Conspiracy Theorist Meyssan Is Convinced That the CIA Wants to Murder Him; But He Does Not Believe for a Second that America Killed Bin Laden

[in Syria] it is not Bashar Al-Assad who has his men fire into the crowds. [Thierry] Meyssan ponders if those wheeled militias are not rather composed of Americans. He is convinced that the CIA wants to kill him. But he does not believe for a second that America has just killed Bin Laden.

Of course it's not only the bloke who calls Osama Bin Laden "an Arab Clint Eastwood" and "a Muslim Robin Hood" who believes in all kinds of conspiracy theories. French society is full of such types — from Thierry Meyssan to Jean-Marie Le Pen. Meyssan, of course, is the fellow who wrote a book saying that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9-11. Thanks to Caroline Fourest's Le Monde column, Ben Laden pays a visit to Elvis, we now know more about the author of L'Effroyable Imposture (« Aucun avion ne s'est écrasé sur le Pentagone ! »):

Thanks to his book, Thierry Meyssan experienced a meteoric career on the international scene. The man does not know where to turn, between solicitations from his friend Hugo Chávez, receptions at Iranian embassies, contacts with China, his travels to Syria, and especially his new job: Hezbollah communications adviser in Beirut.

An odd path, all the same. In the 1990s, the same man was defending secularism and freedom of expression against fundamentalism. At the time, he was active in the Radical Left Party and in gay associations while claiming to be a Freemason. The secular left adored his "notes" on the extreme Catholic right, though often they were false or fictionalized. The Réseau Voltaire network, his small news agency, followed in the path of the Ornicar Project, an organization advocating sexual freedom against censorship and moral order.

That was already an amazing conversion in itself, since in his youth Meyssan had campaigned for Charismatic Renewal, a moralist movement inspired by American Pentecostalism. If he is to be believed, the church even "canceled" his marriage because of his homosexuality. And now we have him alongside the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, who string up homosexuals. Who can still believe what he says?

Throughout the years, this "bona fide Picasso of conspiracy theories" never stopped. At one time, it was the Opus Dei. Then it became the great "Mitterrand plot", with such a tangled web that it covered everything from the National Front's security service to the Musée d'Orsay (who worked there but Anne Pingeot, Mitterrand's hidden mistress!).

While the "work" of "our Sherlock Holmes" — especially since he started taking on his "fantasy machine", the CIA (involved in North Ossetia's Beslan hostage-taking and manipulating the Arab Spring) — might give you cause to rethink the alleged harmlessness of gays and the undeniable good in putting gay rights on the front scene, we turn to another conspiracy theorist.

As for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former FN leader informs Caroline Fourest that "lots of things [in the hunt for Bin Laden] seem suspect to me." But not only does he think it may be possible that the Al Qaeda leader may have been long since dead ("I believe the Americans are capable of anything"), not only does he doubt the official version of 911, he also holds that… Pearl Harbor was a setup"!

On what basis? "Everybody knows that."