Osama assumed that after his own victories as a guerrilla against the Russians, he and his organisat

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Gore Vidal, who died this week, was often scathing in his attacks on US foreign policy. In April 2002, Index on Censorship magazine was the first English-language publication ca ontario airport car rentals to feature this essay, written after 9/11
According to the Quran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness. Last 11 September, when suicide-pilots were crashing commercial airliners into crowded American ca ontario airport car rentals buildings, I did not have to look to the calendar to see what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow across Manhattan and along the Potomac River. I was also not surprised that despite the seven or so trillion dollars we have spent since 1950 on what is euphemistically called Defence , there would have been no advance warning from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency.
While the Bushites have been eagerly preparing for the last war but two missiles from North Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain down on Portland, Oregon, only to be intercepted by our missile-shield balloons the foxy Osama bin Laden knew that all he needed for his holy war on the infidel were flyers willing to kill themselves along with those random passengers who happened to be aboard hijacked airliners.  Also, like so many of those born to wealth, ca ontario airport car rentals Osama is not one to throw money about.  Apparently, the airline tickets of the 19 known dead hijackers ca ontario airport car rentals were paid through a credit ca ontario airport car rentals card.  I suspect that United ca ontario airport car rentals and American Airlines will never be reimbursed ca ontario airport car rentals by American Express whose New York offices Osama inadvertently? hit.
On the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, a passenger telephoned out to say that he and a dozen or so other men several ca ontario airport car rentals of them athletes were going to attack the hijackers. Let s roll! he shouted. A scuffle. A scream. Silence. But the plane, allegedly aimed at the White House, ended up in a field near Pittsburgh.  We have always had wise and brave civilians. ca ontario airport car rentals  It is the military and the politicians and the media that one frets about.  After all, we have not encountered suicide bombers since the kamikazes, as we called them in the Pacific where I was idly a soldier in World War II.
The telephone rings. A distraught voice from the United States. Berry Berenson s dead.  She was on Flight ca ontario airport car rentals The world was getting surreal.  Arabs.  Plastic knives.  The beautiful Berry.  What on earth did any of these elements have in common other than an unexpected ca ontario airport car rentals appointment in Samarra with that restless traveller Death?
The telephone keeps ringing. In summer I live south of Naples, Italy. Italian newspapers, TV, radio, want comment. So do 1. 1 have written lately about Pearl Harbor. Now I get the same question over and over: isn t this exactly like Sunday morning 7 December 1941? No, it s not, I say. As far as we now know, we had no warning of last Tuesday s attack. Of course, our government has many, many secrets which our enemies ca ontario airport car rentals always seem to know about in advance but our people are not told of until years later, if at all. President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor. I describe the various steps he took in a book, The Golden Age. We now know what was on his mind: coming to England s aid against Japan s ally, Hitler, a virtuous plot that ended triumphantly for the human race. But what was is on bin Laden s mind?
For several decades there has been an unrelenting demonisation of the Muslim world in the American media. Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens other than to accuse others of motiveless malignity. We are good, announced a deep-thinker on American television, They are evil, which wraps that one up in a neat package.  But it was Bush himself who put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them as well as all of us somewhere over the Beltway his profound knowledge ca ontario airport car rentals of Islam s wiles and ways: They hate what they see right here in this Chamber.
A million Americans nodded in front of their TV sets. Their leaders are self-appointed.  They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, ca ontario airport car rentals our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. At this plangent ca ontario airport car rentals moment what Americans gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait?
Should the 44-year-old Saudi Arabian bin Laden be the prime mover, we know surprisingly little about him.  We can assume that he favours the Palestinians in their uprising against ca ontario airport car rentals the European- ca ontario airport car rentals and American-born Israelis, intent, many of them, on establishing a theocratic state in what was to have been a common holy land for Jews, Muslims and Christians.  But if Osama ever wept tears for Arafat, they have left little trace.  So why do he and millions of other Muslims hate us?
Let us deal first with the six-foot seven-inch Osama who enters history in 1979 as a guerrilla warrior working alongside the CIA to defend Afghanistan against the invading Soviets. Was he anti-communist? Irrelevant question. He is anti-infidel in the land of the Prophet.
