9/11? It Never Happened.

To get a sense of how deep mistrust of the United States runs in Germany, take a look at the bookshelves. Two years after September 11, German bookstores are flooded with such works as "The CIA and September 11," in which a former government minister of Research and Technology, Andreas von Bulow, insinuates that the U.S. and Israeli intelligence services blew up the World Trade Center from the inside. The two Boeings, he claims, were flown in by remote control as a cover-up. The whole thing was a cynical plot by America's neoconservatives to take over the world.

Published last month by the otherwise reputable Piper Verlag, the minister's book has already jumped to number three on the nonfiction best-seller list. The only books more popular are two works by Michael Moore, an American left-wing documentarian who has, over the past year, become celebrated for his eloquent rants against the Bush administration, accusing it of using 9/11 as an excuse to curtail civil liberties while pursuing its own corporate interests. Recently, more crackpot 9/11 theorists have gotten a kind of official blessing. In June, German government-run WDR television broadcast a "documentary" claiming that no airplane ever crashed in Pennsylvania.

You would expect this sort of thing in some quarters of the world, where hatred of the West is so common and intense that theories of America (and Israel) as a wellspring of sinister forces easily flourish. To this day, many Arabs believe that 4,000 Jewish employees working at the WTC did not show up at their jobs on September 11, having been tipped off by the Mossad, the true perpetrator of the attacks. Consider, too, the many interpretations surrounding the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Many Arabs think the United States did the deed, allegedly to foil those who seek to turn the mission over to multinational control. In a world where paranoia and disinformation reign, it's easy for such theories to spread. But why have they seemingly taken root in a place like Germany? And why now, two years after the attacks?

Make no mistake. The number of Germans, French and other Europeans who believe in a secret American conspiracy surrounding 9/11 is a minority. But it's sizable: one in five Germans, for example, says it's possible that Bush ordered up 9/11 as a pretext for world conquest, according to a July poll by the weekly Die Zeit. There's a practical explanation for the current bout of cryptomania: most of the books released now were written at the height of the nasty transatlantic war over an American attack on Iraq. Amid the antiwar fervor, conspiracy theories played a big role in many Germans' thinking. Indeed, some mainstream media virtually specialized in sinister plots. In suggestive cover stories titled blood for oil and warriors of god, the German newsweekly Der Spiegel described U.S. policy as a conspiracy to control the world-- fomented ...