This is bizarre…

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday called the September 11 attacks on the United States a “big fabrication” that was used to justify the U.S. war on terrorism, the official IRNA news agency reported.

It came amid escalating tension in the long-running dispute between Iran and the West over Tehran’s nuclear program, with the United States pushing for new U.N. sanctions against the major oil producer.

Ahmadinejad described the destruction of the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001 as a “complicated intelligence scenario and act,” IRNA reported.

He added: “The September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan.” He did not elaborate.

Back in January, Ahmadinejad called the September 11 attacks “suspicious”.

Speaking in the southwestern city of Ahvaz, Ahmadinejad asserted that many “experts” believed that the 9/11 attacks were a US-Israeli plot to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.

“They want to dominate the Middle East with their military presence and all their planning is aimed to achieve this goal. Human rights, fighting nuclear weapons and fighting terrorism is all a big lie,” he said.

“Even the event of 11 September is a suspicious incident,” the president added.

This was not the first time that Ahmadinejad, who often rails against the West, questioned the 9/11 attacks. In April 2008, he also described the attacks as a “suspect event”, reports the BBC.

On Wednesday, Ahmadinejad said that “many researchers and scholars” believe the attacks were an excuse for waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq and “occupying” Pakistan.

“They even instigated Saddam [Hussein] to [wage] the eight-year war against our nation in order to dominate the Middle East,” Ahmadinejad said.

So… America encouraged Saddam to start the Iraq-Iran war, then created the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to remove Saddam and take over Iraq?

In 2008, Ahmadinejad also claimed that as part of their coverup, America has never released the names of those killed on September 11, 2001.

“A building collapsed and they said 3,000 people had been killed but never published their names,” he said in a speech in the holy city of Qom.

On the fifth anniversary, the names of 2,749 people killed in New York were read out at a ceremony.

The names are not especially hard to find, nor are other facts.

But- it seems instead that the truthers and conspiracy believers just added a new member- joining the ranks of such deep thinkers as Charlie Sheen, Ed Asner and one of my favorites, Cynthia McKinney…