Conspiracy Theory Grips French: Sept. 11 as Right-Wing U.S. Plot [Or: When France went nuts]

June 22, 2002 - The NYT, Front Page

Conspiracy Theory Grips French: Sept. 11 as Right-Wing U.S. Plot [OR: When France went nuts]

By ALAN RIDING

The new, best-seller French author.

PARIS, June 21 - Even before the fires were extinguished at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, conspiracy theories began flooding the Internet. A few quickly spilled out of Web sites and were widely circulated by e-mail before fading into oblivion. One, however, has taken on a life of its own in France. It was turned into a book that has become the publishing sensation of the spring.

In the book, "L'Effroyable Imposture," or "The Horrifying Fraud," Thierry Meyssan challenges the entire official version of the Sept. 11 attacks.

He claims the Pentagon was not hit by a plane, but by a guided missile fired on orders of far right-wingers inside the United States government. Further, he says, the planes that struck the World Trade Center were not flown by associates of Osama bin Laden, but were programmed by the same government people to fly into the twin towers.

What really interests him, though, is what he sees as the conspiracy behind these actions. He contends that it was organized by right-wing elements inside the government who were planning a coup unless President Bush agreed to increase military spending and go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq to promote the conspirators' oil interests.

To achieve their goals, the theory goes, they blamed Osama bin Laden for Sept. 11 and later broadened their targets to include the "axis of evil," centered on Iraq.

The 235-page book has been universally ridiculed by the French news media, while its arguments have been dismantled point by point in "L'Effroyable Mensonge," or "The Horrifying Lie," a new book by two French journalists.

A Pentagon spokesman said, "There was no official reaction because we figured it was so stupid."

Yet in the past three months, Mr. Meyssan's book has sold more than 200,000 copies in France, placing it at the top of best-seller lists for several weeks. Foreign rights have also been sold in 16 countries (a Spanish version is already on sale), and Mr. Meyssan traveled to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates in April to present his arguments at a local university.

The book's French publisher, Éditions Carnot, said it would release an English version in the United States in July.

Mr. Meyssan said in an interview that he was surprised his book had so far provoked no major debate, but he was convinced that his message was being heard.

"Two-thirds of the hits on our Web site come from the United States," he said. "I'm not saying all my readers agree with me, but they recognize that the official American version of the attacks is idiotic. If we can't believe the official version, where do we stand?"

It is nonetheless puzzling why so many of the French have been willing to pay the equivalent of $17 for "The Horrifying Fraud." Is it a symptom of latent anti-Americanism? Is it a reflection of the French public's famous distrust of its own government and mainstream newspapers? Or has the French love of logic been tickled by the apparent Cartesian neatness of a conspiracy theory?

Certainly, after Sept. 11, some leftist intellectuals suggested that the United States had invited the attacks through its support for Israel. Others recalled that Islamic militants had been financed and armed by the United States to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's. Yet, in this case, Libération and Le Monde, left-of-center newspapers with no love for the Bush administration, have led the assault on Mr. Meyssan's book.

"The pseudotheories of `The Horrifying Fraud' feed off the paranoid anti-Americanism that is one of the permanent components of the French political caldron," Gérard Dupuy wrote in an editorial in Libération. Edwy Plenel, news editor at Le Monde, wrote: "It is very grave to encourage the idea that something which is real is in fact fictional. It is the beginning of totalitarianism."

Guillaume Dasquié and Jean Guisnel, the authors of "The Horrifying Lie," favor a different explanation for the book's success. They write of France's "profound social and political sickness," which leads people to embrace the idea "that they are victims of plots, that the truth is hidden from them, that they should not believe official versions, but rather that they should demystify all expressions of power, whatever they might be."

Still, even if some French are susceptible to conspiracy theories, few had heard of the book until March 16, when Mr. Meyssan appeared on a popular Saturday evening television program on France 2, a government-owned but independently run channel. In the program, Mr. Meyssan was allowed to expound his theory without being challenged by the host. In the two weeks that followed, his book sold 100,000 copies.

Mr. Meyssan himself seems an unlikely purveyor of tall stories. A 44-year-old former theology student, he dabbled in leftist politics before forming a political research company, Réseau Voltaire, or Voltaire Network, in 1994.

The company's Web site (www .reseauvoltaire.com) adopted specific causes, like fighting homophobia and opposing Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front. Its investigative methods seemed thorough and objective.

In person too, Mr. Meyssan, a slim, wiry man with short hair and penetrating eyes, comes over as both serious and rational.

French journalists who had given some credibility to his Web site were all the more surprised, then, to find him building a vast conspiracy theory around the fact that photographs of the Sept. 11 attack showed no airplane parts in or near the smoldering gap in the Pentagon. This became the departure point for his book.

