FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2002 — "Did she say these things while standing on a grassy knoll in Roswell, New Mexico?"

The above question, posed by a spokesman for the Carlyle Group investment firm, was delivered this week in response to Georgia Democratic representative Cynthia McKinney’s claim that the Bush administration knew of the September 11 attacks in advance, and did nothing to halt those attacks. "Persons close to this administration," McKinney asserted during a recent radio interview, "are poised to make huge profits off America’s new war."

A scandalous claim, perhaps, but not a particularly novel one. There are a thousand well-worn September 11 conspiracy theories out there. Throughout the Arab world, for instance, there is a widely held belief that it was Israeli and American spy agencies, not Al Qaeda terrorists, who perpetrated the attacks on New York and Washington. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad is a particularly popular scapegoat. "Why not suspect Mossad of having sought to shake the United States and the world," asked a columnist in the Syrian newspaper Ath-Thawra, "upon directives from [Israeli prime minister] Ariel Sharon, who wants to divert attention away from his aggressive plot [to pulverize Palestine]."

In Europe, meanwhile, French author Thierry Meyssan is enjoying great success with his L’effroyable imposture (A Frightful Deception), a book that claims to find evidence of US complicity in the September 11 attacks. Meyssan’s theory, which has sparked enough interest to thrust the book to the top of France’s best-seller list, began its life on a French Internet site.

As might be expected, the Internet has proven to be fertile ground for September 11–related mythology. The urban-legend reference site Snopes.com lists 11 pages (11!) of dubious rumors that have sprung up since the attacks: an unscathed Bible was found in the wreckage of the Pentagon; Osama bin Laden sent out a memo to his fellow cave-dwellers complaining about a missing box of Cheez-Its; Osama owns Citibank; Osama owns Snapple; Osama launched his jihad because an American woman mocked the size of his penis; the online bookstore Amazon.com is affiliated with a site called Infitada.com; and so on.

Americans pride themselves on their pragmatism. We are far too rational, we like to tell ourselves, to embrace such claptrap. We clasp our cheeks in mock horror. We roll our eyes. We snort with derision. We disseminate e-mails — inevitably bearing the winky-face symbol ;) — containing digitally altered snapshots of a tourist standing atop the World Trade Center, a passenger jet closing in behind him. And yet, despite our scorn for September 11–related urban legends and conspiracy theories, we have bought into the biggest myth of the lot: that of Al Qaeda.

Immediately after the attacks, the media was awash in stories of a ultra-sophisticated, highly organized terrorist superstructure operating in dozens of countries around the globe. While it remains possible that such an organization exists, evidence seems to suggest it is not quite the mean machine that we have been led to believe. This became evident when Al Qaeda troops marched off, AK-47s in hand, to battle US troops in Afghanistan — a far more traditional form of warfare than the James Bond–style villainy that we had come to expect from the organization. Where was Mr. Big’s Death Laser when the foreign Taliban were being vaporized in Tora Bora?

Which is not to say that there is not a continuing threat to American lives and interests around the world — only that, in many respects, the Al Qaeda network as it appears in the American consciousness is chimerical, a monster in the closet.

The fact that Al Qaeda has achieved such mythical status can be blamed largely on the military, which will always overstate the depth and ability of an enemy. It happened during the Cold War, when we were led to believe that the Soviet military machine was larger than it was, more technologically advanced than it was, more of an imminent threat than it was. And the same thing is happening now with Al Qaeda. The military-industrial complex (another national bogeyman) did not orchestrate the September 11 attacks, but it would be naïve to imagine that the military is not taking full advantage of the situation today.

Then again, perhaps it is simply human nature that is at work here. The human mind instinctively shies away from the notion of a random, meaningless universe. In pre-industrial cultures, it was believed that a person who had been struck by lightning must have somehow angered the sky god. September 11 conspiracy theories — that of an omnipotent Al Qaeda among them — are a version of this, a modern update of ancient cosmology. As awful as the notion of a large, well-organized outfit bent on our destruction may be, it’s better than the alternative: shit happens. We can appease the sky god. We can stamp out Al Qaeda. But we will always be vulnerable to random instances of horror.

So maybe we should take all this with a bucket of salt. Chances are that Representative Cynthia McKinney is full of crap. That author Thierry Meyssan is full of crap. That George W Bush — with his "axis of evil" — is full of crap. Nonetheless, we should tread carefully here. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that those who accused the Catholic Church of complicity in a string of child-molestation cases were themselves accused of disseminating a vast, preposterous conspiracy theory.