Everyone remembers where they were when the towers came down. I was in my attic writing a column for the Herald about Tony Blair's forthcoming confrontation with the Trades Union Congress in Brighton. I turned on the television to catch the live conference coverage and found that I was watching a Hollywood disaster movie. If only.
Out of interest, I dug out the articles I filed in the immediate aftermath of the greatest terrorist atrocity in history.. “President Bush's first instinct after yesterday's attack”, I wrote on 12/11/ 2001, “will have been to launch massive and unpitying retaliation - except that he has no obvious target. Osama Bin Laden? The Taleban? Afghanistan? The West Bank? Iran? Iraq?”. I went on: ”An unbridled pursuit of revenge would turn the world into a vastly more dangerous place...History will not excuse America if it now inflicts indiscriminate violence and terror against innocent peoples because they happen to live in the Middle East or Asia, have a brown skin or follow the Islamic faith”. America then proceeded to do precisely that.