Described as fabulously wealthy, Osama is worth only a few million dollars, according to a relative.  It was his father who created a fabulous fortune with a construction company that specialised in building palaces for the Saudi royal family. That company is now worth several billion dollars, presumably shared by Osama s 54 brothers and sisters.  Although he speaks perfect English, he was entirely educated in the Saudi capital, Jeddah; he has never travelled outside the Arabian peninsula. Several siblings live in the Boston area and give large sums to Harvard.
Where does Osama s money now come from? He is a superb fund-raiser for Allah but only within the Arab world; contrary to legend, he has taken no CIA money. He is also a superb ca ontario airport car rentals organiser within Afghanistan. In 1998, he warned the Saudi king that Saddam Hussein was going to invade ca ontario airport car rentals Kuwait.
Osama assumed ca ontario airport car rentals that after his own victories as a guerrilla against ca ontario airport car rentals the Russians, he and his organisation would be used by the Saudis ca ontario airport car rentals to stop the Iraqis. To Osama's horror, King Fahd sent for the Americans: ca ontario airport car rentals thus were infidels established on the sacred sands of Mohammed. "This was", he said, the most shocking moment of my life. Infidel , in his sense, does not mean anything of great moral consequence, like cheating sexually ca ontario airport car rentals on your partner; rather, it means lack of faith in Allah, the one God, and in his Prophet.
Osama persuaded 4,000 Saudis to go to Afghanistan ca ontario airport car rentals for military training by his group. ca ontario airport car rentals  In 1991, Osama moved on to Sudan.  In 1994, when the Saudis withdrew his citizenship, Osama was already a legendary figure ca ontario airport car rentals in the Islamic world and so, like Shakespeare s Coriolanus, he could tell the royal Saudis, "I banish you. There is a world elsewhere." Unfortunately, that world is us.
When Clinton lobbed a missile at a Sudanese aspirin factory, Osama blew up two of our embassies in Africa, put a hole in the side of an American warship off Yemen, and so on to the events of Tuesday, 11 September.
Now President George W Bush, in retaliation, has promised us not only a new war but a secret war. That is, not secret to Osama but only to us who pay for and fight it.   This administration ca ontario airport car rentals will not talk about any plans we may or may not have, said Bush.   We re going to find these evil-doers and we re going to hold them accountable along with the other devils who have given Osama shelter in order to teach them the one lesson that we ourselves have never been able to learn: in history, as in physics, there is no action without reaction.  Or, as Edward S Herman puts it, "One of the most durable features of the US culture is the inability or refusal to recognise US crimes." When Osama was four years old, I arrived in Cairo for a conversation with Nasser to appear in Look magazine.  I was received by Mohammed Heikal , Nasser ca ontario airport car rentals s chief adviser.  Nasser himself was not to be seen.  He was at the Barricade, his retreat on the Nile.  Later, I found out that a plot to murder him had just failed and he was in well-guarded seclusion.  Heikal spoke perfect English; he was sardonic, cynical.
"Not very. But we keep looking for a text." We talked off and on for a week. Nasser wanted to modernise Egypt.  But there was a reactionary, religious element Another sigh. Then a surprise. "We ve found something very odd, the young village boys the bright ones that we are educating to be engineers, chemists and so on are turning religious on us."
"Very." Heikal was a spiritual son of our 18th century Enlightenment.  I thought of Heikal on Dark Tuesday when one of his modernised Arab generation had, in the name of Islam, struck at what had been, 40 years earlier, Nasser s model for a modern state.  Yet Osama seemed, from all accounts, no more than a practising, as opposed to zealous, Muslim.  Ironically, he was trained as an engineer.
Understandably, he dislikes the United States as symbol and as fact. But when our clients, the Saudi royal family, allowed American troops to occupy the Prophet s holy land, Osama named the fundamental enemy the Crusader-Zionist Alliance . Thus, in a phrase, he defined himself and reminded his critics that he is a Wahhabi Muslim, a Puritan activist not unlike our Falwell-Robertson zanies, only serious. He would go to war against the United States, the head of the serpen