At a decade’s remove from the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York and Washington, one element at least has reaped a boon from the horror unleashed on America that infamous day. Not the depleted ranks of al-Qaida, but rather the swelling legions of conspiracy theorists.

Bad enough for al-Qaida that the attacks finally provoked a concerted effort by U.S. and allied intelligence and military forces to hunt down its masterminds, culminating in the recent elimination of Osama bin Laden. On top of that, their ardent boast that it was them and only them that did it has been relentlessly assaulted by a vigorous guerrilla army of conspiracy theorists in whose 9/11 scenarios al-Qaida is cast at best in a supporting role, as useful idiots haplessly manipulated by shadowy higher powers, be it the Illuminati, the international Jewish cabal, or the United States government – or all the above in cahoots.

By the end of the decade, 9/11 had achieved top standing in a ranking of prevailing conspiracy theories compiled by Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, outstripping alternative Kennedy assassination theories that had topped the conspiracy charts for the latter decades of the last century. It further beat out the great Roswell suspicion, that aliens crashed at a New Mexico desert airbase in 1947 and the authorities have covered it up ever since; the tale that the moon landings were faked in a Hollywood studio; and that the world is actually run by powerful clandestine groups – the Illuminati, who have been suspect for centuries, and more recently the like of the Bilderberg Group fraternity of global tycoons, given to plotting the world order in exclusive company at upscale country retreats.

The 9/11 attack has fostered not just one, but a cornucopia of conspiracy theories. The most prominent being that the whole thing was engineered by U.S. authorities, and that the Twin Towers in New York were brought down not by the jetliners that crashed into them, but by controlled demolition from below. Runner-up is that authorities knew of the plot but let it happen. The governing supposition is that it was perpetrated or allowed in order to justify the invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration had been plotting since it took office earlier that year. (This echoes the theory, now crowded down the charts by more contemporary fodder, that Pearl Harbour was allowed to happen to grease America’s entry into the Second World War.)

Ancillary theories have it that the Pentagon in Washington was not actually hit by a plane, but by a missile strike from the ground and that the fourth attack plane, Flight 93, whose passengers overpowered the hijackers causing the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field, was shot down by U.S. fighter jets. There have been widely accepted allegations that no Jews showed up for work at the towers that day and that there was a run of insider trading prior to the event on the stock of airlines whose planes were hijacked.

All challenge the official and generally accepted version of the 9/11 events and their allegations and interpretations are profuse and abundant on the Internet. Offered as contrary evidence to the official record are anecdotal accounts of mysterious explosions at ground level, video of curious eruptions at higher levels, and elaborate – and largely amateur – engineering assessments, which have been disputed by what most people regard as reliable scientific authorities. (The conspiracist line on that being that of course they would say that, being as they are in the pocket of the reigning conspirators.)

As for the U.S. government, belief in a 9/11 conspiracy beyond that hatched by al-Qaida, requires one to accept the notion that George W. Bush, his brain trust and the U.S. intelligence and military brass – along with legions of their subordinates – conspired to perpetrate such a monstrous crime on their own country. Whatever else one might believe about that administration’s notorious mendacity, that tends to defy rational judgment. It also staggers rational belief that a president and an administration of such manifest incompetence during its tenure could mount a plot of such sweeping sophistication, and manage to prevent conclusive proof of it from emerging.

What is eminently believable about the role of authorities in 9/11, and has been reliably documented, is that the al-Qaida plot could – and arguably should – have been uncovered in time to prevent the attack. This might have been the case had there been better co-ordination and less turf wrangling among U.S. intelligence and police agencies, which hoarded vital information that if shared and competently analyzed, should have tipped off authorities to the al-Qaida scheme. (A report in this month’s Vanity Fair suggests that U.S. authorities could have put a tap on every cellphone in Afghanistan while Bin Laden was plotting the strike from there, but that the thing fell through because the FBI, NSA and the CIA couldn’t agree on who should run it.)

