by Robert Fisk
After the call from the features editor, I returned to my seat on the Airbus. Then my phone rang again. Anne Penketh was calling from the foreign desk. “It seems a helicopter has hit the Pentagon, Robert. Don’t know any more yet but I think we need you to write today.” I was sitting in business class and there was an airline satellite phone tucked into the arm-rest beside me. I ran my credit card through the side-swipe and the screen showed positive. I would be able to go on talking to London and to send my copy in-flight. The last passengers were boarding and I walked across to the chief purser. I told him about the helicopter. I kept referring to the “Free Trade Building” rather than the World Trade Center, although I had a vivid image of the twin towers in my mind, sentinels above Manhattan to the left of my taxi when I returned to JFK after giving a lecture at Princeton a few months before.
I made one more call to the office on my mobile. “Robert,” Anne had just enough time to say before I was forced to close down. “It was an airliner—a passenger aircraft that flew into the World Trade Center. And now there’s another!” I closed down the phone. The horror of this was obvious but my journalist’s brain, the professional computer that calculates event, reaction and deadline, was now moving fast. What was happening in the United States was deliberate. It was, in that most classic of clichés, a “terrorist attack.” The American East Coast was six hours behind Brussels. Thousands would be arriving in the Twin Towers for work. And in the Pentagon.
The Airbus was moving across the apron for take-off but the purser came to my seat. Did I know any more? I told him about the second plane and he went straight to the flight-deck. He came back a few seconds later, even as the engines were rising for take-off. “There’s been a passenger aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania too.” I just looked at him. Bin Laden. Who else? I pulled out my notebook and tried to remember everything bin Laden had ever said to me: his hatred for the Saudi royal family, his experience fighting the Russians, his determination to drive the Americans from the Gulf.
We were over the Irish Sea when I made my first satellite call to London. Leonard took the call. He sounded over-serious, his “Father Doyle” voice as I always called it, but I realised he was just shocked. “Two planes into the World Trade Center, an airliner into the Pentagon, another airliner crashed in Pennsylvania. You should see the pictures.” On board the Airbus, they brought round the pre-lunch drinks. The gin-and-tonic tasted like tonic. Twenty—thirty—thousand dead? That’s how I thought. This was on a still unimaginable scale. And what would be America’s revenge? I recalled the old newsreels after Pearl Harbor, the “day of infamy,” when the sound-tracks filled with racist demands to crush the “sneaky Japs.” Bin Laden. I kept coming back to bin Laden. This day represented not just a terrible crime but a terrible failure, the collapse of decades of maimed, hopeless, selfish policies in the Middle East which we would at last recognise—if we were wise—or which, more likely, we would now bury beneath the rubble of New York, an undiscussible subject whose mere mention would indicate support for America’s enemies.
I walked to the galley and asked the cabin crew what they thought. All four planes must have been hijacked. There must have been many hijackers. “They wanted to die,” the young stewardess said without thinking, and we all agreed, and then the purser looked at me very hard. I knew what he was thinking. We too were bound for America. Those four planes had taken off like ours, heading off into the bright morning with friendly crews and law-abiding passengers . . . I walked round the plane with the purser. I didn’t like it. I guess I came back with the images of thirteen passengers in my mind, thirteen I didn’t like because they had beards or stared at me in what I could easily translate as hostility or because they were fiddling with worry beads or reading Korans. Of course, they were all Muslims. In just a few minutes, the so-called liberal Fisk who had worked in the Middle East for a quarter of a century—who had lived among Arabs for almost half his life, whose own life had been saved by Muslims on countless occasions in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran—yes, that nice, friendly Fisk had turned into a racist, profiling the innocent on board his aircraft because they had beards or brown eyes or dark skin. I felt dirty. But this, I already suspected, was one of the purposes of this day. To make us feel dirty, to make us so fearful—or so angry—that we no longer behaved rationally.
