Last post

And so farewell. It's off back to Blighty after three years in Washington DC (District of Crisis). I'm afraid I leave Obama in a mess, Congress in turmoil, a new Secretary of State with too much hair (envy envy), a new Defence Secretary with a tough face but an unknown disposition, let alone the capability to deal with orchestrating a military superpower on its financial knees,  assault rifles still for sale at Walmart - do you want the ordinary rounds or the dum-dums, Sir? - and a foreign policy which basically asks the baddest people on earth not to be too bad - still, better than Bush's "you're with us or against us" I guess. Don't get me wrong, I love this country, the people are great, the Pentagon took me into its vast family, the burgers when good are wonderful - this is my justification for a hint of belly - the old cars, I mean the great shiny beasts with wings, white leather seats and cruise-me-baby looks are a sensation to watch in the frequent parades that go on in Old Town Alexandria - any excuse for a parade this place (I've always wanted to write like that, putting the subject at the end of the sentence, very Latin), and Chesapeake Bay is the best location to go for a serious cooling down, destressing time. New York of course is fun fun fun. Didn't get to see Boston, Memphis (sorry Elvis), New Orleans, Kentucky, or the Niagara Falls, all of which were on the must-see list (I vowed NEVER to write that and I promise it's the last time), nor did I drive in a fancy car (see above) through Montana, North Dakota or buffalo country in Nebraska. So much achieved in three years, yet so much unseen, undone and unwitnessed. Too much work but all very interesting and absorbing and enlightening.

Things I'll miss: passing conversations, like the other day I heard two blokes coming up the escalator behind me, one saying to the other: "We gotta push the agency's mission to the limit." Other bloke: "And beyond." First bloke: "Uhun!" Gotta be the CIA, up in town for a three-courser. But when they got past me - yes, I was standing, well I can't walk up every time, that's why they move on their own you know to let us fatigued people have a rest - it was two fat blokes in a hurry. So perhaps not the CIA, more like the Waterworks Agency or the Pavement (sorry, Sidewalk) Construction Agency, or maybe the Burger Agency if there is one, there must be. Also on the miss list: there are still states where racism is alive and well but where I've been, Washington and surrounding areas, integration of all the different ethnic groups, colours, religions, is fabulous to see. Just totally natural and unsurprising and as it should be. I don't think I ever feel that in Blighty. Also the weather, can be spectacularly changeable, huge dumps of snow, glorious sunshine a few days later, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, tropical storms - and weather predictions pretty well always accurate. Still get a kick when Criminal Minds is interrupted with the nasal sort of out of this world Star Trek voice saying: "Go to your cellar immediately and prepare for winds of up to 99mph, stay away from windows and above all stop watching Criminal Minds." 

The Pentagon, bless it, I will miss hugely. You get to love the place , that spurt of excitement when you swish your security pass through the swishing machine and the barriers open and no one steps forward to shoot you, the "how yer doin" from endless people in uniform as you walk down endless corridors, the "hey Mike" greetings as I approach the Pentagon Press area, the queuing for a capuccino in the cafeteria, picking up conversations like : "We're sending SOF to Yemen (Special Operations Forces)", "Yeah, QDR is TUP, check with COLM soonas." (sorry not a clue). "I'll have a tall latte with vanilla shot". (no, no idea ha ha ha). And oh those great one-to-one chats with "US officials", no name no department can be mentioned but serious players who know everything. Ask and you get an answer, not Hollywood dramatic scoop stuff, but still pretty damn useful and impressive for including in a dispatch for Her Majesty's Times.  Never did get my shoes buffed up by the shoe-buffing-up chap next door to the Chinese laundry. Some conversations there I bet, nuclear war, the lot.

Will miss Obama, a cool dude but his 30-minute answers to every question get a bit tiresome, John McCain (failed Republican presidential candidate and awesome Vietnam prisoner-of-war), getting madder by the day, positively explosive on every subject, Hillary Clinton, seriously impressive and clear favourite to be President in 2016. I saw her in the flesh the other day when she was at the Pentagon for a special award from the military. After travelling round the world about 30 times and hitting her head, she looked relaxed, well-coiffured, red-jacketed and superstarish. A Big Plus for the US of A. Shan't really miss Leon Panetta. Nice guy but if he mentions one more time he's the son of an Italian immigrant I'm going to get the Agency to intervene. Yes the CIA, not the Waterworks Agency. I've discovered that the CIA and the 16 other intelligence agencies are packed with men and women who are just that, men and women, dedicated and some of them very clever and brave, but basically they make mistakes like everyone else, except that mistakes in their line of work can be fateful. Need I mention 9/11? 

