Paul Thomas: Conspiracy theorists losing grip on reality

Veteran Australian leftist Phillip Adams reports that his email was a deafening chatter of disbelief after the apparent foiling of a plot to blow up nine airliners.

His correspondents simply don't believe it. They think the whole thing is a concoction designed to shore up George W. Bush and Tony Blair and distract international attention from the chaos and slaughter in Iraq and Lebanon.

Meanwhile, American reporter Seymour Hersh - whose exposes include the My Lai massacre, Israel's nuclear weapons programme and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal - claims the US colluded in Israel's assault on Hizbollah as a test run for its upcoming attempt to crush Iran.

I suspect many who scoffed at the Heathrow plot would believe every word in Hersh's scoop, but can they have it both ways?

Hersh's sources are his contacts in the US military and intelligence community. In Washington DC, leaking to the press, be it motivated by patriotism, partisanship, careerism or inter-agency rivalry, is as natural as breathing.

The problem with vast, complex conspiracies is their, well, vastness and complexity: all those people in the know, all those lips that must stay sealed.

If the Heathrow bomb plot is a fabrication, the conspiracy involves the White House, 10 Downing Street, the Pakistan Government, MI5, MI6, a fair chunk of the British police force and a stage army of swarthy young men who have spent the past few years hanging around mosques muttering seditiously.

Amazingly enough, no one in this cast of thousands has breathed a word. Not one of those public servants who have been ordered to fake phone intercepts or plant evidence has been sufficiently perturbed by this criminal deceit to make an anonymous call to a newspaper, let alone blow the whistle.

We shouldn't be surprised that so many people are prepared to believe the incredible.

According to Adams, many millions in the Arab and Islamic worlds don't buy the official line on 9/11 - most of them think the Jews did it - while American and Australian sceptics (his word) reckon it was an inside job.

That's right, they believe the US Government sent the planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon (where Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was at his desk; he obviously forgot to check his diary), to justify launching the War on Terror, a smokescreen for imperialistic aggression and seizure of Middle East oil.

Arabs' readiness to believe that Mossad was behind 9/11 can be viewed in the context of decades of anti-Semitic filth spewed by their government-controlled media.

If you believe everything you read in the newspaper, for instance that Jews kidnap and kill Christian babies and use their blood when making matzohs for Passover, you'd assume they're capable of anything, including an act of indiscriminate mass murder in a city that's home to more Jews than any other bar Tel Aviv.

I'd admit to having a few sceptical bones in my body but believing 9/11 was an inside job isn't scepticism as I understand it; that's paranoia, credulity on an epic scale, abandonment of rational thought.

If you believe that, you'll believe anything, beginning with the proposition that Osama bin Laden and Bush are in cahoots.

(And, yes, I'm aware that in the 1980s the CIA assisted the Afghani mujahedin, whose numbers included bin Laden, in their guerrilla campaign against the occupying Soviet Army, but that was during the Cold War when the enemy of my enemy was my friend. It's also a far cry from contracting him to incinerate Manhattan).

This is the golden age of the conspiracy theory. The celebrated writer Gore Vidal, a sucker for every conspiracy theory going back to Pearl Harbour, believes the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 Americans was another miraculously air-tight US Government terrorist plot against its own citizens. His distant cousin Al Gore, who was Vice-President at the time, presumably signed off on that one.

Conspiracy theories operate on Catch 22 logic: the lack of supporting evidence is in itself proof of a conspiracy. The conspirators have covered their tracks.

Don DeLillo, who fashioned his brilliant novel Libra out of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, believes the conspiracy theory bug got into our collective system in the murky aftermath of Jack Kennedy's assassination.

People have developed a sense that history has been secretly manipulated: documents lost and destroyed; official records sealed for 50 or 75 years; suggestive murders and suicides. I think we've developed a much more deeply unsettled feeling about our grip on reality.

If 21st century paranoia has its origins in the Kennedy assassination, the Watergate scandal generated a cynicism that assumes all politicians are venal until proven otherwise. This attitude has helped create an environment in which discerning ulterior, nefarious motives behind everything governments, especially America's, say and do passes for intellectual sophistication.

In this day and age such an outlook isn't necessarily the worst default setting.

All too often, though, political bias kicks in to distorting effect. And when bias hardens into conviction you're on the way to seeing the world in black and white, and there's nothing very sophisticated about that.