Porn, blogs, and 9/11 conspiracy sites. Farhad Manjoo conducts a controlled demolition of the last today for Salon.

It’s a disquieting read, sprinkled with links to the kook pages it cites. (And some not so kooky. Read this, then follow the comments.) Don’t be daunted by the length: it shoots by, and if you quit before the end you’ll miss the best part — where the conspiracy theorists begin to implicate each other in the conspiracy.

“I’m pretty sure our movement has been infiltrated,” Avery says. Rowe argues that “the government puts out disinformation agents within the movement to splinter it. This is what they do, they try to create dissension between head members.” Both say they’ve looked over the rebuttals, but stand by their film’s major claims.

Ironically, Hoffman levels the same charge of government complicity at Avery. Indeed, here’s where the conspiracy theories grow even stranger: Hoffman argues that the 9/11 planners specifically engineered the attacks in a way that would lead some people to embrace flimsy 9/11 theories. Avery, Hoffman says, has fallen into the government’s trap; the government wants people to say that an airplane didn’t hit the Pentagon, because the claim makes 9/11 skeptics look silly. In the movie, Avery wonders why the government hasn’t released surveillance videos captured near the Pentagon that would show definitively whether an aircraft crashed there. (The Pentagon recently put out a couple of videos that don’t at all settle the matter.) Hoffman says he knows exactly why the government is being stingy with the videos — not because it has something to hide about the Pentagon, but because it wants to feed the no-plane theory. It’s all part of the plan to “divert attention from the core fraud of the attack — the Big Lie that the Twin Towers collapsed due to impacts and fires.”

“Avery” is Dylan Avery, the director of Loose Change, and “Rowe” is Korey Rowe, its producer. According to Rowe, Hollywood has inquired about distributing the film. Avery says if it gets picked up, he wants it to open in theaters … on September 11th.

The boys at SLC keep plugging away, though. Here’s their latest dose of reason. Bonus points for topicality.

Update: I realize you’re not going to click all the links in Manjoo’s piece so I’ve got to rescue this one myself. It’s a sober, critical analysis of the theory that no planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, and that the tens of thousands of images to the contrary were actually doctored with graphic overlays. Or was it holograms?

Which party do you suppose the author of that theory belongs to?

Update: SLC e-mails with a link to this old post of theirs about “the second-level conspiracy.”