RIP Hitch

Ian Williams

A Short Long Diatribe Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: the Postponed Liberation of Iraq
reviewed by Ian Williams 

 It is sad to read Christopher Hitchens’ shrill and un-nuanced polemics in A Long Short War. It is also confusing, since he is trying to maintain all the former positions he held while on the left, while uncritically embracing his new friends, whom he calls, “the Pentagon Intellectuals” or the “tougher thinkers in the Defense Department.” The resulting portmanteau politics are an ill-matched and disturbing mix.
It is a shame because Hitchens has often performed an indispensable role in debunking the unthinking dogmas pushed by the thought police of the left. But now he has finally succumbed to the disease of the Leninist left: he has become a free-floating antithesis with not much thesis, unless you accept as such his claims of wisdom and morality for the Bush administration. Everyone who disagrees with him on the cardinal issue of uncritical support for the war on Iraq is attacked in quasi-Vyshinkyist fashion.
It has always been lonely on the American left, one reason being its tendency to shrink itself by throwing people overboard at the first hint of thoughtcrime. One wonders over the years how many other decent people may have been harried rightwards by dogmatic intolerance and application of political litmus tests. Were you for or against Vietnam, McCarthy, Kosovo, Afghanistan?
Few of those doing the persecution had much time for nuance. Please comrade, may I be anti-McCarthy and anti-Soviet at the same time? May I oppose the Vietnam War, without condoning the behavior of Vietnamese communists? All too often the answer has been “certainly not,” and one can almost (almost, I stress) sympathize with the neocons and others, and wonder if the intolerance of the left did not drive them to the right.
Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

Ian Williams

Luckily, orthodoxy in all its left forms took a serious hit with the fall of the Soviet Union, but even so one could easily get a feeling of thankfulness that the tumbrels were no longer running when one saw the reaction to suggestions that Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein were not nice people. Hitchens was in the honorable vanguard of those on the left who thought that human rights were a cardinal moral and political principle in themselves, not just a cudgel with which to beat imperialism. One may instance those who campaign for Mumia while cheering on Cuban executions.
But old habits die hard. Hitchens, like so many of the neocons he now seems to have joined, is steeped in the robustness of Trotskyist and Leninist polemics. When he was under attack for supporting NATO action against Milosevic, he was robust, and mostly correct in his counter-attacks. And then came September 11th. Ironically, some on the left who had opposed a war in the Balkans over ten thousand dead Kosovars, supported one in Central Asia over three thousand dead Americans.
Very few on the left, or indeed anywhere else, actually tried to justify the attack on the World Trade Center itself, but some did oppose the ensuing war in Afghanistan. However, with broad sweep, Hitchens now accuses “many cultural leftists,” of “somewhat furtively” uniting with the European hard right in “believing that September 11 was a punishment for American hubris.”
It is at this stage that Hitchens has become his own enemy. He has become the mirror image of the shrill dogmatists who had opposed him all along. In emulation of George W. Bush’s instructions to his speechwriters, he no longer does nuance. It was, in fact, perfectly possible to be horrified by the atrocity at the World Trade Center, and even to admit that military action against the Taliban and bin Laden was desirable, while still pointing out that it was the previous amoral work of the hard right now in the Bush administration and their involvement in Afghanistan that had made the Taliban and Al-Qaeda possible. After all, Neville Chamberlain’s name is still mud for his part in paving the way for the Blitz on London. One can deplore the cause without condoning the effect.
September 11 was, of course, what made the invasion of Iraq possible. There were and are some serious arguments to be made for a multilateral humanitarian intervention in Iraq and other places to remove genocidal
Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

Ian Williams

regimes. Hitchens did in fact have an honorable record of opposing the Ba’athist barbarism against Kurds, and indeed all opposition in Iraq.
But Hitchens’s uncritical support for the motives and methods of the Bush administration dropped him to a whole new level. To begin with, while much of what George W. Bush said about Saddam Hussein was, of course, true, as Hitchens knows, it was equally true when many figures in this administration were covering for Baghdad in the honeymoon years before their protégé ran amok and invaded Kuwait.
In real politics, one accepts good consequences even from evil actors. But while welcoming, for example, Stalin’s belated support in the war against Hitler, Hitchens’s hero, George Orwell, did not flip to uncritical support for the regime in Moscow the way that Hitchens has for the Bush administration. The White House’s motives for intervention were neither publicly nor privately about democracy in Iraq and it betokens a desperate act of faith on Hitchens part to presume they were.
It is true that Hitchens has a long and honorable record of support for democracy in Iraq, and for the rights of the Kurds. But that does not really justify his adulatory defense of Bush and calumniation of his critics. For example, he himself managed to support intervention in Kosovo without becoming a noticeable cheerleader for Bill Clinton’s all around moral probity.
Hitchens’s well established contempt for Clinton should not obscure the issue that many in this administration, with the help of Clinton’s own deep irresolution, harried him into military ineffectiveness because he had not served in Vietnam, a war he had in fact opposed. In contrast, many of the most sedulous detractors of Clinton actually agreed with the war—but dodged the draft. Hitchens’s response is to attack those who used the well- deserved epithet “chicken hawk” against them. It is true, as he says, that there is now a volunteer army, and even if it were not, those he calls the “Pentagon intellectuals” are not of age or health to qualify. But that does not detract from their fundamental hypocrisy.
While we touch upon Vietnam, along with McCarthy for long the Shibboleth of the Left, it seems equally odd that Hitchens vilifies Harold Wilson, the British prime minister for his “disgusting” support for the war in Vietnam. In fact, Wilson successfully resisted LBJ’s extreme political and economic pressure and refused any British military involvement in the conflict
Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

Ian Williams

whatsoever, which was no mean achievement under the circumstances. I’m afraid that vilifying Wilson while praising Bush and Blair does not make a seamless political and historical whole. In his realignment of his political perspectives, Hitchens has not made the necessary adjustments to the intellectual baggage he inherited from his Trotskyist youth
Hitchens quite rightly excoriates primitive anti-Americanism, but then does Bush’s work with equally primitive anti-anti-Americanism, tarring everyone who disagrees with current American policies with the same brush. He is quite right that the simple-minded refrain of “blood for oil,” made little economic or political sense. He is even right about the motives of the some of the organizers of the mass protests who did not allow criticism of Saddam Hussein on their platforms (not, incidentally in New York, where anti- Saddam dissidents spoke from the platform). But the delusions of the marginal are surely a lesser subject for polemics than the Orwellian use of images and hints from the administration that led 70% of Americans to entertain the likelihood that Baghdad was involved in September 11th?
Hitchens neatly avoids this question with a humorous hypothetical aside on the likely fate of the Iraqi intelligence chief who denied knowledge of the perpetrators the day after, which sadly avoids the main issue: there is no evidence whatsoever of Iraqi involvement.
For evidence of a nuance missing from neo-Hitchens, one could look at Kofi Annan’s speech to the UN General Assembly on September 23, in which he called for multilateral support for genuine humanitarian intervention, while warning of the grave dangers to the world order of the unilateral attack that the U.S. had undertaken.
In these polemics, Hitchens allows no room for those who agreed with him about Saddam Hussein, but saw profound dangers in the Bush administration’s contempt for International Law and the United Nations. Six months after the Iraqi invasion, with chaos spreading across Iraq, Bush reinforcing support for Sharon’s rampages, no sign of weapons of mass destruction, and no evidence of any links between the still at large Saddam Hussein and terror, it is sadly evident that Hitchens has bravely but foolishly jumped on a sinking ship, morally and practically.
Unlike the neocons who have only their residual admiration for Leon Trotsky and their utter self-certainty remaining of their old politics,
Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

Ian Williams

Christopher Hitchens’s portmanteau politics retains enough hybrid vigor from his old principles for us to hope that he will recover from being a neo- neocon. We can rejoice together in the downfall of Saddam Hussein while deriding the parochial, self-centered and faith-based worldview of those currently making every predictable and indeed predicted mistake in the occupation of Iraq. But sadly this book represents a fine mind boiled in vitriol.

