What happens when...

Conspiracy theorists have their conspiratorial concerns confirmed?

Conspiracy theorists are so plentiful in Idaho and Utah that you sometimes have trouble telling them apart from the mutated jack rabbits and nuclear sage brush. That is what makes the story of censorship -- even if the author is a crackpot -- all the more interesting. Not since a Pocatello, ID, TV weatherman was fired last Fall for saying hurricane Katrina was the work of Japanese gangsters with a secret Russian weather machine has a major employer in region taken action against one of its own for holding forth in public with wacko ideas.

Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, the flagship educational institution of the LDS church, this week essentially forced one of its tenured faculty into retirement for publishing "research" that the 9/11 destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center was the result of U.S. government explosives and not hijacked jet airliners crashing into them.

This is not the first time the LDS church has come down on people who attack the credibility of the U.S. government. In 1995 the church ran off James "Bo" Gritz by denying him membership in his local church organization after he advocated tax resistence along with the rest of his anti-government conspiracy and Christian Identity political rhetoric.

The Idaho Falls Post Register runs this version of the AP wire service story on the BYU firing. You can find additional coverage via Google News.