Sep 11 attacks exposed as 'an appalling fraud'

The ultimate conspiracy theory book is flying off the shelves, writes Caroline Overington in New York.

The airliner that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11 was in the air for almost an hour before the building was hit.

The aircraft, apparently hijacked, was known by everybody watching the live footage to be heading for the Pentagon or the White House.

Why are there no video images or photographs of the aircraft before it ploughed into the Pentagon?

Could it be there was no such aircraft? That it was a hoax?

Perhaps what really happened is this: the United States Government, anxious to overcome inevitable public opposition to its plans to beef up military spending, hired a special agent, Osama bin Laden, to plan simultaneous attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

It blew up the buildings itself.

The claims about the Pentagon attack come from a French book topping sales on the Amazon.fr Web site, the French equivalent of Amazon.com.

The book, L'Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Fraud), is also No 1 on the Associated Press weekly Top 10 for France.

Both lists catalogue the book under non-fiction. Essentially, the book's author, Thierry Meyssan, says the US is lying about September 11; that it staged the events itself so it could go to war in Central Asia and the Middle East and make a fat profit.

The book has sold out - about 20,000 copies - and bookshop owners in France are quoted by news agencies as saying it is "flying off the shelves".

The book is supported by a Web site, Hunt the Boeing, (www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreursen.htm), which shows pictures of the Pentagon after it was hit.

The site challenges viewers to "find the Boeing" in any of the pictures. The Web site and book say he hole in the Pentagon's wall is too small to have been made by a 757, and that there are no traces of an aircraft in any of the pictures.

"Did you find the Boeing?" they ask. "Well done. Get in touch with the master of illusion, David Copperfield. He'll be glad to hear from you."

Meyssan is president of Voltaire Network, a French think-tank. He has been described by news agencies as a respected intellectual and as "reasonable". He could not be reached by the Herald.

There have been thousands of fantastic claims about the terrorist attacks.

Most of the urban myths speed across the Internet, where they gain currency.

Arab schoolchildren supposedly told their classmates before September 11 that the World Trade Centre would be attacked. An Arab man who dropped his wallet on September 10 kindly told the person who returned it not to fly the following day.

The aircraft's black boxes have been found, and the voices on them are not human. The aircraft over Pennsylvania was not forced down by determined passengers, but shot down by the US military.

A train was found in the station below the twin towers, packed with bodies. A pair of severed hands, held together with plastic cuffs, was found on top of a building near the World Trade Centre (sadly, horribly, that last rumour is true).

Many of these reports have a sheen of officialdom: Meyssan's Web site has pictures supplied by the Pentagon, and verbatim statements from police chiefs. Most come to pieces when tested. Meyssan offers no alternative theory as to what might have happened to the people on board American Airlines flight 77.

A Pentagon spokesman, Glen Flood, told Reuters the book was "a slap in the face" to the American people. He had not read it, and he had no intention of doing so.

Sydney Morning Herald, April 9, 2002