It is as though President Franklin D Roosevelt had decided after Pearl Harbor that things would be easier if those enemy planes turned out to have been piloted by Fijians.

Friday, September 28, 2001
(Key West, Florida, USA)

THE traditional enemies of the truth are hard at work against me again. I send this letter to WGBH television in Boston:

"I have been shown a copy of your latest video catalogue including the following references to me in reference to Video item WG2711:

"... David Irving claims the Holocaust was a myth. ... Irving defends himself and Hitler's Nazi atrocities..."

It should be obvious to you that these statements are malicious, untrue, defamatory, and grossly libellous, and I must ask you to ensure that they are immediately removed from all your materials. My books have been published by the world's leading publishers, including The Viking Press, Little Brown, Simon & Schuster, Avon Books, Wm. Morrow Inc., Random House, Inc. and others. I also participated in your own well-known film series The Prize."

However, there is some consolation in London: The Daily Telegraph has published a diary item reporting that the Reform Club, which banned me from their portals -- not that I had intended entering -- has now placed two copies of my latest biography of Churchill in its Member's Library.

Saturday, September 29, 2001
(Key West, Florida, USA)

POURING with tropical rain all night. Inches and inches of the stuff. The FBI has now very belatedly admitted that Mohammed Atta, one of the older hijackers and evidently their leader, had baggage which "did not make" the doomed connecting flight from Boston; I wonder how long the FBI has been sitting on this stunning revelation. They now disclose that in that baggage and allegedly among the wreckage of two other planes (including the Pennsylvania crash!) were found copies of a letter which Atta wrote to his team members, couched in the holiest language, giving them tactical instructions like urging them to smile at the taxi driver, and then adding the ideological fuel: they will be dying bravely in the knowledge that they are entering paradise. The letters are in Arabic (not Pashto or any other language used in Afghanistan).

 HAVING grown suspicious of this government's truthfulness, I suspect that the several copies of the letter were found in Atta's baggage; it is improbable that they were found at the disaster scenes. The letter advises the team to "crave death" and to "make sure no one is following" and remarks that "everybody hates death" but it makes no mention of Osama bin Laden, but none of the newscasters is indelicate enough to remark upon that, what with American and US special forces claimed to be already operating inside Afghanistan.

It is altogether an odd war. The White House has picked its own enemy and is going hell-bent after him, "Dead or Alive," regardless of whether he has anything to do with the crime. It is as though President Franklin D Roosevelt had decided after Pearl Harbor that things would be easier if those enemy planes turned out to have been piloted by Fijians, and he was declaring war on Fiji instead.

It becomes increasingly apparent, and no amount of media obfuscation can obscure the fact, that the attack was launched by Islamic fundamentalists claiming no particular sovereignty, and that they did not choose to attack -- and destroy -- New York's Twin Towers, the proud icons of international finance, by happenstance.

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Sept 13: CNN first reports Pennsylvania crash debris found 8 miles away