The line of reasoning that follows is a case study in how a conspiracy theory can be built around contradictions in official statements, unnamed "experts" and "professional pilots," unverified published facts, references to past United States policy in Cuba and Afghanistan, use of technical information, "revelations" about secret oil-industry maneuvers and, above all, rhetorical questions intended to sow doubts. At the end of each chapter, Mr. Meyssan presents his speculation as fact.

To gather his evidence, he worked mainly from articles, statements and speculation found on the Internet. He did not travel to the United States to interview any witnesses. Indeed, he dismisses the accounts of witnesses to the crash of the American Airlines Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.

"Far from believing their depositions, the quality of these witnesses only underlines the importance of the means deployed by the United States Army to pervert the truth," he said.

His "truth" is that no Muslims took part in the attacks "because the Koran forbids suicide." To his original claim that the Pentagon was bombed from the inside, he has now added his conviction that the building was struck by an air-to-ground missile fired by the United States Air Force. "This type of missile, seen from the side, would easily remind one of a small civilian airplane," he said.

In response, Mr. Dasquié and Mr. Guisnel said they traveled to Washington and interviewed 18 witnesses to the Pentagon crash.

They also have named experts explaining how the Boeing 757 could disappear inside the crater caused by the impact. Further, they identify several people mentioned only by their initials in Mr. Meyssan's acknowledgments, including a French Army officer currently on trial for treason and a middle-ranking intelligence officer.

The book has proved to be a windfall for Mr. Meyssan's publisher. More accustomed to publishing marginal books on subjects like the "false" American moon landing in 1969 and the latest "truth" about U.F.O.'s, Éditions Carnot can now boast of its first best seller.

Further, confident that this conspiracy theory will endure, Mr. Meyssan and Carnot have just published a 192-page annex, with new documents, photographs and theories. They call it "Le Pentagate."

"Yet in the past three months, Mr. Meyssan's book has sold more than 200,000 copies in France, It is nonetheless puzzling why so many of the French have been willing to pay the equivalent of $17 for "The Horrifying Fraud." Is it a symptom of latent anti-Americanism? Is it a reflection of the French public's famous distrust of its own government and mainstream newspapers? Or has the French love of logic been tickled by the apparent Cartesian neatness of a conspiracy theory?"

Uhh, I'd venture a guess that France probably has at least 200,000 Arabs living on Government welfare and spending French taxpayers money to buy a book that fits into their grand scheme of things.

This thing will shoot straight to the top of the Middle East Times Best seller list right next to Mein Kampf.

________________________________

James S. Robbins on Thierry Meyssan

O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.
— Voltaire, 1767

Well, it did not take long for the ridiculous to find its way into print. In what is billed as the "first independent inquiry" into the events of Sept. 11, French left-wing activist Thierry Meyssan comes to the shocking conclusion that the Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77. His book, L'Effroyable Imposture (The Frightening Fraud) is apparently a hot seller in his native land, the first 20,000 copies having been whisked off the shelves with more to follow. Meyssan, who had published his views as early as October 8 on his website, the Voltaire Network, (the philosophe must be spinning in his grave having his name appropriated by this imbecile), proves, at least to his own satisfaction, that the damage to the Pentagon could not have been caused by a Boeing 757, but was in fact the result of a carefully planned truck bombing or missile strike which was then made to look like a plane crash.
Meyssan offers as evidence a careful analysis of images of the crash site. (See "Hunt the Boeing," a site based on Meyssan's assertions and run by his son, and the point-by-point refutation here.) He also notes discrepancies in the eyewitness descriptions. (See here for a compendium of eyewitness accounts that, in fact, all pretty much agree.) Note that I haven't read the book — I'm waiting for the movie — but presumably Meyssan answers salient questions such as, if Flight 77 didn't hit the Pentagon, where is it? Where are Barbara Olson and the other passengers who left loved ones behind? If the eyewitnesses can't agree on what they saw, what was it they are disagreeing about and why are there so many of them?

No matter. Meyssan's purpose is to uncover a much deeper plot of the United States against the world. He reveals other interesting facts, like bin Laden was an agent of the U.S. who was used by President Bush to destroy secret CIA offices in the World Trade Towers. Seems like a lot of effort — when Stansfield Turner wanted to do it he just fired a bunch of guys. And if the WTC planes were part of the plan, and presumably also United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania, why go to the trouble of fabricating a strike on the Pentagon instead of just using another aircraft like the missing Flight 77? At some point Occam's Razor has to come into play. But to the tortured mind of Meyssan, whose other causes include hard anti-Catholicism and "rejection of a return to a moral order" it probably makes a lot of sense.

