- The Observer,
- Sunday September 30 2001
The biologists have said frankly from the outset that the DNA samples and dental records relatives are sending them won't always be enough. Some people will have disappeared without an identifiable trace in the rubble and their families will be left with nothing. Victor Weedn, who founded the US Army's DNA Identification Laboratory, said the technology will reach its limit weeks or months down the line. Sooner or later science becomes a costly 'effort in futility', he told the Washington Post. 'You can't identify every drop of blood.'
American detectives have a less gruesome but more frustrating task. The great opening in a standard investigation, the tantalising moment when a case can be tidied-up, comes when a suspect is identified and apprehended. He may say nothing. He may crack under interrogation. He may agree to be turned, and blab all he knows about his co-conspirators. The detectives have learned that one of the points of suicide bombings is to close their great opportunity. When the 19 hijackers killed themselves the best chance of a full explanation went with them. George W. Bush assured the US Congress that 'whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done'. Justice may come to some behind the plot, but not to the actual perpetrators. They have escaped it in the most conclusive manner imaginable.
The FBI investigation will be the most expensive in history. An extraordinary crime has legitimised the use of extraordinary measures. More than 350 people have been held already, and 400 more are being sought. 'Material witnesses', those the FBI think have information but aren't actual suspects, have been held incommunicado without access to lawyers for as long as six days.
For what? No one arrested has been charged with a crime directly related to the attacks. On Friday Robert Mueller, the FBI's director, was forced to release photos of the suspected suicide hijackers and beg citizens to help his agents identify them. One hijacker, he was sure, was linked to the bin Laden network, but he wouldn't give his name. Mueller admitted that he wasn't clear about the identities of many of the rest.
Leaders worried about what the US will do - which is pretty much everyone apart from Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi - find the absence of certainty unsettling. They don't need proof which will stand up in a court against bin Laden and the Taliban just yet, but they do need something. Even in the authoritarian Middle East, the rulers of Syria, Pakistan and Iran still have to give their populations a justification for co-operating with the Americans.
What the world has heard from the FBI inquiry to date is paltry. The Germans and others at the Nato meeting on Wednesday were convinced the US would arrive with a bulging dossier on bin Laden's complicity. They got so little that a desperate Lord Robertson was reduced to covering America's back by wondering aloud whether 'it is necessary for an ally to produce evidence?' For many in Nato and elsewhere who think the world would be safer if the assaults were treated as great crimes rather than acts of war, the answer is 'yes it damn well is'. But where is that evidence to come from? The hijackers' self-destruction, and the refusal of any group to claim responsibility and explain the motive, may frustrate the best efforts to produce it. These attacks could not have been better designed to sow doubt.
I may be wrong. Maybe the FBI has all kinds of secret information it is preparing to release. For the moment all we know is that the Americans have discovered how easy it is for criminals to dodge identity checks. The first charges from the inquiry have been laid against Herbert Villalobos who, the FBI alleges, was bribed or otherwise persuaded into testifying that two of the hijackers were residents of the state of Virginia. He witnessed their applications for state ID cards without realising why they wanted them. At least four of the hijacker names the FBI released have been challenged by Saudi Arabians with the same or similar names who say their identities were stolen. Saudi officials claim, for instance, that an electrical engineer called Abdul Aziz al-Omari - the same name as one of the hijackers on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon - had his passport stolen in 1996 in Denver.
The most minor and obvious lesson of the past fortnight is that demanding identity cards is the first resort of the humbug journalist and gesture politician. ID cards penalise the law-abiding: if you lose or forget to carry one you commit a criminal offence. They destroy the oldest principle of the Anglo-Saxon democracies' common law that citizens who are neither committing a crime nor behaving suspiciously can go about their business without official harassment. Above all, they legitimise criminals who can move freely with a card obtained with a forged or stolen passport.
For these reasons, the Bush administration dismissed calls from Congress for Americans to be forced to carry national ID cards. Jimmy Orr, the White House spokesman, said on Thursday that Bush was 'not even considering the idea'.
Bush's restraint has not constrained New Labour. David Blunkett strikes a Churchillian pose in the current New Statesman and compares opponents of ID cards to the appeasers of Hitler. He is an 'aficionado of history', he tells the readers, and was 'deeply affected' by how 'woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy to overturn democracy.'
The Home Secretary may be an aficionado, but he doesn't seem to know that the most appeasement of Hitler in Britain and Europe came from the Right. Nor does he appear Churchillian when you learn from his civil servants how his plan for ID cards was born.
On 14 September he blurted out a muddled sentence on the Today programme. The Government, he said, would have to consider 'how far anyone should expect to go in a democracy in being able to identify, being able to co-operate in terms of surveillance'. He returned to the Home Office to discover that the police and everyone else was against him. The 1997 Labour Government examined ID cards but decided, as Mike O'Brien, the former Home Office Minister, said, that they were 'unreliable in proving identity and damaged the relationship between the public and the police'. There were 'more effective things to spend our money on'.
Blunkett agreed to drop the idea until the lure of the microphone overcame him once again. He called for cards a second time, while adding, sotto voce, that the police won't have powers to demand to see your papers - a caveat which pushes his policy from the deluded to the crackpot.
The Home Secretary has rebutted complaints that his Government is tired. In the face of war and mass slaughter, he has proved it retains the ability to shock us with the sheer frivolity of its efforts in futility.
Save us from the lap-top pundits
Bertrand Russell dissected in the 1930s the Left's willingness to fall for 'the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed'.
To many well-meaning minds, he said, it wasn't enough to assert that oppression was an evil. The oppressed had to be dignified. Their experience of oppression gave them grandeur and wisdom which compelled those with easy lives in civilised countries to support them. The paradox of the fallacy was that it implied oppression was good for you.
There has, God knows, been plenty of silly adulation for the oppressed in our times, and excuses for their crimes. The support for Serbia during the belated but successful Kosovo bombing campaign was the Left's most horrible mistake since Stalinism. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before some post-modern jerk tells us it is Eurocentric to condemn the Taliban. But at least we'll be ready for him.
What is novel is the error in the minds of Tory pundits: the fallacy of the superior virtue of the blessed. It is not enough for these gentlemen to say the assaults on America were enormous crimes. You must acknowledge the superiority of the richest and most powerful nation on earth or be a ter rorist fellow traveller. Brian Appleyard in the Sunday Times condemned as 'villainously stupid' the assertion in the Guardian that 'when billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities'.
To say that the profits made from the West's arming of Iraq and the Taliban is one of the reasons why we're in this mess has become, in Appleyard's head, blaming the victims of terrorism for their murders.
Michael Gove in the Times says it was also grotesque victim-blaming for our Observer to ask whether 'growing inequalities between the developed and the underdeveloped world' brings fundamentalist violence. He went on to echo the consensus of Fleet Street's lap-top generals by saying that 'the pressure placed on Israel to accede to the demands of a terrorist state' (he means the Palestinians, who don't have a state) was appeasement.
The irony for the Right is that Bush is now pouring aid into Pakistan, accepting stern controls on the global market and forcing the Israelis to talk to the Palestinians. Will the Murdoch papers soon denounce his villainous anti-Americanism?
