His docile demeanour as inmate number 24079-038 is a far cry from the behaviour that landed him here at the US Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility - also known as ADX, Super Max, Bombers' Row, and the Alcatraz of the Rockies - just outside the town of Florence, Colorado. Five years ago, on December 22, 2001, Reid, of Bromley, Kent, boarded American Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami, intending to blow it up by detonating plastic explosives hidden in one of his shoes. As he tried to light the fuse he was spotted by a flight attendant and, following a violent struggle, was overpowered.
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Just over a year later the young fanatic who had attended Finsbury Park mosque in London where Abu Hamza preached was sentenced to life in prison.

The first British al-Qaeda convict was dragged from the federal courtroom in Boston still shouting his allegiance to Osama bin Laden. "I'm at war with your country," he yelled at the judge.

But a spokesman for BAA denied they were stamping on Homer's favourite food. He said: "Passengers can take liquids in 100ml bottles carrried in a clear plastic bag. But passengers use common sense on foodstuffs. Sandwich fillings and the like are not restricted."

In fact, the only foods still on the restricted list are: "Liquid-based foods, sauces, stews, soups over 100ml in size."

Drinks suffer the same restrictions, but there is no mention of doughnuts.

If history was ever a static and universally accepted account of the past, that notion now is as outmoded as a stovepipe hat.

In the United States, it's increasingly a mainstream view that secret forces with mysterious aims shape our destiny. In 1998, CBS News found that three out of four Americans believe that the truth behind John F. Kennedy's assassination has been covered up. This summer, a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials planned 9/11 or at least did nothing to stop the attacks.

Why people embrace conspiracy theories is a complex topic, touching on ideology and psychology. In our time, two factors have made these tales more pervasive:

The Internet accelerates the pace at which isolated mutterings can become national phenomena, exposed to a potential audience of billions. Video clips and documents, real and manufactured, zip through the ether and buttress tales that might otherwise be dismissed as cockamamie speculation.

From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate, late 20th-century scandals proved that the official version of events can be a smoke screen hiding a more sinister and more accurate story.

"Americans tend to be particularly receptive to anti-government conspiracy theories," said Kathryn Olmsted, a University of California Davis history professor who is writing a book on this subject.

In the early 20th century, though, government was not the most popular villain. Then, Olmsted noted, various plots were blamed on forces based outside the United States, including religions (the Catholic Church, Judaism) and industries. The first World War, one theory held, was caused by an unholy alliance of European arms dealers and international bankers.

But as Washington's power grew, conspiracy theorists "found" more masterminds - past and present - within the federal government. In 1937, a book titled "Why Was Lincoln Murdered?" gave a startling answer. The Great Emancipator, author Otto Eisenschiml argued, fell victim to a plot cooked up by his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton.

"That attracted a lot of attention at the time," noted William Hanchett, history professor emeritus at San Diego State University and an authority on Lincoln's assassination. "But it's been completely discredited."

Many conspiracy theories meet a similar fate - they rise on the hot air of controversy; wobble as experts poke holes in their fragile underpinnings; and then drop into oblivion.

Scarred cathedrals

The Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories, though, floated anew in the aftermath of 9/11.

There are undeniable parallels between the events. Gazing into the battleship Arizona's watery grave is not unlike peering through the fence surrounding ground zero. In each of these scarred, secular cathedrals, Americans died in a sneak attack and America changed course.

All according to a secret White House plan, some claim. In the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll, 36 percent of all Americans suspected that the federal government planned or allowed 9/11 because "they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."

This echoes the arguments about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor found in books such as John Toland's "Infamy" (1982) and Robert Stinnett's "Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor" (2000).

"In these two conspiracies," said Emily Rosenberg, author of "A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory" and a history professor at the University of California Irvine, "the conspiracy is at the heart of the government. That buys into the anti-government rhetoric that is so prevalent."

Unfortunately, there is reason for such rhetoric. In 1990, a New York Times/WCBS-TV poll found that black Americans most apt to embrace conspiracies were also most familiar with U.S. history. They knew that the FBI had infiltrated the civil-rights movement in the 1960s and that the U.S. Public Health Service had withheld effective treatment from black men in the Tuskegee syphilis study of 1932-72.

For Americans of all races and backgrounds, well-documented government scandals have diminished faith in "the official story." At the same time, though, even the most elaborate conspiracy theory can offer an odd sort of comfort.

"There is a natural tendency when a tragedy or catastrophe happens to try to make it comprehensible," Olmsted said. (Full disclosure: Olmsted is married to Bill Ainsworth, a Union-Tribune reporter.)