Enough already. Time to sign off. Time to go home to Blighty. Time to say goodbye to the US of A. It's been a ball. See yer.

superpower stuff

You need to read the following conversation between two people in one of the ring corridors of the Pentagon to appreciate its significance. The Pentagon employs 23,000 people and occupies nearly 4 million square feet of office space. It's a thunderstorm of activity involving uniformed and civilian brains who are in charge of the world. They can send drones from one country to another and kill people travelling in a Toyota pick-up who were thought by someone in one of the thousands of locked rooms to be nasty terrorist types and worthy of being targeted by Hellfire missiles, there are people who do nothing else but draw up contingency plans to strike at potential enemies or react to scenarios not even imaginable by the average ordinary human being, there are political wonks who advise and whisper into the ears of President-selected politicians about what to do when to do it what to say when to say it how to do it why to do it why not to do it, there are meetings and meetings and meetings, and telephone calls. In fact someone once added up the phone calls made on an average day and it was 200,000, that ran along 100,000 miles of telephone cable. Someone actually had the job of going " one,two, three....." he must have been sick of Alexander Bell by the time his day was over. So that's a lot of blaa blaa blaaing, some of it so secret the blaa blaa has to be scrambled so it sounds like phswzzv$. 

To help the mindblowing amount of work and clandestine planning going on in the biggest office building in the world and the most famous five-sided construction in the history of the universe - by the way as part of the imminent huge cuts in the defence budget being contemplated because of the failure of the President and Congress to agree a deal on national deficit-reduction, planners reckon a lot of money can be saved by reducing the building to four sides - apparently 4,500 cups of coffee are drunk each day - yes, that little man has been at his adding machine again - and 6,800 soft drinks. No wonder half the vast Pentagon population are overweight.

 You enter this scheming complex for the first time like a man lost in a desert filled with dromedaries. There are A rings and D Rings and E Rings etc etc and there are 17.5 miles of corridors but whoever designed this mighty concrete beast thought of a way of ensuring that whichever colonel in  whatever room you wished to visit you would take no more than seven minutes to get from one place to another wherever it is in the building, thanks to those concentric rings, like being on a fairground roundabout, except that when the music stops at the fair you get off and run away to get candyfloss. In the Pentagon the music never stops. You just go round and round, and if you don't know where the hell you are, I can tell you it takes a darn sight longer than seven minutes to track down your colonel.

For a start there are 131 different stairs and 19 escalators. Get on the wrong one and you're in D Ring instead of B Ring. You stop and ask a passing uniform where Room 356 on B Ring is, he says, always says: "It's very easy. Take staircase 12, go down 18 steps, turn right, go down the long corridor, you'll see pictures of Second World War fighters on the walls, don't stop until you reach Staircase 15, then go up and you're in B Ring. The room you want is down on the left." "Thanks a lot." "By the way, who do you want to see? " "Colonel Wrisctfrdeinhio." "Oh, yeah I know him, I think he's moved to E Ring, do you know where that is? " SEVEN MINUTES HA!!!

If you don't know the time there are 4,200 clocks on hand to help you, all on Zulu time of course (look it up), and when desperate you can choose from the 284 "rest rooms" - if you can find them, that is.

Well, there we are, a brief glimpse inside the Superpower Machine that is the Pentagon. So taking all of that on board, here is the top secret conversation I overheard in A Ring the other day as I was hurrying to see some Marine colonel:

One official: "So, what's happening?"

Second official: "Nothing."  

Blighty? Where the hell's Blighty?

Sitting at the back of a bus, an American late teens guy sits down next to me, says excuse me, they always say excuse me, Americans. I say, no problem, Brits in America always say no problem. The following conversation takes place, word for word, promise:

"You from London?"

"Yes."

"Cambridge?"

"No, London."

"Whereabouts in London?"

"Southwest."

"Manchester?"

