September) is a 2003 non-fiction book by Andreas von Bülow, a former state-secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Defence and a Social Democratic member of the Bundestag from 1969 to 1994.

However, it has faced allegations ranging from absurdity and fostering anti-Americanism, to anti-Semitism, while the quality of its sourcing and the timing of its publication have given rise to debate within the German publishing industry.

The book suggests that the September 11 attacks were self-inflicted: a covert operation aimed at influencing domestic opinion and to persuade Americans to support the invasions of Afghanistan and of Iraq.

[6] The editor of Piper Verlag, Klaus Stadler, contended in an interview with Deutsche Welle that:[4] We told ourselves that we would take it seriously, but we do not feel obligated to independently check each and every detail ... And my own personal position is that Mr. von Bülow poses a number of very interesting and important questions.

We don't want to patronize people.However, Deutsche Welle found other industry observers who credited an increasingly competitive German publishing market with persuading companies to take on books they previously might not have accepted.

[7] This provided fertile ground for The CIA and September 11, which sold strongly: von Bülow eclipsed the sales of writers who clung to a "conventional" interpretation of the 9/11 attacks, such as the intelligence expert Oliver Schrom.

[2] 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 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.

[3] 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".