It's a Conspiracy!

September 11 has spawned reams of conspiracy theories. Many are ridiculous. But far more ridiculous -- if that's the word -- are the uses to which the Bush Administration has been putting last fall's terrorist attacks. It doesn't take a conspiracy nut to see the Shrub/Cheney cabal using 9-11 precisely as if they had done the deed.

Thus, the destruction of the Bill of Rights (except for the Second Amendment). A mushrooming police state apparatus. Huge boosts in military spending, virtually none of which has anything to do with actually fighting terrorism. Rampant corporate theft involving scores of Bush operatives and family members. Utter contempt for global treaties. Rollback of environmental protection. Assaults on women's and minority rights. And no attempt to shut the nuclear power plants that remain our most vulnerable and potentially horrific targets.

In short, it's been a field day for the authoritarian and mean of spirit, a conservative feeding frenzy for an inept, unelected crew that, before September 11, was all but written off. The far right has ridden the bin Laden horse so far and so fast it's sometimes hard to believe they didn't hire him in the first place. (Come to think of it, they did -- though that was to fight the Soviets.)

But the conspiracy theories? The most twisted seems to be a book now sweeping France that says the Pentagon launched missiles on the World Trade Center and itself. Ignoring a virtually infinite number of photographs and eye-witness accounts, the Gallic screed has sold some 200,000 copies asserting that the whole thing was executed by the American armed forces to enhance the power of its most cynical advocate, George W. Bush.

Then there's the stuff on the Internet. Long, detailed examinations of how and why the Bush family's long-standing ties to the bin Laden family and the Saudi Arabia they largely own prove they set the whole thing up. Sketchy CIA meetings with Osama here and there. Complex money trails. The usual.

Much of it is utterly absurd. Some makes pretty good sense.

But none is undercut by the fact that the U.S. military did, in fact, train bin Laden in all the basic skills he might have needed to pull off this attack. It's common knowledge that our men in khaki also trained Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and a host of other vile thugs behind "blowback" attacks on us. And that the real seat of oil-based terror is Saudi Arabia, to which the Bushies pander and plead on an hourly basis.

Then there's the fact that the U.S. military has leveled Afghanistan, Grenada-style, while the U.S. government has yet to begin a single credible criminal prosecution over what Bush brands the most heinous attack on the U.S. ever.