Total bewilderment on my part.

 "No, London."

Total bewilderment on his part.

We change the conversation. This and that. Then he gets up to get off, shakes my hand. "Nice talking to you." Mutual, dear boy, mutual.

It suddenly hit me. After nearly three years in this wonderful superpower country with a deficit the size of the rest of the world's income, I realised what's wrong with everything in the US of A, or put it another way, why they get everything wrong whatever they do. It's geography, stupid. I've sort of mentioned this before I think. This kid, nice manners, gentle soul, well educated I guess, knows he's not allowed to drink alcohol and doesn't - he said so, we were talking about weddings - will probably end up being the President of the United States and still won't know that London is NOT a country. He'll make his first foreign state visit to London, will meet the Queen, sorry Ma'am, probably King by then, will stay at the London Palace, will go to a London football game, probably Premiership leaders QPR, will sip London beer and go back to Washington DC and say to his First Lady: "Well that's London done, such a tiny country." Geography or lack of it puts everything into perspective. It certainly explains all the wars. Geography for Americans is one thing and one thing only - the US of A.  There ain't no other place on earth. And if there are other places, they are unfathomable, alien, and above all, not American.

So, Second World War: been going for ages, lots of dead, lots of world-changing events, Nazis dominating Europe, so-called allies suffering and dying for the cause. America? Zilch. sorry guys, no way buddy, we ain't getting our fingers dirty, you sort yourselves out wherever you are, where are you again?" Then bang, Pearl Harbour gets zapped, well Japped actually. What, shouts the President, I know Pearl Harbour, isn't that where we have our all our warships? Get me the Secretary of Defence, yes yes yes, it's war. We can't have them bombing OUR warships. Tell who? Oh yeah, that Churchill chap. Tell him we're coming to win the war for him. Where the hell is Japan anyway?" And so on and so on and so on. Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, it's all about geography and massive power. 

Shock and awe was the greatest phrase ever invented by the US military. The aforementioned countries have all been subjected to US of A shock and awe. I don't want to be a cry baby but shock'nawe don't necessarily work, gentlemen. The Taleban, who still wear flip flops to war, appear to be deeply unimpressed by shock and awe. They - well they were called Mujahidin then - had all that stuff from the Ruskies in the 80's and laughed them back to Moscow. The Brits, by the way, did the opposite. They sent 3,300 troops to Helmand province in 2006, a province which at that time was pure Taleban, unused to interfering foreigners - about 100 Americans were in the capital Lashgar Gah doing humanitarian and school-building stuff but never ventured into Taleban country - and were expected to stand guard, protect the civilian population and not do a lot of fighting unless they had to. Remember Defence Sceretary John Reid's wonderful comment, how he hoped the soldiers wouldn't have to fire a shot in anger? It was unbelievably British, Rorke's Drift stuff, hold fast there, Private, the damn fuzzy wuzzies are coming. Well, as we know the Brits in Helmand got slaughtered. No one has ever properly been blamed for such appalling military and political judgement.

Anyhoo, I digress, back to Geography classes in the US of A. When Ronald Reagan ordered troops to seize the Caribbean island of Grenada from the Commies in 1983 and neglected to tell Mrs T, I know, I KNOW that the former Hollywood B movie star thought Grenada was in Spain which had nothing to do with the Brits. He couldn't possibly have known about Gibraltar, where the hell's Gibraltar!! So, stuff the Spanish, they're probably all Commies, we gotta get this Granada sorted out. It's a miracle that the GIs found themselves heading for the Caribbean and not to "Eurup". Reagan couldn't believe it when Mrs T rang him to say: "Ronnie, what the hell do you think you're doing? This island belongs to the Queen. She is NOT amused." "Margaret, for once you don't know what you're talking about, it's Granada, it's Spain, your Queen rules much of the world but the last time I checked, Spain is not a member of your Commondooda." As he spoke, he was watching ABC News which proved his point. There was a map above the head of the TV presenter which clearly showed the Spanish city of Granada and arrows pointing towards it representing the approaching might of the shock and awe boys.

