There was a discussion of this book on CNN this morning. Apparently a best seller in France.
FRIGHTFUL DECEPTION:
Wed Apr 10,10:02 PM ET
By Ted Rall
9-11 Conspiracies Real and Imagined
by Ted Rall
PARIS-On September 11th, Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), originally hired by the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan (news - web sites), is working on a new project: the derussification of Central Asia. The spooks have offered him the same quid pro quo they'd cut with Lee Harvey Oswald 38 years earlier: If he takes the heat for what's about to go down, they'll make it worth his while.
What goes down, according to French author Thierry Meyssan, is this: Two passenger jets smash into the World Trade Center a few minutes apart; each under the control of fewer than half a dozen amateur hijackers fending off ten times their number with boxcutters.
Hitting a 70-yard-wide building with a 52-yard-wide Boeing 767 at 500 miles per hour requires virtually instantaneous reflexive response time-a lightening-quick three-tenths of a second. Professional pilots are puzzled by the kamikazes' virtuoso performance that sunny morning, but there's an explanation: someone has placed homing beacons in each tower beforehand. A 1997 Defense Department acquisition, the Global Hawk system, has guided American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 to their respective dooms.
That device was planted by U.S. government agents.
Shortly afterward, Pentagon (news - web sites) officials set off an explosion in a mostly disused section of their own headquarters. It isn't certain whether they've used plastique or a missile to do the damage; what's obvious is that the official version of the building being hit by a third hijacked airliner doesn't hold up. Why not? A photo of the "crash site" proves that the hole in the building is smaller than the plane that supposedly struck it. Moreover, the "plane" impacted without leaving residual debris. And circumstantially, no one "important"-a general, say-works in that area.
It's all in Meyssan's L'Effroyable Imposture ("Frightful Deception"), a 9-11 conspiracy theory title. "Copies have been flying off shelves," a saleswoman at Paris' FNAC bookshop says of the nation's number-two bestseller.
To be charitable, Meyssan is president of the respected Reseau Voltaire think tank. Unfortunately, his book is long on insinuation and short of proof.
Among its more questionable assertions are those that read a coup d'état by Christian fundamentalists in George W. Bush's September 14th prayer service at the National Cathedral, wholesale government fraud in the "ridiculous" discovery (news - web sites) of Mohammed Atta's passport in the rubble and foreknowledge of 9-11 in Bush's first statement to the media. (On the last point, Meyssan mistranslates Bush's syntax to force his already tortured conjecture.) Numerous grammatical errors and typos further undermine the already strained credibility of the tome's slapdash tone.
The book's central thesis is that the Bush Administration planned and executed September 11th in order to justify a huge defense build-up, stifle domestic political opposition, curtail civil liberties, and invade Afghanistan to lock up Central Asia's enormous untapped oil reserves. The Kennedy Administration, Meyssan points out, contemplated a similar scenario in its Internet-famous 1962 Northwoods memo. Northwoods suggested launching acts of domestic terrorism against Cuban exiles and others in order to galvanize support for a Cold War defense expansion. September 11, Meyssan posits, is Northwoods for the 21st century.
There's little doubt that the Bushies took advantage of 9-11 just as Meyssan describes. And his assertion that figures like Donald Rumsfeld had been planning an Afghan invasion back in July 2001 ring true to many Central Asia watchers. But he fails to prove, or even begin to prove, the monstrous accusation that Bush ordered the murder of more than 3,000 Americans. Northwoods and plans like it fill the archives of every presidential administration. The U.S. government likes to think out loud, on paper; the vast majority of such schemes, like a U.S. plan to subject France to Allied military governance at the end of World War II, are ultimately ruled out.
As Meyssan notes, Bush has already outlied Clinton during the 15 months he's been in office. September 11th accelerated that dissembling to a frantic pace. Who can forget the classic administration story that Islamic terrorists had targeted Air Force One as it zigzagged across the Midwest? Students of international law had a field day with the bizarre notion that Afghan POWs are subject neither to U.S. law because Guántanamo is in Cuba or to Cuban law because the base is leased (illegally) by the U.S. Meyssan reminds us that Bush's top dogs have been implicated in almost every political and business scandal in memory: BCCI, Keating, Iran-Contra, Enron. These guys lie more often than they breathe.
Meyssan's research never extended beyond use of a search engine, yet he nonetheless unearths new lies and discrepancies. An Arabic-language document described by the FBI (news - web sites) as an instruction manual for suicide pilots found among their personal effects hilariously contains such obvious American linguistic tics as "you must confront and understand this 100 percent." It was obviously forged. ABC television's 9:42 am news item on 9-11 about an apparent arson attack on the Executive Office Building appeared and disappeared without follow-up. Why was it suppressed? And that hole in the Pentagon is smaller than "they don't build `em like they used to" can explain.
Meyssan asks: "Could such an operation been conceived and directed from an Afghan cave and carried out by a handful of Islamists?" Here's the converse of the standard retort to those who accuse the government of running conspiracies because they're too big and disorganized to pull them off. Neither line of reasoning makes sense, of course. Big things can be carried out by either big or small groups; series of coincidences neither prove nor disprove the existence of conspiracies. 9-11 probably wasn't carried out by Afghan cave dwellers, but that doesn't mean Bush did it either.
Meyssan's book adds no blood to the hands of Mssrs. Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Ridge beyond those of 10,000 Afghans no one cares about and a few dozen American troops. But it's an inevitable response to the arrogance, obsessive secrecy and dogmatic opportunism they've exhibited since September 11th.
If they keep it up, as they surely will, look for more of the same. |
