The Truthers' New Friends

...Several panelists, including a building expert and (amusingly) a retired KGB analyst, rejected the conspiracy theory...

...He bitterly lamented his inability to fi nd distributors in Western Europe and the United States...

...Actually, they were South Ossetians with Russian passports issued in recent years...

...But the lunatics, for the most part, were running the asylum...

...Since these are not quite Soviet days, there was at least a semblance of debate...

...Near the end of the program, Meyssan launched into an impassioned diatribe against U.S...

...The rabidly anti-American TV commentator Mikhail Leontiev matter of factly suggested that American leaders regard the mass murder of their own people as a perfectly acceptable tool for achieving foreign policy objectives and trotted out the far-right canard that Franklin Roosevelt “set up Pearl Harbor...

...The discussion was heavily dominated by several pro-conspiracy panelists who dismissed the “offi cial story” of “19 Arabs directed by Osama bin Laden in a cave” as self-evidently absurd...

...The host, Russian journalist and fi lmmaker Alexander Gordon, exuded pious concern and angst...

...imperialism and its evils...

...Yet, at the same time, Moscow has encouraged an orgy of anti-American hysteria in the loyalist Russian media...

...Pundit Vitaly Tretyakov and Russian Islamic Committee chairman Geidar Jemal disagreed on whether the 9/11 attacks were engineered by a shadowy cabal of warmongers acting without the knowledge of the White House (Tretyakov) or by Bush himself (Jemal...

...His reply: “Maybe it is...

...BY CATHY YOUNG As the post-Georgia chill in U.S.Russian relations con tinues, the Russian govern ment has repeatedly declared its readiness to resume a friendly partnership if the United States will reciprocate and abandon its Cold War rhetoric...

...he exclaimed, to raucous applause from the studio audience...

...Aside from the effect inside Russia, it is likely to help spread the poison of 9/11 conspiracy theories around the world by lending them a patina of legitimacy...

...Cathy Young is a contributing editor to Reason magazine...

...The skeptics’ statements were ignored or treated with thinly disguised mockery...

...Several speakers bemoaned “the dearth of information” and “manipulation” in the media—the Western media, of course, not Russian television with its blacklists of opposition fi gures and its airing of a video doctored to suggest that a Fox News anchor tried to silence an Ossetian girl with pro-Russian views...

...Two days after the program aired, appearing as a guest on Ekho Moskvy, Russia’s only major politically independent radio station, Gordon was asked whether the program was linked to the new chill in U.S-Russian relations...

...Only you can stop all this...

...And maybe it isn’t...

...in the last half-hour, their voices were almost completely drowned out...

...To their credit, some commentators even in the pro-government Russian press were appalled by the airing of Zero...

...The repeated gibes about “19 Arabs” prompted a sarcastic query from one of the dissenters, Middle East expert Irina Zvyagelskaya: Would 25 or 50 have been more believable...

...We expect a great deal from you, from Russia...

...On September 12, the America-bashing reached a new low: a prime-time special on national television peddling the notion that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11, 2001, were an inside job by American warmongers...

...The broadcast, as commentator Boris Sokolov noted in the independent online magazine Grani.ru, “proves that, at least on Russian television, the Cold War is in full progress...

...So far, this insult has received no response from Washington...

...The special, aired in a program called Closed Screening on the governmentcontrolled Channel One and viewed by up to 30 million people, was built around the documentary Zero made by Italian journalist and European Parliament member Giulietto Chiesa...

...But the demented circus on Channel One is a more serious matter than the political equivalent of a playground taunt...

...It should...

...Besides stoking anti-Americanism in the Russian population, the purpose may have been retaliation: You won’t buy our version of the war in Georgia...

...He questioned the purpose of this calculated slap in the face to the United States at a time when U.S.-Russian relations are hardly at their best...

...thank heaven Russia still allows a forum for free speech...

...But his bias was evident from the start when he somewhat caustically referred to guests skeptical of the Chiesa-Meyssan theory as “those completely satisfi ed by the offi cial American version...

...In addition to being a deliberate provocation, it is a further indication of how far Russia’s masters have gone in moving the country away from the mainstream of civilized nations...

...Chiesa, who is fl uent in Russian, argued that the bin Laden videotapes aired on TV “obviously” featured several different bin Laden impersonators...

...Chiesa himself, a Soviet-era Italian Communist party apparatchik and Moscow correspondent for the Communist daily L’Unit?—who seems to have smoothly transferred his loyalty from the USSR to the corrupt statecapitalist Russia of today—was on hand for the studio discussion...

...Sukhoi also remarked that he had personally seen debris from Flight 77 at the Pentagon, though Chiesa’s coauthor, French 9/11-conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan, earnestly assured him that he had not...

...But not many Russians are likely to pursue this line of thought, or to ponder another troubling parallel: the fairly credible allegations that the FSB, the KGB’s post-Soviet heir, was involved in the 1999 apartment-building bombings in Russia that took nearly 300 lives and were blamed on Chechen terrorists, helping generate public support for the war in Chechnya...

...Sukhoi listened with the patient, bemused expression of someone forced to endure the ravings of a lunatic...

...Next time Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov meets with Condoleezza Rice, they’ll have no shortage of unpleasant matters to discuss, but even so the airing of Zero deserves a mention...

...Who can stop this enormous predator from ravaging the planet...

...Ironically, the day Zero aired, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev told a gathering of Western pundits that Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia on August 8 was Russia’s 9/11—a day when helpless Russian citizens had been murdered...

...Fine, we won’t buy your version of 9/11...

...Izvestia columnist Maksim Sokolov (no relation to Boris) wrote that the program “not only insults one’s intelligence but is in extremely poor taste...

...Indeed, Western coverage of the Georgia war was predictably cited as an example of rampant bias and disinformation— the media repeating the lie of Russian aggression just as they had colluded in the 9/11 cover-up...

...In view of the Zero broadcast, this strained analogy might be seen as an unwitting confession that Moscow had secretly engineered the clash in South Ossetia...

...Closed Screening specializes in “controversial” topics, but it is unthinkable that it could have aired the fi lm without offi cial approval...

...Vladimir Sukhoi, a former Channel One correspondent who was in Washington, D.C., on the day of the attacks and in New York a few days later, spoke movingly of the horrors he witnessed and said that he could not “betray” those memories by lending credence to Chiesa’s thesis...

...Ignored in most of Europe and panned by the Italian press, Zero is a hodgepodge of familiar “truth about 9/11” claims (the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives inside the buildings, the Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a plane) accompanied by ominous music and insights from such “experts” as Nobel Prize-winning literary clown Dario Fo...

...When Gordon asked the live studio audience how many people believed the “offi cial version” of 9/11, not one hand went up...