New Dimensions for Trading Algorithms

Speculator: Fast forward to the future of trading

Ian Williams

Blink and you may miss this amazing investment opportunity

It’s what science is for, I guess. In recent weeks two separate news items came together to produce a true Eureka! moment.

Hibernia Atlantic is spending $300 mn to lay a new underwater cable between London and New York that will accelerate financial transactions to 59 milliseconds, about 10 percent faster than the current 65-millisecond voyage.

Hibernia Atlantic expects to be able to charge hedge funds and similar traders 50 times the rates of its rivals, because it estimates that every millisecond saved can boost a fund’s annual bottom line by $100 mn.

This is not new technology. The data cannot go faster than the speed of light through the fiber-optic cable; indeed, they only travel at two thirds the speed they would in a vacuum.

The pioneers simply drew the route for the Hibernia Express on a globe instead of a flat map, so the path takes the shortest route between the two cities. It might or might not be significant that the Titanic was steering the same course.

One wonders whether, when Adam Smith spoke of the invisible hand of the markets, he really envisaged a market with no human hands involved at all, one where my algorithms speak to your algorithms, each second-guessing a human agency that is nowhere to be seen.

Money maker

Regardless of the answer to that question, if this is the way of the future, we must confront the more fundamental question: how can we make money out of it?

News of the faster cable inspired Speculator to float a new company, New York Securities Instantaneous Neutrino Yield Dispatcher (NYSINYD). Our business plan is breathtakingly simple: neutrinos go at the speed of light even through solid rock.

By building particle accelerators and detectors under New York and London we can shoot data directly between them in a straight line 2,500 miles through the Earth at maximum light speed, giving us a theoretical data speed four times that of the Hibernia Express.

Allow for some relay problems, and let’s assume it only doubles the transaction speed: that still means, if hedge funds would pay 50 times the going rate for a 10 percent speed increase, they would pay at least 500 times more for doubling the speed.

Faster than light

But then the second news item appeared: the clever guys at CERN in Switzerland sent neutrinos to Italy – and they traveled faster than light! Time to reconfigure the prospectus, not least since one explanation for this is that the neutrinos breaking the speed limits go into another dimension en route.

It is fitting that Italy should inspire our synergistic alliance of creative physics and finance: money often disappears into other dimensions there, as indeed it does between the City of London and Wall Street.

It’s also possible that information traveling faster than light will arrive before it leaves, adding a whole new – and probably legal – form of insider trading because the concept is certainly faster than Dodd-Frank.

We considered changing the name of the firm to Now You See It, Now You Don’t, evoking the most inventive of modern banking rules, but decided just to stick with NYSINYD. Buy now and the money will leave the account before you have made your decision!

OWS in Tribune

Ian Williams

Anger can be power – now build on it

by Ian Williams

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Sometimes, you just have to be there. I was in Wall Street when the protestors were allowed into the park – minus sleeping bags and tents. As they waited while billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg went jurisdiction shopping to find a tame judge to overthrow the earlier verdict that had ordered him to stop the eviction, it was fascinating to see the interaction between the occupiers and the public servants he had ordered to evict them. The normal cops, despite their ­brand-new riot helmets, were friendly, ­laughing, bantering with the ­demonstrators, who had sedulously “reached out to them”, real as public workers threatened by budget cuts.
In the background were the thugs, the senior officers. Old school cops with bullhorns on this occasion, but pepper sprays on others, whose whole demeanour reflected their visceral ­distaste for the occupiers and all they stood for. And behind them, of course, stood Bloomberg and the political leaders of most major cities in the United States, 18 of whom had co-ordinated a nationwide crackdown. Bloomberg, who has made his billions from Wall Street, was under particularly heavy social and political pressure to remove the occupation that had started such a ­
global avalanche of protest.
However, Bloomberg and his cops would have served the bankers better by ignoring their whims. Instead, they inadvertently did the Occupy Wall Street movement a big favour, almost on a par with when a senior officer gratuitously pepper-sprayed three women in the early days. Even though the occupiers had had training from Norwegian ski-troop ­veterans and Alpinists about cold ­weather, New York’s cold would really have demanded “Winter Soldiers”, as Tom Payne would have recognised. The forced evacuation made them ­honourable victims, who can build on their own considerable success, which exceeded their wildest original ­expectations. The nationwide over-reaction of the police renewed support and interest.
Their success is as a catalyst, igniting the various elements which had accumulated. In some ways, the most puzzling question has been the deafening sound of silence around the financial crisis. The occupation has brought the issue of inequality out from the vaults where the politicians, pundits and their plutocratic payrollers had hidden it.
For example, quite possibly inspired by OWS, New York Judge Jed S Rakoff has been examining a Securities and Exchange Commission settlement with Citibank. Like most such boilerplate agreements, the defrauding companies agree to pay a cash settlement, without admitting to any wrongdoing. Rakoff has been having fun. Instead of rubber-stamping the settlement, he read it. Like all the other previous settlements, it included a promise not to do it again. Yet the SEC attorney had to admit that they had never ever brought any company before a judge for contempt of court when, over and over again, they broke the law.
Set to a backdrop of a wacko Supreme Court decision that corporations are people when it comes to “free speech” or bribing politicians with ­campaign donations, the contrast with their lack of personhood when it comes to the criminal law has been rankling.
So where does it go from here? One can only hope that now they are freed from the chores of housekeeping and eccentric rituals of bonding hitherto involved in maintaining the occupation, the OWS cadre does not go further into manifesto writing. Some of the draft ­versions that have emerged read like ­pastiches of John Cleese’s band of revolutionaries in Monty Python’s Life of Brian – politically correct psychobabble devoid of effective content.
In many ways, that is better than if they knuckled down to serious manifesto-writing, which would have ­alienated not just the 57 varieties on the left, but all the others who are united in detestation for what Wall Street has done, but disagree about almost ­anything else.
Despite the understandable disdain for the American political machine, ­anyone who is touch with reality will realise that motivating people to vote and forcing elected politicians to take notice is the only way out of the impasse. If the Tea Party, representing a cultist minority, can wield so much influence over the Republicans, then the ­sentiments represented by OWS can surely find expression in the Democratic Party whose time-serving fifth columnists have so often represented corporate interests.  OWS can maintain the anger. It is up to others to focus it electorally and ensure that it is not dissipated in apocalyptic angry visions, or new age fatuities.
One aspect of that is re-electing Barack Obama. At the time of his election, I wrote that he was not the second coming: but he wasn’t the Anti-Christ. The Republican line-up, beneath the clownish presentations, makes Lucifer’s lot look angelic.

Overhangs and hangovers

Investor Relation magazine

1 Aug 2011 | Rating by Ian Williams

Confiscating cash may not be the best way to win over the electorate, notes Ian Williams

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, US economists warned him about the ‘overhang’ of billions of ‘useless’ unused rubles, otherwise known as the savings of millions of hard-working Soviet citizens, who had entrusted their earnings to the state banks. So Gorbachev ruined his domestic reputation by confiscating people’s bank savings and introducing a currency conversion that demonetized the cash of anyone who did not trust the banks. Even more so than closing the vodka distilleries, it made him unelectable ever after.

Worse, it failed to stop the hyper-inflation and probably facilitated the ensuing massive looting and transfer of wealth to the kleptocrats. Reading the words of some commentators on the US deficit now, one suspects they may be planning something similar.

Ever since Senator Daniel Moynihan ‘saved’ Social Security by increasing the percentage of income paid on contributions, the system changed to one of backdoor revenue raising. The billions taken from employees and employers go into a fund that promptly buys Treasury bonds with them.

Congress treats these bonds differently from those the Treasury sells to domestic and foreign investors. It does not include them in its deficit calculations, let alone in the much-vaunted debt ceiling.

And with the new spirit in Washington there are growing signs of people there wanting to do a Gorbachev on the Social Security and Medicare funds. After all, it is a massive overhang. The Social Security Trust Fund has risen from almost nothing to more than $2 tn in the last decade, and it has all been spent by successive Congresses – especially those that claim the fund is going bankrupt.

