Is there a case for conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the Iraq war?

from MSNBC/Newsweek

About 10 minutes into the ultra-low-budget documentary “Loose Change,” now making its way around the Internet, that late, great genius of addled truth-telling, Hunter S. Thompson, is heard giving his gonzo opinion of the way the American press behaved after 9/11. “Well, let’s see, ‘shamefully’ is the word that comes to mind,” he says.

“Fair enough,” I thought.

But then Thompson went on. “You sort of wonder when something like that happens, well, whooo [he stretched out the ‘o’] stands to benefit?” Right there and right then, I realized this would be one of those movies that reveled in conspiracy and revealed little in the way of fact. But I went on watching, because this fantasy begun in France that the United States government actually carried out the 9/11 attacks, ugly as it is, fits neatly with the world’s image of the United States as a land that’s been run by power-mad, supersecretive, hypocritical scofflaw servants of narrow corporate interests ever since the Bush administration came to power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin played on that theme in his annual state of the union speech earlier this week, referring to the United States, none-too-obliquely, as “Comrade Wolf,” and in the same breath, announcing what could soon become a new arms race on a scale not seen since the days of the cold war.

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