Conspiracy theories

Lenin’s tomb reports that an Observer poll revealed most Brits believe ther bush administration knew about the September 11 Attacks and allowed them to happen.

I have not seen any responses to this news yet, but they are not hard to imagine. Frothing at the mouth denunciations from the right wing war supporters, hand wringing apologias from the liberal , moderate, “sensible” anti-war people, and tut-tutting by the “leftwing war supporters. (Case in point…). They will have one thing in common: a (faked) outrage that people are so silly as to believe in *gasp* conspiracy theories, as if US governments have never conspired against their own citizens, Operation Northwood and MK-Ultra not withstanding.

Despite these denounciations, we should not be too fast in rejecting the very real possibility that Bush and co “allowed” the attacks to happen, or at the very least did not try very hard to prevent them. The Bush administration has proven to have no problems with lying or causing the deaths of innocent bystanders to realise their policy goals, after all. Sure, they may have just been very incompetent, locked into a Cold War mindset that only regarded state actors as dangerous, but there are just too many nagging things about the attacks to completely disregard the option that more was going on.