Best-Seller Blames 9/11 on U.S. Military

Author's wild theories are 'a great success' in Europe

by Isabel Vincent
The National Post
August 31, 2002

Buried under the pile of Sept. 11 commemorative books currently appearing in bookstores in time for the first anniversary of the terrorist strikes is a strange curiosity called 9/11: The Big Lie.

The book's author, a Frenchman named Thierry Meyssan, alleges, among other things, that the Pentagon was not hit by a plane, but by a guided missile that was fired on orders of extreme rightists within the U.S. government.

He also says the planes that hit New York's World Trade Center were not flown by Muslim terrorists, on the orders of Osama bin Laden, but were programmed by those same right-wing elements in the U.S. government to fly directly into the twin towers.

Moreover, he argues the rightists who allegedly planned and executed these attacks were also planning to overthrow George W. Bush, the U.S. President, unless he agreed to increase military spending and go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq to secure important U.S. oil interests in the two countries. The United States blamed bin Laden in order to have an "excuse" to invade Afghanistan, and to launch a later attack against Iraq, which it made part of the "axis of evil," he says.

It may all sound like the kind of half-baked conspiracy theories that circulated on the Internet after the Sept. 11 attacks, but unlike the others, this one seems to have stuck in a big way, at least in parts of Europe and the Middle East.

Although the 235-page book was universally ridiculed by the French mainstream media when it was first published in France last March, it has turned into a wild best-seller there, selling more than 210,000 copies in just a few months. Le Pentagate, a 192-page supplement to the book which includes copious documents and photos that allegedly prove Meyssan's theory, has sold more than 30,000 copies since it was published in France last month.

Both books have been translated into 16 other languages, and are currently topping best-seller lists in Italy, Spain and Bulgaria. An Arabic edition will be released soon, as well as one in Chinese and another in Russian.

For Editions Carnot, the French publisher which has published books about such topics as UFOs and the "false" U.S. moon landing in 1969, Meyssan's books are their first international best-sellers.

On September 10, Editions Carnot plans to release both books in the United States and Canada. The print run on the first book alone will be 100,000 copies.

"We are pretty sure it will be a best-seller in North America," says Patrick Pasin, a spokesperson for Editions Carnot in Paris. "This book has had great success wherever it has been published."

But why?

Perhaps Meyssan's theories tap into some kind of anti-Americanism that is sweeping Europe in the wake of the United States' support for Israel. Certainly after Sept. 11 many French political leaders and intellectuals openly speculated the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were a direct result of the Bush administration's support for Israel.

"This phenomenon is not typical to the French," said French sociologist Pierre Lagrange in an interview in Liberation. "But the events of 11 September gave us a reality so similar to science fiction that there has been more of a market for paranoid interpretation."

Whatever the reasons for the books' success, Meyssan, a former theology student who runs a left-wing political research company called Reseau Voltaire (the Voltaire Network), has achieved a kind of international cult status. (The Voltaire Network -- www.reseauvoltaire.com -- has featured articles criticizing the politics of French right-wing politician Jean- Marie Le Pen and warning of the dangers of homophobia.)

In the five months since his first book was published, Meyssan has been a fixture on European chat shows and invited to speak at conferences in the Arab world.

In April at a conference in Abu Dhabi, organized by the League of Arab States, Meyssan spoke before an audience of government leaders, diplomats and intellectuals from other Arabic countries.

He declared it was "impossible that the attack against the Pentagon on Sept. 11, killing 125 persons, was carried out by a jetliner."

Meyssan dismisses witness testimony of the crash of the American Airlines Boeing 757 into the Pentagon, and says photographs of the attack showed no airplane parts in or near the Pentagon.

He believes the Pentagon was bombed from the inside and then was hit by an air-to-ground missile fired by the U.S. Air Force.

No Muslims took part in the Pentagon attack or the attack on the World Trade Center because "the Koran forbids suicide," he says.

Meyssan did not travel to the United States to do his research, and appears to have gathered his "evidence" - most of it derived from speculative articles and unverified "facts" - on the Internet.

When asked what he thought of the reaction to his book would be in the United States, Meyssan seemed confident it would do well.

"Two-thirds of the hits on our Web site come from the United States," he told The New York Times. "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?"

A recent editorial in Le Monde seemed to offer an answer to his question: "It is very grave to encourage the idea that something which is real is in fact fictional. It is the beginning of totalitarianism."

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