Osama bin Laden had scarcely drawn his last breath when the conspiracy theories sprouted: Where’s the body? Where are the photos of the corpse? Why didn’t they take him alive? The theorists demanded.
The Facebook page “Osama bin Laden NOT DEAD” sprang up almost immediately with posts like this one from a Chad Gray:
“Osama ‘buried at sea’ yeah riiiiiight this all sounds like a ploy to get approval numbers up in preparation for the next election. First the long form birth certificate appears, then note even a couple weeks later magically Osama is killed with no proof.”
A contributor to 911blogger.com on Monday wrote: “I wonder if the people that created Obama’s birth certificate will be the same ones that create Osama’s death certificate.”
Robert Alan Goldberg, a history professor at the University of Utah and the author of “Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America,” explains:
“Eighty percent of Americans, he said, believe that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, rather than a lone gunman, as a government commission affirmed. Thirty percent believe the government covered up aliens’ landing in Roswell, N.M., and a third of American blacks believe that government scientists created AIDS as a weapon of black genocide. Sept. 11, of course, has inspired conspiracy theories — it was plotted, variously, by “the Bush administration or Saddam Hussein.”
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