The Freedom, The Light, The Joy, The Humour

We trust that the Belfast Novichok lady is receiving the medical attention that she needs. Charged with assisting Russia, Joshua Cammidge will turn out either to have a very colourful past or somehow to have no past at all. The bailing of those allegedly spying for Iran speaks for itself. And Peter Hitchens writes:

The whole Free World went crazy on September 11, 2001, 25 years ago tomorrow. It broke our spirits, and if we don't cure this madness soon, there will not be a Free World for much longer.

Travellers in airports shuffle like convicted criminals through special machines that scan their breasts or testicles, and are forced to take off items of clothing by officious, blank-faced guards who will pounce on any infraction or sign of resistance. At least one American airport, in Houston, Texas, for many years warned passengers against making jokes about this, or they might be arrested. I am not making this up.

Elsewhere, identity documents are ceaselessly demanded for the most innocent activity. The power of the state to detain us without trial, and to punish us through process alone – wasting our time, humiliating us – grows daily. I don't myself believe that the ancient right to silence under interrogation (which authorities can now use against you) and the ancient rule against being tried twice for the same offence could have been abolished – as they have been – without the mass panic that followed the destruction of the Twin Towers. Dissent on foreign policy is smeared as treachery, the implication being that there is now only one permissible point of view, and it is the Government's. Don't believe me? Try dissenting. And all of this is done in the name of 'fighting terror'.

I used to travel by air all over the world. Sometimes I even enjoyed it. Now I do everything I can to avoid ever setting foot in an airport. It's not just that I can't endure the tedious, futile procedures. It's that I am infuriated by the passive, even submissive way in which most people have learned to accept being treated like this. In May 2022, it was announced with pride that British prisons had introduced 'airport-style security' to scan new arrivals in jail, an announcement so ludicrously upside down and back to front that nobody laughed when it was made. A hideous massacre was turned into the pretext for an age of repression, stupid wars, surveillance and censorship. The atrocity happened roughly halfway through my adult life. I look back on the years before it as an extraordinary period of light, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I see the quarter of a century since as growing ever darker, more confined, more violent and more afraid.

You'd think we would have grasped by then why we call terrorists by that name. They want to scare us, often by pretending to be far more powerful than they truly are. And they had done so for decades before the Manhattan Massacre. There was the age of plane hijacks, which frightened us into sucking up to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a mistake we have paid for ever since. Then there was the Provisional IRA, which frightened us into more concessions than I care to name, plus the infuriating abolition of station litter bins and left luggage offices. Giving way to blackmail is more popular than you might think, and the politicians who do it – as Sir Anthony Blair and his mental valet Alastair Campbell did – will not always suffer at the polls when they do so.

Were we really so determined to 'never give in to terrorist blackmail', as we said we were in 2001? In fact, the West did give in to some key demands of the 9/11 murderers. The attack on the World Trade Center was generally understood in the Middle East to have two aims – to weaken US support for Israel and to demand the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia. Indeed, one of the hijackers said so. Abdulaziz al-Omari, a Saudi national like most of those involved, was one of the thugs who hijacked the American Airlines plane that flew into the North Tower. He made a pre-suicide video, dressed in the chequered 'keffiyeh' scarf closely identified with the Palestinian cause. He said the attacks on America were a 'message to all infidels and to America to leave the Arabian peninsula and to stop supporting the cowardly Jews in Palestine'.

In the days after the attack, the Palestinian Authority made great efforts to suppress TV reports of Palestinian Arabs rejoicing at the 9/11 massacre, even confiscating and then censoring a tape of such an event made by the Associated Press [Fatah and Hamas alike are among the most vigorous putters down of their sworn enemies in al-Qaeda and IS]. Foreign TV stations and news organisations were warned by Palestinian officials that their local employees' safety 'could be jeopardised' if film of the rejoicing was shown on air. Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat arranged to be videoed donating blood for American terror victims. The US troops in Saudi Arabia were in fact withdrawn in April 2003. But much sooner, in October 2001, President George W. Bush announced that he now supported the idea of a Palestinian State, a major shift in US policy.

Even by that time, US and British law enforcement were aware, within hours of the attack, that at least some of the hijackers were closely connected with an official of a major Middle Eastern Islamic state, which was not Iraq nor Iran, Syria nor Egypt (and it certainly wasn't Afghanistan). This country's link to the atrocity has grown stronger as the years have passed. But as the authorities in Britain and America refuse, to this day, to admit it, I'll leave you to work out which Arab nation it is.

Yet despite these multiple cynical moves, the public were led to believe that from now on the West was embroiled in a perpetual 'war against terror' in which we would be required to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship and put up with an unlimited regime of surveillance, bureaucracy and overmighty state officials. The excuse of 'security against terrorism' would trump every argument for liberty, let alone convenience and ease. Every door would henceforth be locked, every face scanned, every journey lengthened by suspicion and invasions of privacy. We were also persuaded to support mad wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later on in Libya and Syria and Iran, which were spared any serious investigation into why we were waging them.

The supreme moment came in Damascus last year when Western efforts and money installed an actual Al Qaeda graduate, a sympathiser of the very movement against which the world was supposed to be fighting, as the leader of Syria. In that country we had been busily backing people who we would have arrested had we found them in Birmingham. This was surely the moment the 'War against Terror' disappeared down its own gullet. Meanwhile almost every act of drug-induced madness – from the Charlie Hebdo shootings to the Bataclan massacre – is attributed to a vast and mystical terror plot, which appears to have no defined aims at all, but which is never defeated and with which (unlike the IRA) we can reach no deal. And this looming monster excuses the maintenance of an enormous apparatus of 'counter-terror' measures, and the use of unlimited stupidity in failing to investigate the actual meaning of these events.

How I miss the freedom, the light, the joy and the humour that existed before this awful moment. But will we ever get them back? I see no sign of it.