So, thanks to my bus companion, everything about this great country has to be seen through the Grenada/Granada prism. The world is out there, guys, but you just don't have a clue where it is. Another thing, the world is not centred around the US of A. The President is no longer "the most powerful man on earth". (Right now that man is Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner). Take this little conversation as another example of how even the brightest Americans think. Travelling with an American friend in his car, my BlackBerry goes off. It's The Times in London, could I do this, could I do that, could they pick my brain, could I write 500 words, the usual stuff for a nice Sunday off. I reply and have a chat and agree, sort of.

My American friend: "Were you talking to London?"

"Yep."

"Amazing."

"Sorry?"

"Just like that, could you hear what they were saying?"

"Er, yes."

"Amazing, you sitting here in my car talking on your BlackBerry to someone in London."

"I do it all the time."

"You know something?"

"What?"

"I've never rung abroad in my whole life."

Honest, I promise, he DID say that. You see, it's all about geography.

It's cotton pickin politics

Three days to go before The Election, I will have to devote this missive to everything Obama/Romney. Well history dictates what history dictates and this is my time for pronouncing  on the prezzie election campaign. Everyone says Obama is going to win, but Romney is beginning to look and sound quite presidential. He may have been coaching in front of the wardrobe, sorry dressing room in his case, mirror, but he looks kinda White Housey. But Obama has a huge advantage. He’s the Commander-in-Chief, the Boss, the Guvnor, it’s so much easier to swan around the country as the President than it is as the would-be president, especially when there’s a helluva storm going on. Obama, and I’m not being cynical here, seized on Hurricane Sandy to grab all the headlines. He wore Commander-in-Chief jackets, hugged everyone he could lay his hands on and “directed” everyone to do everything. Actually it’s quite easy being president. All you have to do is gather all your cabinet ministers etc around you and after a lot of chat about this and that, you give a “directive”: Mr Panetta, go kill Osama bin Laden (OK Mr President), FEMA, (Federal Emergency Management Agency), do everything you can to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy (Yes Mr President), Secret Service, please stop being naughty in hotels before I arrive (Too late, Mr President), Michelle, where’s my dinner? (Get it yourself, Mr President!), this Benghazi affair, who’s to blame? (Not you Mr President), Am I going to win reelection? (Of course, Mr President, we’ve fixed Ohio good). Well done, guys, off you go, my directive is, get me and Sandy together as much as possible, I am the Commander-in-Chief after all (Yessir!). So there we are, it’s pretty well a done deal. Never mind how presidential Romney is, Obama is The One. Not quite The One he was in 2008, but just enough of a One to stay in the White House. I think. All depends on Ohio. Romney knows he has to win Ohio to get a chance. My prediction,  Obama wins 294 Electoral College votes, Romney, 244. I can’t see anything happening in the next few days that would be so dramatic as to change the college votes which, as you know, is how the Prezzie gets picked. Some commentators have suggested there could be a tie, 269 each. Then what? Well, this is what: The House of Representatives gets to pick the president because the House has always been a democratically elected body, unlike the Senate which has only been an elected body since around 1912 I think. The House is Republican-controlled, so Romney gets to be Prezzie. The Senate is just about controlled by the Democrats, so they pick good old Joe Biden for Vice-Prezzie. Wow,  that would be something, wouldn’t it? It won’t happen. Remember, Obama’s mates have fixed Ohio good.

 I’ve gone on about the presidential directives, but there’s something else called an executive order which sounds really exciting and sort of dominating, big-time leadership stuff. A president can issue an executive order when everyone in Congress says no and he says, stuff it I say yes and here’s an executive order to put in your pipe and smoke. My grandfather on my mother’s side used to say that when he handed me a packet of Rollos. Well, I’m thinking that if Obama IS reelected and the House remains Republican and the Senate is wishy-washy with a tiny Democratic majority, the reinstated Commander-in-Chief is going to have play pretty fast and loose with his executive orders. Otherwise, he’ll get nothing done in the next four years, like he didn’t get that much done in the first four years. (Osama being the exception of course!) He promised to close Guantanamo but chickened out when Congress said, nooooo way, and the New York mayor said, you ain’t bringing those GTMO detainees over here in my backyard,  and, by the way, there were no votes in closing the place which is nicely shut away from everyone’s minds in some place called Cuba (Doesn’t Castro live there? Least that’s what Jack Nicholson said in that film, right?) Obama could have issued a, yes you’ve guessed it, an executive order, but he didn’t , surprise surprise. So my second prediction is: if Obama wins reelection, GTMO will stay GTMO for another 15 years. At least, probably more. One thing’s for sure, Castro will die before the world’s most hated detention centre, sitting on leased Castro territory, gets dismantled. It’s all so weird! I wonder if it keeps Jack Nicholson up at night. Ha ha ha.

