I wanted you to be the first to know. It has just been revealed by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy in the United States that I am on a very short list of journalists (eight in Western countries and seven others in India, Pakistan and Arab countries) to whom Osama bin Laden wanted to send "special media material" on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. To what do I owe this honor?
I can't vouch for the authenticity of the letters that the American forces seized when they raided bin Laden's house in northern Pakistan a year ago, but according to the CTC's translation, the plan was to send these carefully selected and named journalists a site address and password "at the right time" so that we could download his "special material".
That never happened, because bin Laden was killed before the anniversary rolled round, but it does raise an interesting question. None of the people he named (me, Bob Fisk of the Independent in Britain, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the U.S., and independent journalist Eric Margolis in Canada, for example) has actually written in favor of al-Qaida and its goals — so what did he think he would gain by sending us the stuff?