Lecturer under fire for 9/11 conspiracy belief

Wisconsin lawmakers are demanding that a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer be pulled from his fall teaching position because of his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were not carried out by terrorists, but by the U.S. government.

Kevin Barrett, who is scheduled to teach the course "Islam: Religion and Culture," said his views on the 9/11 attacks should not come as a surprise to anyone.

"I've been saying these things for three years, on local and national radio and TV, while teaching at UW-Madison and Edgewood College of Madison," he said. "Nobody even complained before, least of all the students."

"The appropriate question to ask about professors who give their opinions about 9/11 in the classroom, whether to embrace or reject the official theory," says David Ray Griffin— professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, "is the standard one: Do they do so in an academically responsible manner, supporting their opinions with evidence in a way that could be defended before their peers?"

9/11 and 7/7: Mere coincidence?

Christopher Bollyn writes: "Can it really be a mere coincidence that a crisis management company was running a terror drill that simulated terrorist bombings on the very same London underground trains and stations at the very same time as duplicate real bombings were occurring? Should the fact that the very same coincidence occurred on the morning of September 11th 2001 when FEMA was conducting a simulated bioterrorism attack in New York raise any eyebrows?

"What about the fact that on the morning of September 11h 2001, officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance Office had planned and was running an exercise in which an errant aircraft crashed into one of its buildings?"