Of course, stealing voters’ savings is not generally a winning electoral strategy, as House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan is now discovering with his tentative attempt to dip into the Medicare fund. Perhaps we can introduce him to apples falling and Newton sometime. In the meantime, old Gorby might have had a point. By one of those cosmic coincidences, American corporations now also have some $2 tn in cash reserves – three times the so-called stimulus package that oozed its way through Washington.

Corporate executives could distribute these reserves in dividends, special or otherwise. They could spend them on investment, R&D or employment, which would certainly help revive the US economy. Indeed, they could even boost salaries. But companies prefer to sit on their war chests, relishing the feel of all those resources while the economy stagnates.

Such observations lead to speculation. If Washington were to confiscate all corporate cash surpluses above a reasonable amount for corporate expansion and replace them with long-term federal bonds, it could soften the blow by diverting the proceeds into a development fund devoted to long-term work-generating infrastructure investment and R&D, or to low-interest loans to entrepreneurs who actually want to invest in productive enterprises.

Now how might that play with the American voters?

This article appeared in the August print edition of IR magazine.

In gods we trust

Investor Relations Magazine

In gods we trust

3 Oct 2011 | Rating by Ian Williams

But bigger isn’t always better, argues Ian Williams

As a precocious schoolchild, I tried to sketch a family tree for the Greek gods. With the complicated family life of the Olympians, it ended up a tangled diagram of inter-dimensional string theory as divine parents, offspring and siblings mated ad libidinem up, down and across the generations.

The M&A history of Ma Bell and her children reminded me of this abortive family tree as the sundry Bells gropingly sought each other out to undo the original antitrust settlement that had torn them asunder. The new-born Baby Bells almost immediately began mating with each other, and then three of them, joined in unholy matrimony, engulfed their mother company.

Ten years on and this incestuous product of corporate miscegenation is stretching out its all-engulfing pseudopods toward T-Mobile. If corporations really were people, as the law would have us believe, Ma Bell and her offspring would be serving long sentences for incest and related crimes. It certainly makes a mockery of the consent decree that split up the companies.

Gods deal with eternity while corporate law deals in decades. When the Bell anti-trust case began in 1974 it was an era of ‘rediscovering’ competition as the driving force of capitalism. Deregulation, privatization and lifting the burden on business were the catchphrases of the day, and the Department of Justice and Judge Harold Greene, who heard the case, took breaking up monopolies seriously. Government still had a role, however, if only to keep corporations competing.

Later, reviled by telecoms executives and lobbyists, Greene said: ‘We can’t let a huge corporation do whatever it wants – it needs to be approved. The AT&T case may have biased me on antitrust issues but the issue of allowing a monopoly to have a stranglehold on information is still a concern.’ Disgruntled AT&T attorneys later claimed the judge went too far, accusing him of being cynical about big firms and distrustful of those who run them. They claimed the litigation ‘was unnecessary, unproductive and… destructive of a great corporation.’

In today’s climate, some might deem the now-deceased judge prescient. Three years ago a number of big institutions on Wall Street were deemed too big to fail; there are now fewer but bigger finance houses whose sense of impunity has doubtless been enhanced by open checks from federal funds.

In telecoms, the quaint days when Ma Bell monopolized the fixed-telephone system seem as atavistic as a monopoly on speaking tubes. Greene is dead and so is his approach to monopolies. We now see giant corporations with newspapers, television, radio and TV stations, internet services and mobile phones replicating the slogan of News International’s former News of the World: ‘All human life is here.’ And they really mean it – they have their fingers on society’s jugular vein.

Beyond too big to fail, we now have too big to regulate. Under-funded – indeed, defunded – civil servants are no match for cash-rich corporations that can count on reflexive support from politicians who will fight any government interference with how corporations do business. Come back Judge Greene, all is forgiven.

This article appeared in the October print edition of IR magazine.

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Obama: Impaled on the Horns of an AIPAC

United Nations Report December Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

Washington Impaling Itself on the Horns of a Diplomatic Dilemma

By Ian Williams
In the twisted chains of events in the Middle East, one set of
links is clear. Almost 500 Palestinian prisoners—and Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit—released on Oct. 12, with a second group of 555 Palestinian prisoners to be released later, owe their freedom to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ determination to push the U.N. membership issue. Binyamin Netanyahu could have freed Shalit any time
on these same terms—but the Palestinian statehood issue, for psychopathological reasons we have discussed earlier in these columns, rattles the Israeli prime minister and his supporters so much that he was prepared to give Hamas a boost against Fatah with the release.
Those of us who savor fine hypocrisies will also relish the irony of long negotiations resulting in a political boost for a movement with which Israel says the rest of the world should have no contact. One almost looks forward to the arrest, indictment and trial of Israeli leaders on their next visit to the U.S., where people are serving long sentences for much less substantial contact and support for Hamas related organizations!
However, back to the main issue, Palestine’s application for U.N. membership is now languishing in a Security Council subcommittee, few of whose members seem eager to bring the issue to a head. No matter what the Obama administration does now, it is cruising for a diplomatic bruising. While U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is not as pugnacious as her predecessor John Bolton, or indeed James Baker, in rounding up votes in the U.N., the Obama administration has been trying hard—despite Washington’s weakened clout—to persuade vulnerable states that it is in their best interests not to vote yes in the Security Council. If the resolution accepting Palestinian membership does not garner nine positive votes, then—in the spirit of the toddler who hides behind the drapes and can’t understand that everyone can see his feet sticking out—the U.S. hopes to escape the contumely it richly merits for vetoing a resolution fulfilling the wishes expressed by the president just a year earlier.


