No, back then it was far more than a simple belief that we were being sold a dummy to justify war. It was obvious to all that we were up against spin - there were plain public lies, for example, such as that Saddam had refused to allow the inspectors in, there were rebuttals of Colin Powell's UN file on WMDs, there was open high-level protest (the French, the Germans, Robin Cook), there was Hans Blix and then Joe Wilson to blow the whistle quite early on, and facts came out, Niger-documents-wise, from Italy too. At no time was it an "absurd and unsubstantiated" conspiracy theory that intelligence had been cooked up to justify war, it didn't take years of patient fact-digging to get at the truth, and neither is it "something we still cannot understand".

9/11 is qualitatively and quantitively different. The necessary skill in conception and execution, the control over events and executants, the scale of the deception, would take it out into the mega-galactic zone (note that I'm not saying they weren't capable of wishing to do it, nor that I'm 100% certain they didn't do it - any more than I meant to suggest that you believed they did it..!). I'm saying this is not a matter of spin that was denounced practically as it was made public (Iraq lies),  but a manipulation of another type and scale altogether.

So my point is that you're drawing a false analogy between Iraq War lies and 9/11 as examples of government/spook conspiracy. They're not on the same page.

(Your point, bop, my point, bop. Deuce.)

You offer further analogies - not in the conspiracy theory line - the first, that the thought a bridge could collapse would have been considered "absurd". But there is nothing absurd about the idea a bridge, or any other mechanical structure, might fail and even fall. When public business is properly handled, there are engineers whose job it is to monitor these things. The second, concerning the monsoon disaster, is, I'm tempted to say, even less "absurd" - unfortunately, such disasters have happened before in the region, and we know large parts of Bangla Desh are low-lying and threatened by global-warming water-level rise.

So your examples of perceived "absurdity" don't seem to me to hold up. You offer them, of course, to support the idea that it's wrong to oppose discussion of certain subjects on this blog. Seems to me you're exaggerating the opposition (I've given a clear counter-example re 9/11 that you don't acknowledge, to which can be appended Private's view). Beyond that, I think it's a question of focus. What's our availability, how much time and energy do we have, what should we spend it on?  

My answer is that we could spend a lot of time and energy giving off heat and not that much light on subjects like the purported stage-management of 9/11, and that we would not convince large numbers of people anyway, because people will fix their view of this particular issue in function of the broader frames and narratives by which they view the world. It's the broader frames and narratives we should be focusing on. Just my point of view, of course.

Otherwise, you're just growling again about top-down / bottom-up, right? All I want to say to that (at least here and for the moment) is that, though ET may appear to you and some others too top-down, in the larger perspective of  communications in today's society, it's very much bottom-up. Don't let's look at things from the wrong end of the telescope...