Last Call: Blasted
Reid, Stuart
"Last Call: Blasted" by Stuart Reid Blasted IWAS ON THE TELEPHONE talking to a former Foreign Office minister about arms sales to Saddam Hussein when, at 7:01 on the...
...Their 1,000-lb...
...No doubt I had looked foolish...
...As READERS OF THE WASHINGTON POST will know, Adams is president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA...
...Perhaps Bill Clinton is now regretting having seized the Adams paw...
...STUART REID is associate editor for comment at London's Sunday Telegraph...
...82 April 19 9 6 • The American Spectator...
...A LAST WORD ABOUT THE TWO MEN who died in the Docklands bomb...
...At 7:01 on the evening of February 9,1996, that smile vanished, and so did the face...
...Here is how the argument goes...
...She tapped a ballpoint pen nervously against her thigh...
...Yet Adams struts and frets and protests his (injured) innocence, just like a regular politician...
...No doubt they still V Gerry in some of the more backward parts of Boston and Philadelphia, but the man's stock is low in the civilized world, and even Clinton has to take notice of what the civilized world thinks...
...He did not bother to ring Downing Street, but that may be because he has fewer friends there...
...1111-411111111inur.:, Jul LAST CALL by Stuart Reid Blasted IWAS ON THE TELEPHONE talking to a former Foreign Office minister about arms sales to Saddam Hussein when, at 7:01 on the evening of February 9, the IRA ended their ceasefire...
...THE IRA FEAR THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE, because they do not have the support of the people...
...The • shock wave hit me in the stomach...
...Nothing happened...
...Many of the reporters, being inquisitive, had rushed to the (shatterproof) windows...
...Inside, the picture on the newsdesk television was breaking up because the satellite dish on the roof of the tower had been damaged in the blast...
...She would not have been any the wiser if the police had let her through, but perhaps Gerry Adams could have told her what was happening...
...bomb seemed to explode just outside the windows of the offices at London's Sunday Telegraph...
...ADRENALINE WAS PUMPING AMONG the Atex terminals...
...In a self-serving article in the Post a week after the bombing, Adams wrote: "The responsibility for the tragic explosion in London rests squarely with the IRA, but the blame for the breakdown in talks can only be claimed by the Major government...
...If Major had not threatened the IRA with democracy, they would not have planted the bomb...
...Major therefore made a counter-proposal: that elections should be held in Northern Ireland as a route to all-party talks...
...All was apparently quiet out there...
...She wore a black coat and a sheepish grin...
...The younger of the men, a 29-year-old Muslim, used to give a shy, conspiratorial smile when I, a seemingly responsible and mature adult, bought a bag of children's candy...
...A distinguished member of the Daily Telegraph's editorial team was striding about in his camel hair coat, back straight, chin thrust forward, seizing women by the shoulders and kissing them on each cheek...
...Sinn Fein seldom gets more than so percent of the vote in parliamentary elections...
...Someone took her by the arm and pointed back towards the tower: "Over there, love, that's where you want to be...
...A news reader gave some sketchy details, but there was no indication of the full horror of what had happened—two dead, more than so° injured—until much later...
...They worked in a newspaper shop...
...But the police won't let you through...
...In other words, it was all John Major's fault...
...I dropped the receiver and did the same...
...There was no secondary blast...
...A pretty girl from the Observer came by and said that, actually, she was, you know, doing a story, and could anyone tell her what was going on...
...The bomb had gone off in South Quay Plaza, a couple of hundred yards from our offices in the Canary Wharf tower...
...From the corner of my eye, I saw one of my colleagues, a veteran of foreign wars, dive to the floor...
...They were mutilated almost beyond recognition...
...He tipped off the White House that the cease-fire was at an end...
...The IRA saw that as a betrayal of the peace process and reacted by planting the bomb...
...Only hours before the second bomb went off in London, he was telling his fans in West Belfast: "We say to John Major, 'Pull back from the abyss, we want to talk and we want peace but we must have justice and we must have freedom and we must be treated as equals:" Not even the Liberal International could buy that...
...Impasse...
...That was not acceptable to the IRA, who at best might have agreed to turn over some weapons after talks, or to the Protestant majority, who wanted the IRA to disarm before talks...
...But nothing was visible from the tower: no smoke, no fire...
...The Mitchell report on decommissioning had proposed that the IRA should surrender their weapons during all-party talks on the future of Ireland...
...By the time we had been evacuated from the building, we were buzzing...
...There was a lot of laughter and a lot of cursing...
...I stood up, feeling foolish...
...I sometimes went there at lunchtime to buy Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts...
...I ducked...
...We moved east, like a column of refugees, except that we had mobile telephones, and gathered outside a 24-hour McDonald's which had sustained minor bomb damage and was closed for business (only in England...
...No man who has a decent respect for the opinion of mankind can afford to be caught in bed with Gerry Adams...
Vol. 29 • April 1996 • No. 4
