On August 6, 2001, while vacationing in Crawford, Texas, George Bush received an intelligence briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It included revelations that al Qaeda members were conducting "surveillance of federal buildings in New York"; the World Trade Center was mentioned in the first paragraph, the prospect of terrorist "retaliat[ion] in Washington" in the second. According to the briefing, Osama bin Laden's organization was acting in ways "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

But Bush must have had headphones on, because 36 days later when he saw Flight 11 fly into the World Trade Center, he claims his first thought was, "There's one terrible pilot." Even after the second crash Bush assures us he was unsure what was going on: "I grew up in a period of time where the idea of America being under attack never entered my mind."

The attacks of 9-11 have since been used to justify two military actions that the government has chosen to call "wars," the more recent of which -- a "pre-emptive," which is to say unprovoked, assault on Iraq -- has yielded American soldiers their bloodiest two weeks of combat since 1971. Odd, then, that every expressed reason for the Bush administration's massive and deadly undertaking in Iraq, most conspicuously Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, has evaporated under scrutiny. In fact, the only thing we know for sure is that the invasion isn't about oil. Tony Blair, among others, has been quite clear on this: any attempt to explain the war in Iraq as an oil war is a "conspiracy theory."

This makes one wonder whether other so-called conspiracy theories might be more worthy of consideration than we've been led to believe. Some months ago I wrote an article originally published in Popmatters magazine about this. In light of subsequent events, the time was right to revisit it -- particularly since the political climate in America, with its indefinite detentions and pointless color-coded alerts, has taken a more Orwellian turn than anyone ever imagined possible.

1. Prior Warnings.

Right after September 11, rumors began floating around that World Trade Center employees of the Jewish faith had been mysteriously alerted to stay home that fateful morning. This racist fantasy had an equally ugly counterpart among anti-Islamic reactionaries: that Muslims the world over knew of the 9-11 attacks in advance and managed, en masse and in their millions, to keep it a complete secret.

Such bizarre hearsay about collective foreknowledge has many unpleasant effects, not the least of which is to delegitimize an otherwise worthy question: was anyone told beforehand that something shocking might happen on or around 9-11? It turns out quite a few people claim to have received such warnings. Although the mainstream press tends to mention these accounts in isolation or attribute them to uncanny serendipity, when taken together they cry out for further explanation.

The airport security service for San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, for example, had contacted him eight hours prior to the strikes and warned him not to fly, and controversial author Salman Rushdie also claims to have gotten warnings before September 11 not to take to the tarmac. As reported in the Sept. 24, 2001 issue of Newsweek, several employees at the Pentagon cancelled their flight plans the night of September 10, citing "security concerns." And last but not least, Justice Department head John Ashcroft had stopped flying commercial aircraft two months before 9-11. Why? The FBI cited an unfavorable "threat assessment" -- but after September 11 has been unwilling to elaborate on this.

2. What Was With That Handshake, Anyway?

As I write a scandal is unfolding at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where American soldiers are accused of torturing and brutally humiliating prisoners, possibly at the behest of military intelligence officers. In a particularly bitter irony, Abu Ghraib was once a favored torture chamber of Saddam Hussein, a fact that leads some to ask whether there are actually any good guys in the U.S.-Iraq conflict.

There are more reasons than this to wonder. Where Iraq's human rights violations are concerned, U.S. foreign policy has long been sterner in rhetoric than in deed, dating back at least to the 1980s -- when many Bush administration figures were dealing with Iraq on behalf of then-president Reagan. Among these were Mideast envoy Donald Rumsfeld, whose 1983 meeting with Hussein resulted in a videotaped handshake that has since crossed the world countless times on the Internet. Speculation abounds as to what may have transpired at this meeting, but one thing is certain: at the time Hussein was employing chemical weapons almost daily in his hideous war with Iran. In 2003 the Bush administration referred to these gas attacks as part of its justification for invasion, but for whatever reason it has taken 20 years for Rumsfeld et al. to discover their own outrage over these horrific crimes.

3. That's Our Plan and We're Sticking to It.

From the toppling of the Taliban to the creation of the Homeland Security Department, September 11 has been used to justify virtually every action that the Bush administration has taken since. But as with so much concerning the administration, this is more complicated than it appears. Case in point: conspiracy theory web sites -- and later on, mainstream progressive e-zines -- have made much hay of the Project for the New American Century, an extragovernmental pressure group which has long been bent on conquering Iraq. As far back as 1998, PNAC sent the Clinton administration a now-notorious letter insisting that the sanction-choked country posed an imminent danger to the United States. P-Nackers such as conservative writer Bill Kristol argue that the oil moguls and weapons firms PNAC represents have long been preoccupied with Iraq out of an abiding humanitarian concern, but the fact remains that where Iraq is involved, September 11 has not altered policy so much as it has been used to justify policies that were already in place.

4. The Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Your Liberties.

Similar stories haunt the USA Patriot Act, which was promoted as a response to 9-11 but in fact resembles anti-terrorist measures passed following the Oklahoma City bombing as well as an anti-drug bill that was scuttled in 2000 for being too "reactionary." The stunning 9-11 attacks created a more compliant social climate for such harsh measures, so that after the attacks Congress passed the Patriot Act without even bothering to read the provisions it had earlier found so untenable.

Different people draw different conclusions from this. Unabashed conspiracy sites like www.prisonplanet.com speculate that the government deliberately orchestrated the 9-11 attacks in the hopes that this would drum up support for war and indoctrinate the American people into willingly abandoning their freedom. Others such as Gore Vidal make slightly more temperate accusations, that corruption and real-politik policies left American security in a dire state of neglect, setting the stage for the attacks. Whoever is right, it seems clear that although life in America has changed radically in the wake of 9-11, the plans in the highest levels of the government have remained oddly unchanged.

5. The War in Iraq Is Not About Oil.

We have noted with relief the assurances of those on high that the Iraq War has nothing to do with control of natural resources. We can therefore assume that the following facts, though interesting, are completely irrelevant:

Some may recall a curio in 2001's sleepy late-summer news season, equal parts shark attack and trade with Mexico: a lengthy article Gore Vidal wrote for the September Vanity Fair in the wake of Timothy McVeigh's execution. Since McVeigh was no longer with us, Vidal believed the time was right for a retrospective on the Oklahoma City bombing.

The reasons for the bombing were readily available. Turns out McVeigh, like the Unabomber, had a manifesto: a series of letters he exchanged with Vidal after reading an earlier article Vidal had written on civil liberties. The right-wing extremist McVeigh felt much the same as his left-wing expatriate correspondent: something had gone terribly wrong with what was passing for "liberty" in the United States. Where one railed against this with the published written word, the other spoke in violence, using it as a perverse kind of emphasis, a punctuation mark.

When Vidal's article went to press in the September Vanity Fair, the Oklahoma City bombing was the worst terrorist attack in history on American soil. It was worth understanding why it happened. Particularly since, as Vidal explains, four years before the bombing McVeigh was a patriotic Army man, a model soldier in the Gulf War. This seems like a contradiction. But McVeigh's war service was part of the reason his anti-government fervor was eventually to grow so formidable. The experience allowed McVeigh to say of Waco and Ruby Ridge that "[f]or all intents and purposes, federal agents had become 'soldiers' (using military language, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization and mindset) and they were escalating their behavior."

McVeigh's specialized knowledge certainly made it likely he would be among the first to register any looming mobilization of the American army against the nation's citizens. His sensitivity to the implications of his own conduct, though, seems much less keen. In appropriating military tactics to mount his assault on Oklahoma City, McVeigh inflicted on the American people exactly what he claimed to be most upset about. He became for all intents and purposes a soldier acting on U.S. soil, directing the nightmarish violence of the U.S. war machine against his fellow citizens.

Although he never explains why his act doesn't merit the same derision he casts on U.S. foreign policy, McVeigh does at least try to justify himself: "Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations," he explains. "Based on observations of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option."

But if bombing Iraq is "morally" "acceptable," one wants to reply, whence the outrage that led to the destruction of the Murrah Building in the first place? If, on the other hand, bombarding populations is morally unacceptable, shouldn't other means be used to combat it? The apparent difference for McVeigh is that the violence at Waco was directed against Americans. The war, as he perceived it, was between the country's government and its citizens.

The murder of government employees was unfortunate but necessary in his mind, because it could make the government stop attacking the people. But it wasn't possible to destroy the government or force it into submission with a single strike. Instead, McVeigh's point with Oklahoma City was to send a message. "He committed the act mostly out of revenge because of the Waco assault," Vidal quotes McVeigh's psychiatrist as saying, "but also because he wanted to make a political statement about the role of the federal government and protest the use of force against the citizens."

A man who plainly knew a great deal about violence, McVeigh seems to have had a much poorer grasp of effective communication strategies. He demonstrates both in a letter to Mr. Vidal, in which he says that Waco was all the evidence he needed to prove that a war was underway on U.S. soil, and that therefore:

For about thirty minutes after his chief of staff told him that America was under attack, George W. Bush continued to sit in an elementary school classroom listening to a second-grader tell a story about a pet goat. He did a marvelous job of looking completely unsurprised. Meanwhile, four hijacked jumbo jets were able to fly off-course across several states without encountering any opposition from the most powerful and responsive air force in the world.

Less than a month later, on the pretext of pursuing terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, the Bush administration began what it called a "war" on the impoverished and already war-torn country of Afghanistan. It turns out this assault had been in the works well before September 11 took place.

Soon after replacing the Taliban government with one more to its liking (and, in what is surely a coincidence, resuscitating the world's most bountiful opium fields), the administration began agitating for a similar, but even more destructive, bombardment of the oil-rich nation of Iraq. This, although Osama bin Laden was still at large and no link between him and Saddam Hussein could be established.

For these reasons and hundreds of others, the year following September 11 has seen probably the most staggering proliferation of "conspiracy theories" in American history. Angry speculation -- focused mainly on government dirty dealings, ulterior motives, and potential complicity in the attacks -- has risen to a clamor that easily rivals what followed the Kennedy assassination. Some of these suppositions are patent balderdash. But many others are coherent and well argued, and cite disconcerting reports from the U.S. corporate media and respected overseas news desks to support their claims. Providing grist for the mill are such odd episodes as last year's partisan anthrax poisonings (using U.S. army microbes) and the sniper attacks that recently plagued Washington, DC.

Following are the ten most alarming theories about September 11, the "war on terror," and the future of the world. Feel free to accept them as gospel, study them as symptoms of a traumatized culture, or scoff at them as anti-American propaganda: I'm only the messenger. Personally, though, at this point the only person I hold above suspicion in the matter of September 11 is that poor kid with the goat.

1. Great Game in the Caspian Sea.

Among the theories about the administration's real reasons for bombing and occupying Afghanistan, the one with the most traction argues that Afghanistan provides the best real estate for an oil and natural gas pipeline. Believers say that fossil fuels in the Caspian Sea, once part of the Soviet empire, are now up for grabs in a fierce contest between Russia and the West. To the winner will go control of much of the energy supply for East Asia. Sources cited in support of this idea -- which has gotten ink in England's Guardian newspaper and the BBC, as well as offhand mention on U.S. Sunday talk shows -- include Zbigniew Brzezinski's apology for empire, The Grand Chessboard, and a 1998 Taliban-damning report to Congress from the oil company Unocal. But the most telling evidence of all: Now that Afghanistan is a satellite state of the Bush administration, the pipeline is actually being built!.

2. The Afghanistan/Enron Connection.

Rumor has it that in the months before Enron's collapse, Bush, Cheney, and the much-gossiped-about "energy task force" convened daily, high-priority meetings to try and engineer a bailout for Bush's most generous campaign contributor. At the peak of the Enron scandal and in the aftermath of the attack on Afghanistan, a fascinating document surfaced in conspiracy circles that told of a bank-breaking Enron venture: A power plant the firm had partly built in India. Plagued with cost overruns and accusations of employee mistreatment that led to violent labor disputes, the power plant became a cash sinkhole that threatened to send Enron into insolvency -- unless the plant could tap into a pipeline network to be spun off from the Caspian Sea venture and recover some of its losses by operating on natural gas. A detailed and intriguing read, this document explains why Dick Cheney would sooner chug a quart of 10W-40 than surrender the minutes of those energy meetings.

3. The Magic Passport Theory.

We can now add Mohamed Atta's reality-defying passport to the Arlen Specter Gallery of Improbable Projectiles. This incriminating item was thrown intact from a cataclysmic fireball and miraculously plucked from 1.6 million tons of debris in a matter of hours. The corporate media rarely mention the unlikelihood of this. Many in the alternative press, though, are unafraid to draw an obvious, albeit taboo, inference: that the Atta passport is planted evidence. According to Washington, DC, peace activist John Judge, other potential plants include the Arabic-language flight manuals left in one of the hijackers' cars (with note: The discussion of the flight manuals begins at around 13:30). These manuals could serve no useful purpose at such a late stage unless the hijackers planned to finish learning how to fly during a half-hour ride to the airport. But as deliberately placed articles, they are as if a signed diary called "My Plan to Kill the President" had been unearthed in Lee Harvey Oswald's flat. Also high on the possible planted evidence list is a spiritual manifesto for the Al Qaeda kamikaze pilots, which, to journalist Robert Fisk, sounds an awful lot like it was written by a God-fearing Christian.

4. Hijacker Oddities I.

Little-observed in the fine print of the FBI rap sheet on the September 11 hijackers was a clumsily phrased disclaimer admitting that the Bureau's document wasn't, ahem, necessarily a final draft (with note: "It should be noted that attempts to confirm the true identities of these individuals are still under way").

Ringleader Mohamed Atta's identity was a slam-dunk, of course, owing to the propitious recovery of his passport. But bear in mind how quickly the FBI conjured its 19 Enemies of the State while you ponder the strange case of Waleed Al Shehri. In an article for the BBC, this Saudi Arabian national says that he turned up on the FBI list and feels that rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated. Not to be outdone, the British Daily Telegraph also ran an article on the subject, claiming to have found no fewer than four of the supposed September 11 attackers -- alive, well, and hopping mad. Pending long overdue clarification from John Ashcroft's vaunted Bureau, one can hardly blame the conspiracy-minded for crying "patsy."

5. Hijacker Oddities II.
Another theory about the hijackers' real identities takes as its departure an utterly bizarre and largely overlooked story on MSNBC.com, which says that some of the hijackers may have trained at U.S. Army bases. Yes, you read that right. Strange as it may seem, providing terrorists-slash-"freedom fighters" with lethal skills is a tradition in certain specialized arms of the American military and U.S. intelligence. The infamous School of the Americas, for example, helped to train the death squads that claimed so many innocent lives in Central America. Even so, the idea that the government might aid Osama's minions is completely beyond the pale, right? Perhaps. But remember the CIA and the military's record-breaking aid program to the Afghan Mujahedin movement, as outlined, for example, in John Cooley's Unholy Wars. Questions about hijacker links to U.S. intelligence got more complicated when the spook watchdog magazine CovertAction Quarterly claimed that many of the hijackers got into the country using CIA "snitch" visas. (This article can be found in CovertAction Quarterly's Winter 2001, 41-44; the BBC conducted an interview with the author, Michael Springmann). As with many issues involving The Agency, this promises to be shrouded in mystery for a long time.

6. Insider Trades.

Remember right after the attacks when you couldn't watch TV for five minutes without hearing somebody say "put option"? The 9/11 insider stock trades got endless airplay on the major networks before Osama bin Laden became fixed in the popular imagination, whereupon the media bent themselves to the task of establishing his guilt. Still, even if Al Qaeda placed the 4,744 suspicious transactions, wouldn't the story still be useful, if only to further illuminate the terrorist network's money machine? Apparently not, because the story didn't just fade away over time; it suddenly vanished. Once in a while, a TV news anchorperson would assure us there had been "nothing to" the rumors while failing to explain, if this was true, where the story had come from or why it had gotten so such attention.

But conservative scandal-tracker Tom Flocco didn't give up on the hinky stock trades. In a series of articles, he follows the money back to a bigwig in the financial firm Deutsche Bank, who also was once executive director of (surprise!) the CIA. Some might question Flocco's credibility as an investigative reporter, I suppose -- although credibility in the news business appears to be a dead letter anyway, if CNN could accidentally fabricate the 5,000 trades out of whole cloth to begin with.

7. The New World Order Will Not Be Televised.

Assuming you haven't stopped reading yet -- either to start digging a bomb shelter in your backyard or to flip on FOX News for a much-needed dose of pro-war soma -- you have to be wondering how these flabbergasting stories escaped the notice of America's intrepid newshounds. Examine this question for even a minute and you will stumble onto a proven, card-carrying evil conspiracy: It's called the U.S. Congress, and conclusive evidence links them to a truly terrifying document known as the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

This legislation is relevant post-9/11 because it allowed the megamergers of media conglomerates to become ultra-monstermergers. As a result, today a handful of multinationals control most of what is said in the U.S. about military actions overseas and the reasons for them. At least one of these companies -- General Electric -- has financial stakes in the weapons racket as well, but this blatant conflict of interest gets as much coverage as the Telecommunications Act originally got when it was on the floor of Congress: next to none. Some media observers and academics, like MIT's Noam Chomsky and Norman Solomon of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, have doggedly pointed out that the bloated media emperor has no clothes. Too bad they stand little chance of appearing regularly on Face the Nation.

Not many people noticed when the rules governing what gets said about war and who gets to say it were exposed in Harper's Magazine, which ran a Florida News Herald memo outlining some of the carefully crafted talking points journalists must observe in discussing U.S. bombing campaigns. Among them: Ignore or minimize innocent death. "If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties" caused by U.S. bombings, the Herald's copy desk decrees, "DO IT.... Failure to follow any of these or other standing rules could put your job in jeopardy" (1). Lesson? If you live in the U.S. and think you know what your government is doing to other countries and why, just because you watch cable or read a daily newspaper -- think again.

8. Iran/Contra Redux.

Near the end of 2002, a surprisingly lethargic debate was underway in the U.S. concerning the "war on terror"'s erosion of Americans' civil liberties -- which many felt were already pretty meager anyhow, having been picked clean during two decades of the "war on drugs." The debate took a turn toward the paranormal when the corporate media briefly went agog over the Bush administration's citizen-stalking Information Awareness Office. By the time it got mentioned in the Washington Post, though, the IAO was old news to flying saucer buffs: Art Bell rival Jeff Rense had already run several articles scrutinizing the IAO's logo, which -- with its all-seeing, Masonic pyramid-and-eyeball -- seems meant to agitate the growing ranks of the understandably paranoid.

