Brit (and space buff) Gareth Slee has a tribute to the NY firefighters.

Brendan O’Neill has found some folks who are turned all the way up to eleven on them:

Sitting on the comfy couch, their cups of tea in hand, they try to convince me that the 11 September 2001 attacks were executed by elements in the west who wanted to launch wars and “make billions upon trillions of dollars”.

“We know for certain that the official story of 9/11 isn’t true,” says Shayler. “The twin towers did not collapse because of planes and fire; they were brought down in a controlled demolition. The Pentagon was most likely hit by an American missile, not an aeroplane.” Machon nods. In black trousers and black top, this sophisticated blonde in her late thirties comes across more like a schoolmarm than a 9/11 anorak. “The Pentagon’s anti-missile defence system would definitely have picked up and dealt with a commercial airliner. We can only assume that whatever hit the Pentagon was sending a friendly signal. A missile fired by a US military plane would have sent a friendly signal.” She says this in a kind of Anna Ford-style newsreader’s voice, as if she were speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. She takes another sip of tea.

Say the phrase “conspiracy theorist” (but don’t say it to Shayler and Machon if you can help it, because they angrily deny being conspiracy theorists) and most people will think of those nutty militiamen in redneck areas of America who hate Big Government, or of taxi drivers with possibly anti-Semitic leanings in some hot, dusty backwater of the Middle East who revel in telling western clients in particular: “America and the Jew did 9/11.” Yet, here in Highgate, I am talking to a man and woman who have worked in the British secret services and who, together with their landlady Belinda, a professional linguist, truly believe that American elements facilitated 9/11 in order to “justify their adventurism in oil-rich countries in the Middle East”, in Shayler’s words. Here we have a new kind of conspiracy theorist: the chattering conspiracist, respectable, well-read, articulate, but, I regret to report, no less cranky than those rednecks and misguided Kabul cabbies.

Amazing.

[Late afternoon update]

Jim Robbins finds another refugee from Toontown:

Meyssan’s purpose is to uncover a much deeper plot of the United States against the world. He reveals other interesting facts, like bin Laden was an agent of the U.S. who was used by President Bush to destroy secret CIA offices in the World Trade Towers. Seems like a lot of effort

I agree with Jonah:

While I don’t subscribe to so-called ass-brained theories that Bin Laden never existed, I am coming around to the view that he’s dead as Michael Ledeen has suggested. I mean why wouldn’t Bin Laden issue a video for the five year anniversary of 9/11?

I agree with Jonah:

While I don’t subscribe to so-called ass-brained theories that Bin Laden never existed, I am coming around to the view that he’s dead as Michael Ledeen has suggested. I mean why wouldn’t Bin Laden issue a video for the five year anniversary of 9/11?

I agree with Jonah:

While I don’t subscribe to so-called ass-brained theories that Bin Laden never existed, I am coming around to the view that he’s dead as Michael Ledeen has suggested. I mean why wouldn’t Bin Laden issue a video for the five year anniversary of 9/11?

Hitchens says that it will get worse before it gets better (particularly because we don’t seem to be able to unite before the enemy), and it’s too early for commemorations:

The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused–not just overseas but in this country also–of making or at least of implying a “partisan” point. I debate with the “antiwar” types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been “war-weary” ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is “the war” that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not “antiwar” at all.

Steven Den Beste has related thoughts.

We can have a war on drugs (which is absolutely unwinnable) or a war against the Jihadis, but it’s nuts to think that we can have both.

Want a criticism of the Bush administration? Here’s one: the blindness of the drug warriors is appalling, and has set us back dramatically in the real war.