Jones was a communist who admired Stalin and North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, and who wanted to move his commune to the USSR. He was not religious. He stated, “We do not accept religion,” characterizing it, in Marxist terms, as the “opiate” of the people.

Jones was plagued by conspiratorial delusions. Deborah Layton Blakey, a member of Jones’ Peoples Temple for seven years, wrote in a June 15, 1978 affidavit:

Jones saw himself as the center of a conspiracy. The identity of the conspirators changed from day to day along with his erratic world vision. … He convinced black Temple members that if they did not follow him to Guyana, they would be put into concentration camps and killed. White members were instilled with the belief that their names appeared on a secret list of enemies of the state that was kept by the C.I.A. and that they would be tracked down, tortured, imprisoned, and subsequently killed if they did not flee to Guyana.

Blakey wrote: “in Jonestown, the concept of mass suicide for socialism arose. Because our lives were so wretched anyway and because we were so afraid to contradict Rev. Jones, the concept was not challenged.”

Mass suicides were rehearsed and, following Ryan’s visit, one was ordered by Jones. In a final act, he tried to give seven million dollars he had hoarded to the Soviet Communist Party. The letter to the Soviet consul in Guyana explained, “we, as Communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world.”

The 918 people who died 30 years ago at Jonestown were victims of Jones’ megalomania, conspiracy thinking, and communist delusions.

Jihad Unspun is a pro-al Qaida, pro-Taliban website run by Qahaar, who was known as Beverly Giesbrecht before converting to Islam after the September 11 attacks.

I wrote about Jihad Unspun as a prime venue for disinformation several years ago.

Qahaar traveled to Pakistan in August, entering Mohmand province in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, in order to make a film on the Pakistani Taliban. She describes the difficulties of her trip and a near escape from kidnapping in an August 26 dispatch, “Qahaar: Live from Mohmand Agency.” She said that four different translators she had hired for the trip to the tribal areas quit, mostly out of fear.

On October 22, she published an “Urgent Request” for funds to leave the country.

Last week, Pakistani newspapers reported she had been kidnapped on November 11, along with a translator and personal assistant.

On Friday, Canadian foreign affairs spokesperson Lisa Monette confirmed that an unnamed Canadian citizen had been kidnapped in Pakistan, stating “Canadian officials are working with Pakistan for her early release.” She refused to comment further, saying disclosing more details could undermine efforts to free the woman and put her at greater risk.

I called World Public Opinion, but they did not collect this data. Their pollsters were told to place answers in an overall category, not to record individual responses.

I found one creative “answer” in a recent book by ABC foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto, Against Us: The New Face of America’s Enemies in the Muslim World. He wrote:

“An American diplomat serving … in Saudi Arabia told the story of being invited to dinner at the home of a senior Saudi business executive in Riyadh in 2004. After the meal … his host leaned over as if to pass on a secret. He knew who was behind 9/11, he said. The diplomat had heard it all before: the CIA, the Israelis. No, no, the man replied, it was the Japanese. The Japanese had a history of kamikaze attacks, he explained, and they had to take revenge for losing World War II and they were angry at America for overtaking the Japanese economy after the 1980s.”

At a conference last month, I learned some West Africans believe former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who lost the 2000 election by the narrowest of margins, was behind 9/11. Some people there misinterpreted it as an attempt by Gore to seize state power.

Our creative minds are very good at concocting “reasons” that “explain” why groups that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks were supposedly “behind” it.

A large part of the section focused on the lives lost and the impact on surviving family members, a human dimension that is often overlooked.

I was struck by the story of 8-year-old Anthony Tolbert, as told to his mother Shari. Anthony was only 18 months old when his father, Lt. Commander Otis Vincent Tolbert, died. Here are excerpts from Anthony’s story, which I could not find on the Web:

My mom told my sisters, who are older than me, that our dad wasn’t coming home anymore.

I think everybody thought that I understood what happened. But I didn’t. I really just thought my dad was at work from before I got up in the morning until after I went to bed at night. It’s the only thing that made sense to me. …

Now that I know my dad is dead and not just at work, I am trying to get used to the idea of not having a dad around. … I wonder sometimes what that feels like, to be with your dad. …

I kind of wish I had been older when 9/11 happened so that I could have understood what was happening. Sometimes I imagine that I would have been at home and would have seen what was happening on the news or even out a window. I would have called my dad’s cell phone number and told him to get out of the building.

My grandfather has taught me a lot about airplanes, and I think I could have calculated where the plane would have landed. If I had been there, maybe I could have saved my dad.

I don’t really remember anything about my dad. I dream about him sometimes, but the dreams are like slide shows of pictures I’ve seen of him. Sometimes I stop in the hall and stare at the pictures. I try so hard to remember.

Deep down inside, I feel sad once in a while. Some days, I try to erase it from my mind and to pretend that day never happened.

See the site for more details and instances of false claims by Russian officials and others in Russian media.

Russia Today’s Aleksandr Gurnov interviewed “Zero” filmmaker and European Parliamentarian Giulietto Chiesa this week. The 25-minute program is boring – Chiesa wanders aimlessly through his subject – and takes forever to download. Here’s the url, if you have a lot of patience and bandwidth.

