The June 6 article in the Register portraying Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Guantanamo detainee implicated and to be tried by the U.S. military for "masterminding" the Sept. 11 attacks, raises a number of interesting questions.

For instance, what is it precisely that he is being charged with masterminding? Is Khalid Mohammed held to be responsible for neutralizing and incapacitating the entire U.S. air-defense system at once, enabling four attacks to go unintercepted?

Is it alleged that Khalid Mohammed as a mastermind was somehow responsible for getting a failed rookie pilot - who couldn't guide a Cessna - to fly a 144-foot-wide airliner all the way through the 16-foot-wide hole that its entry created at ground level into the Pentagon without leaving any wreckage outside the hole larger than you could hold in your hand?

And is it likewise alleged that the execution of his master plan made it possible for stooges crashing a mere two jet airliners into the World Trade Center complex to bring down three of its steel-frame skyscrapers by both impacts, plus causing jet-fuel (kerosene) fires sufficiently hot to melt or weaken the massively reinforced steel to a sudden breaking point (a first), in a way that perfectly mimicked the results of pre-set controlled demolitions? (Not to mention dozens of day-of-the-event reports by those present of massive explosions ahead of time, suppressed until their release was forced by court order nearly four years later. See David Ray Griffin, "Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11," John Knox Press, 2006.)

Is he charged with being responsible also for the plan carried out by the airliner that ended up crashing straight into the ground in Pennsylvania, leaving no recoverable wreckage at the site, but scattering it instead across 10 miles of countryside? Was it his planning that got all of the alleged 19 mass murderers on board the four airliners without registering their presence on any of the available flight lists of the planes?

Because, in a nutshell, those were the verifiable facts of those perplexing, related Sept. 11 incidents. Notably, he confesses that he, too, would have been on one of the planes, if only he had not failed to wangle a passport. But, I would submit, if he is found by the military tribunal to have masterminded all four of those officially alleged results of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks (and his prosecutors have guaranteed a conviction of him and his cohorts), he would have to be recognized as the greatest criminal mastermind of all time.

So, why should we care about the truth behind any of these events? Because the official version is revealed as a sham by the facts, and, as Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And that is what has happened, with more than 1 million lives and a chunk of our freedoms and way of life lost in wars foisted on the world as a result of an unsubstantiated, implausible and discredited conspiracy theory.

Must the disastrous reflex reactions to still not properly investigated events continue to occur, define us and tie us down? To quote the renowned Rabbi Abraham Heschel: "The opposite of good is not evil, it is indifference." There is too much of that today!

In the words of a retired member of Congress, "If you don't get involved, you'll never make a difference."