9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Echo Early Bin Laden Talking Points

First, allow me to state that I am no enemy of conspiracy theories on that basis alone.  I was co-author of a book released in the early 1990s entitled "The Gary Hart Set-up," that contended that the demise of the 1988 Hart campaign might well have been the result of a political dirty trick possibly engineered by the campaign of George Bush, Sr.  While a local bestseller in the Denver area and its later repetition in books such as Richard Ben Cramer's "What It Takes," that particular conspiracy theory was generally pooh-poohed in the media, making me one of its sole adherents.  

As with Senator Hart, I was and have always been skeptical of the findings of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy.  I believe I was the first investigator to point out that the damage inflicted by the various bullets that day showed clear evidence of being caused by different kinds of ammunition.  

In 2001, I wrote an article for the Washington Free Press of Seattle, Washington (under the pen-name R. Roy Blake), that won a Projected Censored Award entitled "Genetic Bullets," that alleged the existence of government programs in various nations to study the feasibility of "genetically specific biological weapons,"  that is biological weapons that could be made to target only members of a specific ethnic group. That may well have been the story that cost investigative reporter Danny Casalaro his life.

Thus, I think I can clearly state that if I find a conspiracy theory to be preposterous, that criticism cannot be readily dismissed as the criticism of one who does not believe that conspiracy has helped to shape human history.  Indeed, in an essay I entitled "Conspiracy and Chaos," I put forth the argument that conspiracy has and is one of the major contributors to history, and that conspiracy can also be summed up rather innocuously as an attempt, tacit or deliberate to control chaos, which I defined as everything from market forces, to political movements, to the weather.