French 'Deck' Bush, Rummy

French Playing Cards Feature American Hawks

(CBS/AP)  The ace of spades? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gets the honor in a new French deck of cards. President Bush is the king of diamonds and Osama bin Laden the joker.

The game takes a jab at the famous deck of cards created for U.S. soldiers hunting down ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and other leaders from the deposed regime.

"I found it completely indecent to present a manhunt as a game," said Thierry Meyssan, the man behind the French deck. "We thought this card game would allow us to…explain why we consider the government of George Bush a threat to international security."

Meyssan is the author of a one-time French best seller, "9-11: The Big Lie," claiming that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, and that the attacks were plotted by a faction within the U.S. military.

Now, Meyssan said in a telephone interview, he wants to expose "the 52 most dangerous American officials."

Meyssan heads the Voltaire Network, a left-wing association that put the cards on its Internet site.

A little over 2,500 decks a la francaise have been sold, at $9.20 each, on the Internet in recent weeks, Meyssan said. There are plans to sell the decks in stores soon and translate them into 10 languages, he said.

Each card carries a photo of the official and a text explaining the choice. Mr. Bush, as the king of diamonds, is described as "the president of a baseball club."

Rumsfeld, however, is especially unpopular in France for calling it part of "old Europe" when Paris refused to support the war.

Since Central Command unveiled its deck of cards of wanted Iraqis, several factions have adopted the motif. Greenpeace issued a deck of world leaders who, it claimed, aid the spread of weapons of mass destruction by possessing nuclear weapons.

An anti-war group has published cards featuring "War Profiteers," mainly defense industry figures and other business leaders.

There is yet another deck that depicts actors who opposed the war as unpatriotic "Hollywood Weasels."