However, back to the main issue, Palestine’s application for U.N. membership is now languishing in a Security Council subcommittee, few of whose members seem eager to bring the issue to a head. No matter what the Obama administration does now, it is cruising for a diplomatic bruising. While U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is not as pugnacious as her predecessor John Bolton, or indeed James Baker, in rounding up votes in the U.N., the Obama administration has been trying hard—despite Washington’s weakened clout—to persuade vulnerable states that it is in their best interests not to vote yes in the Security Council. If the resolution accepting Palestinian membership does not garner nine positive votes, then—in the spirit of the toddler who hides behind the drapes and can’t understand that everyone can see his feet sticking out—the U.S. hopes to escape the contumely it richly merits for vetoing a resolution fulfilling the wishes expressed by the president just a year earlier.
Twenty years ago, the U.S. scarcely felt the need to justify what it wanted. Now, over-extended militarily, wobbling financially, its carrots are stringy and its stick detumescent, so it has to explain why Russia is being unreasonable in blocking the membership of Kosovo, recognized by about half of the U.N., while a White House-threatened veto of membership for Palestine, recognized by more than two-thirds of U.N. members, is statesmanship of a high order.
Indeed, inquiring minds might well compare the Russian and Chinese vetoes against action in Syria to prevent repression, with those by the U.S. against any resolution that even mildly criticizes Israel for documented repression in the occupied territories—as listed by the State Department’s own annual reports on human rights and religious freedom!
And more Israel Lobby-induced mayhem was heading down the turnpike toward Washington, with UNESCO’s scheduled late fall vote on its board’s recommendation for Palestine’s full membership status in the agency’s general council. Forty of the 58 board members backed a Palestinian draft resolution proposing membership, with the U.S. among four voting against, and 14 abstentions—countries which do not really oppose it but don’t want to upset the U.S.
The Vatican Precedent
This has a double significance. Firstly, the Vatican’s convoluted route to acceptance as a non-member observer state at the U.N. began with it being “smuggled” into membership of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) by the devotee who headed the organization at the time. After all, the Vatican had its own stamps—a nice little earner—and its own radio station, which got it into the International Telecommunications (then Telegraph) Union. It was never allowed to join the League of Nations, nor for many decades would Washington countenance U.N. membership—but the Vatican had a long-term strategy, as one would expect, on how a postage stamp state with a population of a few hundred celibates could get more recognition.
The U.N. invited members of the specialized agencies to participate, but not vote, in the General Assembly and, nudged along, gave such entities, which included Switzerland for half a century, a vote in conferences.
Echoing the issue of whether President Abbas represents the PLO, Palestine, or the Palestinian Authority, it is the Vatican City which is a member of the two U.N. agencies. Half a century ago, however, it switched the name of its U.N. observer mission to the Holy See—then separated the Holy See as the Catholic Church from the Holy See as the entity holding sovereignty over the Vatican City!
In a little noticed move in 2004, the General Assembly upgraded the Vatican’s status from an entity—Palestine’s current designation—to a non-member state. The U.S., which opposes such status for the several million Palestinians, did not object.
So, under existing rules, membership in UNESCO would take Palestinian participation out of the special case situation it currently occupies as a result of 20 years of diplomatic war by attrition, and bring it under general rules that the U.S. and Israel would have no chance of overturning.
Renewed Assaults on the U.N.
But there is, of course, more. After some years of the puzzling sound of silence regarding the U.N., some of the Republican right and their Democratic allies whose hearts beat as one with the Likudnik pacemaker have been building up for a renewed assault on the U.N. and all its works. They have passed legislation that would require the U.S. to pull its funding—and membership—from any body that gives “full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.” The legislation is of course weaselly worded to mean Palestine—but not the Vatican—while interestingly leaving Taiwan in limbo.
That would present an interesting quandary for Hillary Clinton, who, visiting UNESCO headquarters in Paris this
year, declared, “I am proud to be the first secretary of state from the United States ever to come to UNESCO, and I come because I believe strongly in your mission.” That dilemma could be resolved immediately, of course, if the president and the State Department determined that in fact Palestine does have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood. After all, Kosovo, under U.S. sponsorship, has joined the World Bank and IMF—which should, if U.N. membership were the determinant, have the U.S. pulling out and defunding those organizations as well. Looking at the damage they have done worldwide, that might not be such a bad idea—but in any case, no one has brought it up hitherto.
The diplomatic dilemma on the horns of which the administration is impaling itself becomes more barbed with each passing denial of reality.
By U.N. custom, once one agency has accepted a member, all other U.N. agencies also accord it full rights, as the Vatican demonstrates. Since the World Bank and IMF are quantum U.N. agencies—in and out at the same time, depending on what suits them—Kosovo cannot yet lever membership there into other U.N. agencies. UNESCO membership, however, like the UPU, opens the doors to all the others.
So the U.S. can either pull out of all the U.N. agencies this administration holds dear—including the U.N. itself—if the General Assembly accepts the Holy See way to Palestinian participation, or it can accept Palestine as a state under international law. Washington could, of course, suggest that the case be referred to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague for an advisory opinion. That, however, would then imply accepting other ICJ judgements, such as the one against the U.S. mining of Nicaragua’s harbors—and on Israel’s occupation wall.
A Hard-Hitting Report
The latter, of course, is long overdue. On Sept. 16, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon submitted the report requested by the General Assembly on Israeli settlement activities. Citing instance after instance of violent discriminatory behavior, the hard-hitting report “seeks to underscore the discriminatory nature of the Israeli policy and practice of promoting settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. While illegal settlement expansion continues to take place in the West Bank, restrictions on Palestinian construction and the demolition of Palestinian homes have been on the rise. The report also addresses settlers’ violent
acts against Palestinians and their properties during the reporting period and the discriminatory treatment of Israeli settlers and Palestinians in law enforcement. The involvement of Israel Defense Forces in acts of violence, either through their participation or inaction to prevent the acts, is discussed as a growing concern.”
But perhaps most timely for those expressing shock and horror at the Palestinians undertaking due process to secure the rights as a state that most nations grant them is the report’s conclusion: “The General Assembly and the international community should more actively seek the implementation of their decisions, resolutions and recommendations, as well as those of the Security Council, the International Court of Justice and the United Nations human rights mechanisms, including treaty bodies and special procedure mandate holders, in relation to the situation of human rights and international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
It puts in perspective the U.S. threat to defund all Palestinian activities in retaliation for the statehood bid—as, indeed, does the promise to increase aid to the state that is defying not only the U.N., but U.S. pleas, and continuing to build settlements. ❑

UNESCO Train Wreck -Pres Mesmerized at controls

Obama will rue his lack of principle on Palestine's Unesco membership

In pulling out of Unesco, Obama gives the right a boost and abandons all pretensions of being an honest peace broker

• 
• • Ian Williams
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 November 2011 12.30 EDT
  • Article history

Palestine is voted as a new Unesco member state. Photograph: Dou Matar/Unesco
The cheers that rang across the hall of the Unesco meeting when Palestine became a member on Monday are being echoed in surprising quarters.
The Obama administration has perversely given a big boost to the Republican right's antipathy to the UN and all it stands for. Ironically, it was George W Bush who brought the United States back into Unesco 20 years after Reagan withdrew. Equally ironically, driving the engine in this diplomatic train wreck was Barack Obama, whose speeches in Turkey and Egypt during the early months of his presidency had deceptively signalled a new opening to the Muslim world.
By reflexively withdrawing from Unesco in response to Palestine's admission, the Obama-Clinton state department has taken the lunatic fringe and put them centre stage. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who chairs the House foreign affairs committee, combines a Likudnik support of Israel with a recidivist hatred of the UN and has been trying to de-fund the UN and its agencies.
In contrast, Hillary Clinton, who visited Unesco's Paris HQ earlier this year, had announced: "I am proud to be the first secretary of state from the United States ever to come to Unesco, and I come because I believe strongly in your mission." Indeed. So strongly does she believe in it that she is prepared to pull out of the organisation for recognising the Palestinian statehood that Obama had himself called for at the UN general assembly in September 2010.
The voting lineup on Monday was indicative. France, much more diplomatically adroit than the US, and mindful of its global standing, supported Palestinian membership. Even subservient Britain could not bring itself to vote with the US and pusillanimously abstained. The voting suggests that when the security council resolution on Palestinian UN membership comes up next week, it will get the nine affirmative votes needed – which means the US will have to use its veto and risk consequences, such as those threatened by the Saudis.
If the US had put nearly as much pressure on Israel as it had on others to avoid using its threatened veto, it would be a much more credible and creditable world power. As it is, its desperate attempts to avoid a veto by getting others to do its dirty work for it have made the Obama administration look like a toddler who hides his head behind the curtains and cannot understand why everyone can still see him.
The security council vote apart, the Unesco vote presages Palestinian admission to other agencies. One looks forward to US withdrawal from the International Atomic Energy Agency, relieving the pressure in Iran, or from the World Health Organisation, as soon as Palestine is allowed to join.
Compounding the irony, Israel itself has so far not indicated it is pulling out of Unesco, nor indeed any other UN agency. On the contrary, WikiLeaks recently revealed that Israel was angling for a major position in Unesco.
The nature of the US approach is clear. There is a general lack of principle. For example, the route being followed by Palestine in its effort to join multilateral institutions replicates that of the Vatican, whose far more dubious claim to statehood derives from its original membership of the Universal Postal Union, since the postage stamp-sized enclave did indeed issue its own stamps.
The actual legislation the state department invokes is a 1990 prohibition on funding "the United Nations or any specialised agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organisation the same standing as a member state", and another in 1994 banning payments to "any affiliated organisation of the United Nations which grants full membership as a state to any organisation or group that does not have the internationally recognised attributes of statehood".
Any president, as we have seen, has ways to get around congressional mandates like this. For example, there are questions about which manifestation of Palestine is applying: the PLO or the Palestinian Authority. The congressional legislation was passed before the Oslo accords – and before the US began funding the Palestinians directly, so an executive decision could have declared that events had overtaken the intent of the law, and, what is more, that it was not the PLO but the Palestinian state that had been admitted.
As for the second part, US diplomats will have fun explaining why the US maintains membership of the World Bank and IMF – which have admitted Kosovo, whose disputed territory and statehood, rightly or wrongly, has far less general recognition than Palestine's.
The White House should listen to the cheers in the hall that followed the Unesco vote – reminiscent of those that greeted the end of another period of diplomatic folly when Beijing took Chiang Kai-Shek's seat in the UN after decades of American pretence that an off-shore island represented China there.
Over-stretched financially and militarily, beset with problems that can only be solved multilaterally, doing Binyamin Netanyahu's bidding will win Obama few votes at home. The American Likudniks will still believe the president is an alien-born Muslim and send their votes and cheques accordingly. Abroad, the US has abandoned all logic, all signs of joined-up diplomacy, and abandoned the last vestiges of pretensions to be an honest broker in the Middle East.
As an epitaph to American diplomacy and illusions of empire, look at the votes for Palestine: Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Libya all voted against the US. Any more candidates for liberation?