People often reduce complicated issues to a single cause - the bigger the issue, the bigger the cause, said Patrick Leman, a British psychologist who studies the origins of conspiracy theories.

Leman's research also indicates that people who are inclined to believe conspiracy theories are also inclined to discard facts that run counter to those theories.

"It's called confirmatory bias," said Michael Shermer, author of "Why People Believe Weird Things" and executive director of the Skeptics Society. "People tend to look for or recognize evidence that supports their ideas and ignore everything else."

Case in point: Olmsted notes that every war that the United States has fought since 1900 has spawned a conspiracy theory, often inspired by the conviction that Americans love peace.

"Opponents of war, at the time or often later, argue that this is basically a peaceful country," she said. "If everyone had known all the facts, we wouldn't have gone to war."

Conversely, more commonplace, non-conspiratorial explanations can shake our faith in order and reason. Rosenberg cites the "clutter and noise" view, that catastrophes sometimes happen because authorities are distracted or incompetent. This can be a difficult, if not intolerable, reminder of chance's role in life.

A 'war frenzy'

Reviewing World War II, the first prominent "backdoor to war" advocates were Sens. Owen Brewster and Homer Ferguson, two Republican opponents of Roosevelt. Sitting on the 1945-46 Senate committee on Pearl Harbor, they argued that the White House was covering up Roosevelt's role in the war's outbreak.

The committee - dominated by Democrats, 6-4 - concluded its review by placing the sole blame on Adm. Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, the senior commanders at Pearl Harbor.

Kimmel and Short's long campaign for exoneration drew bipartisan support. In 1999, when the Senate voted 52-47 that Kimmel and Short had performed "competently and professionally," the supporters included Democrats Joseph Biden and John Kerry. One of the "nays" came from John Warner, R-Va., and a former Navy secretary.

Still, Rosenberg said, this campaign played into the 1990s' culture wars, with some Republicans using the occasion to take potshots at Roosevelt, a venerated Democrat.

After 9/11, though, conservatives stopped hammering Roosevelt. Speculation about a U.S. president using a surprise attack as a pretext for sending troops into combat had politically uncomfortable echoes. "9/11 has so overshadowed Pearl Harbor," Rosenberg said. "I don't think it is a right-wing Republican cause célèbre as it really had been for 50 years."

Now the drumbeats are heard from the opposite direction, to "prove" another point.

Roosevelt's nefarious plot "is trotted out now by the 9/11 conspiracy theorists who want a historic precedent," Olmsted said.

In a recent article in Australia's New Dawn magazine, "War on Terror: The Police State Agenda," Richard K. Moore asserts that both Roosevelt and the Bush administration "intentionally set the stage for a 'surprise' attack" to whip the American people into a "war frenzy."

"Unbelievable as this may seem," Moore wrote, "this is a scenario that matches the modus operandi of U.S. ruling elites."

Unbelievable or not, this backdoor has moved. Once a staple of the far right, it is now attached to the extreme left.

Documents acquired for Wired News using the Freedom of Information Act claim that most of the radiation (83 percent) is instantly absorbed by the top layer of the skin, heating it rapidly.

The beam produces what experimenters call the "Goodbye effect," or "prompt and highly motivated escape behavior." In human tests, most subjects reached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds.

"It will repel you," one test subject said. "If hit by the beam, you will move out of it -- reflexively and quickly. You for sure will not be eager to experience it again."

But while subjects may feel like they have sustained serious burns, the documents claim effects are not long-lasting. At most, "some volunteers who tolerate the heat may experience prolonged redness or even small blisters," the Air Force experiments concluded.

The reports describe an elaborate series of investigations involving human subjects.

The volunteers were military personnel: active, reserve or retired, who volunteered for the tests. They were unpaid, but the subjects would "benefit from direct knowledge that an effective nonlethal weapon system could soon be in the inventory," said one report. The tests ranged from simple exposure in the laboratory to elaborate war games involving hundreds of participants.

The military simulated crowd control situations, rescuing helicopter crews in a Black Hawk Down setting and urban assaults. More unusual tests involved alcohol, attack dogs and maze-like obstacle courses.

In more than 10,000 exposures, there were six cases of blistering and one instance of second-degree burns in a laboratory accident, the documents claim.

The ADS was developed in complete secrecy for 10 years at a cost of $40 million. Its existence was revealed in 2001 by news reports, but most details of ADS human testing remain classified. There has been no independent checking of the military's claims.

The ADS technology is ready to deploy, and the Army requested ADS-armed Strykers for Iraq last year. But the military is well aware that any adverse publicity could finish the program, and it does not want to risk distressed victims wailing about evil new weapons on CNN.

This may mean yet more rounds of testing for the ADS.

