Who really downed the twin towers? Johann Hari

• Why is no plane visible on photos taken seconds before the Pentagon was hit?

• more than half of all black Americans believe that the CIA makes drugs easily available in their communities to keep them quiescent

• one-fifth believe that it deliberately introduced the Aids epidemic

• 80 per cent of all Americans believe that the US government is conspiring to withhold information about Gulf war syndrome

bestseller in France claims that Osama Bin Laden was a US agent who was used by President Bush to destroy secret CIA offices in the twin towers.  Thierry Meyssan's bestselling book L'effroyable imposture (The Frightening Fraud).  He believes that the government plotted the whole affair, in part to control rogue
agents within the security services.

• points to discrepancies in eyewitness statements

• lack of footage of any plane wreckage

• CCTV cameras across Washington which seem to show that there was no plane approaching the Pentagon.  "Hunt the Boeing!" www.asile.org/citoyens/ numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm

But it contain huge gaps: there's a stray Boeing out there carrying Barbara Olsen of CNN.

George Bush felt the need to denounce the theory when he spoke to the UN General Assembly last October

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot seemed to imply that the US government might have had a role in the "convenient"  anthrax attacks which followed 11 September

most implausible conspiracy theories emanated from the hard right mimicking Hitler's Reichstag, to justify the seizure of significant state powers to detain and control  "dissidents"

The director of the US Anti-Defamation League, Abraham H Foxman, has been forced to issue a plea that "blaming Jews for 9/11 must stop".

• Woodward and Bernstein mocked initially as crazy conspiracy theorists but Richard Nixon really was at the heart of a dangerous anti-democratic conspiracy.

• Warren Commission actually was a whitewash - the truth about JFK's death is being concealed by somebody out there

• Hillary Clinton identified a "vast right-wing conspiracy" seeking to bring down a twice-elected and popular president

• 11 September attacks were themselves the result of an al-Qaeda conspiracy that few people would have credited on 10 September

• CIA's bungling (and conspiratorial lies about the events) at Ruby Ridge and Waco, which ended in the deaths of law-abiding citizens, including children

they are an expression of the decline in trust across all sectors of society, and towards governments in particular

governments' power decrease, people begin to believe that the power has gone somewhere else: to people in the shadows