September 11 has spawned reams of conspiracy theories. Many are ridiculous. But far more ridiculous -- if that's the word -- are the uses to which the Bush Administration has been putting last fall's terrorist attacks. It doesn't take a conspiracy nut to see the Shrub/Cheney cabal using 9-11 precisely as if they had done the deed.

Thus, the destruction of the Bill of Rights (except for the Second Amendment). A mushrooming police state apparatus. Huge boosts in military spending, virtually none of which has anything to do with actually fighting terrorism. Rampant corporate theft involving scores of Bush operatives and family members. Utter contempt for global treaties. Rollback of environmental protection. Assaults on women's and minority rights. And no attempt to shut the nuclear power plants that remain our most vulnerable and potentially horrific targets.

In short, it's been a field day for the authoritarian and mean of spirit, a conservative feeding frenzy for an inept, unelected crew that, before September 11, was all but written off. The far right has ridden the bin Laden horse so far and so fast it's sometimes hard to believe they didn't hire him in the first place. (Come to think of it, they did -- though that was to fight the Soviets.)

But the conspiracy theories? The most twisted seems to be a book now sweeping France that says the Pentagon launched missiles on the World Trade Center and itself. Ignoring a virtually infinite number of photographs and eye-witness accounts, the Gallic screed has sold some 200,000 copies asserting that the whole thing was executed by the American armed forces to enhance the power of its most cynical advocate, George W. Bush.

Then there's the stuff on the Internet. Long, detailed examinations of how and why the Bush family's long-standing ties to the bin Laden family and the Saudi Arabia they largely own prove they set the whole thing up. Sketchy CIA meetings with Osama here and there. Complex money trails. The usual.

Much of it is utterly absurd. Some makes pretty good sense.

But none is undercut by the fact that the U.S. military did, in fact, train bin Laden in all the basic skills he might have needed to pull off this attack. It's common knowledge that our men in khaki also trained Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and a host of other vile thugs behind "blowback" attacks on us. And that the real seat of oil-based terror is Saudi Arabia, to which the Bushies pander and plead on an hourly basis.

Then there's the fact that the U.S. military has leveled Afghanistan, Grenada-style, while the U.S. government has yet to begin a single credible criminal prosecution over what Bush brands the most heinous attack on the U.S. ever.

Nor are the new 9-11 theories soiled by the reality, as documented by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, that the administration seems in no hurry to find whoever sent anthrax through the U.S. mail, terrorizing Congress and the Postal Service. In fact, conspiracy buffs are heartened by the fact that the anthrax was military grade, and went to Senate liberals who questioned the post-September 11 Patriot Act and its destruction of our basic freedoms.

All this adds up to a sad reality: Sometimes the conspiracies are real, and then time passes and it no longer matters. For example:

• In 1898, did the Spaniards blow up the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor? The answer is almost certainly no. But the belief they did -- manufactured by the cynical newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst -- led the U.S. into a bloody imperial war and the conquest of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, which is still a U.S. territory.
  
• Was the passenger ship Lusitania illegally carrying weapons to Britain when it was sunk by the Germans in 1915, leading the U.S. into World War I? Definitely. But we weren't sure Woodrow Wilson's denials were a lie until 70 years later, when a new high-tech submarine examined the ship at the ocean's bottom.
  
• Did Franklin Roosevelt conspire with the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, leading the U.S. into World War II? No, but he may have indirectly encouraged it to happen.
  
• Did South Korea goad the North Koreans to attack, leading the U.S. into a war there that eventually involved China? Probably.
  
• Was John F. Kennedy killed by a conspiracy that may have involved the CIA? Still the debate of the last century.
  
• Was Martin Luther King killed by a conspiracy that may have involved at least tacit complicity from the FBI? Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes.
  
• Were the killings of Kennedy and King used to make America more violent, more twisted and less just? Like 9-11, it's hard to argue otherwise.
  
• Did the U.S. invent a non-attack at the Tonkin Gulf in 1964, leading to the Vietnam War? Definitely.
  
• Did Richard Nixon sabotage Vietnam peace talks during the 1968 campaign, leading to his election? Definitely.
  
• Did Ronald Reagan sabotage Iranian hostage negotiations during the 1980 campaign, leading to his election? Highly likely, but still hotly debated.
  
• Did Enron deliberately create and manipulate the California "energy crisis" of 2001, giving the oil industry an excuse to draft the Bush Energy Plan? Definitely.
  
• Did George W. Bush violate the law when he failed to report that he made $848,000 by selling his shares in a money-losing company called Harken Energy, of which he was a director. Definitely, according to a memo from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
  
• Did Dick Cheney engage in illegal activities at the Halliburton Oil Company? Highly likely, though not yet proven, and the Department of Justice does not seem anxious to find out.
  
• Did Bush and Cheney conspire to have jets crash into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania on September 11? Not likely.
  

But if they keep shredding the Constitution while feeding our billions to their corporate buddies, it'll be hard to argue otherwise, at least in those countries where historians still have the right to say such things.

Maybe it would help if Bush, Cheney and their known co-conspirators were actually indicted for what they did at Harken, Halliburton and Enron. But that seems about as likely as a conspiracy to re-float the Lusitania.

Originally published in Columbus Alive (www.columbusalive.com) on July 11, 2002.

Copyright Columbus Alive Inc

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