A warning! You may think the prezzie election is drawing to a close. But even as I write this there are serious people plotting and planning for the 2016 election. Chris Christie, for example, the gargantuan-sized Governor of New Jersey, and hardworking good guy post Hurricane Sandy, has begun a diet so that he can be the new-look slim Guvnor when the next presidential election campaign begins which is NOW! The US of A is obsessed with elections. They never stop. But, here’s a thing, your average hillybilly twanging his banjo in West Virginia like what he has always done, and your average polar bear watcher in Alaska, and your mind-your-own-business populace living in the deep south or  in the middle where the buffaloes roam,  most of whom (the people, not the buffaloes) have never been abroad (what’s abroad?), ain’t too cotton-pickin worried about anything that happens in Washington DC. So all that fuss about Obama or Romney and which bloke might look better, let alone serve better, in the Oval Office,  don’t matter a ....Pass me my sawn-off, Chuck, will yer!! There's a squirrel on my broccoli!"

Hacks and rats

Back for my fourth trip to Guantanamo Bay. Apart from the obvious huge importance of whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed can wear camouflage in court, whether the five detainees charged with the 9/11 terrorist plot have to attend court and whether their experience in the hands of the CIA for three years should be kept top top secret, this visit is also about Joe and Josh and Jess and banana rats.  The first three are American reporters covering the pre-trial hearings of KSM and the four others, and banana rats are big in Guantanamo. I mean big, because they are a big nuisance and big because they are big, the size of an average cat  but with more hostile intent.

First the guys, especially Joe and Josh. They are frontline super reporters from the New York tabs (tabloids), friends but  round-the-clock 352 days of the year rivals. What one has got the other has to get, or else the editor is on the phone screaming. I remember this from my tabloid days when the Daily Express and the Daily Mail were the fiercest rivals in Fleet Street. If the Mail got the guy (hoodlum, drug baron, wife-beater, adulterous MP), the Express would get the wife. That’s the way it was, and sometimes the other way around.

Josh and Joe  mix it, and it’s fun to watch. They're good guys. Take this conversation in a bar the other night. Joe: “So in my view what the defence was saying today about KSM was the bona fide statement that the judge took notice of.” Josh: “Look, Julius Caesar, speaking Latin may impress some people but it sure as hell doesn’t impress me.” We had arrived at the bar at 9pm and asked for food. We were all desperate for food. “No,” says the barman, “kitchen closed at 9pm.” A lot of ranting and raving but all we got was a basket of sort-of warm chips, all that could be found in the empty kitchen. Josh: “Well, if you have a choice of food or beer, it’s easy, right?”

Josh is short and stumpy with legs like baseball bats, shown off because he is wearing shorts, and of course the inevitable baseball cap. Loud mouth, big mouth, plenty of teeth, head drawn back in super confidence though pretty short in stature. Joe, much quieter and less brash, no shorts, so I can’t reveal the shape of his legs, but somehow a good foil to Josh’s exclamations.  The two New York tab reporters spend their time in the Big Apple staking out doorways to wait for the arrival or exit of key players in whatever the going story might be. We Brits call that doorstepping. One famous Brit crime reporter once said: “I’ve been on more doorsteps than a milk bottle.” Those were the days by the way when a milkman turned up in a milk float and placed bottles of milk on the doorstep, a service almost unknown in much of the UK these days I guess.

Bursting with loudness, Josh says he has a deal with Joe. If they have been staking out an address all day and, say, it’s 9pm, they agree to ring their news editors at the same time and say the rival paper is “pulling out” and nothing is happening. “Then we go to the nearest watering hole,” says Josh.

By now you’re asking what about Jess. Well I only mentioned Jess, a reporter with an upmarket newspaper, because for 48 hours I couldn’t remember who was which. I got Josh pretty quickly but I kept on calling Joe Jess and Jess Joe. It was the bar evening and the introduction of Julius Caesar which helped me finally to realise that Joe was Joe, Josh was Josh and Jess, far less interesting with a rather penetrating and boring voice, was Jess.

