Brendan O'Neill has found some folks who are turned all the way up to eleven on them:

Sitting on the comfy couch, their cups of tea in hand, they try to convince me that the 11 September 2001 attacks were executed by elements in the west who wanted to launch wars and "make billions upon trillions of dollars".

"We know for certain that the official story of 9/11 isn't true," says Shayler. "The twin towers did not collapse because of planes and fire; they were brought down in a controlled demolition. The Pentagon was most likely hit by an American missile, not an aeroplane." Machon nods. In black trousers and black top, this sophisticated blonde in her late thirties comes across more like a schoolmarm than a 9/11 anorak. "The Pentagon's anti-missile defence system would definitely have picked up and dealt with a commercial airliner. We can only assume that whatever hit the Pentagon was sending a friendly signal. A missile fired by a US military plane would have sent a friendly signal." She says this in a kind of Anna Ford-style newsreader's voice, as if she were speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. She takes another sip of tea.

Say the phrase "conspiracy theorist" (but don't say it to Shayler and Machon if you can help it, because they angrily deny being conspiracy theorists) and most people will think of those nutty militiamen in redneck areas of America who hate Big Government, or of taxi drivers with possibly anti-Semitic leanings in some hot, dusty backwater of the Middle East who revel in telling western clients in particular: "America and the Jew did 9/11." Yet, here in Highgate, I am talking to a man and woman who have worked in the British secret services and who, together with their landlady Belinda, a professional linguist, truly believe that American elements facilitated 9/11 in order to "justify their adventurism in oil-rich countries in the Middle East", in Shayler's words. Here we have a new kind of conspiracy theorist: the chattering conspiracist, respectable, well-read, articulate, but, I regret to report, no less cranky than those rednecks and misguided Kabul cabbies.

Amazing.

[Late afternoon update]

Jim Robbins finds another refugee from Toontown:

Meyssan's purpose is to uncover a much deeper plot of the United States against the world. He reveals other interesting facts, like bin Laden was an agent of the U.S. who was used by President Bush to destroy secret CIA offices in the World Trade Towers. Seems like a lot of effort — when Stansfield Turner wanted to do it he just fired a bunch of guys. And if the WTC planes were part of the plan, and presumably also United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania, why go to the trouble of fabricating a strike on the Pentagon instead of just using another aircraft like the missing Flight 77? At some point Occam's Razor has to come into play. But to the tortured mind of Meyssan, whose other causes include hard anti-Catholicism and "rejection of a return to a moral order" it probably makes a lot of sense.

Today is Yom Hashoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, and Meyssan's theory fits neatly with those of the Holocaust deniers. In both cases, the premises of their originators are indefensible, which forces them into a position where they have to throw the facts overboard to sustain their arguments. But notions like this are kept alive by people who have a predisposition to believe them, those who have pre-existing grudges and will engage in whatever reality-denying behavior justifies their baseline prejudices. For example, it is already widely believed in the Middle East that Sept. 11 was not perpetrated by bin Laden but by the Mossad, the CIA, or some other group, in order to give the United States a pretext to intervene in the region. Meyssan's theory is a qualitative step beyond the idea that al Qaeda was not behind the attacks — he denies that the attack on the Pentagon even happened, at least not "the way the government says it did." This story is certain to find fertile soil in some of the more radical quarters, especially among those that both deny the Holocaust happened and wish it had been more effective. For example Ibrahim Abu-al-Naja, the first deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who complained about how the world was going to make the Palestinians "pay the price for what happened to [the Jews], if indeed anything had happened to them." Or the recent editorial on WAFA, the Palestinian Authority news service, that admitted that a few Jews went to the gas chambers, but "about whose number there is some ambiguity." (WAFA had no trouble counting the 12 million Native Americans allegedly exterminated in the 17th-19th centuries.) If Meyssan has any sense at all, he will rush out an Arabic edition pronto.

Yet, here in Highgate, I am talking to a man and woman who have worked in the British secret services...

For some reason the intel services have been attracting this type for generations. Is it any wonder the analysis coming out of them is sometimes not reliable?

If the war was about oil:

1) how come gas prices are so high?

2) how come they went halfway around the world, when simply rolling the tanks north from Montana for ten hours would have captured 1/3 of the world's total oil supply?

I’ve got one of these in my office. He has a masters degree in electrical engineering, which makes it even more scary (granted the degree is from a marginal university). He tells me with a straight face that temperature of the fire didn’t come anyway near the melting point of steel therefore it was a demolition job. I showed him steel property data that shows that steel loses 25% of its strength at 425C and 75% of its strength at 750C, well below the melting point of about 1600C. This information made no difference; he just started ranting about something else….

And we let these people vote!

"I showed him steel property data that shows that steel loses 25% of its strength at 425C and 75% of its strength at 750C, well below the melting point of about 1600C. This information made no difference; he just started ranting about something else…."

Just beause people have a title with "Engineer" in it does not make them special. I will wager you friend is "Short Bus Special". Bet you a fiver he doesn't have his PE.

It is like arguing that an Astrophysicist is an automatic expert in Rocketry. I wonder if we could argue that Aerospace and Mechanical Engineers should automatically be considered authoratative in Astrophysics?

Anybody with any experience with 4150 Chrome Moly Vanadium can tell you this happens.

A machine gun barrel will slump under its own weight and the bullet will exit the side of the now slumped barrel. The barrel will never get hot enough to actually melt, it will loose the strength to contain that projectile that does not want to make that turn and fail first.

Even barrels that don't catastropically fail can be permently damaged by exposure to high temps.

When steel exceeds 1200º F. it will decarburize and lose hardness as the alloying carbon atoms are allowed to escape the Fe lattuice. Oxygen in the air will bind with the Carbon and cary it off as CO2 gas.

Let me add that the slumping is because the high temp caused the steel to lose its rigity for clarification purposes.

I used to be one of those big time JFK assassination conspiratorial nuts. I would get in huge heated arguments with friends, believed Oliver Stone even, and read countless stories that backed up the grassy knoll claims. When your so committed to an certain perception or opinion for so long its like a 2 mile long train trying to come to a stop before one is finally convinced otherwise. It really is an adolescent fantasy that one is smarter then everyone else. That you're part of the small group of people that refuse to be duped by lies *pumps fist in air*. When actually, in reality, its much easier to often times hang onto fantasy then to just accept the fact that reality can and will often times prove to be even more bizarre and perplexing then even anything that can be imagined. It's this fear in the face of unlimited possibilities that cause people to retract into a boxed-in fantasy world where they get to make up the rules and decide the outcomes.

Since then I've lost my gusto for most any conspiratorial ideal. Sure it's fine to question and imagine but I try to keep my BS meter finely tuned to prevent myself from entering into yet another situation where I have to apologize to friends for things I might have said in the heat of arguments. I try to remain a big enough person to not be afraid to admit I'm wrong; when I occasionally am ;)

If the war was about oil:
1) how come gas prices are so high?

Putting on my tinfoil hat and assuming there is a conspiracy, the objective would be to create supply instability (real or percieved) so that hedge traders bid up the prices on deposits that the US oil companies actually control.

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