IP: Conspiracy Theory (Bizarre)

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

What can one expect from people who believe in UFO, Atlantis, Aliens etc (I
don¹t mean just some French).

I have good friends who were sitting at their desk at Stevens Institute and
watched with horror as
the second plan hit the tower. They are reputable and were not brainwashed
or hypnotized  


------ Forwarded Message
From: TruChaos () aol com
Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 16:56:58 EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Conspiracy Theory (Bizarre)


Conspiracy Theory

France's No. 1 best seller claims the U.S. orchestrated the Sept. 11
attacks. Why do people read this stuff?

BY BRUCE CRUMLEY/PARIS <mailto:mail () TIMEatlantic com>


DANIEL JANIN/AFP
Thierry Meyssan - "The biggest victor of Sept. 11 was the U.S.
military-industrial lobby. Its wildest dreams [are] fulfilled"
 

Move over Fox Mulder, here comes Thierry Meyssan. Like the unrelenting FBI
hero of the popular X Files TV series, Meyssan is a player in the conspiracy
business. But in contrast to the fictional Mulder's sympathetic crusades ‹
one geek's quest to combat a farcical cabal of sociopathic humans and the
world-conquering extraterrestrials they serve ‹ Meyssan's campaign has
attracted audiences with a singularly despicable suggestion: that the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were carried out by U.S. government officials
as part of a murderous economic and military plot.

Meyssan makes that astonishing proposition in the book l'Effroyable
Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud), a controversial tome that topped France's
best-seller list in six of the seven weeks since its release. Meyssan
defiantly dismisses the universally accepted version of the 9/11 tragedy as
"a loony fable" patched together by the White House and the Defense
Department "as one lie called forth another." He maintains that neither
American Airlines Flight 77 nor any other aircraft crashed into the Pentagon
on 9/11 ‹ the explosion supposedly detonated on the ground. He similarly
rejects notions that the planes that struck the World Trade Center towers
were flown by al-Qaeda terrorists and argues they were in fact directed from
the ground by remote control.

So what does Meyssan think really happened? Although he stops just short of
the categorical, the militant libertarian champions the theory (previously
limited to Internet forums and sites, including his own) that the attacks ‹
and the 3,000 victims they claimed ‹ were the work of officials in the U.S.
government and military, looking for an excuse to launch war on Afghanistan
and Iraq. "If the energy lobby was the main beneficiary of the war in
Afghanistan, the biggest victor of Sept. 11 was the military-industrial
lobby," Meyssan writes. "Its wildest dreams have now been fulfilled."

To support his theory, Meyssan plays up factual oddities or gray areas
surrounding the attacks ‹ a skeptical focus facilitated by secrecy rules
imposed in the ongoing investigations. He notes that no film footage of the
Pentagon explosion exists and regards eyewitness testimony of the crash as
suspicious, contradictory or flatly incredible. He similarly argues that the
photos offer no evidence of the debris typical of an airplane crash
(discounting expert explanations that the extreme violence of the impact and
heat of the explosion caused virtual atomization of the jet), and says the
area of destruction to the Pentagon is impossibly small given the size and
span of the craft. 

Meyssan's theories on the New York City attacks are even more
counterintuitive. He cites unnamed "professional pilots" who claim the World
Trade Center strikes could not have been carried out by neophyte fliers.
Meyssan then recounts testimony from similarly unidentified New York amateur
radio operators, who say they picked up the signals of navigational beacons
within the towers guiding the planes to their targets. Using tones of stony
authority fused with acidic mockery, Meyssan casts the events of Sept. 11
and those that followed as the work of a virtual shadow junta within the
U.S. government that has masterfully manipulated American media and public
opinion. 

The terminally serious Meyssan, 44, launched the book on one of France's
flashiest, trashiest talk shows, and he followed up with a string of
controversy-churning TV appearances that further piqued public curiosity.
The print press denounced the volume in turn ‹ Libération retitled it The
Horrible Swindle ‹ but that too helped fuel purchases. The book now has the
distinction of breaking the French publishing record for first-month sales
previously held by Madonna's Sex.

Given the dogged manner in which his quirky association Réseau Voltaire
defends free thought and speech from a host of nefarious threats, Meyssan's
unconventional speculation on 9/11 isn't entirely novel. More surprising was
the rush of French readers, who had so earnestly commiserated with a wounded
America, to get a copy of the tract. French observers say the book's
fascination has more to do with the sheer entertainment value of spooky,
over-the-top conspiracy scenarios than it does with any blossoming of
anti-American paranoia in France. The publisher, Carnot, plans to release an
English-language translation this month and an additional 18 foreign
versions by September. What's next ‹ a movie version? A TV series? If only
Meyssan had worked in a few aliens, he might have had a real shot at the X
Files market





 

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