Contrarian and reluctant neoconservative Mitchell Porter has connected the September 11 terrorist attacks, and his theory of a decade-long secret war between the CIA and an Iraqi-backed Al-Qaeda, to the Illuminatus! trilogy, via the pre-Islamic Egyptian calendar and the correspondences with the book (particularly, the Chaney/Cheney thing, the anthrax and the bombing of the Pentagon):

Well, here is a first hypothesis, which ought to freak out any Robert Anton Wilson fan: Mohammed Atta was a fan of Illuminatus, and took some inspiration from the terrorists in the book. As the article on the Egyptian New Year, linked above, testifies, there is a great appetite in the Muslim world for elaborate conspiracy theory involving esoteric secret societies. The constitution of Hamas is a good example, in the way it groups Rotary Clubs and Freemasons together as part of the grand anti-Islamic conspiracy. And Illuminatus!, while largely unknown to the literary mainstream, is well-known to conspiracy aficionados of all sorts. For that matter, Atta spent a lot of time in Germany, where Illuminatus! had already intersected real espionage in the person of "Hagbard Celine", a young hacker who took his name from one of the novel's anarchist heroes, and who penetrated Western computer networks on behalf of the KGB.

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