If you don't know what Disney is by now...I have a copy of a 1939 Disney story book called 'Mickey Never Fails' that was used to prepare America's kids for WWII.
Yes, 1939, just before Hitler invaded Poland but had already mobilized.
So the use of fictionalization to 'foreshadow' events in the public's mind, especially children and other illiterates is atleast 68 years old.
Also, Pan. When you write about garden variety "conspiracy writers," what does that mean? Just hungry creatives milking clippings of news of the weird? Is that really the only possibility? History suggests otherwise.
You dismiss all suggestions of spook intent in writing and huff that I'm "smearing good people" and accuse me of wanting a 'joyless world without beauty.'

The series title, 'The Lone Gunmen' screams "show biz conspiracy theory for your amusement" so loud it is deafening, extreme telegraphing of framing.
Exactly like Disney's videogame division being called...Propaganda Games.
Disney Interactive has today confirmed a date that gamers will be greeted with those three hallowed word - "I AM TUROK!" - on the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, in the latest dino-blasting first-person shooter being developed by Propaganda Games.
That's mnemonic inoculation in action, baby!
Obviously, most of the people working on 'The Lone Gunmen' shows would've just been careerists getting paychecks, not 'deciders.' Just like in war.
But there are 'deciders' with ties to other 'deciders' like Disney and the rest of West Coast Langley involved with the show who could have been steered towards a script without their realizing it would go live in real life, just like what happened to the NORAD excercise people on 9/11.
8bitagent was right about 'The Manchurian Candidate' being intentional 'foreshadowing' on that topic in case of exposure. CIA efforts to create assassins were going on several years before the 1959 Richard Condon book which became the movie. And I've written how Condon is CIA creating decoy stories.
Open source academic propapaganda texts (Doob, 1935) describe a process of introducing a topic to a target audience as "sophistication," meaning creating a place in their minds for a subject where previously there was none. First this is done in any manner at all just to start, fiction is perfect and can begin a framing, and then once the audience had considered it then more qualifications on the topic can be introduced. Exactly this method was used to 'foreshadow' global warming.
The definition of inoculation that seventhsonjr provided was a good one and he's right about this being used to discourage belief.
So the probability of something bad happening AGAIN at the WTC could very well have been intentionally foreshadowed by feeding the 'fictional' idea to 'Lone Gunmen' production to both alert the public to the possibility and discourage belief about an inside job.
Of course hitting the WTC again was 'in the air.' But the value of inoculation is immense for the crime of the century if people are going to suspect an inside job.
Especially since there was already web scuttlebutt about:
>inside job of WTC '93
>inside job of CIA cocaine from Nella/Mena airports '94
>inside job of Oklahoma City '95
>inside job of TWA 800 '96
>inside job trial of Martin Luther King case '97
>inside job of Unabomber/Harvard trial '97
...and more.
So with something BIG coming anyday, it would have certainly been logical for an inoculation 'foreshadowing' to be inserted into a 'conspiracy show' series perfect for it...and probably created for just that purpose as some of us think 'The X-Files' was, too.
The public was being prepared for The Big One repeatedly throughout the 1980s ('Wrong is Right') and 1990s ('Independence Day') but a growing internet awareness of multiple inside jobs was a new problem that had to be dispelled as 'paranoid conspiracy theory.'
And it was.