French Fried Fraud


April 6, 2002


BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Conspiracy theories surrounding September 11th have ranged from the ludicrous to the frightening, and from Canada to Saudi Arabia. The speculation concerns who was responsible for the terrorist attacks and their motives. This week in France a book by a man named Thierry Meyssan has caused quite a stir. His allegations reached heretofore unknown heights of paranoia. Martin Walker, chief correspondent for United Press International, is here to explain. Martin, welcome back.

MARTIN WALKER: Hello there.

BOB GARFIELD: So what's the name of this tome?

MARTIN WALKER: Well it's called September the 11th, "L'Effroyable Imposture," which I'd describe as "The Despicable Deception." It says that there was no terrorist attack on the Pentagon or not at least by Islamic militants using a hijacked airliner. The claim is that the attack was staged by American agents using a truck bomb and the motive was to generate support for a larger defense budget.

BOB GARFIELD:Well it's certainly plausible. I mean it's quite clear that after the planes hit the World Trade Center within 4 minutes the American intelligence community got busy to jack up the defense budget by staging an airplane crash. It's very, very clever and just what we'd expect from the CIA. Are you telling me that there's people who believe this?

MARTIN WALKER: Well there's certainly an awful lot of people who are buying the book. It's, it's Book of the Week on the FNAC Internet Bookstore which is even bigger than Amazon on France. It's, it's also the, the best seller in a number of Paris bookstores. It's one of those cultural phenomenon that I, I think help to illuminate the degree to which people are starting to be prepared to believe just about anything about America at the moment, and what I was struck by was the way in which one of the most traditionally anti-American newspapers, the most critical of America, Liberation, has condemned this book as a series of, of despicable lies. In an editorial just last week was saying: "One hears in this argument about the fake crash at the Pentagon the echo of another lie -- that is the question about why was it on 11th of September in the Towers of the World Trade Center there were no Jewish corpses. Obviously because they were warned about the imminence of the, of the attacks -- by whom? -ah, indeed, by Mossad and the CIA. This crapulous thesis, this appalling thesis should take its place alongside the idiocies of the Holocaust deniers. We cannot understand why this book is being taken seriously." But it is.

BOB GARFIELD:Well it certainly provides another very nice reason to hate the French. You, you've spent a great deal of time in France. Can you imagine how such a preposterous, implausible conspiracy theory could have taken root there?

MARTIN WALKER: Well, I, I think that the conspiracy theory about-- Jews being warned away from the World Trade Center on September 11th is -- I've got to say -- is widespread in the Arab world. It's not just in France. I, I think that the one particular factor in France at the moment is that they are in election month, and it's an election in which both Chirac and, and Jospin -- Chirac, the Conservative incumbent president; Lionel Jospin, the Socialist prime minister --they're in a very, very tight race, and one of the key constituencies is going to be the several million French people, French voters of Arab descent, and this is why there's been I think such an extraordinary agonizing in France about the current state of, of the crisis inside the Middle East and why the, and why you now have this - the, the, this very strong European reaction to the wave of anti-Semitism in France that's seen synagogues burned down and so on. And I was very struck by, by one particular comment that I saw in the German newspaper, Frankfurter Rundschau which says: "The anti-Semitic attacks in France and Belgium are a direct response to the escalation of violence in the Middle East, and they demonstrate the absurdity of the notion that the Arab/Israeli conflict can be limited to the Middle East. This war has now come home to us. So if only out of pure self-interest, the United States must coordinate their foreign policy and throw their diplomatic weight into the balance."

BOB GARFIELD: Very well, Martin. As always, thank you very much.

MARTIN WALKER: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Martin Walker is chief correspondent for United Press International. He joins us regularly to survey the world press. [MUSIC]