I did a Web chat yesterday on conspiracy theories. Topics included the September 11 attacks, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the origin of AIDS, why Osama bin Laden is not wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for the September 11 attacks, the Illuminati, and other subjects. Check it out.

The “Main Story” on Russia Today’s English-language Web site on September 11 promotes the conspiracy theory film “Zero,” which claims “the U.S. official version of events surrounding the attacks on 9/11 can not be true.”

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.

In July 2006, a Scripps Survey Research Center poll found that 12 percent of Americans “suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rather than by an airliner captured by terrorists.”

This mistaken belief is largely based on the fallacy that the attack on the Pentagon created a small hole consistent with a cruise missile strike, rather than a large hole, as a commercial airliner would make. The wildly popular conspiracy theory video Loose Change made this mistake, among many others.

But the “small hole” was really a large hole, most of which was obscured by fire-fighting foam during the 19 minutes between when the airliner struck the Pentagon and when that section collapsed, forever obscuring the impact site. See this State Department photo gallery for selected photos of the Pentagon on 9/11.

Also, the remains of the 64 passengers on the plane were found at the Pentagon crash site. 184 of the 189 people who died in the attacks (64 on the plane and 125 in the Pentagon) were identified by DNA analysis. In addition, massive amounts of plane debris were found at the site. More than 100 eyewitnesses reported they saw a plane.

See the Pentagon page of Links for 9/11 Research for a wealth of information debunking this conspiracy theory.