Charles Moore: 9/11 ... What Have We Learnt?
Charles Moore covers politics with the wisdom and insight that come from having edited The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator.
On a lazy summer’s day in 2002, it came home to me. I was mink-hunting (then a legal activity) by a river on the Kent/Sussex border, and a cockney foundry worker called Vince was there with his terrier.
We chatted, and eventually it came out that his sister had been killed in the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. She had been helping to organise a conference there, Vince said. More British people were killed on September 11, 2001 than in any other terrorist incident ever, including 7/7 and the Lockerbie bombing.
Sixty-seven out of the 2,996 people who died in the attacks on the United States that day were British citizens.
The figure is relevant as the 10th anniversary approaches because it is a reminder that the argument that “it was nothing to do with us” was never, from the very first moment, true. We were in it from the start. The death toll of Americans was 40 times higher...