The French publishers of a manual on 20th-century history aimed at higher education students, including those of the elite Paris political sciences school, has apologised after it was discovered that it described the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11th 2001 as being 'no doubt orchestrated by the CIA'.
French interior minister Christophe Castaner said an individual 'inspired by the events of September 11th and the planes which destroyed the World Trade Center towers' had recently been arrested by intelligence services for planning a similar attack in France.
When Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners in the US, slamming two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and another onto The Pentagon building in Virginia on September 11th 2001, governments across the world were gripped by alarm and panic that more was to follow on their own soil. In France, the crisis exposed the dangerous confusion over the power shared between president and prime minister. Which of them, for example, had the power to order the shooting down of an airliner headed for a nuclear power plant? Mediapart reproduces here revealing extracts from a book published in France this month which recounts the staggering conflict during the crisis between then-President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Lionel Jospin.
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