In the interview, Chiesa claims that the hole in the Pentagon was not large enough to have been caused by an airplane. He’s wrong. The hole was some 27 meters wide. Like many other conspiracy theorists, Chiesa mistakes the portion of the hole on the second floor for the entire hole. This error was made possible because firefighting foam obscured much of the ground floor damage in several photographs taken that day.

See the photo gallery, “The September 11 attack on the Pentagon” for detailed photos and explanations of the damage to the Pentagon.

On September 12, “Zero” will be shown on Russia’s state-owned Channel One, the most popular television channel in Russia, along with a debate featuring another conspiracy theorist, France’s Thierry Meyssan. He’s the one who first popularized the mistaken Pentagon “small hole” theory. Meyssan wrote his book on this subject, 9/11: The Big Lie, without interviewing any eyewitnesses to the 9/11 attacks.

46% said Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, or Islamic extremists – the factually correct answer.

15% said the U.S. government and 7% said Israel – the alleged culprits in most conspiracy theories.

Africans got the highest marks for accuracy (Kenya 77%, Nigeria 71%), easily beating Europeans, who ranged from 42% correct in Ukraine to 64% correct in Germany.

In the Middle East, those in the Palestinian territories were correct most often (42%), with Jordan ranking last at 11%.

In Asia, Taiwan was tops with 53% accuracy; Indonesia lowest at 23%.

Only one-third of Mexicans, the only Latin America country polled, answered the question correctly. Americans were not polled.

Poll director Steven Kull says the high error rate can not “simply be attributed to a lack of exposure to information.” Instead, the researchers found that beliefs tended to correlate strongly with general attitudes about the United States.

Facts are stubborn things, they say. But attitudes can apparently be even more stubborn.

This contradicts the Russian claim that much of Tskhinvali was destroyed by a Georgian assault, which served as a pretext for the Russian invasion. It also contradicts Russian and South Ossetian claims that Georgian villages were not destroyed.

See the 16 UNOSAT maps of Georgia, especially the one reprinted in a September 8 article in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. From the top, the map shows eight Georgian villages, with pie charts indicating the destruction they suffered, as of August 19.

UN photo analysts judged that five of the Georgian villages had 42% to 52% of their buildings destroyed or severely damaged; the others, 31%, 15%, and 5%.

On August 12, Human Rights Watch researchers passed through four of these villages – Kekhvi (44% destroyed), Kvemo Achabeti (52%), Zemo Achabeti (42%), and Tamarasheni (51%). They said they “witnessed terrifying scenes of destruction.” They reported, “according to the few remaining local residents, South Ossetian militias … looted the Georgian villages and set them on fire.”

The large pie chart at the bottom left shows the destruction in Tskhinvali. UN analysts said only 5% of buildings were destroyed or severely damaged there.

Michael Slackman reports from Cairo that people throughout the Arab world believe – wrongly – that the United States and Israel were behind the September 11 attacks.

One of the main arguments is the totally false story that no Jews showed up for work that day at the World Trade Center, a myth that has been thoroughly debunked for years but still persists.

Others believe that the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq somehow “proves” that the U.S. government was behind 9/11.

There is absolutely no evidence to support this claim, but that hardly matters. Having spent 15 years countering false stories, it is clear to me that many people decide first what happened – based on gut feelings and their sense of what should be true – and then search for evidence (real or imagined) to support their conclusions, rather than examining the evidence first and drawing conclusions based on the evidence.

The popularity of September 11 conspiracy theories in the Arab world is “the result of widespread mistrust, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States has a prejudice against them,” says Wahid Abdel Meguid, deputy director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Egypt, quoted in the Times article.

It seems to me that what matters most are the narratives about the world that people have in their minds. If they mistrust the United States and hate Israel, they will believe that they should be blamed when bad things happen, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden has clearly admitted he launched the September 11 attacks.

So, there will always be work for me to do countering misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in an August 28 interview with CNN that the United States may have “created the conflict deliberately in order to aggravate the situation and create a competitive advantage for one of the candidates for the U.S. presidency.”

As evidence of U.S. involvement, Russian officials showed reporters a copy of the passport of American citizen Michael Lee White, allegedly found in a building in South Ossetia by Russian troops.

But as the Wall Street Journal reported on September 3, White lost his passport in October 2005, when he left it in the seat pocket of an airplane on a Moscow-New York flight. The U.S. State Department confirmed that White reported the passport missing in 2005 and that it was subsequently cancelled.

White told the Wall Street Journal that during the fighting in Georgia, “he was in Austin, Texas, helping to care for his 85-year-old father, who suffered a stroke in the spring.” The Journal reports that “Mr. White’s brother, reached by phone in Austin, confirms that account.” White left Austin on August 27 to return to China, where he works as an English-language teacher.

Russian officials have also falsely accused the United States of sending military assistance to Georgia during the conflict. In fact, U.S. aid to Georgia since the conflict began has been exclusively humanitarian, totaling nearly $38 million. This has included more than 150,000 packaged meals, more than 350,000 humanitarian daily rations, 10,500 cots, almost 20,000 sleeping bags, thousands of blankets, sheets, tents, baby food, bottled water, and other humanitarian supplies.

On September 3, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a major economic support package of more than one billion dollars for Georgia.

“This is a reconstruction package for the Georgian economy,” Rice said. “It is not yet time to look at the question of assistance on the military side.”