Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2011

I TRIED NOT to jump to conclusions. I remembered Oklahoma – those few hours (or was it days?) during which people thought that the blasted government building, its child-care centre littered with tiny corpses, was a Muslim crime scene. So I said, ‘Bin Laden couldn’t do it.’ Afterwards, I wondered whether my reaction, hearing about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, was ‘denialism’. I had not meant that bin Laden wouldn’t do it, but that he had targeted the complex once before, and failed. He would have done it, but he couldn’t. Maybe the hijackers crashing planes into New York and Washington were well-organised white supremacists.