The Terrorists' Trojan Horse - 30 November 2001

Every evening, just at sunset, and before what's become the ordeal of the evening news, we're always shown a long shot of some stretch of the city with its sparkling lights reflected in the waters of the Hudson or the East River.

The other night we were looking down, maybe from the top of the Empire State Building, but looking deep down to the entrance to the Bay where a long shaft of light, coming from the western sky, isolated the figure with the torch - the Statue of Liberty - that most famous symbol of what America is supposed to be about. A haven for the persecuted.

Everyone knows the line inscribed on the pedestal: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Not many people, I suspect, know the opening line of that poem, proudly proclaiming that the statue is not - "Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame."

Trojan Horse

That brazen giant refers, I'm sure, to the Colossus. But, increasingly since that appalling September Tuesday, people have been made to think again about the Liberty Lady as a Trojan horse, and her welcome offered not necessarily to the tired or the poor.

To the Department of Justice the stature's inscription might just as well have read: "Give me your pious student, your religious fanatics, your clever young anarchists eager to learn new secrets of war from America's willing teachers."

Oh, I've just been given the embarrassing reminder that in some Western countries the elementary schools are just as bad about dispensing general knowledge as New York schools are, which is about as bad as they can be. So I trust no one will feel condescended to if I sketch the story of the Trojan horse.

After years of fighting between Troy and Greece there was a puzzling pause and the withdrawal of the Greek forces.

The Trojans assumed that the Greeks had given up. An assumption strengthened by the appearance outside the gates of Troy of a huge wooden horse, plainly a peace offering.

The Trojans jubilantly dragged the horse inside and broke into a general celebration of victory.

Analogy

At which point silently emerged from the belly of the horse a phalanx of Greeks, who killed the guards to the city, opened the gates to their own army, and by the next sunrise every Trojan was either dead or a slave.

The analogy is fair enough, if terrifying, once you go into the details of the big, vague generalisation we've all just learned, that al-Qaeda and other terrorist outfits have recruited and assigned thousands of dedicated agents in over 40 countries.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California has been probing and she's calculated from the Immigration Service's records that in the past 10 years alone, more than 16,000 students have come legally into the United States from Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya and Syria.

The man who drove the bomb-filled truck into the World Trade Center in 1993 was on a student visa.

One of Saddam Hussein's top nuclear advisors learned his expertise years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the actual head of Iraq's nuclear programme - that's the one that doesn't exist - was nuclear educated at Michigan State University.

Pressing issue

These are not oddities but typical of very many of the suspects being held by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

This question of the political identity and the possible terrorist intentions of all immigrants, especially ones from the Middle East and the Arab countries, is a pressing issue suddenly in most of the Western nations - in Britain, Germany, Italy, France. Here in the United States, certainly, it is the most pressing domestic issue.

In the second week of September the first suspicion that the Justice Department's inquiry into terrorism might violate the civil rights of legal immigrants "yearning to breathe free" was happily pacified by the attorney general's report that four people had been held, none yet charged, and one had been released.

But once the counter-terrorist department of the FBI got busy it became appalled to discover the size and range of the terrorist network and the discovery of how many patient years - 20 perhaps - it had taken to build it.

Now Attorney General Ashcroft is holding, without trial, well over a thousand suspects and until last Tuesday refused to release their names - a denial which everybody at once thought an abominable, un-American, undemocratic, violation of the liberty of the subject.

Protest

Mr Ashcroft said that to identify them and the relevant charges would be of incalculable help to Bin Laden. Nevertheless the storm of public protest was so overwhelming that he released a list of names anyway.

But the tidal wave of protest has swept across the political landscape - from the farthest left of course, but through all moderate country to - this is important - to the most conservative right.

At the moment it seems inconceivable that the president can maintain or legally sustain his executive order to deny non-citizens a jury trial and commit them to secret military tribunals.

The president, I suspect, may well come to envy and to echo the unforgotten Fiorello La Guardia - the bounciest, most ruthless, of New York's reform mayors.

"I seldom," said Mayor La Guardia, "I seldom make a mistake but when I do it's a beaut."

Before the fateful 11th hypnotised our lives there were obviously many aspects of American life I should normally have looked over.

One theme that has gone by the board is the obituary and the habit of praising famous or fascinating men and women in the moment of their going.

Most recently, within weeks of each other, two American men died, neither well known to the general public but each unique in his trade.

The one who died last week is one Melvin Burkhart who was probably the last of a dying profession, that of a sideshow artist.

I wonder if that means anything to two generations - not a circus performer, not a clown at children's parties - you might say a fugitive from a flea circus. Now I hear my grandchildren saying, What is a flea circus?

Well there existed, certainly in Britain and the United States until the Second World War, men and women who had some freakish gift and performed at state fairs, county fairs, travelling carnivals, amusement parks, pleasure beaches.

Human blockhead

Melvin Burkhart did several of the standard tricks of his trade - he swallowed swords and licks of flame, he could rotate his stomach muscles in a manoeuvre he called "the machine mixer", he wrestled snakes, and he could breathe with one lung.

What made him special was his gift for making a theatrical act out of hammering nails up his nose.

He became known as the human blockhead and he must have hammered a thousand nails up and through his nose in his lifetime. No medic or magician could ever quite explain him.

Ask your doctor - but don't forget to mention that Mr Burkhart, the human blockhead, had a normal nose on his deathbed - oh, and oh yes, he died at the age of 94.

I don't know anyone who envied Mr Burkhart his extraordinary gift but as for the charming Westerner, Kenneth Hale, who died a month ago at the age of 67, even the world experts in his field envied his prodigious and equally unexplained gift.

Kenneth Hale was a teacher of linguistics. He was a very modest man - a contradiction in itself - and could carry on conversations in something between 50 and 56 languages - about 20 of which were spoken only by remote native peoples.

The gift came to him in boyhood as he played in his native Arizona with children of the Hopi and Navaho tribes.

Those two tribal languages were only the first of a score of American Indian and Australian native languages, along with related dialects, that were dying out.

At the end Kenneth Hale was the only speaker in the world of about half a dozen now defined as "dead" tongues.

It goes without saying that as he grew up into manhood he learned all the European languages, some Asian languages, but rarely, if ever, from the book - but from listening to native speakers. Sometimes one leisurely conversation in a new language would be enough.

Only Dutch he found particularly troublesome: It took him a week.

On his retirement he was confronted by a native of a Pacific island, a speaker of the most unheard-of island's language.

Within 15 minutes he understood and he could be understood. Fifteen minutes later, both he and the islander were thoroughly, comfortably chatting away.

I must say if there's one gift to which I myself might strike a Faustian bargain it's not nubile females but fluency in several languages.

I was once bemoaning this lack in conversation with the late Harold Nicolson, the diplomat, author, himself accomplished in five or six languages.

He told me not to fret. It was a gift, he said, independent of general intelligence.

And he told me about an old acquaintance of his who, at one time, had been chief language examiner for applicants to the British foreign service.

"He spoke 16 languages," Nicolson said, "with total fluency - and said nothing intelligent in any of them, including English."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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