I still believe, along with an encouraging number of young reporters, that we##ve got to be out on the streets, just as I was when I started in journalism. So Fisk was prowling the streets of
A colleague gave me Obama##s detailed schedule, and there was the key: “11.50 am: POTUS and Sec of State Clinton tour mosque.” Poor old Obama, I thought. Surely he didn##t deserve to be reduced to a codename like POTUS – until dimwit Fisk realised this stood for “President of the
“You cannot stay here,” one of them muttered at me – I had planned to hide in a local tea-house until I discovered that all the tea-drinkers were cops – “and anyway, they##re going through the other gate”. Thanks mate. And sure enough, round the corner were a hundred more officers. There were police generals and police colonels and police captains and a vast horde of black uniformed security men (all standing to attention with their backs to the road). One of the generals had so much sparkling braid on his hat that I feared it might fall off because of the weight of gold.
And they were cheerful. This foolish, obviously mad Englishman, wandering around in the midday sun, was a source of amusement to these bored men. I##ve come to see the POTUS, I explained. One of them examined my press card. “Fisk! ,” he shouted. “I read what you write about us.” This was not great news since I hadn##t been terribly kind about his president of late – but I think he was lying. He did admit to me, though, that those ghastly police ties were all bought by the authorities. I had thought as much.
I found only one other journalist there, a friendly Egyptian photographer for Reuters who helped to talk me through the last checkpoints until there we were, bang in front of the entrance to the mosque. “They##re on their way!” one of the thugs shouted. And a swishing convoy of black limousines was suddenly upon us, three of them sporting huge American and Egyptian flags. There were 32 security vehicles in all, some of them with Egyptian gunmen leaning half out of the window with their rifles.
A glimpse of the POTUS was enough, a lithe, athletic, tall figure beside a dumpy little old lady – that##s what happens when the “Sec of State” wants to appear alongside her boss – and they were gone, followed by a trail of hop-skip-and-jump White House press corps girls and boys trying to keep up. Above them all, on the mosque walls, were massive, ancient gashes in the stones, shellfire from a much earlier age. Did the Egyptians, I wonder, tell the POTUS who performed this sacrilege? For the culprit was another young and powerful Western leader, fascinated by the
Only when I left did I see the Egyptians behind the police lines, old ladies with birds in wooden cages, a broken cripple with a wooden stick, Dickensian urchins without shoes, scarved girls licking ice-creams. And I began to have my suspicions. These people were no threat to the POTUS and the little American lady. Indeed, I felt sure they would have been grateful for that strong handshake which is so willingly bestowed upon safe, blue-eyed Germans and Brits.
And I rather suspect the POTUS would like to have met these poor people. It was the police who would have disapproved. Not to mention the President of Egypt.
The POTUS wasn##t being protected from danger, I was sure. He was being protected from the words these Egyptians might utter, from their views of the Arab world, of
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The
Independent (abridged)