[Matt Wiser]

Normally, I don't weigh in on conspiracy theories, but as a gent with a BA and MA in History, here's my two cents:

1) There isn't a major historical event that doesn't have a conspiracy theory attached. There were the "Merchants of Death" conspiracy theories in the '20s and '30s to explain the U.S. getting into WW I, and when that didn't go, many of them jumped on the Pearl Harbor conspiracy, along with the FDR-haters and die-hard isolationists, for example. JFK we know, and there's also conspiracy theories about the lunar landing, the Challenger shuttle accident (Jesse Helms claimed for a while the KGB sabotaged the Shuttle-on the fact that there wasn't a Soviet spy trawler off the Cape as usual), Y2K, and so on. If there weren't 9-11 conspiracy theories, I'd be surprised.

2) For those who peddle these theories, it can take the form of a religion. Any evidence that contradicts it, debunks it, or raises any doubt at all about their theory is dismissed, or even twisted to fit the conspiracy theory. The 9-11 theorists are prime examples, refusing to acknowledge holes in their theories, especially after Popular Mechanics published first an article, then a book, taking the key 9-11 claims and debunking them one by one.

3) A lot of it is denial: Pearl Harbor and 9-11 are also examples. Denial that (a) the Japanese of all people could strike over 3000 miles from home and catch the U.S. Navy napping-someone had to either know or have helped them. And denial that (b) 19 guys who had only box cutters were able to hijack four airliners and crash three of them into targets and no one was wise to them? Someone had to have given them help. The myth of the all-powerful "government" comes into play here: an example of this is on 9-11: many conspiracy theorists ask "if we had fighters on alert, why didn't they take action?" Well, when there were only 14 fighters on duty nationwide on 9-11 for air defense, unlike the Cold War days, when there were hundreds (which is the image many of these folks have), well, you get the idea.

4) Some of it is political: many Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists were Roosevelt-haters (either writers or a few serving naval officers), while many of the 9-11 theorists refused to acknowledge that George W. Bush was a legitimate President. And it becomes another key to the religion....

Personally, the paper these "theories" are written on is only good in one place: the toilet. And the bandwith that their sites take up is wasted space. But that's just me.