For many, however, the notion that there was a grander conspiracy behind 9/11 is more comforting than the thought it was a mere combination of random factors, of prosaic systemic failures, banal incompetence and a plot executed by an upstart bunch of raggedy-ass fanatics operating out of caves in Afghanistan. Either that, or they are prone to outlandish tales and paranoid delusions; never mind the Bilderberg Group or aliens from outer space, there is a constituency that believes the world is run by hyper-intelligent reptilian creatures that operate from deep underground redoubts. Or else they are passionately distrustful and resentful of official authorities and official accounts.

In an analysis of conspiracist thinking, British psychologist Patrick Leman suggested in a 2007 New Scientist paper that belief in conspiracies, however outlandish, is a coping mechanism for the insecure. That on the one hand convincing ourselves of conspiracy theories wishes away the stark, terrifying arbitrariness of life on this Earth, or, on the other, compensates for a sense of disempowerment and enables people to blame personal failures on the clandestine machinations of a malevolent governing system that conspires to keep them down and from knowing the truth of their evil schemes.

“In a strange way, some conspiracy theories offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability. (In other words, that the universe is all right.) Instability makes most of us uncomfortable. … Essentially, people often assume that an event with substantial, significant or wide-ranging consequences is likely to have been caused by something substantial, significant or wide-ranging,” Leman noted.

Or, as American sage H.L. Mencken put it in a 1936 piece, “The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of iniquity.” (Predators indeed stalked Wall Street in recent years, though they were all too human and their devious machinations have been amply chronicled, if insufficiently prosecuted.)

It is true that conspiring is endemic to human nature. The world is and has been replete with conspiracies grand and petty, and some have been revealed and many have not. Some trustworthy voices have said that shadowy powers do indeed move in the world. Benjamin Disraeli is quoted as saying, “For you see, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those not behind the scenes.” Or Justice Felix Frankfurter: “The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes.” Winston Churchill ascribed Soviet Russia to the culmination of a “world conspiracy” that had been festering since the French Revolution.

Big and shameful secrets can be kept, even when a high-level conspiracy involves a cast of dozens, hundreds, even thousands, contends legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who leaked evidence of scandalous American plotting during the Vietnam War. “The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.”

His view is, however, challenged by leading Watergate conspiracy henchman G. Gordon Liddy, as cited by Michael Shermer, Scientific American columnist and author of Why People Believe in Weird Things: “The problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut.”

What distinguishes the leading conspiracy theories is that there is a preponderance of evidence to support the conventional version, but which conspiracy theorists deny on the basis of slight inconsistencies and small gaps in the official knowledge. These they counter with wild imaginings and twisted interpretations that suit their political leanings or personal fantasies.

Some are just benignly silly, such as the high-ranking theories that Elvis Presley faked his death in 1977 and limited his public appearances thereafter to franchise convenience stores, or that Paul McCartney did die, and an imposter has been filling concert venues under his name to this day. Some are woefully pernicious, such as the widely held belief that the HIV virus was produced in a U.S. government laboratory and unleashed on the African-American population to keep blacks down.

Shermer and others suggest that conspiracy theorists work backwards in their interpretation of events, starting with a belief of what happened, conditioned by their religious or ideological tendencies, and then select evidence, real or imagined, that reinforces the initial belief. “Belief comes first, reasons for belief follow, and those reasons are winnowed to ensure that the belief survives intact.”

Conspiracy theory believers tend to be impervious to rational argument, as suggested by Vincent Bugliosi and more recently by National Post editorialist Jonathan Kay in his book Among the Truthers. “Whenever I’ve tried to debate 9/11 conspiracy theorists, all my accumulated knowledge about the subject has proven entirely useless – because in every exchange the conspiracy theorist would inevitably ignore the most obvious evidence and instead focus the discussion on the handful of obscure, allegedly incriminating oddities he had memorized. In this game, the conspiracist claims victory merely by scoring a single uncontested point – since he imagines every card he plays is a trump.”

