It's All a World Conspiracy

A new book has inflated public paranoia over September 11 into the bestseller lists, writes Stuart Wavell

by Stuart Wavell
The London Times
May 19, 2002

As you probably suspected, the American government planned the September 11 strike on the Pentagon, the explosion was caused by a missile and not an aircraft, and President George W Bush had advance warning personally of the attack. Oh yes, and Osama Bin Laden is not an enemy but an agent of the United States.

If you have a taste for conspiracy theories, this one is a peach. It has been devoured avidly in France, where Thierry Meyssan's book L'Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud) has become an overnight sensation, rocketing to the top of the charts and breaking the national record for first-month sales held by Madonna's Sex. An English language version is due this month. The book's central theme is that the Pentagon was not attacked by Islamic terrorists, but by a military-industrial complex intent on furnishing an excuse to prosecute war against Afghanistan and Iraq. "Its wildest dreams have now been fulfilled," Meyssan writes.

The 44-year-old author, who is head of the left-wing think tank Reseau Voltaire, or Voltaire Network, has tapped into a vein of paranoia that pulses in backwoods America and across the internet underworld. E-mail users are bombarded with messages detailing sinister aspects of September 11, ranging from the claim that Jews were warned away from the World Trade Center to the "fact" that the CIA station chief in Dubai met Bin Laden seven weeks before the attacks.

In the classic manner of conspiracy theorists, Meyssan has threaded together a number of discrepancies to create a hair-raising scenario. His "evidence" is based on press releases, news accounts and photographs taken after the supposed crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The latter show no identifiable debris from a plane, nor the area of destruction one would expect from a Boeing 757, he argues.

Rather, the explosion occurred at ground level, caused either by a cruise missile or a truck bomb set up by the American government to look like a plane crash, he contends. Since the book's publication, his thinking has evolved. "It could only have been done by a cruise missile because there is a sort of piercing of the walls," he said in a recent interview.

"The damage done to the Pentagon was not done by a Boeing 757. It's impossible."

Similarly, the planes that brought down the twin towers were not flown by Al Qaeda terrorists but were guided to their targets by remote control, he writes.

Meyssan claims that signals from navigational beacons within the towers were detected by New York radio hams, whom he fails to identify.

His conjecture about the Pentagon explosion thrives on the absence of any film footage. But his own explanation has glaring holes. What happened to the passengers of Flight 77? He maintains they simply dropped off the radar somewhere over Ohio and have not been heard from since. What about the witnesses to the plane crash? Mistaken, he says.

The book has been denounced in the French press and few people believe the public are taken in, even though it plays to anti- American sentiment. A French government spokesman said: "It's a bestseller because it's so outrageous that people want to know why he would say such a thing. It's not that people believe it."

In America, where media reaction has been derisory, the book's ideas chime with the suspicions of the extreme right-wing militia movement, which regards even tax forms as an insidious government plot to undermine freedom. Their communications buzz with the conviction that the attacks were staged to equip the US government with draconian powers to persecute them. In their view, Bush is acting for the "communist" United Nations, which aims to set up a new world government.

American conspiracy theories tend to use the same ingredients. Typical is an e-mail circulating last week. It contains "THE 9 DISTURBING FACTS" (such e-mails tend to favour capital letters). Sourcing each item, it begins with the claim that the Bush administration "forced the FBI to back off of the Bin Laden investigation months before 9/11".

The CIA chief's mysterious meeting with Bin Laden, while he was on the "wanted" list, is followed by news that the US joint chiefs of staff "ACTUALLY DESIGNED" a plan "to committ (sic) domestic terror on Americans to whip them into a war hysteria".

September 11 conspiracy theories are becoming big business. An e-mail from "World Citizen" last week offered the tantalising hook: "Bush knew everything. Here's the proof." It turned out to be a publishing company offering free analysis and a video "that is taking the country by storm ... order here".

What can explain this appetite for secret machination? Experts point to an increasing distrust of governments, borne out by exposed conspiracies such as Watergate and Irangate. Suspicions are fuelled by fresh revelations, such as last week's admission that an FBI agent warned before the September 11 attacks that a trainee pilot could have been planning to fly a plane into the World Trade Center.

Dr Peter Kinderman, a reader in clinical psychology at Liverpool University, says conspiracy theories have existed for hundreds of years. Paranoia can be an additional element, leading people to fasten onto a self-serving belief or prejudice, he said.

In the scale of conspiracy theories, however, September 11 is small beer. According to the American political maverick Lyndon LaRouche, it fits into a global conspiracy by Britain to subjugate the planet. The Queen, he claims, is deeply implicated in spreading narco-terrorism throughout the world.

Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Limited

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.