On Friday week it will be the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and if you were alive and sentient on that day when 2,977 innocent people on the other side of the Atlantic died in a series of fireballs you will know exactly where you were and what you were doing. (The death toll was actually 2,996 but the 19 hijackers were far from innocent; they were guilty as hell, where I hope they are rotting now.)
Broadcasters started the countdown last week with a fascinating documentary: Inside the President’s War Room (BBC iPlayer). It changed my mind — briefly — about George Bush Jr who came over as more focused a leader than I had thought. When he asked who the perpetrators were and who funded them, the obvious suspects were suggested: Iraq and Afghanistan.
When a bright young CIA fellow suggested Al-Qaeda, the hunt was on but it didn’t stop Bush (and Blair) going to war on the original suspects, based on a report that has since proved to be ‘sexed-up’ fiction.
This week Radio Four is running a remarkable series by an investigative journalist called Jane McMullen who has found the All-American Mom who allowed two of the would-be hijackers to rent an apartment she managed in San Diego. She didn’t know it then, but Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi were plotting death on a scale not known since the end of WW2.
McMullen identifies a third man who acted as a guarantor for the pair as Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi who, 10 days after the atrocities, was arrested in Birmingham, held and questioned for seven days and then released only to vanish. But here’s the thing: The FBI which assigned 4,000 operators, in Bush’s words at “hunting down the terrorists and the governments which back them”, then refused to have him extradited to the States.
This, despite the fact that the Feds already had enough evidence to have Bayoumi dispatched straight to the electric chair. A hand-drawn aircraft diagram, trajectory calculations matching the Pentagon attack and an address book with the code name for the terrorists. They knew too that the three men ‘worshipped’ at the King Fahad mosque in LA, regarded as extreme and on the FBI watch list, and funded by a Saudi royal. None of this was disclosed to the Met Police tasked with questioning Bayoumi.
So what was the FBI’s game? When one agent asked for permission to interview the mosque’s imam, who doubled as a Saudi diplomat, it was refused. “The brakes went on so hard I had airbag burns,” he said.
The 9/11 Commission when it reported in 2004 concluded that though 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, there was “no evidence that the Saudi government or senior official had funded the attacks”.
Bush, you will not be surprised to know, was at pains to say how great the Saudi government (aka the royal family) was and that it was America’s greatest ally in the Middle East. And of course it still is, with a tasteless mutual love-in between two murderous potentates with a penchant for gold and more gold.
The Pulitzer award-winning historian and author Arthur Schlesinger Jr summed up the Bush administration as “a small group of Messianic men whose self-righteousness bids fair to wreck our age”. He died in 2007, too soon, alas, to chronicle the current mob in the White House.
Having read the Commission’s report, it seems clear to me that it was a whitewash, seeking to blame anybody and everybody except the Saudi royals. Twenty-five years on, Bush and Co should hang their heads in shame.
*****
I said we all know exactly where we were on 9/11. Most of you reading this will have been working flat out on various newspapers which were still then, pre-social media, proper papers.
I had resigned as executive editor of the Express in 1995 and on September 11, 2001, was about to chair a board meeting at Property Internet which I co-founded three years earlier. I popped out for a sandwich and was back in the front hall of our Blackfriars offices when the cheery commissionaire suggested I turn on the television. I did so just in time to see United Airlines flight 175 crash into the South Tower at 580 mph.
There would be no board meeting, indeed like most non-news outlet offices everywhere, work ceased for the day. I invited our staff of more than 30 to join me in the board room where we watched the box until 8pm.
About 300 yards up the road was the Lubyanka and how I wished I had been there instead.
*****
I visited Pakistan in 1991 and found the place fascinating, full of contrasts from finding a dead man lying on the street during a Sunday stroll in Lahore to the breathtaking beauty of the Karakoram mountain range. I met Benazir Bhutto, garlanded in flowers at Lahore airport where I was waiting for my lost suitcase. Take it from me, a lost case (later found) is a small price to pay for meeting one of the most beautiful women in the world.
Imran Khan was coming to the end of his great career as captain of the Pakistan cricket team (a rather better bunch than the current ones who have been blown apart by England in the current Test series). He still lived in London, in Draycott Avenue, as smart an address as any in Chelsea and he was a handsome lothario who despite eschewing alcohol was a regular at Tramp (where Mountbatten Windsor apparently found it so difficult to sweat).
He seemed to have it all, the looks, the brains honed at Oxford, and incredible skill as an all-rounder.
But now? Festering in Adiala jail in Rawalpindi where he has spent the last three years of a 17-year sentence for corruption which I have no doubt was politically motivated and trumped up. His eyesight is failing, he suffers from high blood pressure, and there can be little doubt that if he continues to be incarcerated he will die in Adiala.
He is 73 and the last time his two sons heard their father’s voice was six months ago. Last week 21 former cricket captains called for Imran to be “given humane treatment and proper medical care”. The wretched government of Shehbaz Sharif reacted by telling the Test team, currently touring here, not to speak on the subject should they be asked.
Greg Chappell, the former Aussie captain, instigated the letter signed by, among others, Mike Atherton , Michael Brearley, Alastair Cook, David Gower, Clive Lloyd, Andrew Strauss and Allan Border. Not a single former Pakistan skipper of course: they knew they might end up sharing a cell with Imran if they had.
Shehbaz Sharif has form: he was leader of the opposition when Imran was prime minister and in 2020 was charged with laundering £35million through a scheme involving his family members. He was also accused by the Daily Mail of stealing some of the £500 million aid sent by the UK following the 2005 earthquake. The subsequent libel case was settled out of court.
I met Imran a few times at an annual charity match in the 80s and 90s and on the flight taking me back from Lahore to London. We were in first class, in my case an upgrade by Pakistan International Airlines, and we treated the experience rather differently. Immediately after take-off Imran changed into sleeping gear, turned his seat into a bed and slept for seven hours.
I accepted the offer of champagne, fine wines and excellent food and snoozed for a few minutes.
My hope is that he will be released from his prison soon but if the Pakistan government ignored a strong letter by former cricket greats it is unlikely to heed the Drone. But who knows…
*****
AND FINALLY
Congratulations to Roy Curtis of the Irish Daily Mirror. He wrote a piece this week anticipating the forthcoming visit of Agent Orange to his golf course at Doonbeg in Co Clare. He didn’t mince words and the heading to his feature summed it up perfectly: Festival of vulgarity and shameful Irish submission looms for Trump Doonbeg visit.
The subhead was even better: Irish people are funding the cesspit that will bring an unbearable stench to the country in mid-September.
Buy that man a pint!