I called Leonard again. There had been phone calls from the passengers on the four planes. The hijackers had cut the throats of some of the crews and passengers. Men and women were throwing themselves from the upper floors of the Twin Towers. There had been some television pictures of Palestinians celebrating. Leonard, I said, I’m going to have to write about history. We’ve got to have a context, some explanation. I said that this was so epic a crime that I would do something I had not tried since my reporting days in Northern Ireland when the IRA–British war had to be filed against deadline, from notes and memory rather than from written script. In the old days, before computers and mobiles, we dictated our reports to copy-takers, men and women wearing earphones who would type out our stories as we shouted them down the line from Irish villages or—in my early days in the Middle East—from Cairo or Damascus hotels. Now I would do the same again. I would “talk” my story over the phone so as to match the hour with the spontaneity that journalism should possess. Or so I arrogantly thought.
Even as I was talking, the Belgian Airbus captain was on the public address system. There had been terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, he said, the United States had closed its air-space to all commercial aircraft. We were dumping fuel over the sea far to the west of Ireland before returning to Europe. We started to fly in big concentric circles, sunlight bursting through the starboard then through the port windows of the plane as if the sun was perpetually rising and setting, the desolation of the north Atlantic mocking our warm isolation. They served lunch as we described these spheres in the sky, foie gras and steak with glasses of Médoc. I looked at my notebook. I wrote down the names of Balfour, Lawrence of Arabia, bin Laden. Then I scribbled them out. I picked up the satellite phone, swiped the card and dialled The Independent. Leonard put me through to one of the paper’s copy-takers, a woman in Leeds with a Yorkshire accent. I told her where I was, that I was filing from my head, asked her to be patient. “Take your time, love,” she said. But it came quite easily. I knew what I wanted to say. It was like reading a letter to a friend:
So it has come to this. The entire modern history of the Middle East—the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Balfour declaration, Lawrence of Arabia’s lies, the Arab revolt, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab–Israeli wars and the 34 years of Israel’s brutal occupation of Arab land—all erased within hours as those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people. Is it fair—is it moral—to write this so soon, without proof, when the last act of barbarism, in Oklahoma, turned out to be the work of home-grown Americans? I fear it is. America is at war and, unless I am mistaken, many thousands more are now scheduled to die in the Middle East, perhaps in America too. Some of us warned of “the explosion to come.” But we never dreamt this nightmare.
And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind, his money, his theology, his frightening dedication to destroy American power. I have sat in front of bin Laden as he described how his men helped to destroy the Russian army in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on America. But this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia—paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally—hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.
No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened in the United States. That Palestinians could celebrate the mas
sacre of 20,000, perhaps 35,000 innocent people180 is not only a symbol of their despair but of their political immaturity, of their failure to grasp what they had always been accusing their Israeli enemies of doing: acting disproportionately. All the years of rhetoric, all the promises to strike at the heart of America, to cut off the head of “the American snake” we took for empty threats. How could a backward, conservative, undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and small, violent organisations fulfil such preposterous promises? Now we know.
And in the hours that followed yesterday’s annihilation, I began to remember those other extraordinary assaults upon the U.S. and its allies, miniature now by comparison with yesterday’s casualties. Did not the suicide bombers who killed 241 American servicemen and 100 French paratroops in Beirut on 23 October 1983 time their attacks with unthinkable precision?
There were just seven seconds between the Marine bombing and the destruction of the French three miles away. Then there were the attacks on U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, and last year’s attempt—almost successful it now turns out—to sink the USS Cole in Aden. And then how easy was our failure to recognise the new weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans nor any other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.
And there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the injustices that lie behind yesterday’s firestorms. We will be told about “mindless terrorism,” the “mindless” bit being essential if we are not to realise how hated America has become in the land of the birth of three great religions.