Keystone Cops in FBI endanger the world

Iran Assassination Plot Has Earmarks of FBI Care and Feeding

By Ian Williams, October 19, 2011

Last weekend the Martin Luther King memorial was unveiled in Washington, evoking  his speech “I have a dream.” I was having a dream too, but mine wandered between nightmare and “déjà vu all over again.” Unlike many on the left in the USA, when I see President Obama I see a fundamentally decent person reading a script written by others -- which in this dream is like Colin Powell reciting his fundamentally flawed brief at the UN about Iraqi weapons.
The taurine faecal evidence of an Iranian plot to kill a Saudi envoy in the US has all the conviction of Hitler describing Polish infiltration into German territory in 1939 -- and all the humiliation of seeing a decent person’s integrity being abused.
The “plot” recalls how much of American governmental behavior evokes the unreformed eighteenth century British polity on which it is based. Apart from the overtly corrupt electoral system gerrymandered into an American version of rotten boroughs and the Gradgrindish attitudes to public welfare, that is no more apparent than in the legal system.
Maybe they no longer hang people for pickpocketing any item worth more than a shilling, but they do execute quite a few on dubiously assembled evidence that relies on paid informants and, especially in the case of the FBI, on paid instigators.
So one does not have to join the  Iranian Ayatollah Fan Club to be skeptical of the latest allegations. It is a sad fact that almost every terrorist plot the FBI has unearthed for many years -- even before 9-11 -- has also been planted and nurtured by the FBI. Even in the long-forgotten first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 it was an Egyptian officer who was also a paid FBI informant who seems to have instigated the completely inept plot, for which arch-enemy of the Mubarak regime Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman is still serving a life sentence -- or not, since the actual charges of conspiracy and sedition are reminiscent of days of repression in Britain around the time of the Peterloo massacre that moved Shelley to stirring verses, rarely taught in English Lit classes.
It does not take a close shave with Occam’s razor to question whether Teheran really sent a wire transfer of a $100,000 to the USA to secure the assassination of the Saudi Ambassador. Firstly, every transfer of more than $10,000 has to be registered, and rings alarms bells for money laundering, and secondly, sadly, among Mexican cartels, that sum buys a wholesale massacre, not a retail murder.
Then there is the old question, Cui Bono? Who would benefit? One can never totally discount the stupidity of the Iranian regime, but this goes beyond expectations. Iran would gain little from offing a Saudi diplomat -- but lose lots. The FBI gets itself yet another (contrived) terrorist plot to justify its huge spending and the intrusions into civil liberties it has been allowed under the so-called “war on terror.” Its previous record of getting informants and instigators who are paid and pardoned of other crimes to set up the weak and gullible to be arrested with a fanfare certainly fits the script here: an arrested drug smuggler paid to suborn an Iranian immigrant second hand car salesman struggling under a huge debt load.
But Israel wants an excuse to attack Iran -- and hitherto even a complaisant Washington has warned against that. Obama might not support, but if persuaded by these amateur theatricals, like Colin Powell, he might not oppose an assault very vigorously. And there are many in his administration for whom the question “Is it good for Israel?” outweighs whether it is good for Obama, let alone America.
Even if this were just Keystone Cops stuff from a xenophobically insular FBI, without thought for the international consequences, it could have profound international consequences. Quite apart from the  sanguinary consequences to Israel itself, not to mention to Iran and the region, of any solid manifestation of Netanyahu’s bellicosity, a closure of the Gulf and removal of a huge portion of the world’s oil supplies would be all that is needed to bring the whole house of cards, dollar and Euros, tumbling down.
And to return to Martin Luther King, let us remember, despite official American media amnesia. King was a democratic socialist, who was assassinated while being tailed by the FBI, as he supported a strike by a municipal workers’ union. He knew the FBI well -- he would be properly skeptical of any claim they made. And he would be occupying Wall St, not calling for war on Iran.

It's not black and white, nor even red and blue!

Me dropping on the binary positions on intervention and making digs at Slavic leaders like Milosevic and Putin who rotate presidencies and premierships.

The Unions Made the Labour Party

 My piece in the Labour Party conference issue of Tribune 24 Sept 2011

Attempts in Britain to break the connection between the trade unions and their offspring, the Labour Party, have a strong resonance in the United States, where relations are strained between the unions and the Democratic Party.
There are always tensions. The narrower interests of the unions do not always coincide with the greater good of the society at large. In the US, prison unions lobbied along with private prison providers against the decriminalisation of drugs. Police and warders’ unions have lobbied successfully for sweetheart deals on pensions and pay that are far too costly for local governments. It reminds me of Liverpool in the old days of Militant where the infiltrators gave the municipal unions all they could want in return for support in the district Labour Party.
However, even that was infinitely preferable to the current, much more successful crop of infiltrators in both the Labour Party and the US Democratic Party, whose strategy since Tony Blair and Bill Clinton has been to slough off the unions so they can give sweetheart deals to financiers. I am all in favour of accepting corporate donations for parties, as long as all they get in return is a receipt and a respectfully sceptical hearing.
But what makes unions different, certainly in Britain and even in the US, is their ideological commitment to the greater public welfare. The much-reviled Auto Workers Union in the US did win better wages, pensions and healthcare than many other weaker groups of workers. But it did so only after failing to get a better national pension and healthcare system. They helped with cash and workers to end segregation in the South, and even now are strong supporters of protecting state-run Social Security and Medicare benefits and support a single payer healthcare system.
For such endeavours, and in reward for their efforts to help Democratic Party elections with volunteers and cash, Clinton dismissed them as “special interests” – to be distinguished, of course, from the Wall Street bankers who also filled his coffers, in return for the deregulation that George W Bush built on and led to the crisis and slump of the past two years.
In the wake of that crisis, on both sides of the Atlantic, unions have rediscovered a new combative spirit. Their members are more responsive to calls for action fuelled by the ever-potent mix of self-interest – after all, they are under attack – and moral indignation at the callow, selfish ideologies propounded by governments.
In Wisconsin, the public unions rallied unprecedented thousands of ordinary citizens against what they correctly saw as the right-wing governor’s ideologically motivated attack on the rights of all workers and the entitlements of all ordinary citizens.
Sadly, Barack Obama’s response was to offer even more than the pound of flesh the Republicans in Washington had asked for. He threw in social security and Medicare and more spending cuts.  His motivation is a mystery. Until then, the one sure thing the Democrats had to beat the Republicans was their attack on programmes most Americans hold sacred. Even the Tea Partiers carried placards demanding: “Keep the government’s hands off my Social Security”.
Social Security was always regarded as the “third rail” of American politics, but the Republican budget attacking Medicare added an overhead wire as well. Now Obama has firmly grasped both – and short-circuited the most energetic Democrat campaign item. The President persists in trying to compromise
with ideologues who are, well, uncompromising.
What he needs, like the Labour Party, is an ideology to combat theirs. The unions, on both sides of the Atlantic, are at the core of a communal concern that led to 30 years of unprecedented growth and prosperity in the US, and nearly 60 years in Europe. Some union leaders may be almost as power hungry and greedy as their corporate opponents – but then some business leaders, such as Warren Buffet, are more progressive than New Labour and New Democrats. However, the effort to cut the union ties is on both sides of the Atlantic not only an unprincipled effort to mute the voices of working people in the political process, it is also a self-defeating move that will alienate the very voters and activists the parties need to be elected. Those New Labour apparatchiks might get selected without the unions. They won’t be elected.

Palestinian Stat(us) at UN and the US.

