August 14, 2003 (Thursday)
Key West, Florida

AN e-mail from Tim V sends an early news report he has seen yesterday: "The third man, Yehuda Abraham, 75, a New York jeweler from Afghanistan, was charged with money laundering in a separate hearing in Manhattan and was held on $10 million bond. He was to be transferred to New Jersey. From today's AP blurb."

I reply: "Yes, some TV channels have now named him, but most, e.g. CNN, have now suppressed entirely the fact that two others have been arrested. I wish I was a fly on the wall of their newsrooms, watching them squirm."

Also an email from a skeptical 12 year old; I urge caution, caution, caution.

[...]

I get some CHURCHILL writing done in the evening, piecing together June 1944.

THE whole of the north-eastern United States and southern Canada is blacked out tonight by an impressive collapse of the electric power grid system. From 4:10 p.m. in a rolling three-minute cascade of multi-megawatt clicks and bangs, the whole power grid shuts down.

The government is quick to pin the blame on a lightning strike on that huge transformer station south of Niagara Falls, NY, and the whole US television channel system clicks its heels and joins in, in a rolling cascade of reassurance to their gape-mouthed viewers. Later word comes out from the unhelpful Canadian Government that there have been no lightning strikes within hundreds of miles of the Niagara-Mohawk grid that evening.

Bush goes on television and announces in his stumbling opening remarks, so far as I can understand them, that no terrorism was involved. That's quick work guys, that's great. So that's okay, just like the American Airlines plane that went down in Rockaway Bay.

Whatever, these folks are scared of their own shadows. It makes them sitting ducks. If it wasn't terrorism, it must surely have put thoughts into the heads of any surviving members of Mohammed Atta's intrepid crew, and even pinpointed some of the weak links for them. The Homeland Security organisation under Tom Ridge -- I have always believed that as Governor of Pennsylvania he was given the new Homeland Security job to keep his mouth shut on United Airlines 93 -- is a fitting successor to the Keystone Cops.

It all takes me back to July 1977. I was taking the family -- including our then four daughters -- around North and South America on a three-month tour. We had reached Los Angeles, and I had bowed to their shrill demands to see Disneyland: that is, I had pointed them down the freeway to Anaheim, given Pilar the car keys, and retired to the hotel room to write.

Hitler's War had just been published, and the British newspapers were fully of both fury and approbation. I gave their mother the Paillard-Bolex, a heavy 16mm film camera, and because of its value told her not to leave it in open view in the car, but "put it in a suitcase." Alas, she misunderstood me and thought she had to carry it around Disneyland in the suitcase. In the heat of a southern Californian July, that was not a prudent decision on her part.

At the end of the day, they were hours late, and they had still not returned to the Beverly Wilshire (yes, in those days the enemy had still not undermined my income); I mentioned this in a phone call to Tom Congdon, one of my best friends, my editor in New York. Eventually, they dragged in, in a state of blind fury. Pilar was clearly distraught. She had forgotten where she had left the rental car, or even what it looked like, and had had to drag four children, the oldest being fourteen, and that heavy suitcase, on foot around the parking lot at Disneyland, which is roughly the size of Brixton, trying to find a car that would fit her key.

I phoned Tom Congdon in New York to report that the family had been found. He said, "David, we are sitting here in darkness." The whole north-eastern seaboard was blacked out. Just like this evening. Come to think of it, that was not al-Qaeda either, so President Bush may be right.

Tomorrow, Rusty Anchor.