Ask an Arab how he responds to 20,000 or 30,000 innocent deaths and he or she will respond as decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel’s 1982 invasion
of Lebanon. And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last September—the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians, the bombardments and state-sponsored executions . . . all these must be obscured lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for yesterday’s mass savagery.
No, Israel was not to blame—though we can be sure that Saddam Hussein and the other grotesque dictators will claim so—but the malign influence of history and our share in its burden must surely stand in the dark with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman empire, led inevitably to this tragedy. America has bankrolled Israel’s wars for so many years that it believed this would be cost-free. No longer so. But, of course, the U.S. will want to strike back against “world terror,” and last night’s bombardment of Kabul may have been the opening salvo. Indeed, who could ever point the finger at Americans now for using that pejorative and sometimes racist word “terrorism”?
Eight years ago, I helped to make a television series that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the West. Last night, I remembered some of those Muslims in that film, their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. They talked about how no one would help them but God. Theology versus technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. Now we have learnt what this means.
September 11, 2001, was not the genesis of this book. But it proved to me that history’s power is inescapable. Rereading that story I filed over the telephone from 37,000 feet over the Atlantic, I am appalled; not so much by its conclusions but by the repercussions that those conclusions—painfully accurate as they would turn out to be—would provoke. I was right about the way in which the world would be told that this was a war of “democracy versus terrorism,” about the attempt to obscure the historical injustices that lay behind this terrible act. I never imagined how brutal, how dangerous and how bloody would be the attempts to suppress all but the most sublime acceptance of this naive, infantile version of history.
As we flew back to Belgium in the dusk, I asked myself if we could really—at this early stage—name the guilty party, however strong our suspicions. I knew that with so awesome a crime, there would be those who would argue that the ordinary rules of journalism must be suspended. That we should all be “onside.” That if we stopped for a moment to ask the question “Why,” we would count as supporters of “world terror.” The Israelis had already perfected this outrageous logic. Merely to be called “pro-Palestinian” was to associate you with suicide bombing and “world terror.” You were with us or against us. George Bush Junior would use just that simplistic, dishonest argument—an argument much favoured, of course, by bin Laden himself—to shut us up, to keep us silent, to close down any debate about the Middle East or America’s role there or—an even more taboo subject—America’s relationship with Israel.
I wrote a second article on the plane that night. “Is the world’s favourite hate figure to blame?” the headline on this story would read in next day’s Independent. “If bin Laden was really guilty of all the things for which he has been blamed, he would need an army of 10,000,” I wrote:
And there is something deeply disturbing about the world’s habit of turning to the latest hate figure whenever blood is shed. But when events of this momentous scale take place, there is a new legitimacy in casting one’s eyes at those who have constantly threatened America . . . If . . . the shadow of the Middle East falls over yesterday’s destruction, then who else could produce such meticulously timed assaults? The rag-tag and corrupt Palestinian groups that used to favour hijacking are unlikely to be able to produce a single suicide bomber . . . The bombing of the U.S. Marines in 1983 needed precision, timing and infinite planning. But Iran, which supported these groups, is more involved in its internal struggles. Iraq lies broken, its agents more intent on torturing their own people than striking at the the U.S. So the mountains of Afghanistan will be photographed from satellite and high-altitude aircraft in the coming days, bin Laden’s old training camps . . . highlighted on the overhead projectors in the Pentagon. But to what end? . . . For if this is a war between the Saudi millionaire and President Bush’s America, it cannot be fought like other wars. Indeed, can it be fought at all without some costly military adventure overseas? Or is that what bin Laden seeks above all else?