United Nations Report

Once Again, in Full View of the World, U.S. Acting for Israel, Against Its Own Interests By Ian Williams

t

The U.N. vote on Palestine is an oddity. No one can be sure what benefit the Palestinians get from it, and there is good reason to believe that its main current motivation is an earnest desire on the part of President Mahmoud Abbas’ administration to show some progress—any progress at all, in fact—from its appeasement to Israel and the U.S.
On one level, the Palestinian move to up- grade its status is the continuation of a long march through international institutions that developed momentum in the 1990s. That upgraded the Palestinian delegation to that of a unique observer mission just fractionally short of statehood, and restated and strengthened resolutions and expressions of international law on the conflict.
But why revive the issue now? Many Palestinians see it as a diversion and a means to shore up a corrupt and compro-

mising administration in the Palestinian Authority—and, contrary to Israeli rhetoric, not as a means to kill Oslo, but to maintain flickers of life in that Zombie-like structure as it shambles toward the mirage of a two-state solution.
However, whatever Abbas’ motives, and no matter how inadvertently he has hit the right target, the illogical fury of the Israeli reaction, and the servile echoing of it by the Obama administration, should vindicate him.
Not since the British and Canadians burned the White House in 1813 has American foreign policy been so publicly and humiliatingly trashed. And it is all self-inflicted.
As Obama reminded the international delegates, an American president stood at the podium of the General Assembly in September 2010 and looked forward to welcoming a Palestinian state within the year—but a year later he was ordering his diplomats to join with Israel to take every measure, including abusing the U.S. veto to thwart the consummation he himself had promised the year before.

This year, Obama restated the administration line: “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations...Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians—not us—who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders and on security, on refugees and Jerusalem.” He omitted any direct threats or references to the Palestinian application for membership, or even Palestine’s attempt to upgrade its status at the U.N. 

The diplomatic silence might have avoided irritating the Palestinians, and perhaps slightly camouflaged the humiliation of what is, after all, still the world’s biggest military and economic power, pandering to the crazed ideologues of a small rogue state.

The threatened veto rewards a U.S. “ally” which had defied a plea to halt settlement building and had humiliatingly announced a round of illegal construction during a visit by Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden.
In return, Washington has lost what little trust it had with the newly enfranchised Arab electorates; alienated major re- gional powers like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and lost its credibility with the two-thirds or more of U.N. members who have recognized Palestine or indicated an intention to do so.on the opposite side of the world.

If Obama does not do enough damage, Congress is likely to cause even more. In the heyday of American power, Congress began to cut funding for the U.N.—over the Palestinian issue. The assumption was that the U.N. needed the U.S. more than vice versa. That is no longer quite as true, and congressional threats to defund the U.N. and its agencies if the members of the organization vote for some form of Palestinian statehood will enhance the damage to American prestige—and leverage— when Washington wants something from the U.N., as it increasingly does. With the parlous state of the U.S. economy and its overstretched military, Washington will in- deed be going back to the U.N., but will find it more difficult than ever to get the legitimation it wants and needs.

On the Israeli side, reports of Israeli “diplomacy” suggest that harangues to foreign ambassadors and ministers by right- wing Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman are predictably counterproductive. If countries pay any attention, it is to the American dummy, not the Russian-Israeli ventriloquist, since American power, even rapidly evaporating as it is, is still substantial.
Perhaps the one hint of self-interested lucidity in the White House and State Department is the realization of just how much damage an American veto would do to Washington’s standing in the world. However, the efforts to get other countries to “help” by not supporting the Palestinian bid in the Security Council presume a global public that is all of below average intelligence. Widely advertised, the U.S. was hoping to squeeze enough weak links to ensure that the resolution would not get the nine necessary positive votes.
Do Obama and Clinton really think that the rest of the world would not know who had brought about the defeat? Or that those countries dragooned in would not re- sent being forced to share the blame?
Quite apart from any effects on Palestinians, the U.S. maneuvers can hardly help its professed larger projects in the United Nations: democratization, enhancing the rule of law, and prevention of crimes against humanity. It not only does truth to the rumors of double standards spread so assiduously by sundry dictators and their friends, but if the U.S. were successful in suborning European and other allies, it strips away Washington’s credibility when it comes to advocating, for example, the Responsibility to Protect.
In short, not only is there no rational self-interest for the U.S. in thwarting Pales- tine’s efforts, it actually detracts from American interest.
However, it is based on the fatally flawed policy introduced by Bill Clinton, which was to bypass international law and insist that the road to peace lay through bilateral negotiations. So a Sumo wrestler steals the tricycle of a diapered toddler, and the solution is put them in the area together for a fair fight to settle the issue.
Which brings us to the Israeli motivation

for combating this. In the words of Macbeth, the Israeli narrative is “a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Certainly Lieberman’s harangues to diplomats seem to be counterproductive, not least because they all remember that the Quartet, the U.S. president, the U.N. and even, very grudgingly, Netanyahu himself, all have accepted that the road to peace is a two-state solution, with boundaries based on the pre-1967 armistice line.
So why should the full force of Israeli hasbara, the John Boltons, Eli Wiesels, Alan Dershowitzs and the rest of the crowd, not to mention the full resources of the U.S. State Department, be marshaled against the Palestinian resolution?
To begin with, of course, Netanyahu ac cepts a Palestinian state the way he would welcome a melanoma. He was only kid- ding. Many of those screaming behind him would not even pay lip service to the idea. They repudiate the whole idea of a Palestinian state and resent any implication of Palestinian rights in any part of Israel and the territories it illegally occupies. Many such hysterical supporters in the U.S. are also deniers of Obama’s American nation- ality and have campaigned furiously against him and the Democrats, which adds extra poignancy to Obama’s pander- ing to them. They will still hate him.
There is also a rational, albeit cynical, point. A Palestinian state, whether a member of the U.N. or not, can and would be accepted as a state member of the In- ternational Criminal Court—indeed its appli- cation to sign the Con- vention establishing it is already under consider- ation. That has pro- found implications for Israeli civil and military leaders. While the coun- try that kidnapped Eichmann and brought him to justice has not signed the convention, its citizens would be li- able for crimes commit- ted in the West Bank and Gaza if ratification followed statehood.
But there is also an element in the psycho- politics of extreme Zionism which reminds

them that they are indeed people of the law. Although the interminable court proceedings about land-grabs and civilian rights invariably lead to ratification of occupation misdeeds, they do go through the process!
One is reminded of some of the evasions of Talmudic exegesis such as the idea that a telephone wire around an area can make it an enclosed part of one’s backyard. While the rest of the world regards the territories as occupied, Israel refers to them as “dis- puted,” because, they say, no state had recognized title to them. Of course, a Palestin- ian state would unravel any notional tele- phone wire the courts might hitherto have accepted around the boundary.
In the end, one does have to wonder what the Palestinians as people get out of the U.N. bid. But certainly, the embarrass- ment it has caused to Obama and Clinton have made them take Palestinian positions more seriously than they have in the past, while removing any residual illusions that some Palestinian leaders might have that the U.S. is an honest broker in the conflict.
Obama, reportedly, shares the detestation that most reasonable people have for Netanyahu, so one can only welcome any- thing that makes the partnership more uncomfortable for him. ❑

THE WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS

NOVEMBER 2011

Topless Towers

WTC, 9-11, memories
I wrote this for a London magazine which in the end spiked it, as I remember for a piece by a close friend of the editor who was distressed by the smoke from a vantage point at the opposite end of the island. So here it is. In memoriam, ten years later.

Ian

Osama’s Victory.

September 2001

I moved from midtown to lower Manhattan in late August 2001. South Street Sea Port seemed like home to someone who left Liverpool twelve years before. Indeed in some ways I had hardly left. The plaque on the esplanade mentioned that it built on rubble landfill from blitzed London that returning supply ships used as ballast.. Those ships actually came from bombed Liverpool. I’d used it to illustrate my thesis that American civilian experience of war was vicarious and inaccurate compared with that of Europeans, even younger ones like me brought up playing in bomb sites and listening to tales of evacuations and bomb shelters from older family members.

I had developed a routine in the new apartment. A brisk cycle ride round the southern tip of the island, past Battery Park and up the new bike up the Hudson that begins by running through the dark valley between the World Trade Centre and the World Financial Centre. On the morning of September 11, I began my day as usual by checking my email as I swigged my first mug of tea, sitting, I must confess, in stark naked comfort.

