ABOUT a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the US orchestrated the attacks. However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with US allies like Turkey or in the US itself. And it cannot be dismissed because it reflects a gulf in politics and perception, especially between the West and many Muslims. “That theory might be true,” said Ugur Tezer, a 48-year-old businessman who sells floor tiles in the Turkish capital, Ankara. “When I first heard about the attack I thought, ‘Osama,' but then I thought the US might have done it to suppress the rise of Muslims.” Compassion for the United States swept the globe right after the attacks, but conspiracy theories were circulating even then. It wasn't Al-Qaeda, they said, but the United States or Israel that downed the towers. Weeks after the strikes, at the United Nations, President George W. Bush urged the world not to tolerate “outrageous conspiracy theories” that deflected blame from the culprits. However, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided fodder for the damning claim that the US killed its own citizens, supposedly to justify military action in the Middle East and to protect Israel. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey – all among the most moderate nations in the Muslim world – said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks. Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that US officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them. Those who say the attacks might have been an “inside job” usually share antipathy toward the US government, and often a maverick sensibility. Besides Ahmadinejad, high-profile doubters include Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura has questioned the official account. Controversy over US actions and policies, including the widely discredited assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, reinforced the perceptions of conspiracy theorists. Iranians dug deeper into history, recalling the US-backed coup in their country in 1953. “Initially, I was doubtful about the conspiracy theories. But after seeing the events in later years, I don't have any doubt that it was their own operation to find a pretext to hit Muslim countries,” said Shaikh Mushtaq Ahmed, a 58-year-old operations manager in a bank in Pakistan. “It's not a strange thing that they staged something like this in their own country to achieve a big objective.”
