THE AGE OF MALARKEY

In an earlier column, I theorized that when the hijackers rammed those planes into the World Trade Center, they must've torn a hole in the space-time continuum, opening the door to another dimension – the Bizarro World – an alternate universe where everything is grotesquely inverted. But now it seems that the Great Inversion may have occurred far earlier, well before the hijackers succeeded in their hellish plot. The news that Mohamed Atta and friends paid a visit to the Department of Agriculture in order to apply for a government loan – after all, terrorism on the scale he imagined didn't come cheap – goes waaaay beyond bizarre, all the way to phantasmagoric. How else can we describe Johnelle Bryant's story of her close encounter with Atta, in which the terrorist mastermind walked in demanding a $650,000 government loan to fulfill his "immigrant's dream" and start a crop-dusting business?

"He wanted to finance a twin-engine six-passenger aircraft … and remove the seats. He said he was an engineer, and he wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting."