IOL: Bush under fire by 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Bush under fire by 9/11 conspiracy theorists

June 26 2006 at 08:31AM

Los Angeles - They wore T-shirts that read: What Really Happened?, snapped up DVDs titled 9/11: The Great Illusion, and cheered as physicists, philosophers and terrorism experts decried the official version of the September 11 attacks that shook the United States to its core.

About 1 200 people gathered at a Los Angeles hotel at the weekend for what organisers billed as the largest conference on the plethora of conspiracy theories that see the 2001 attacks on Washington and New York as, at best, official negligence, and at worst an orchestrated US attempt to incite world war.

"There are so many prominent people who are incredibly well respected and who have stated that the evidence is overwhelming that 9/11 was an inside job," syndicated radio talkshow host Alex Jones told a news conference.


"There are hundreds of smoking guns that people need to be made aware of," said Jones, calling for the impeachment of President George Bush and charging that the mainstream media had been slow to cover the growing movement of 9/11 sceptics.

'9/11 was an inside job'
The 9/11 and the Neo-Con Agenda conference comprised two days of seminars, video presentations and talks by groups including Scholars for 9/11 Truth, www.infowars.com and an appearance by actor Charlie Sheen.

Most are convinced the US military command "stood down" on the day of the attack, that the hijackers were trained at US military bases, and that the World Trade Centre towers collapsed because of a series of controlled explosions set before they were hit by two hijacked planes.

Suggested motives range from expected benefits for US arms and oil conglomerates to revolutionary plans for a new world order headed by the US.

The theories, derided by critics as wild and far-fetched, have mostly been confined to the Internet, talk radio and the alternative press. But an August 2004 Zogby opinion poll revealed that 49 percent of New York residents believed US leaders knew in advance of the attacks and failed to act.

The 9/11 Commission, set up in 2002, cited government intelligence lapses in the failure to prevent the attacks, which killed about 3 000 people.

'Wild and far-fetched'
A 10 000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology held that jet-fuel fires weakened the structure of the Twin Towers and led to their collapse.

Sheen, star of the TV sitcom Two And A Half Men, provoked a media storm in March by calling in interviews for an independent investigation.

Sheen "brings the movement some legitimacy," said a Los Angeles student attending the conference, who gave his name as Rico.

Webster Tarpley, author of 911 Synthetic Terror; Made in USA, said the attacks were an example of "state-sponsored, false-flag terrorism" designed by rogue CIA elements "to start the war of civilisations".

Tarpley said Washington was "gripped by war psychosis" and had used terror as a pretext to turn the US into a police state. - Reuters