Oh, there’s also a John, but he is set apart. He looks exactly like the tall thin comic who always appeared with The Office star  Ricky Gervais. I think his name was Stephen Merchant. Anyway this guy John is Stephen Merchant, so apart from risking calling him Steve, I generally am ok with calling him John. Since the Julius Caesar intervention at the bar there has been much mirth and jollity over the bona fide comment. Anything smelling of Latin or over-cleverness brings back the bona fides.  Just tab talk but great fun.

Banana rats come out at dawn and dusk in Guantanamo. They attack in packs. A reporter jogging along the road the other night was literally ambushed by these beasts determined to feed on him. He screamed and shouted and they hesitated. He escaped but it was warning a to us all. One of the defence counsel, a somewhat fierce lady,  has told the judge the office she has been given to do her research work at Guantanamo has been invaded by rats and mice. As proof, she described how the floors and tables and walls were covered in rat/mouse faeces and urine. Sorry if you’re reading this over breakfast. Now it’s not clear whether she is referring to common or garden rats or banana rats. If the latter, she is in serious trouble. As it is, she appears in court each day covered from head to foot in a black robe, with only  her pinched worried-looking face and her high-heeled shoed feet visible. She claims she’s wearing the garb in respect for her client, one of the 9/11 accused  who is a Muslim and is not allowed to see any other part of her frame. But me and the New York tab reporters know it’s to protect her from the sharp teeth of the invading banana rats. Grrrrrrrr.

A changing America

Meet Dave and Christy, quintessential American hard-working independent couple, with six kids between them, both married for second time, looking to the future, worried about the way things are going in the US, especially the economy, and wondering what's going to happen to their business if there's to be another four years of Obama. OK, they are Republicans, not Obama fans, but their hopes and fears for the way the United States of America is heading right now are, I suspect, mirrored across a broad spectrum of "typical" American families. The economy is struggling, unemployment remains at more than 8 per cent, American influence in the world is diminishing, defence spending is being slashed, the anti-American voice around the world is increasing in decibels alarmingly, and the huge debts are weighing heavily on the nation's ability to plan for the years ahead. Congress is a mess of frustrated, obstinate, irresponsible, partisan, self-seeking politicians who seem to have forgotten what their role is and the meaning of serving their country. Meanwhile, American servicemen and women are dying each day 8,000 miles away in a war that increasingly has less purpose and less meaning - and there's still two years to go.

So Dave and Christy, in their early 50s, believe another four years of Obama will make things worse. Christy believes the nation will go bust if Obama continues spending at the rate he has in his first four years, and Dave just says his country has become dependent on government - a very un-American concept. He ran a fish restaurant in Virginia for years, knows more about scallops than most people and was famous locally for his dishes. But when the lease ran out, he closed down. He didn't blame Obama per se but he said the economy, the job problems, uncertainty over the future had driven many of his customers away. The price of scallops had also shot up after the BP Gulf oil spill and the nuclear power disaster in Japan which forced Japanese restaurant owners to buy scallops from the US, because the Japanese ones were "hot".

Dave is now a tree-feller and has already lost a finger! His business is building up, but he fears his nation is no longer the entrepreneurial, go-get, American dream country he knew and loved, but has become a place where a huge number of people rely on the government for benefits and have lost the work ethic. I know that sounds like Mitt Romney. But this guy doesn't like Romney either. Dave is a salt-of-the-earth kinda chap who employs social misfits when he can to give them a chance. Christy works with deaf students and supports her Dave all the way.

Yes, a typical middle class American couple, fearful of the future for themselves and for their six kids. This is America today.

