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Swiss-based al-Qaeda suspect had Saudi passport By Stephen Fidler in London Published: April 27 2005 18:21 | Last updated: April 27 2005 18:21
A Swiss-based businessman accused by the US Treasury of providing financial help to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda carried a Saudi diplomatic passport, according to copies of documents contained in a book published on Thursday in Paris.
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The documents include a letter from the US Treasury to the Swiss authorities, which says that al-Qaeda and its leader received financial assistance from the businessman Ali bin Mussalim "as of late September 2001". They also include a copy of Mr bin Mussalim's diplomatic passport. The disclosures, contained in Al-Qaeda Will Conquer (Al-Qa'ida Vaincra), by the author Guillaume Dasquié, will be uncomfortable reading for the Saudi government, which has disputed any suggestions of official complicity in the attacks of September 11 2001.
The January 2002 letter from George Wolfe, then the US Treasury's deputy general counsel, says Mr bin Mussalim "has been providing indirect investment services for al-Qaeda, investing funds for bin Laden, and making cash deliveries on request to the al-Qaeda organisation". The letter links him to the now defunct Bank Al-Taqwa and its founder, Youssef Nada. Both have been named by the US and United Nations as providers of terrorist finance. The existence of the letter has been previously reported by some news organisations, but Mr bin Mussalim's diplomatic status was not emphasised. According to the book, Mr bin Mussalim was found dead in his residence in Lausanne last June, a month after reports of the US Treasury letter first emerged.
The book draws attention to Mr bin Mussalim's role as intermediary in negotiations over the €4.3bn ($5.56bn, £2.9bn) Sawari 2 contract, signed in 1994 between the French and Saudi governments to supply frigates to the Saudi navy and for which it says he received €50m in commissions. Mr bin Mussalim's role in controversial financial dealings goes back to the early 1980s, when US prosecutors accused him and others of attempts to corner the silver market. Other documents cited in the book include a flight manifest of the so-called bin Laden flight, in which members of the bin Laden family were flown out of the US in the days after the September 11 attacks. The manifest shows 29 people aboard the flight that flew to Le Bourget airport from Boston on September 20, after originating in Los Angeles and then flying to Orlando and Washington Dulles airport. This contradicts the number cited in the report of the 9/11 Commission published last year, which said there were 26 people aboard. The manifest shows the aircraft flew on from Le Bourget to Geneva and Jeddah.
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<id>http://www.guillaumedasquie.net/article-2007672.html</id> <title>Guillaume Dasquié - Revue de Presse - New York Times -</title>
<updated>2008-02-05T09:11:37Z</updated>
<published>2006-02-28T01:15:41Z</published>
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NYTimes
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FOREIGN DESK
Sept. 11 as Right-Wing U.S. Plot: Conspiracy Theory Sells in France
By ALAN RIDING (NYT) 1316 wordsPublished: June 22, 2002PARIS, June 21 - Even before the fires were extinguished at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, conspiracy theories began flooding the Internet. A few quickly spilled out of Web sites and were widely circulated by e-mail before fading into oblivion. One, however, has taken on a life of its own in France. It was turned into a book that has become the publishing sensation of the spring.
In the book, ''L'Effroyable Imposture,'' or ''The Horrifying Fraud,'' Thierry Meyssan challenges the entire official version of the Sept. 11 attacks.
He claims the Pentagon was not hit by a plane, but by a guided missile fired on orders of far right-wingers inside the United States government. Further, he says, the planes that struck the World Trade Center were not flown by associates of Osama bin Laden, but were programmed by the same government people to fly into the twin towers.
What really interests him, though, is what he sees as the conspiracy behind these actions. He contends that it was organized by right-wing elements inside the government who were planning a coup unless President Bush agreed to increase military spending and go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq to promote the conspirators' oil interests.
To achieve their goals, the theory goes, they blamed Osama bin Laden for Sept. 11 and later broadened their targets to include the ''axis of evil,'' centered on Iraq.