The moment my Airbus touched down in Brussels, my mobile began to ring like a grasshopper. The office, radio stations in America, Britain, Ireland, France. I was in the taxi to my hotel when Karsten Tveit came on the line. “Robert, have you seen the pictures?” No, I said. “You must see the pictures. They are in-cred-ible.” Karsten, I said, I’m still in the taxi. I can’t watch television in a bloody taxi. “Look at the pictures!” he said again. “You’ve got to see the pictures. The moment you reach your room, look at the pictures—then you’ll understand.” When I reached my room, I turned on the television. The Twin Towers were smoking, incandescent. Figures floated like feathers, fast, upside down, with a terrible grace. The United passenger jet slid into the side of the south tower again and again, as if some scientific achievement was being demonstrated, as if this airliner was supposed to knife so effortlessly into the thin skin of the tower. And then there was the golden spray of fire. CNN put the edited sequences together so that the United plane crashed into the building while its burning fuel splashed out the other side, the second tape spliced in a millisecond after the collision. Hollywood could not compete with this—because it was Hollywood. The disaster movie of September 11th would never be made. It has already been made. Al-Qaeda productions got there first. This was “shock and awe” before America invented the expression for its invasion of Iraq.
All the dreams and nightmares of tinsel-town—all the racist movies depicting venal, murderous Muslims—had finally reached the screen en vérité. “Never before in the history of motion pictures . . .” If we have come to model ourselves on our film heroes, to mimic their language, their simplistic ideas, their robust, ultimately savage morality, now at last we could believe
in those heroes and villains. Instead of reality turned into fiction, fiction had become reality. Still the United plane went on sliding into the tower, obsessively, obscenely, its passage so well known that one looked elsewhere on the screen. Did the tower shake, just a little, with the impact? Was that a bird that flicked across the screen just before the plane hit the building, innocence fleeing the darkness to come? And when the French crew produced their unique film of the aircraft that hit the other tower, that man on the sidewalk who looked up at the sound of the ramped-up jet engines—at what point exactly did he realise what he was watching? Or was he too seduced by the neatness, the ease with which an airplane could fly into a building?
On the Airbus, I had been connected via Irish radio to Conor O’Clery, the Irish Times’s man in New York, who had reported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with me almost a quarter of a century earlier. His office was next to the World Trade Center. He had described with his usual devastating clarity how he had seen the second plane come in, how he saw the aircraft flaps moving up and down at speed as the hijacker at the controls fought desperately to bring the aircraft into the centre of the tower. The pilot’s act of mass murder was to be as perfect as possible. In Brussels I called Chibli Mallat, the young Lebanese lawyer who was trying to arraign Ariel Sharon in a Belgian court for his role in Sabra and Chatila. Only a few hours earlier, I had assured him that my report on the new massacre evidence would be published next day. No more. “Of course, Robert, this changes everything,” he said. “I think that legally and morally we must regard what happened today as an international crime against humanity.”
The calls kept coming. Italian radio, CBS, BBC World, BBC Cardiff, BBC Belfast, Pacifica, NPR, Radio France International. They all wanted to know what no one could yet know. Who did it? How did they do it? No one—but no one— wanted to know why “they” might have wanted to do it, for this was the forbidden question. Eamon Dunphy put me on his show out of Dublin with Alan Dershowitz, the leftist, pro-Israeli academic at Harvard. I tried to explain that there must have been reasons for this atrocity, that crimes are not committed just because men are bad and don’t like democracy. Dershowitz was—I tried to think of the right word as I listened to his uncontrollable, hysterical anger—frenzied. Fisk was a bad man, a patronising man, a dangerous man; Fisk was anti-American and “anti-Americanism is the same as anti-Semitism . . .” Dershowitz shouted at me and shouted at Dunphy who eventually switched him off the air. But I got the message. Only one line was going to be allowed after these massacres in America. Any opposition to U.S. policy—especially in the Middle East—was criminal and “pro-terrorist.” Anyone who criticised America now was an anti-Semite. Anti-Semites are Nazis, fascists. So America was sacrosanct—so was Israel, of course—and those of us who asked the question “Why” were the supporters of “terrorism.” We had to shut up. On the night of September 11th, the BBC’s 24-hour news channel, reviewing the next morning’s British newspapers, produced a pro-Israeli American commentator who remarked of my article that “Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad taste.”
