9/11 The Home Front

For the family of Gavin Cushny, a computer expert from Lewis who worked for the stockbrokers Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the north tower – and who had been due to return home to marry the following month – it was a shattering blow. As it was for the kin of Derek Sword, a banker from Dundee who died in the south tower; and for those of Ian Gray, who had emigrated to the US as a young man, and died when terrorists crashed the American Airline flight on which he had been travelling into the Pentagon.

So the initial impact of the plane strikes was, for a few Scots, immediate and lasting. Yet the ripple effects of the collapsed towers would bob our nation up and down in ways both obvious and utterly surprising. The two elements of Scottish society to be hardest hit by the consequences of al-Qaeda’s plot were the armed forces and the Muslim community: one would lose their lives and limbs in an attempt to defeat the group and their allies in Afghanistan; the other would dwell under a cloud of suspicion and prejudice and endure a rise in racist abuse and violence.

“A decade after 9/11, many Muslims in Scotland feel under siege,” says Aamer Anwar, a solicitor and human rights activist. “Since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001, the state offered those who follow Islam a choice – either you can be ‘good Muslims’ and accept Britain’s foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond, or, be cast as the ‘enemy within’ and subjected to endless persecution.”

For the rest of the Scottish population the most outward signs of a changed world were lengthy queues at airport security and, after the failed attempt by the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in December 2001, the requirement to remove your brogues and shuffle through in socks. We, were, however, stripped bare in more subtle and secretive ways. Our e-mails, mobile phone calls and other communications are monitored as GCHQ and MI5 have rapidly expanded their influence with the security service, opening their first office in Glasgow. The explosion in CCTV cameras across the UK would result in us becoming the most scrutinised nation in the world.

“The man on the street would say that we seem to be obsessed with terror,” says Henry McLeish, who was first minister at the time of the attacks. “The first call on a nation state is the defence of its citizens and I don’t have a problem with that, but we have to watch that we don’t become so obsessed that we actually prioritise this at the exclusion of other subjects that require our attention.”

In Scotland MI5 prefer to conduct their interviews over tea and sandwiches at the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow. Aamer Anwar, who has accompanied his clients to such meetings and insists it is more “Austin Powers than James Bond” said he was surprised “to see young ‘preppy’ looking students whose attempts to extract information are pathetic”.

He says: “They refuse to provide the information or even accuse my clients in case it gives away their sources.”

He adds: “Their attitudes have been corrosive, destroying good relationships built by community police officers over the years. On a weekly basis I hear from my clients of attempts to blackmail, threaten, bribe and instructions to spy.”

The “Special Relationship” between Britain and America, begun during the Second World War, meant that where George W Bush led, Tony Blair followed. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had no direct link to 9/11, but it would probably not have been invaded had the Twin Towers not been toppled and, as a result, Scots were directly affected.

Private Gordon Gentle, 19, from Pollok was killed by a roadside bomb there in June 2004, and two Scots security guards, Jason Creswell and Alan McMenemy were kidnapped in Baghdad in 2007 and later killed.

A groundswell of anti-war sentiment meant Gleneagles Hotel was ringed by protesters on 7 July, 2005 when it hosted Bush during a meeting of the G7. Meanwhile in London Helen Jones – who earned a first in divinity at Aberdeen University – was murdered by an acolyte of Osama Bin Laden at King’s Cross tube station, one of 52 dead that day.

Scotland’s role in the 9/11 wars has, at times and under the abeyance of the UK government, been shadowy and supportive. Air Force One, the president’s plane, landed at Prestwick Airport when Bush came for the G7. Prestwick was described by the European Union’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition (APPG) as a “Category A” stopover facility, providing refuelling and support services for the private jets in which the CIA ferried prisoners to be tortured in secret prisons and by foreign governments.

Over 156 US warplanes, including aircraft linked to military intelligence, have landed at Prestwick airport since the controversy over rendition flights began, with other flights landing at Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, as well as RAF Leuchars in Fife.

For Scotland’s writers and artists, the invasion of Iraq has inspired artistic excellence. Black Watch – Gregory Burke’s play about squaddies in Iraq, based on interviews with young veterans – has played to ecstatic audiences around the world. While the artist Gerald Laing’s pop art pictures of the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib on Brillo boxes, created in his ancient keep outside Inverness, wowed the London art world. The din from Baghdad even echoed through Dunsinane, David Greig’s bold sequel to Macbeth, about one man’s attempt to restore peace to a country ravaged by war.

Linda Norgrove, also wanted to bring peace to a nation ravaged by war. The Scottish aid worker was killed by US Special Forces during a rescue mission last September, but her work will survive in the charitable foundation set up by her parents.

And could independence be an eventual legacy of 9/11? It sounds ridiculous, how could they possibly be connected? Yet the Iraq war led to a political backlash against Labour, on which Alex Salmond, was able to capitalise. Nonsense? According to John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, there is an element of truth.

“Yes, it is part of the story. The 2003 and 2007 elections showed that in contrast to issues like tuition fees and council tax there was some relationship between people’s attitudes towards the Iraq War and what party people voted for, which resulted in an increased vote for the SNP and the Liberal Democrats.”

However, he added: “Iraq undermined trust in Blair and among the left, that is part of the story, but it is not the whole story. If Alex Salmond hadn’t decided to come back from Westminster and the Labour Party hadn’t fought such poor election campaigns we would not necessarily be where we are now. But it provided some of the mix whereby the Labour Party was suffering both sides of the border. and the SNP were one of the beneficiaries.”

For McLeish it is a hypothesis that does not hold water. “Iraq is clearly a place that we should not have been and with the prime minister so close to the United States that had a profound impact on the Labour Party and, of course, the breakdown of trust between voters and a Labour government. On the other hand, did Alex Salmond benefit from that? I’m not sure. He has moved devolution forward, there is a whole set of other reasons why I think Alex Salmond is doing particularly well and I don’t think 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq would be fundamentally important to what he has achieved over the last four or five years.”

Osama Bin Laden did make more obvious changes to Scotland: the heavy steel bollards that now ring our airports would not be there had his teachings not inspired Dr Bilal Abdulla to drive a second-hand jeep stacked with gas canisters into the front of Glasgow Airport in 2007.

The event also made a global hero out of John Smeaton, the baggage handler who wrestled with one of the two terrorists and later found himself fêted by Mayor Bloomberg and the chief of the fire department on a visit to New York.

Now Smeaton, who has retrained in fish farming, says: “I don’t know if Scotland has changed at all, it changed my life, but Scotland has just got on with it.”