Everybody out

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Back in orange jumpsuit country for my fourth visit. Supposed to be for nine days for legal hearings inside the massively secure courtroom, concerning the upcoming (actually it could be four years away) trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "I did it" architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and four others with names and multiple aliases too difficult to spell, all of them staying at the pleasure of the US Government at the Guantanamo detention centre. Have Castro or his brother ever been asked what they think about having a terrorist detainee camp at the tip end of their island? Anyway, the only real drama during this trip was the threat of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Isaac washing over the island and threatening the assembled media, all sleeping in tents. After 48 hours of wondering whether we were all wasting our time and our Foreign Desks' money, the military judge puts his finger in the air, sniffs, mouths hurricane, and we get the order: "Everybody out!" It's to be my first official evacuation. I guess sleeping in a tent in hurricane-force winds would have been a bit hairy. Yes it's strictly tented accommodation for the hacks. Apart from incoming hurricanes, the only other danger sleeping in the tents at GTMO comes from banana rats and mosquitoes which is why the US military turns up the air conditioning in the tent to Arctic conditions. Totally freezing air blasting into your face the whole night. The banana rats bless them don't like the cold, so they stay outside the tent in the warm. But inside the tent, the nine-man beds are quivering with trembling reporters trying to wrap themselves in sweaters, anoraks and bobbly hats to have a fighting chance of a few hours' kip. Personally, I'd rather be a banana rat.

So after just two days in GTMO, writing pieces about things that were not going to happen - ie the legal hearings and debates about torture and the judge's pronouncements on the US government's secrecy classifications - we were told to pack up our belongings and head for the airport. The ferry going across to the US Naval Station where the airport is located was packed with journalists, lawyers, human rights observers, families of 9/11 victims, military types and a general in a fancy suit - the chief military prosecutor, a cool dude if ever I saw one. Bye bye GTMO, until the next time. If and when Isaac turns up, presumably the 168 detainees will be told to lie on the floor (shackled for their safety) until it blows over. But although the detention camps I have visited, Camp 5 and Camp 6, don't look that strong, apparently they are Hurricane Four-proof. Well, we'll see.

Out of the blue, we got some drama after all. We all piled onto the chartered aircraft, run by Ryan International Airways - no not Ryanair as we first thought - and the media were settled into the back rows of the plane. The judge and general were up front of course. Then a steward came to see us and pronounced the following: "Okay, can you listen please. We need you all to move further up, grab what seats you can find because 34 prisoners are coming on board and they are going to sit at the back where you are." WHAT? 34 prisoners? 34 GTMO detainees? What what what!!! What an amazing story and we are going to be on the spot  to record it. Everyone whipped out their Blackberrys, not to warn Foreign Desks because BlackBerrys don't get a signal at GTMO, but to be ready to take photos of detainees being brought down the aisle in handcuffs, hopefully dressed in orange! Wow wow, the expectation was immense. But wait a minute, 34 "prisoners" leaving Guantanamo and hitching a lift on a passenger plane, stuffed with journalists, 9/11 victims' families, a judge and a general?! Surely this can't be true. No one in Washington would ever contemplate such madness, would they? Please, let them be mad, we were all saying. The Fox News lady was beside herself with excitement. I began to smell a rat - not a banana rat. I walked up the aisle, spoke to a military type who knew nothing about it, and then grabbed the senior stewardess. Excuse me, are you really telling me that 34 detainees are about to get on the plane? I don't mind giving up my seat for them, but I am wondering if this is true. Well, she said, I've just come off the phone and apparently it has been cancelled. So, I said, no detainees after all. Er, no. So, I said, can I go back to my seat? I guess, she said. End of story boo hoo. I walked down the aisle and said loudly, it's all a joke. The judge did not look amused. The general just looked cool, such a dude.

Someone had to have an explanation. The steward who had announced the scoop of the century was beginning to look a bit sheepish. A military spokesman gathered us together and said there had been a slight misconception. I SHOULD SAY. Apparently, someone had said that there were two federal marshals on board, and federal marshals would only be on board if they had prisoners to escort. By a series of Chinese whispers, the message came down to our friendly steward - poor chap - that the last four rows of seats needed to be vacated pronto because of the expected arrival of 34 prisoners. A stewardess even said, oh don't worry, they'll all be handcuffed, WE weren't worried. We had our notebooks and pens poised. The anti-climax was huge. The steward started worrying about his job and we all felt thoroughly let down. The rather intense Fox News lady said: "I was that close to it, I could smell it." Yeah well, scoops don't come too often and anyway, lady, there are 22 other reporters on this plane, so it wasn't going to be a Fox special.

I did begin to wonder whether Ryan International Airways really was an offshoot of the blessed Irish Ryanair. It all seemed like a wonderful Irish joke.