Climate of Fear Read Online Free PDF

greeted with those
knowing
smirks that declared one a victim of Western brainwashing and an enemy of the anti-imperialist struggle. The notion that there should be rules and restraints even within an accepted mandate of justifiable violence in the cause of a people’s liberation was simply too abstruse a concept, one that identified only the lackeys of the imperialist order. Distasteful though the conclusion may be to such mind-sets, September 11, 2001, has proved to be only a culmination of the posted signs that had been boldly scrawled on the sands of the Sahara, over decades, in letters of blood.
    We are repeatedly bombarded with the notion that the world we once knew ended on September 11, 2001. I find myself unable to empathize with such a notion, and we shall look at the reasons why as we proceed with our series. For now, let me simply admit that it is within that subjective context that I found it most appropriately symbolic that I, the only African passenger aboard a British Airways flight between London and Los Angeles on that day, should be the last person on the plane to learn what had happened, and perhaps one of the last million or two of the world population to know that the world had, allegedly, undergone a permanent transformation. It is an appropriate anecdote on which to end this introductory lecture.
    What happened was quite simple: my routine on an aircraft—which I regret to admit has virtually become my third or fourth home—is quite simple. I take advantage of the total isolation to do some work, eat at meal-times, doze off in fits and starts, drink any amount of wine I feel like—in defiance of medical wisdom—but mostly engage in a sometimes intensive dialogue with my laptop. On September 11, the routine was no different. I must have been in one of my sleep modes when the event occurred. When I woke up, I simply reported back for duty with my laptop.
    My surprise was quite subdued when, eight to nine hours after takeoff, I heard the pilot announce that we were now approaching Manchester—subdued because the United States makes free with the names of cities from all over the world, and I imagined that the weather had forced the pilot to follow a different flight pattern from the norm, one that brought him over some American town called Manchester, rather than the city of Boise, Idaho, a name I had grown accustomed to hearing from the flight deck as we drew close to Los Angeles. However, when, a few minutes later, the same voice announced that we were now crossing the Welsh border, I had to wonder if this was not one coincidence too many.
    Before I had time to work out what it all meant, however, the next announcement informed me that we were making our approach for a landing in . . . Cardiff! I pressed the bell and the flight steward came by. Why, I asked, were we landing in Cardiff, and could he inform me in what part of the United States that was situated?
    The poor man blinked hard, stared down at me. Didn’t I know that we had turned around in mid-Atlantic? There had been, he said, a “security incident” in the United States and all planes were being either diverted or not permitted to take off at all if their destination was the U.S. We were headed for Cardiff because there were no more berths at Heathrow, other U.S.bound planes having been grounded. Beyond that, he could offer no explanation. I shrugged it off. It was not, after all, the first time that my plane had been diverted or done a full turnaround, mid-Atlantic, on account of some technical problem.
    Here is an appropriate moment to confess to my own five-year cohabitation with a personalized form of fear. Nothing less than fear had long since schooled me into traveling with only hand luggage. I have always been a light traveler, but the habit became de rigueur under the terror reign of Sanni Abacha of Nigeria. So unscrupulous were the methods of that dictatorship that its agents did not hesitate to