The email brought several promising commissions, and so I decided to postpone my daily ride, even though the blue skies and equable temperature outside promised one of New York’s few sweet spots between its more customary extremes of frigidity and torridity. Instead I began work on an article for Punch, on the underlying wobbliness of the American economy.

I had written “The” was when I heard the bang. It sounded like a building collapsing, so I ran to the window to look out. The fish porters from the Fulton market were standing in the square of Peck Slip staring up as if at the Second Coming. I pulled on clothes and ran down with a cell phone, recorder, binoculars and a camera. If this wa sindeed the second coming, it was the early stages, the arrival of Satan on Earth. The World Trade Centre’s north tower had an exit wound some three quarters of the way up, with flames erupting from the north east corner , and thick black smoke framing the brightness.

“Look there’re people jumping” a woman shouted in anguish. As far as I could see, what she thought were people was in fact metal siding drifting downwards on the wind. However, my reassurance was premature: shortly afterwards, that’s just what people trapped in the upper floors began doing.

I began trying to call various newsrooms on my cell phone, to no avail. Either everyone else in Lower Manhattan was hitting their dial buttons at the same time, or, I suspected, the antennae were on top of the Twin Towers.

I ran inside to call from my desk phone, but Canadian Broadcasting’s Toronto newsroom was already calling. Ducking between my fire escape platform and the phone, I began to tell them what was happening. The other tower exploding at a slightly lower level. Then the apocalyptic crash as it collapsed.

Up the East River Drive, the FDR. I could see along the shore line as ambulances, fire trucks and police cars fought the rush hour traffic to get closer. Then the evacuees began to trudge by. I had seen refugees in war zones before, but to see endless columns of necktied office workers was a new experience. Most of them marched onwards stolidly without a backward glance, perhaps not realizing that this stretch of their route offered a direct view of the disaster they were fleeing.

On the Brooklyn Bridge, the marching files were silhouetted against the sky like a scene from an Eisenstein film. But then, even those who still stood transfixed in the square had no view. A white cloud, like Pliny’s description of Vesuvius spread from the tower. Heavy choking white ash which fell like snow over the area. By then, most of the rubber neckers had joined the majority marching out the city. A few optimistic ones tried to stop yellow cabs, which sensibly wanted nothing to do with them: just to get out.

In the square some young Indian women had lost their shoes in the rush, and were bleeding from head wounds. My girlfriend invited them to wash off in the bathroom and phone relatives before setting off. A young African man, probably illegal since he did not want to give his name, waited anxiously. He’d been taking his three year old son to pre-school and had lost him in the stampede. In one of the day’s happy stories, he found him, intact at the nearby hospital where some passer by had taken him. He stood in the square in front of us, hugging him thankfully and staring at the column of smoke that marked the site.

I’d been describing the scene from my fire escape for CBC in Toronto, who told me to stand by for ninety seconds for “local announcements.” As they did so, the second tower collapsed. It was the first time I lost my calm. I bellowed down the phone, cursing them and telling them what to do with their local announcements, but to no avail. I had to hold the line open as it was transferred from editor to editor, producer to producer, mostly ignoring the call waiting signals which represented the more successful attempts of friends and family to check on our safety. As the news spread, inward circuits were blocked as people across the world tried to do the same.

A second cloud headed across Manhattan, adding more white ash to the dust that drifted like snow across downtown. By now I was recounting the morning’s events for the BBC, while wrestling with an illustrative side issue. I had mentioned to another editor earlier that Mayor Rudy Giuliani had built his $16 million dollar command and control centre for emergencies and disasters in the World Trade Centre. She commissioned an immediate piece.

I thought it was a potent metaphor for the inefficacy of expensive Star Wars defence systems against this type of attack and spent several hours alternating between radio interviews by phone and checking my memories. It was true. The “bunker,” widely derided as a grandiose folly when it was built, was indeed on the 23rd floor of number 7 WTC, already aflame and later to collapse.

I clicked the send button and as the call volume fell, the adrenalin aftershock set in. Coughing and hoarse with dust and talking, I decided I could take it no longer. I had to go to see what was happening closer to the scene.

The Pompeii parallels became more apt outside. On Fulton Street, the local deli’s display of flowers was shrouded in ash. A fish porter’s breakfast lay in its foil tray, similarly coated, and the little mobile hot dog stands stood abandoned, their bagels and buns buried in a drift of grey dust.

Smoke streamed across towards Brooklyn, and the emergency vehicles stirred up dust devils as if on a desert road as they sped through the police lines to the epicentre. Looking straight down Fulton St, I expected to see a stump, a pyramid of rubble. But who’d a thought the old towers had so little substance in them. It was clear that despite the column of smoke, there was nothing to be seen.

I could flee, or carry on working. Firstly I wanted to pay my debts so we went to the downtown hospital to give blood. They were not accepting it, and what’s more, there was what I thought of as a “fee fo fi fum” warning out. The blood of Englishmen smelt of mad cow disease and was not acceptable.

So brandishing a tape recorder I approached Alex MacLain, a junior doctor at NYU hospital. She had been on duty forty hours, recalled just as she was leaving. She described an early rush of burn victims, “glove injuries,” she said, and explained. “Like one woman came in, and all the skin on her arm and shoulder came off.” Then there was a rush of impact injuries and fractures: followed by an ominous hiatus. She had come to the corner of Fulton St to see what was happening.

As we spoke, behind us I could the lighthouse shaped Titanic monument. In front of us the world was ending in fire, not ice. Coughing despite the masks that the local hospital was distributing, I suddenly had a terrible thought. We were breathing people. There was no way that everyone could have escaped. This smoke, these ashes, were from a massive funeral pyre: the Windows on the World had become a peephole into Hell.

Blowing around in the ashes, the memories of the world’s life were flashing by in form of charred and chewed papers. Plans for environmental projects financed by Wall Street bonds, cheques for unimaginable numbers of zeroes, bunkering invoices from Pakistan, Japanese investment reports, and personnel files. I learned from a police deposition that a Ms Watkins earned $500 a day in a massage parlour, charging $40 for a hand job, $80 for oral sex and $150 for full sex. But it had done her little good since her pimp took the lot. Down by Wall St, in front of Federal Hall, where George Washington was proclaimed the first president, his statue overlooked his handiwork, his hair appropriately powdered like a Georgian wig for the first time in two centuries.


The NYPD working press pass says it entitles the bearer to cross police lines. It had never worked before, so I was not surprised to be greeted with customary brusqueness when I probed the police perimeter to get closer. I moved south and discovered a motley Dunkirk style line of tour boats and tug boats at Battery Park, waiting for evacuees. It was a weak link in the cordon and I sidled through.

On the Hudson side of Manhattan, the debris, smashed vehicles and even deeper ashes made for an even more apocalyptic scene. We were closer and the wind blew from the west into the fire, giving a clearer view of the firefighters trying to control the blaze in the surrounding buildings. Next to us, lines of hoses led from the fireboats which normally only seemed to provide water displays for the visiting cruise liners. Now they were pumping thousands of tons of Hudson water into the ruins.

I lent my cell phone to several exhausted firemen, checking on children, wives and friends. Someone had forced open a local Deli, and they were helping themselves to water and snacks. Even though it was technically looting, no one took more than they needed, except one young man, who looked like a local resident. He helped himself to a pack of cigarettes, paused, and then took two more. Tobacco does that to a person, I thought, even as I wondered at an ash covered fireman who came out with a huge lit cheroot in his mouth. How much smoke can you take!

Another fireman came out of the store. Caked in dust and sweat, he was voraciously stuffing a banana into his mouth in between gulps of water. He looked around with a sort of pugnacious puzzlement at the ash, the debris, the mud, and the smoke. “Can you believe it?” he asked me, “I’m looking for a fucking garbage can!” He threw the peel at the ashes on the floor as if it were a demonstration against the lack of civilization in the neighbourhood.

One of the firemen who had used my phone was telling me bitterly “you know, three hundred of guys got caught when they collapsed.” He then said. “I don’t want to offend anyone, but we just gotta go in and nuke the whole fucking Middle East now.” It was timely reminder. It was early days, and no one had fingered the perpetrators, but somehow, I didn’t want to remind him of Timothy MacVeigh and the anti Arab hysteria that the media had perpetrated before it had happened.

It was now eight hours from the first crash. I had enough local colour, and thought that I was in danger of degenerating from a reporter to a rubbernecker, so I decided to make my way back and file. I headed south only to meet a more than usually implacable police cordon on the Hudson River promenade, “Get on the boat, “they said. pointing to a tug whose bow was nudging the sea wall. “No thanks I said politely,” waving my press card. “You have to. It’s dangerous.”

“I’m press- it’s my job to take risks. I’ve been in Beirut and Balkans. No one’s shooting at me here, I told him, brandishing my press card.
“Get on, or we put you on. We already put two of you guys on.” he said with “make my day” relish. The tug took us to New Jersey, and dropped us at a pier with large signs saying “Condemned structure. No trespassing.” I had no idea how to get back into Manhattan to file, or to wash or change for that matter.

The view from the boat was almost worth it. The Sun setting behind us was lighting up the intact windows of lower Manhattan as if they too were on fire, and tingeing the column of smoke with an appropriately bloody hue. All weekend I had been sailing on the Hudson from the Manhattan Yacht Club out of the North Cove in the shadow of the WTC. We had used the two towers as our navigation aids as we practiced tacking up and down the Harbour. Their absence was even more striking. And I remembered, so was that of my fellow crew member, a Brit I had met for the first time, who had just arrived and was working on the 25 floor of one of the towers. He only had an office number. Death moved from wholesale to personal.

In New Jersey, waiting on the pier were police, paramedics, Red Cross, waited for casualties. They had spent hours watching the pyre burn across the Hudson: they wanted desperately to help, but we were disappointments for their eleemosynary instincts, deportees more than evacuees. The lines of ambulances and doctors waiting on the other side, no casualties emerged, except as smoke.

Hours later, a train from New Jersey to midtown, and a long hike down the East River side brought us home. The police manned checkpoints on all the roads, but as so often in New York the bike paths and foot paths are invisible to drivers. The police overlooked the route along the esplanade, and it became my own personal route for several days. At home, the power was gone, so were the phone lines. And a week later they still were.

Downtown reminded me of divided Berlin or Beirut. To the North of the police perimeter, there were bright lights, shops, bars and restaurants open for teeming crowds. To the south the inhabitants stumbled about in the dark. If they trudged North to resupply, they were shaken down at innumerable checkpoints by a motley array of military and police uniforms. I suspect, despite rather than because of them, there was little of the looting or lawlessness that the stereotype of New York City would suggest. The only vehicles moving were official vehicles with flashing lights on top. Looking for light relief, I suggested ”Hey, if aliens were looking on, they’d think it was the lights made them move!”

At the end of the week, the Police commissioner reported that crime was way down. Even the criminal classes rose to the occasion. Radio reports dwelt on the few crimes. A man appropriated a fireman’s jacket, a retired warder stole some watches while someone else broke into Brooks Brothers. Brooks Brothers! Did he need a suit to start work on Monday? One thing was sure. He would pay some small part of the price for the absent perpetrators when the courts opened.

Our recently stocked refrigerator was thawing rapidly. On the first night, exhausted , dusty and thirsty I made an executive decision was made. There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge still cool. We knocked it back before it could warm and sank into fitful sleep, punctuated by long vigils at the window watching as the first convoys of armoured cars and troops arrived along the FDR, and noting the absence of ambulances among the sporadic bursts of traffic.

We began an ironic tribute to Paris Zoo menu from the siege of 1870. A born again carnivore with a cholesterol problem, I had stocked up on venison, buffalo burgers and ostrich loin. No fricassee of elephant trunk at the back of the freezer, but we ate our way through the rest.

Just around the corner, our problem was writ large, much larger in fact. There was no power for the Fulton Street fish market, where millions of dollars worth of fish waited in freezers without power. Never particularly sweet smelling, I quailed at the thought of their eventual exhumation.

Two days later, the police allowed in generators for them, and trucks to ship some out. I went down to check. “Is this fish being dumped or sol?” “It’s still in ice, it’s fine,” they told me, as I made a mental note to drop fish from my menu for a few weeks. In a way, it was a reassuring sign of the return of the commercial impulse. One bleak reminder of the shock of the tragedy was that no umbrella sellers appeared on the streets to sell their wares when the rain of dust fell. After two days, in China town, a store keeper was selling visitors photo postcards of the explosions at 2 for three dollars. And of course there were flags, a dollar each.

The flags began to appear two days later. CBC wanted a series of interviews for their local stations, so I got up at 6 and went down to the river side so my cell phone could get a strong signal from across the East River in Brooklyn. Half an inch of rain had fallen, and more was bucketing down I shuddered at the thought of the murky slurry that the rescuers would be working in.

In the grey morning light, the low clouds obscured the smoke and the rain even quelled the ubiquitous smell and dust. Under the shelter of the elevated highway, life had returned to normal. Elderly Chinese from nearby Chinatown did their exercises, and one solitary man brandished a sword in an intricate series of balletic movements. He did not pause as a column of a steel workers formed up in bright yellow water proofs and hard hats with their union Local number written on the side. Led by a large stars and stripes they headed south into the inferno.

About a dozen homeless usually live in the vicinity and four of them who seemed to make a virtual family were inspired to mount their own surreal march. Pushing the one in a wheel chair, they paraded with a placard, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall. New York City/The World.” Pausing in between radio interviews, I asked “Why?” “Gotta a ciggy?” one replied in an London accent. “No, sorry!” I apologized as the phone rang, from, of all places, Iquiluit in the Inuit new territories.

I’ve never understood flag fetishism, but I could see why people would want to respond. Over the next few days, the flags proliferated, but in almost reverse proportion to the distance from what the news reports were calling Ground Zero. “Positive patriotism” is all too often sullied with Xenophobia, which is never an exact science. Maronite Churches were firebombed along with Sikh temples. Maronite and Sikh enthusiasm for Islam, let alone Islamic fundamentalism, has been historically someone tenuous, as anyone should know. But few voters in the world’s only superpower ever take time to study the world, which was perhaps precisely why I was standing in a disaster zone.

Another friend called, with semi light relief, but again with a dark side.

His friend Mohammed worked in a restaurant where 11 of the 14 waiters were also called Mohamed. They used their colleges as names. “Hi Princeton! Hi Columbia!” He was earnestly seeking advice on how to change his name. Quickly

You could almost tell how foreign a storekeeper, or a yellow cab driver felt from how many flags they are flying or sticking like talismans on their doors and windows. And the more I spoke to people, I could see solid reasons for the fear. “Someone must be punished,” is a universal cry. I did a radio interview for the left wing station Pacifica in California. The anchorman on the other side of the continent said “We have to punish them.” Inhaling the smoke from what was after all a near miss for me personally, I asked, “ How do you punish eighteen people who have just killed themselves? And if they had accomplices, can you trust the ideologues round this administration, the Cheneys and Rumsfeldts, to identify the real perpetrators rather than use the opportunity to hit at their own perverse enemies’ list?”

I could trust Powell, who knows that even gestures have their price, but the others worried me. Each day, the news brought more suggestions of right wing wish lists being tacked across the stable door after the Trojan horse had already exploded. More wire taps, tougher immigration, more defence spending, and calls for action all the more ominous for being so nebulously targeted.

I had seen the best side of New York and America in the long lines of volunteers, the heroism of the rescuers, the donations of food, clothes, and money and the flood of resources available when the will was there. But the urge to do something could be as innocuous as standing on street corners with candles, or it could lead to applause for the incineration of other faraway cities of which they know or care little.

As Sunday drew on, Mayor Giuliani opened the way to Wall St. Back to normalcy. Radio advertisements told Americans that the way to show their patriotism was to show their support for American companies. “Buy Stock,” the broker harangued. I did a double take: it was genuine, not some subversive parody. And within sniffing distance, an army of rescuers used muscle power to sift the still smouldering ruins, looking with almost certain futility for survivors among the five thousand lives snuffed out in less than an hour on bright sunny morning in Manhattan.