The events of 11 September 2001 were followed live by millions of people, riveted to their TV screens. All the viewers, including the commentators, were put into a daze by stupefaction in the face of the scale of the attack and shock at the gratutiousness of the violence. The lack of information about the American authorities' attitude, as well as the spectacular violence of the images, drove the TV channels to show an endless loop of the suicide airplanes crashing into the towers of the World Trade Center, and the towers' subsequent collapse. The exigencies of live broadcast, confronted with the effect of surprise, limited the available information to a description of the immediately-known facts and prevented any overall understanding.
In the three days following the attacks, officials released very numerous supplementary bits of information to the press, regarding the misunderstood aspects of these events. But these bits of information were drowned in the uninterrupted flood of dispatches relating to the victims and to the rescuers. Other information did appear sporadically over the next few months, but in the manner of so many anecdotes, without being placed into context.
Several thousand people lost their lives this 11th of September, and a war has been waged in Afghanistan to avenge them. Nevertheless, these events remain mysterious. The way they're told is full of strangeness, uncertainty, and contradictions. Despite the ill-ease which they inspire, public opinion contents itself with the official version, it being understood that the imperatives of national security do not permit the U.S. authorities to tell everything.
This official version does not stand up to critical analysis. We will demonstrate to you that it is nothing but a montage. In certain cases, the elements which we have collected permit the truth to be reestablished. In other cases, our questions have, for the moment, remained unanswered; this is no reason, though, to persist in believing the authorities' lies. At all events, the dossier which we have put together already permits one to call into question the legitimacy of the American response in Afghanistan and of the "war against the Axis of Evil."
We invite you not to consider our work as a definitive truth. To the contrary, we invite you to skepticism. Have confidence only in your own critical spirit. To allow you to verify our imputations and to form your own opinion, we have enriched the text with numerous notes identifying our primary sources.
In this period when the USA is separating the world into Good and Evil, we are trying hard to recall that freedom does not mean believing in a simplistic vision of the world; it means understanding, extending the options, and multiplying the nuances.