Madness

MSNBC helps provide more fuel to the 9/11 conspiracy fires by writing about a number of the people who are part of this particular mass psychosis. There is a form of madness sweeping this country that is fueled, I suspect, by a number of different factors. The unrelenting attacks by the left on the administration. An inability to believe that there really are vicious killers who want us dead, no matter what we do or do not do. An internal inability to accept that we are not in control of all events. Pick one or all as driving these delusions.

It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why Bush listened to a child's story while the nation was attacked and how Osama bin Laden, America's Public Enemy No. 1, escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora.

He wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. He read the 9/11 Commission report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian official was reprimanded, much less cashiered.

"To me, the report read as a cartoon." White-haired and courtly, Griffin sits on a couch in a hotel lobby in Manhattan, unspooling words in that reasonable Presbyterian minister's voice. "It's a much greater stretch to accept the official conspiracy story than to consider the alternatives."

Such as?

"There was massive complicity in this attack by U.S. government operatives."

Forget talking rationally to these people. This is a for of mass psychosis. There simply is no way to get past the defenses they have set up.

The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped looking for truth from the government. As cacophonous and free-range a bunch of conspiracists anywhere this side of Guy Fawkes, they produce hip-hop inflected documentaries and scholarly conferences. The Web is their mother lode. Every citizen is a researcher. There's nothing like a triple, Google-fed epiphany lighting up the laptop at 2:44 a.m.

A government that has proved time and time again that it cannot keep secrets is elevated to omnipotent stature. Intelligence agencies that collectively are hard put to find their collective butts with both hands become godlike creatures with limitless reach and abilities.

Let's put aside the could-anyone-do-something-that-spectacularly-twisted? question and touch on practicalities. Isn't the problem with big ugly conspiracies — from the Gulf of Tonkin to My Lai to the 1961 Pentagon plan to provoke a war by attacking Americans and blaming it on Castro — that they are too big and ugly to keep secret?

Griffin shrugs. History is littered with government black-bag jobs. "How do you know they can't keep big secrets? Can you be sure you know what you don't know?"

And there, of course is the final keep in their multiple layers of defenses. The absence of proof is itself proof. There is no way to cure these people. They will have to wake themselves out of this self-induced trance world they occupy. All the rational people can do is keep trying to repeat the facts that they keep denying. We might at least stop some from joining the fever parade.

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