New bombs can be rushed into service in a matter of weeks, but the process is more complex for nonlethal weapons. It may be years before the debates are resolved and the first directed-energy nonlethal weapon is used in action.

The development of a truly safe and highly effective nonlethal crowd-control system could raise enormous ethical questions about the state's use of coercive force. If a method such as ADS leads to no lasting injury or harm, authorities may find easier justifications for employing them.

Historically, one of the big problems with nonlethal weapons is that they can be misused. Rubber bullets are generally safe when fired at the torso, but head impacts can be dangerous, particularly at close range. Tasers can become dangerous if they are used on subjects who have previously been doused with flammable pepper spray. In the heat of the moment, soldiers or police can forget their safety training.

Steve Wright of Praxis, the Center for the Study of Information and Technology in Peace, Conflict Resolution and Human Rights, notes that there are occasions when this has happened in the past. He cites British soldiers, who increased the weight of baton rounds in Northern Ireland.

"Soldiers flouted the rules of engagement, doctoring the bullets by inserting batteries (to increase the weight) and firing at closer ranges than allowed," says Wright.

There may also be technical issues. Wright cites a recent report on CS gas sprays which turned out to be more dangerous in the field than expected.

"No one had bothered to check how the sprays actually performed in practice, and they yielded much more irritant than was calculated in the weapon specification. This underlines the need for independent checking of any manufacturers' specifications. Here secrecy is the enemy of safety."

Eye damage is identified as the biggest concern, but the military claims this has been thoroughly studied. Lab testing found subjects reflexively blink or turn away within a quarter of a second of exposure, long before the sensitive cornea can be damaged. Tests on monkeys showed that corneal damage heals within 24 hours, the reports claim.

"A speculum was needed to hold the eyes open to produce this type of injury because even under anesthesia, the monkeys blinked, protecting the cornea," the report says.

The risk of cancer is also often mentioned in connection with the ADS system, despite the shallow penetration of radiation into the skin.

But the Air Force is adamant that after years of study, exposure to MMW has not been demonstrated to promote cancer. During some tests, subjects were exposed to 20 times the permitted dose under the relevant Air Force radiation standard. The Air Force claims the exposure was justified by demonstrating the safety of the ADS system.

The beam penetrates clothing, but not stone or metal. Blocking it is harder than you might think. Wearing a tinfoil shirt is not enough -- you would have to be wrapped like a turkey to be completely protected. The experimenters found that even a small exposed area was enough to produce the Goodbye effect, so any gaps would negate protection. Holding up a sheet of metal won't work either, unless it covers your whole body and you can keep the tips of your fingers out of sight.

Wet clothing might sound like a good defense, but tests showed that contact with damp cloth actually intensified the effects of the beam.

System 1, the operational prototype, is mounted on a Hummer and produces a beam with a 2-meter diameter. Effective range is at least 500 meters, which is further than rubber bullets, tear gas or water cannons. The ammunition supply is effectively unlimited.

The military's tests went beyond safety, exploring how well the ADS works in practice. In one war game, an assault team staged a mock raid on a building. The ADS was used to remove civilians from the battlefield, separating what the military calls "tourists from terrorists."

It was also used in a Black Hawk Down scenario, and maritime tests, which saw the ADS deployed against small boats.

It might also be used on the battlefield. One war game deployed the ADS in support of an assault, suppressing incoming fire and obstructing a counterattack.

"ADS has the same compelling nonlethal effect on all targets, regardless of size, age and gender," says Capt. Jay Delarosa, spokesman for the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, which decides where and how the ADS might be deployed.

"It can be used to deny an area to individuals or groups, to control access, to prevent an individual or individuals from carrying out an undesirable activity, and to delay or disrupt adversary activity."

The precise results of the military's war games are classified, but Capt. Delarosa insists that the ADS has proven "both safe and effective in all these roles."

The ADS comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. As well as System 1, a smaller version has been fitted to a Stryker armored vehicle -- along with other lethal and nonlethal weapons -- for urban security operations. Sandia National Labs is looking at a small tripod-mounted version for defending nuclear installations, and there is even a portable ADS. And there are bigger versions too.

"Key technologies to enable this capability from an airborne platform -- such as a C-130 -- are being developed at several Air Force Research Laboratory technology directorates," says Diana Loree, program manager for the Airborne ADS.

The airborne ADS would supplement the formidable firepower of Special Forces AC-130 gunships, which currently includes a 105-mm howitzer and 25-mm Gatling guns. The flying gunboats typically engage targets at a range of two miles or more, which implies an ADS far more powerful than System 1 has been developed. But details of the exact power levels, range and diameter of the beam are classified.