It takes only a few clicks on the IAO's homepage to learn that the agency is presided over by Iran/Contra luminary John Poindexter, just one weapons-running Reagan-era alumnus to find an honored seat in Dubya's star chamber. Also plucked from political ignominy is Elliot Abrams, who has gone from pleading no-contest to charges of perjury before Congress to helping lead the Bush Administration's Mid-East policy. These are only two of the administration's many questionable appointments -- don't even get me started on Henry Kissinger -- but Iran/Contra is a matter of special note to conspiracy trackers. Take the late Mae Brussell, a minor legend to some for her reflections on the Kennedy murder. She once provided scathing alternative assessments of Iran/Contra for her underground radio show, "World Watchers". Like Tom Flocco, Mae Brussell should be taken with some healthy skepticism. Even so, the rage behind her accusations -- she links the Iran/Contra figures with wholesale drug dealing and the CIA with the Jonestown massacre -- is a predictable result when bloody official policies are conducted absent anything resembling consent of the governed.

9. The Reichstag Fire and Operation Northwoods.

Now things get really weird. To those who scoff at the idea that the government could have had foreknowledge of or complicity in the September 11 attacks, conspiracy researchers respond that attacks have been faked or manufactured plenty of times before, usually to maneuver the public into supporting a war they would otherwise oppose. The Nazi party, for instance, most likely set fire to the Reichstag building in order to pin the crime on the communists and galvanize the people behind their police-state tactics. They also forged a fake battle to justify their invasion of Poland (2). Sure, you say, but the Nazis were like that. Unfortunately, similar incidents pop up in the U.S.'s recent past, as well. Frequently mentioned examples include Pearl Harbor -- which many, such as Day of Deceit author Robert Stinnett, feel was allowed to happen to prompt America's entry into World War II -- and the weird Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Researchers discussing this issue often cite an interesting find: an internal Pentagon document from the early 1960s, which appears in James Bamford's book on military subterfuge, Body of Secrets, and puts the lie to the contention that the government would never manufacture incidents or attack its own people to lead the country to war. The Operation Northwoods memo is the result of a brainstorming session on ways to help sell military action in Cuba by fabricating or committing acts of violence and blaming them on Fidel Castro. Among its suggestions: shoot down a plane full of college students, sink an American ship ("casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation"), or rig astronaut John Glenn's rocket to explode. The Northwoods memo invites us to rethink what some in the government might be capable of not only in terms of September 11 but also the Kennedy assassination. After all, if spectacular murders of people like John Glenn are conceivable, is it so fantastic to plot the assassination of a sitting president?

10. Things to Come.

For many writers -- like www.rense.com's Diane Harvey -- the corruption of American empire is relevant, but only as a sidebar. The real problem stems from two incontrovertible facts: that reserves of oil and other non-renewable resources will someday run out, and that on its current course, the Earth is soon to become overloaded with people. If these twin problems go unaddressed, our species faces a gloomy fate. As the situation gets worse, governance in the traditional mode, based around at least the pretense of liberal democracy, will become impossible. Instead, naked power grabs will become the norm for wealthy elites capable of mounting them. "The people"'s job will be simply to provide money and labor for the war machines that make these imperial conquests possible; those who aspire to a role in their own governance beyond subsidizing imperial expansion will be brutally repressed.

Harvey and others feel that such a global transformation has already begun, and episodes like September 11 and the U.S. government's bizarre obsession with oil-laden Iraq are among its harbingers. But, you say, oil supplies look fine from where you sit. According to hard-on-the-eyes website, www.dieoff.org, the problem won't manifest itself all at once, when the world's oil wells suddenly dry up. It is instead happening incrementally, because the rate of production has started to lag behind the world's increasing demand. Among numerous cases in point, www.dieoff.org cites "The Coming Anarchy," an Atlantic Monthly article describing intolerable government repression in the long-neglected region of sub-Saharan Africa. Such will be the harvest of empire for our overextended world: warlordism, brutal dictatorships that verge on chaos -- death, and in vast quantities. I don't know whether these predictions will come to pass. But after this past year, I find the possibility an awful lot easier to imagine (29).

Honorable Mentions

The top 10 conspiracy theories, speculations, and plain odd things I didn't have space to discuss here: