Here are Vidal's remarks on the World Trade Center attack, translated by machine and then edited for clarity by Kenneth Champeon.

Black Tuesday Comments by GORE VIDAL translated from Spanish and Portuguese by Kenneth Champeon

According to the Koran, it was on Tuesday that Allah created the darkness. On the 11th day of September, when suicidal pilots launched American commercial airplanes against significant points of architecture, I did not need to turn my eyes away from the television and look at a calendar to know what day it was: the Tuesday of Darkness had cast its shade on Manhattan and all along the Potomac River.

Neither was I surprised upon learning that, despite the approximately $7 trillion that we have spent since 1950 on what is euphemistically described as our "defense", no anticipated acknowledgment was given by the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, or by any other organization, and that no American fighters rose to the occasion, unless the rumors are verified that they demolished the aircraft that collided with the Pentagon and that fell close to Pittsburgh.

Although our government habitually attributes guilt to the wrong people, so far it seems to have found the right one, at least in part: the Saudi billionaire, educated at Harvard and occasional resident in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, had pulled our leg.

While the followers of Bush prepared anxiously for the antepenultimate war - missiles launched from North Korea and marked clearly with flags would rain down on Portland, Oregon, but they would be intercepted by the balloons of our anti-missile shield -- the sly Bin Laden only needed pilots to commit suicide and to kill the passengers who happened to be on board the hijacked commercial airplanes.

Thus, something new really happened under the sun of Black Tuesday. My sister, who lives in Washington, had a friend on board one of those airplanes. Without losing her calm, the friend called her husband on a cellular phone. "We were hijacked," she informed him. After that, she started to describe the last minutes of her life leading up to the airplane's collision with the fifth side of the Pentagon. It was the husband's birthday.

We've always had wise and courageous civilians. It is the military, the politicians, and the press who make them nervous. After all, we have not encountered suicidal bombers since the kamikazes, as we called them in the Pacific, where I served as an idle soldier during World War II. At that time, our sole enemy was Japan. Today, we have Bin Laden, the Muslims, the Pakistanis...

The telephone rings. I live to the south of Naples, in Italy. Publishers, Italian television and radio want commentaries. I do too. Recently I wrote on Pearl Harbor. Now they ask me the same question, time and time again: is this not the same as what happened on the morning of December 7, 1941? No, it is not. We did not have advance warning of last Tuesday's attack - as far as we know. Our government has many, many secrets of which our enemies always seem to have knowledge beforehand, but of which we ourselves learn only years later.

President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. In the book "The Golden Age", I describe some of the steps that preceded this. Today, we know what Roosevelt had in mind: to come to the aid of England by fighting the ally of Japan, Hitler. But Bin Laden had - or has - what in mind?

For some decades, the American media has undertaken the implacable process of satanizing the Muslim world. Though I am a loyal American, I cannot say why this has happened -- but the fact is that we do not have the habit of analyzing why any thing happens, except to blame others for our errors. In a world where the devil is constantly on the watch, walking up and down and tormenting us for being so kind, our press wants us to believe that Bin Laden is simply a manifestation of pure and simple evil, and therefore we are obliged to invoke clause five of NATO and to detonate all the devils that had given shelter to him, to teach him a lesson that we ourselves never learn: that in history, as well as in physics, action without reaction does not exist.

The Bush administration, in spite of its disquieting ineptitude towards all its tasks, except the main one -- to exempt the rich from the burden of taxes -- has been able to break, immediately, treaties signed by civilized nations like the Kyoto Protocol and the ABM treaty. While Bush supporters lead their implacable mining of the Treasury for Social Security (a bottomless pit, supposedly), they allow the FBI and the CIA to act without the least control, leaving in our hands the indispensable and, by popular selection, last global empire, like when the Magician of Oz pretended to make magic tricks hoping not to be discovered.

To be fair, we cannot place all the guilt of our incoherence on the current Oval Being. Although his predecessors, in general, have had higher IQs than he has, they also had worked assiduously for the 1% of the population that owns the country, while they left the remaining portion to capsize. Bill Clinton was especially guilty. Although he has been by far our most skillful president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Clinton, in his frantic fetching for electoral victories, fondled the trigger of the police state that his successor must, at this precise moment while I write, be preparing to pull.

Police state? How thus? In April of 1996, one year after the attack of Oklahoma City, president Clinton approved an anti- terrorism law, a so-called "conference law", to which contributed many sufficiently dirty hands, including the leader of the majority in the Senate, Bob Dole, the law's co-sponsor. Although Clinton did many imprudent and opportunist things to win elections, he rarely said imprudent things. His legislation on terrorism authorizes the Attorney General to use the Armed Forces against the civil population, thus annulling the Posse Comitatus of 1878 that forever forbade the use of military force against our population. The habeas corpus, cornerstone of Anglo-American freedom, also can be suspended when it has been determined that a terrorist is among us.

Irritated by the critical outcry of groups and individuals attached to the Constitution, Clinton denounced his critics as being "unpatriotic". Later, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, he spoke from the throne: " He cannot be called patriotic who pretends to love his country while despising its president." This is an amazing affirmation, because it can be applied to most of the population at one time or another. Put a different way: would a German in 1939 be unpatriotic by despising the Nazi dictatorship?

Black Tuesday is already exerting considerable pressure on our society, as it grows more and more militarized. In the decade of 1970, the FBI was reinvented. Originally it was an organization of "generalists", trained in justice and accounting, and attired in jacket, necktie, and white shirt (surprising though it may seem, J. Edgar Hoover toed the civilian line). It then transformed into an army of special warriors employing "Weapons and Tactics " (also known as SWAT), who liked to don camouflage uniforms, the black clothes of ninjas, and, depending on the task, ski masks. In the early 1980's, a superteam SWAT of the FBI was formed, Hostage Rescue Team 270.

As so frequently happens in the United States, this group specialized, not in the freeing of hostages or the saving of lives, but in launching murderous attacks against groups of which it did not approve, many times for being excessively independent, as was the case with the Branch Davidians, a religious sect of evangelist Christians that lived peacefully in its proper complex in Waco, Texas, until an FBI SWAT team, equipped illegally with army tanks, killed 82 of them, including 25 children. This happened in 1993.

Now, since Black Tuesday, SWAT teams could be used to pursue suspicious Arab-Americans or, in reality, any person who can be guilty of terrorism, a term without legal definition (as if suspending habeas corpus can fight terrorism, when all those who want their corpuses free are already locked up.) But, in the climate of trauma after-Oklahoma, Clinton said that those that were not in favor of his harsh legislation were conspirators, allies to the terrorists, interested in transforming America "into a safe place for terrorists". If cool-headed Clinton could be infuriated to such a degree, what can we expect post-Tuesday from the militant Bush?

Although the American population does not have the means to influence its government directly, its opinions are harvested in polls. According to a 1995 CNN/Time poll, 55% of Americans believe that "the federal government has become so powerful that it threatens the rights of citizens ".

The New York Times is the main vehicle of the opinions received from the American corporate elite and, moreover, it is a more accurate barometer of the humor of our leaders than, let us say, the " The Wall Street Journal ", which suffers from publishing deficiency. Even so, all the editorial columns published by the NYT since 12 September have missed the target.

The television coverage had tired us all, except that sensible conservative Anthony Lewis. Those images of fire and ardent collapse were repeated before our eyes, even though we did not possess the cathodic tube that transmitted them. Under the heading "Requirements of the Leadership ", the NYT showed optimism of a kind. Everything will go well if you work hard and don't drop the ball, Mr. President. Apparently Bush " is facing multiple challenges, but its most important task is a simple question of leadership." Thanks be to God. Not only is leadership is important, but simple in the extreme. For a few seconds I had reason to fear...

After that, the NYT says how things must be, rather than how they are: "the administration passed a good part of the day yesterday trying to silence claims that Bush revealed weakness by not returning to Washington after the terrorist attack ". But, as far as I could tell, nobody was very worried about this. The majority of us felt safer with Bush in his bunker in Nebraska.

The NYT soothed Bush by saying that he will not be forced to accept Democrats into his cabinet, like past presidents in times of war and....There it is. Simply mentioned in passing, almost as if by chance: "in times of war". Patiently, the periodical inserts the nugget, for Bush and us. "In the following days, Bush may ask the nation for endorsement of military action that many citizens will find alarming. He will need to show that he knows what he is doing." So Bush can be at ease. What a shame that FDR did not receive letters of this kind from Arthur Krock of the old NYT.

"Allies against the Terror" is the heading of the next editorial. Apparently, we need allies. "Like his father in the Gulf War, he will need to construct a coalition of nations prepared to act." Excellent advice. He will also need to make these allies pay up front for a war opposed by All of Humanity. Bush, father, had to work to convince others to help pay for his CNN war. The Japanese had the gall to complain about the exchange rate. Bad luck for them - you see what has happened to the yen.

When the weekend arrived, Pakistanis of dyed hair and furtive eyes were already being interrogated for CNN because, in a threatening way, Pakistan now acts as the official protector of the Taleban. "It is believed that the Taleban harbors the most dangerous international terrorist, Osama bin Laden." Much courage was necessary to publish this, NYT. But it seems to fit well with your mantra: "Washington clearly demonstrated yesterday that its patience with Pakistan is rapidly depleting." Poor Pakistan. I would not like to be in its slippers.

Next editorial: "The National Defense": "the fight against terrorism must be moved from the periphery to the center of American national security concerns. Nobody is suggesting that this is an easy task or an inexpensive one, but, despite the nearly $30 billion that Washington spends on espionage, the country will have to know more about terror networks and their conspiracies. If more money could be invested toward useful purposes... "

"Americans need to rethink how to protect the country curtailing the rights and the privileges of the free society that we defend." True, true.

"Third World-wide War", by Thomas L. Friedman, is optimistic. Friedman is very young and has never lived through war. Now that I think about it, with the exception of Colin Powell and two or three senators, the members of the administration and the Congress, although all adept at military rhetoric, are people who stayed at home.

The region Friedman covers is the Middle East, and many times what he writes on the subject is interesting. Of the voices raised in the NYT on Thursday, only he suggests that "the support that we give Israel" annoys the Arabs, but then later he starts to speak of the innate hatred that the Arabs nourish for our hegemony. Suddenly, in a baffling way, he bawls: "Who in my country really understands that this will be the Third World War?"

The question is not merely rhetorical. "The people who had planned the attack on Tuesday combined a high degree of wickedness with a high degree of genius, with devastating effect. If we don't put our better heads together to fight them - in a Third World War Manhattan-style - using equally bold and unconventional means, then we stand to have serious problems." This is the certain prescription for more problems.

The column "The New Day of Infamy " by William Safire foresees that "the next attack will probably not be led with a hijacked airplane, an eventuality against which we are tardily prepared. It will most likely be a nuclear missile bought by terrorists or a barrel of deadly germs."

Finally, Anthony Lewis thinks that he is wise to reject the unilateralism of Bush in order to cooperate with other countries, to contain the darkness of Tuesday with the understanding of its origins, at the same time that we launch provocations against a culture that opposed us and our agreements. Lewis - uncommon thing for a columnist The New York Times - defends peace now. I also. But the truth is that he and I are old. We value our increasingly disappearing freedoms, unlike those exacerbating patriots that beat drums in Times Square, who summon a war that all America must fight.
http://www.pastornet.net.au/jmm/aasi/aasi0566.htm