that probably doesn't exist) will matter.

*I have the same problem with Lovecraft's works, btw. Okay, fine, the horrible gods sleep their sleep and will someday wake up and destroy everything. So what? How's that worse than the heat death of the universe, Lovecraft? Is Cthulu waking up, like, right now? No? Well, then, I have to get to the bus so I can get to work, thanks.

I think the deal with Lovecraft is that individuals sometimes encounter these things and get messed up. Not every story is apocalyptic.

Anyway. I once worked with a truther. He, a physicist, thought he'd proven via a physical model, that the video of the collapse of the towers was inconsistent with the collapse of the buildings being from the fire, so there had to have been demolition charges.

Never mind that there was nowhere in the building one could place these charges to make the simulation come out 'right' to his standards, except by putting a few explosives on every floor. How they got those explosives placed on the same floor as the plane, or above it, not to explode in the heat... was never explained.

But it's a clumsy evil mastermind who can't figure out a way to lead an attack on an unpopular country without blowing up one of his own buildings. There's a strange mix of competence and incompetence in most conspiracy theories - like when some shadow group is able to control the whole world and keep the truth almost perfectly hidden, and yet can't help dropping enough clues that some random guys without any special knowlege or insight can figure them out.

I think conspiracy theorists like the 9/11 Truthers are just another example of the binary thinking that has crippled our whole political system. There are some kernels of truth to some of their ideas. If there is not no evidence, then the truth must be the opposite "logical" extreme. The neoconserviative think tank PNAC (Project for the New American Century) had an open letter posted on their website to then President Clinton declaring diplomacy had failed and it was necessary to attack Iraq. When President Dubya got into office he had several PNAC members and affiliates in his administration. When 9/11 happened they seized the opportunity and took us to war with Iraq. This subtlety gets lost to the extremist thinker. They can't stop at the fact someone wanted to do something, they have to extrapolate that desire means they must have taken the initiative and been directly responsible for the events that made their desire possible.

So... There are some people out there that still know, huh? The Big Five need to be alerted...
/joke

I've always believed that there exist SO many conspiracy theories covering such a wide and diverse number of topics that a small number of them at the very least could actually be true. For the most part it's something stupid to do and I'm not sure if I'd willingly associate with avid conspiracy theorists for any reason other than trolling them.

While I don't believe some of the tripe that comes out from people like this, some of the questions raised are valid. Look at the people that believe we let Pearl Harbor happen to give us a reason to enter WWII. There are a lot of documents released that shows there was a known risk and a possibility that it could happen.

The weirdest conspiracy theorists are the ones that have these outlandish theories, but don't have any good reason why the conspirators would be doing what they are alleged to be doing. I remember running across some guy who thought (at the time) that the Bush administration had Osama bin Laden's corpse frozen in some secret morgue somewhere. He was asked why they'd be keeping it stashed away instead of trotting it out and saying, "Hey, look who we've got!" especially since this was during the period of time when Bush was taking the most flak over Iraq and WMDs and really could have used the popularity boost he would have gotten by being able to say "We killed the #1 most wanted terrorist in the world." The conspiracy theorist didn't have a good answer for that, but still insisted that it was true. Wherever he is, what I wonder now is what he thinks about Operation Neptune Spear. Has he rejected his previous conspiracy theory, or just heaped more on top of it? Does he think that the corpse brought back from that operation was the real body taken out of the freezer, or that it was fake and that the real body is still on ice?

And for people who think that the Obama administration faked Osama bin Laden's death for the publicity, how do they explain the fact that bin Laden hasn't popped up in a videotape yelling "I'm still alive, suckas!"? I suppose they'd say he's actually in league with the Americans.

*puts on tin foil hat* Osama never stopped working with the CIA since the 80s.

And that's the 1880s.

Have you not seen the pictures on the internet? Osama and Obama are the same person... He had to fake his own death so that he could live under our noses as our first "black" president.

No! Tin foil hats actually amplify the mind control rays! You want an anti-drone scarf.

As usual, David Wong explains it best: