Climate of Fear Read Online Free PDF Page B

introduce contraband, specifically hard drugs, into the luggage of the opposition, then alert the customs officials at the destination of the approaching drug baron. If I lived under any real fear during the struggle to rid the nation of that dictatorship, it was definitely that, over and above anything else. It surpassed even the possibility of being seduced by a designing female, like the hapless whistle-blower on the Israeli nuclear activities whose pleasure trip with his paramour ended up in the net spun by the Mossad, and an eighteen-year prison sentence. Against such a predicament one could at least protect oneself by resisting temptation; checked-in luggage was far more vulnerable matter. This project of incrimination through baggage tampering actually succeeded with a traditional monarch who had refused to surrender his domain to Abacha’s campaign for a life presidency. I was involved in what were fortunately successful efforts to extricate that innocent from a virtual illegal imprisonment in London, public embarrassment, and even extortion.
    The fear of Abacha had thus turned me into one baggageless passenger you could swear by on any flight, and thus the very first out of the customs area—that is, when I was not being interrogated for having three passports stuck together, plastered with visas and immigration stamps from cover to cover. This time, passage was smooth. I ensconced myself in the bus that had been provided to take us to our hotel, settled down with a book. An hour, one and a half, then nearly two hours later, I was still seated in the bus, increasingly impatient, joined by only a handful of fellow passengers. Cardiff was apparently not accustomed to receiving so many jumbo jets all at once, and the baggage handlers were in a total flounder.
    I got down to look for someone at whom to rail for the delay, stretch my legs, find out into what hotel we were booked, and look for a taxi—then recognized some of the passengers huddled around a mobile telephone, while others queued up for the public equipment. Only then did I begin to suspect that something truly out of the ordinary was responsible for our turnaround. I approached the mobile-telephone owner, who was transmitting to his circle live developments from the United States. That was how, nine to ten hours after the event, I came to know that the world I knew was supposed to have disappeared, or become altered unrecognizably.
    Well, I must confess that the world still looked the same to me, not only on the outside but from what I sensed inside. And this was because my mind flashed in that instant to the day, twelve years earlier, when, for me, the world chose to pretend that nothing unusual had occurred over the continent of Africa, at the edge of the Sahara, knowing full well that agents of a yet unidentified cause had sown the seeds of fear in the hearts of millions of people. The leadership of the world, including the leadership of that continent, chose to absorb this abnormality as only another incident in the war of causes, though even the most tenuous rules of engagement had been unilaterally rewritten to eradicate the rights of the innocent.
    What had I expected? I suppose an equivalent at least of the sense of universal outrage that greeted the destruction of the World Trade Center, an event timed deliberately to take the maximum toll of innocents. Nineteen eighty-nine for me was, therefore, the moment when the world first appeared to have stood still, waiting for a response whose commensurate nature was required to restart the motions of the globe. That response was lacking, at least in intensity, certainly in its neglect of a global repudiation and mobilization. That lack consecrated Lockerbie and set the scene for September 11, 2001. From Niger to Manhattan, the trail of fear had stretched and broadened to engulf the globe, warning its inhabitants that there were no longer any categories of the involved or noninvolved. No longer