French author Thierry Meyssan's has news for Americans preparing to commemorate the anniversary of September 11: the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon did not involve hijacked airlines.
9/11, The Big Lie, the English translation of Meyssan's incendiary French-language book is due to hit US book stores by the end of this month. The book alleges that the world has been taken for a ride over what really happened on September 11.
The French have already lapped up Meyssan's theory that a military faction in the United States government used remote controls to guide two aircraft into the twin lowers and that a US missile - not an American airlines jet - smashed into the Pentagon.
L'Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Fraud) graced French bestseller lists for months despite ridicule from national media. Meyssan hopes for similar success in the United States.
"What I hope is that there will be a debate on what really happened and that opinion in the United States and the rest of the world is alerted," he said in an interview.
"The US government has chosen its scapegoats," he said of the US "war against terrorism" launched in Afghanistan, whose deposed Taliban rulers were believed to harbour suspected September 11 master mind Osama bin Laden.
"But we cannot allow those who are really guilty to go unpunished and the innocent to be bombed," said Meyssan, head of the little-known Left-leaning think tank Reseau Voltaire.
Meyssan's book sold little he was invited onto a television chat show in March. His appearance prompted a rush on bookshops as his theories tapped into a mistrust; things American among some French, particularly on the Left.
French media, which had previously ignored the book, poured scorn on his claims in a windfall of press exposure that only served to increase the book's notoriety and help publisher editions Carnot notch up sales of over 200,000.
Meyssan (45), claims there have been sightings of some members of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network who were named as hijackers of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre.
He contends that photographs showed the damage. the Pentagon to be incompatible with a Boeing 757 airliner crash, while both witness a counts and official statements of the crash were contradictory and incomplete.
"One can totally reject official versions of events" said, suggesting the likely suspects were US military insiders; hoping to reap the rewards of a huge boost in defence spending.
Meyssan concedes he lad concrete
proof of such a plot as well as evidence of what happened to American airlines
flight 77 and its 64 passengers if it did not crash into the Pentagon.