Film targets JFK conspiracy theories

"The Pentagon was struck by a 'hijacked' airliner 45 minutes after two other 'hijacked' airliners struck the WTC," this recent missive continued, "without the airliner being intercepted, approached, chased, or even seen by our air defenses? The Gov't still refuses to release clear video of whatever happened at the Pentagon to this day, six years later??? Why???"

This e-mail urges you and me to visit the Web site 911truth.org, and all I can say is, feel free to exercise your First Amendment rights. There is a "truth novel" (paging Mr. Orwell) about 9/11 coming out from a "New York Times Best-Selling Author" later this month. Look for it! On the Web site, you can check out the "peer-reviewed" Journal of 9/11 Studies. The site also allows you to download "resistance music," like Zan Overall's "I Want to Believe You, Mr. President," sung by Bill Horn and 911Truth Chorus. Sample lyric: "The more I learn about 9/11/Believing you gets harder to do."

You can watch clips of "Boston Tea Party" for 9/11 truth at the Web site boston911truth.org. I saw a video of retired Brigham Young University physicist Steven Jones explaining that he had found chemical evidence of Thermate, "a high-tech incendiary that melts steel like a hot knife through butter" in World Trade Center detritus. A press release from architect Richard Gage announces that "the official explanation of the total destruction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers has explicitly failed to address the massive evidence for explosive demolition."

Are there mysteries? Yes, there are mysteries. A friend of mine thinks that American Airlines's Flight 587, which crashed in Queens in the fall of 2001, was shoe-bombed. (Shoe bomber Richard Reid was arrested a month later on an American Airlines flight.) Even though I have since met an engineer who consulted on the investigation, which attributed the crash to wake turbulence and pilot error, I think my friend may be right.

But I don't think Dick Cheney, or the titans of capital, or the agents of the Apocalypse blew up the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 people to further some dark cause. I think the plot was hatched right where we think it was, in the faraway, hot sands of anti-American hatred.

I doubt the truth is out there. I think it is already here.

(DVD special features: A visit to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, "The Zapruder Film and Beyond" and an interview with producer Robert Stone. The DVD is available for purchase at www.shoppbs.org and proceeds support public television.)

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Alex Beam is a Boston Globe columnist