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.

A recent World Public Opinion.org poll reports growing numbers of people in some of the largest Muslim countries claim they don’t know who was behind the September 11 attacks:

• In February 2007, 29% of Egyptians said they didn’t know; in August 2008, that figure had grown to 46%.
• In January 2007, 43% of Indonesians said they didn’t know; in August 2008, 54%
• In February 2007, 63% of Pakistanis said they didn’t know; in August 2008, 72%.

(See page 24-25 of the February 25 report “Public Opinion in the Islamic World on Terrorism, al Qaeda, and US Policies” for data on these and other countries.)

If views about the September 11 attacks were based on facts, the trend would go the other way as more information becomes available, but this isn’t happening in Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

The World Public Opinion.org report comments, “this suggests that, rather than the passage of time allowing greater distance and deliberation, an avoidance and denial mechanism may have grown more habitual.”

It adds:

[C]onflicted feelings about al Qaeda—support for its goals coupled with rejection of its attacks on civilians—may help explain … the widespread rejection of the idea that al Qaeda was behind the September 11 attacks. … What this suggests is that many Muslims may feel tension or cognitive dissonance between their support for al Qaeda’s goals and disapproval of attacks on civilians. To alleviate this tension they may then avoid or discount information that points to al Qaeda (even the videos in which al Qaeda leaders claim responsibility) and seek out information that casts doubts on al Qaeda’s culpability and offers alternative theories.

The recent World Public Opinion poll “Who was behind 9/11?” noted that 46 percent correctly responded Al Qaida; 15 percent the United States, and 7 percent Israel. But 7 percent blamed other groups for the crime. I wondered: who might these supposed culprits be?

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.

On September 11, The Washington Post published a special section on the dedication of the memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

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.

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.

Those are the results from a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 16,000 people in 17 countries. They were asked the question, “Who do you think was behind 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.