The 235-page book has been universally ridiculed by the French news media, while its arguments have been dismantled point by point in ''L'Effroyable Mensonge,'' or ''The Horrifying Lie,'' a new book by two French journalists.
A Pentagon spokesman said, ''There was no official reaction because we figured it was so stupid.''
Yet in the past three months, Mr. Meyssan's book has sold more than 200,000 copies in France, placing it at the top of best-seller lists for several weeks. Foreign rights have also been sold in 16 countries (a Spanish version is already on sale), and Mr. Meyssan traveled to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates in April to present his arguments at a local university.
The book's French publisher, Éditions Carnot, said it would release an English version in the United States in July.
Mr. Meyssan said in an interview that he was surprised his book had so far provoked no major debate, but he was convinced that his message was being heard.
''Two-thirds of the hits on our Web site come from the United States,'' he said. ''I'm not saying all my readers agree with me, but they recognize that the official American version of the attacks is idiotic. If we can't believe the official version, where do we stand?''
It is nonetheless puzzling why so many of the French have been willing to pay the equivalent of $17 for ''The Horrifying Fraud.'' Is it a symptom of latent anti-Americanism? Is it a reflection of the French public's famous distrust of its own government and mainstream newspapers? Or has the French love of logic been tickled by the apparent Cartesian neatness of a conspiracy theory?
Certainly, after Sept. 11, some leftist intellectuals suggested that the United States had invited the attacks through its support for Israel. Others recalled that Islamic militants had been financed and armed by the United States to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's. Yet, in this case, Libération and Le Monde, left-of-center newspapers with no love for the Bush administration, have led the assault on Mr. Meyssan's book.
''The pseudotheories of 'The Horrifying Fraud' feed off the paranoid anti-Americanism that is one of the permanent components of the French political caldron,'' Gérard Dupuy wrote in an editorial in Libération. Edwy Plenel, news editor at Le Monde, wrote: ''It is very grave to encourage the idea that something which is real is in fact fictional. It is the beginning of totalitarianism.''
Guillaume Dasquié and Jean Guisnel, the authors of ''The Horrifying Lie,'' favor a different explanation for the book's success. They write of France's ''profound social and political sickness,'' which leads people to embrace the idea ''that they are victims of plots, that the truth is hidden from them, that they should not believe official versions, but rather that they should demystify all expressions of power, whatever they might be.''
Still, even if some French are susceptible to conspiracy theories, few had heard of the book until March 16, when Mr. Meyssan appeared on a popular Saturday evening television program on France 2, a government-owned but independently run channel. In the program, Mr. Meyssan was allowed to expound his theory without being challenged by the host. In the two weeks that followed, his book sold 100,000 copies.
Mr. Meyssan himself seems an unlikely purveyor of tall stories. A 44-year-old former theology student, he dabbled in leftist politics before forming a political research company, Réseau Voltaire, or Voltaire Network, in 1994.
The company's Web site (www .reseauvoltaire.com) adopted specific causes, like fighting homophobia and opposing Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front. Its investigative methods seemed thorough and objective.
In person too, Mr. Meyssan, a slim, wiry man with short hair and penetrating eyes, comes over as both serious and rational.
French journalists who had given some credibility to his Web site were all the more surprised, then, to find him building a vast conspiracy theory around the fact that photographs of the Sept. 11 attack showed no airplane parts in or near the smoldering gap in the Pentagon. This became the departure point for his book.
The line of reasoning that follows is a case study in how a conspiracy theory can be built around contradictions in official statements, unnamed ''experts'' and ''professional pilots,'' unverified published facts, references to past United States policy in Cuba and Afghanistan, use of technical information, ''revelations'' about secret oil-industry maneuvers and, above all, rhetorical questions intended to sow doubts. At the end of each chapter, Mr. Meyssan presents his speculation as fact.
To gather his evidence, he worked mainly from articles, statements and speculation found on the Internet. He did not travel to the United States to interview any witnesses. Indeed, he dismisses the accounts of witnesses to the crash of the American Airlines Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.
''Far from believing their depositions, the quality of these witnesses only underlines the importance of the means deployed by the United State