The CIA and September 11 (book) - Response

Response

The work has been described as supporting or fostering anti-Americanism. However, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, von Bülow denied that his book was contributing to anti-American sentiment in Germany:

The book has also been attacked for the quality of its journalism and research. The author admitted that much of the material came from the Internet and discharged the burden of proof by claiming that it was for the American government to refute the allegations rather than for him to prove them. This produced anger among authors using more conventional journalistic methods: "The line in the sand is when respectable media and publishers start serving up fiction as truth," was the response of Oliver Schrom (whose study of the 9/11 attacks pointed the finger at intelligence failures, rather than a more spectacular claim of CIA complicity).

The CIA and September 11 was one of the subjects of a cover story in Der Spiegel in September 2003, along with Gerhard Wisnewski's TV documentary Aktenzeichen 11.9. ungelöst and the books Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories and the Secrets of September 11th (Bröckers) and Operation 9/11 (Wisnewski). The article, entitled "Panoply of the Absurd", sharply criticizes von Bülow's reliance on Internet research, in particular that he had used archived but inaccurate stories that had been written in the confusion of the immediate aftermath of the attacks and then dropped.

An example of this is the assertion that at least six of the suspected hijackers named in the aftermath of the attacks turned up alive, the so-called "zombie hijackers" claim. Der Spiegel offers an explanation for this apparent mystery: BBC News used as a source the Arab News, an English-language Saudi newspaper, which in turn had compiled reports from Arabic newspapers, of people who obviously had nothing to do with the attacks but happened to share the same names with some of the suspected hijackers. No photographs of the suspected hijackers had been released at this point in time, and thus a few cases of mistaken identity occurred. In one instance, a man with the name of Said al-Ghamdi had given an interview to Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper in Tunis, outraged that he had been portrayed by CNN as one of the hijackers. CNN had broadcast his photograph after doing research on their own and finding a Saudi "Said al-Ghamdi" who had received flight training in the United States. CNN had found the wrong suspect, which only became clear once the FBI officially released the photographs of the suspected hijackers.

The Spiegel article accuses von Bülow of accepting without due scrutiny any fragment or urban legend that fits his suspicions of foul play, and describes him as a "dreamer". However, in his analysis of von Bülow's book and the response to it in Germany, Stefan Theil has contended that Der Spiegel is, itself, not unknown to publish speculative or conspiratorial theories, and suggests that the surprisingly strenuous article had deeper motivations than high feelings over journalistic quality. He speculates that the fact that Germans who claimed to believe that George W. Bush masterminded 9/11 were not actually demonstrating in the streets was a sign that they simply regarded the conspiracy theorist literature as "political entertainment". With American difficulties in Iraq intensifying, and the possibility of Europe becoming dragged in, politicians and journalists alike were being forced to turn away from the escapism the plots offered.