Today is Yom Hashoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, and Meyssan's theory fits neatly with those of the Holocaust deniers. In both cases, the premises of their originators are indefensible, which forces them into a position where they have to throw the facts overboard to sustain their arguments. But notions like this are kept alive by people who have a predisposition to believe them, those who have pre-existing grudges and will engage in whatever reality-denying behavior justifies their baseline prejudices. For example, it is already widely believed in the Middle East that Sept. 11 was not perpetrated by bin Laden but by the Mossad, the CIA, or some other group, in order to give the United States a pretext to intervene in the region. Meyssan's theory is a qualitative step beyond the idea that al Qaeda was not behind the attacks — he denies that the attack on the Pentagon even happened, at least not "the way the government says it did." This story is certain to find fertile soil in some of the more radical quarters, especially among those that both deny the Holocaust happened and wish it had been more effective. For example Ibrahim Abu-al-Naja, the first deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who complained about how the world was going to make the Palestinians "pay the price for what happened to [the Jews], if indeed anything had happened to them." Or the recent editorial on WAFA, the Palestinian Authority news service, that admitted that a few Jews went to the gas chambers, but "about whose number there is some ambiguity." (WAFA had no trouble counting the 12 million Native Americans allegedly exterminated in the 17th-19th centuries.) If Meyssan has any sense at all, he will rush out an Arabic edition pronto.

The answer to Meyssan and any other such revisionist is the truth, particularly the primary sources, the body of knowledge compiled by those who experienced the events in question. In the case of the Holocaust, the affirmative evidence is overwhelming, particularly the living record, the dwindling numbers of survivors and witnesses who have assumed the responsibility to chronicle their stories, to relay them personally to generations born long after the events. Likewise with the Sept. 11 attacks, it is incumbent to remember, and through memory to prevent similar events from happening again. The images of the WTC attacks speak for themselves. Where video is lacking, as in the case of Flight 77 (which is more proof of the plot, says Meyssan) it is up to the eyewitnesses to tell their stories.

So here's mine. I was in my Washington office doing research when one of the secretaries told me that an aircraft had hit the World Trade Center. We brought the news up on the projection screen in our darkened conference room and watched the coverage, seeing endless six-foot high replays of the impacts and explosions. It was unsettling, even disorienting, but my colleagues and I were appraising it professionally, trading theories on who was to blame and how the terrorists coordinated the attacks. We did not come to any firm conclusions.

I went back to my office around 9:20. A short time later a friend of mine called, an Air Force officer, and we spoke awhile about the strikes in New York. I was standing, looking out my large office window, which faces west and from six stories up has a commanding view of the Potomac and the Virginia heights. (When I hired on my boss said we had the best view in town. True, most days.) The Pentagon is about a mile and half distant in the center of the tableau. I was looking directly at it when the aircraft struck. The sight of the 757 diving in at an unrecoverable angle is frozen in my memory, but at the time, I did not immediately comprehend what I was witnessing. There was a silvery flash, an explosion, and a dark, mushroom shaped cloud rose over the building. I froze, gaping for a second until the sound of the detonation, a sharp pop at that distance, shook me out of it. I shouted something both extremely profane and sacrilegious and told my friend, "They hit the Pentagon. We're under attack. Gotta go." I hung up the phone and turned back to the window to see the dark cloud spreading. I yelled down the hall, "Look out the window!" I heard gasps outside, and a researcher dashed into my office and stared. I grabbed my bags and said I was getting out of the building and invited others to do the same. I took the elevator down and walked to the edge of the greensward, in easy view of the Pentagon across the river. I set down my bags and stood in the dew soaked grass, seeing the brilliant blue sky filling with rolling clouds of smoke. The blackness stretched south the length of the horizon. The adrenaline of the initial shock had worn off a bit, and I was able to take in the enormity of the event. Even more than witnessing the plane crash, I remember those long helpless minutes standing in the grass.

So, of course, I take it personally when a half-wit like Meyssan comes along saying it did not happen. And he is so evidently at war with reality that one is tempted not to waste time with him. His ideas are obviously foolish, easily disproved, an affront to any reasoning person. It would be easy to ignore him. But that would be a mistake. This is another front in what President Bush called "the war to save civilization itself." The history of the 20th century should show that no idea is so absurd that it cannot take destructive hold and play havoc with societies, even to the point of sanctioning mass murder. Allowing the extremists to go unchallenged only encourages them. People like Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other millennial criminals were just like Meyssan at one point in their careers. If they had been opposed more vigorously sooner, perhaps they never would have attained power. When such ideas are allowed to stand, they take root among the impressionable or those predisposed to think the worst. And especially now that communications technology has made it possible to give global reach to the bizarre and archive it forever, it is essential for men and women of reason resolutely to counter the delusions of the fringe element.

I was there. I saw it. That is my entire rebuttal.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.