Earlier this summer, the U.K. government released 9,000 pages of UFO-related documentation it had amassed over the years, none of which offered a smidgen of conclusive proof of extraterrestrial presence on Earth at any time. Even at that, true believers are unlikely to be dissuaded, said National Archives consultant David Clarke. “Many people want to believe we are not alone in the universe. There is nothing you can to to disprove this no matter how many files are released. If people don’t see what they want in the files, they don’t believe it’s the truth.”

It is why, Kay suggests, that few experts are willing to confront conspiracy theorists in public debates, and those that do are typically sorry they did.”

Mass media have contributed, exponentially as their reach multiplied with technological innovation, to the propagation of conspiracy theories, particularly since the advent of the Internet. Mainstream media which give space and airtime to conspiracy theorists. Movies like Enemy of the State and Shooter whose plots are based on fictional government conspiracies; TV shows like the X-Files that play on the premise of alien visitations suppressed by authorities; the runaway Dan Brown bestseller The Da Vinci Code that appropriates the long-held Jesus theory, that he fathered progeny with Mary Magdalene whose descendants went on to propagate a French royal line.

It is easy for most people to dismiss conspiracy theorists as fringe nutters, but some warn that even if their theories are poppycock, their presence and proliferation in modern society is real and should not be lightly dismissed.

Former New Republic editor Michael Kelly coined the term “fusion paranoia” to describe the political convergence of left- and right-wing activists around conspiracy theories that rest on antigovernment attitudes. An example of this is the widespread belief that the swine flu epidemic was a hoax perpetrated by scientists, governments and the World Health Organization to enrich vaccine producing pharmaceutical companies. It started in leftist circles and quickly spread across the political spectrum to the Tea Party constituency on the right, as virulently as the flu itself.

A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, by University of Syracuse political scientist Michael Barkun, is widely held as a definitive academic study of the enduring and growing conspiracist phenomenon. He views broadly shared conspiracy theories as a bridge between the politically disaffected and the culturally suspicious that closes divisions between the two.

He acknowledged that for the most part the conspiracists lack formal organization and have negligible institutional support, but suggests even that is not as huge a drawback as it once was in the pre-digital age now that conspiracy obsessives can disseminate their fanciful constructs at lightning speed over the Internet and adjust their theories at will without the encumbrance of obligation to a formal institution. He concludes that the danger lies less in the beliefs themselves than in the behaviour they might stimulate or justify in the smitten believers. He cites Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh as having made pilgrimages prior to his own terrorist strike to the charred remains of the Branch Davidian site at Waco, a rich trove of conspiracist lore, as well as the Roswell countryside.

“As long as the New World Order appeared to be almost but not quite a reality, devotees of conspiracy theories could be expected to confine their efforts to propagandizing. On the other hand, should they believe that the prophesied evil day had in fact arrived, their behaviour would be far more difficult to predict.”

Countering conspiracy theories and their propagators, never mind dissuading their believers, is a challenge to authorities for which there is no ready approach. A 2008 paper by Cass Sunstein, a White House legal affairs director, offered a range of options: Ban conspiracy theorizing; impose a tax of some sort on propagators; mount a media campaign to discredit conspiracy theories; engage in “cognitive infiltration” of conspiracist groups and hire covert agents to mount counter-arguments to prevailing conspiracy theories. Given the nature of the beast, none of these is likely to be effective, and might even serve as confirmation of its suspicions of institutionalized government perfidy.

At best, they could try getting comic Dennis Miller on the payroll to talk to the conspiracists. His line on conspiracy theories being: “The biggest conspiracy has always been that there is no conspiracy. Nobody’s out to get you. Nobody gives a shit whether you live or die. There, do you feel better now?”

Actually, they wouldn’t. The suspicion of that is precisely why they turn to conspiracy theories for comfort in the first place, in this insensately cruel world.

hbauch@montrealgazette.com