Last night I blogged about the destructive impact of the current popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories--- on society at large as well as on the people who entertain such paranoid notions. There's one more damaging facet of blaming the government for the most devastating terrorist attacks in history: if US officials were secretly responsible either for orchestrating the incident or allowing it to go forward, then the terrorists themselves are off the hook. By focusing their suspicions and denunciations on American leaders, the conspiratorial demagogues take attention from the Islamo-Nazi killers who brought about so many assaults on our interests and continue to menace US citizens everywhere. 

  During the debates surrounding the 9/11 commission, arguments raged on how to affix blame: did Bill Clinton or George Bush deserve stronger condemnation for their failure to prevent the al Qaeda attacks? On my radio show at that time, I decried such arguments because the real blame-worthy party wasn't the Bush administration or the Clinton administration: it was al-Qaeda and the radical Isalmist movement it represented.

   In the same sense, Americans who become obsessed with bizarre tales of the origins of 9/11, focusing on super-secret accounts of high-level plots involving Skull & Bones, the Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations and so forth, help leave us less prepared for the next attack-- whose source will not be some US secret society, but the very public efforts by religious extremists to impose Islamist rule around the world. 

   It's not some secret club of rich businessmen or conniving "neo-cons" raining deadly rockets on Israeli civilians: it's fanatical Muslim killers who want to destroy the one island of western civilization and representative democracy in their midst. Those same ideologues hate the US with similar intensity and playing games with fanciful, laughably illogical conspiracy theories only distracts needed attention from the very open, fiercely implacable Islamist conspiracy that continues to menace us in the real world.