Mr. Imad Hamad, director of the Midwest Region of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and a community leader in Detroit, Mich., was a nominee selected for the 2003 Director’s Award for exceptional public service. It has recently come to our attention that evidence referencing Mr. Hamad has been filed in connection with an upcoming deportation proceeding against associates of his. Accordingly, this award has been withdrawn."

Walked with my editor a ways until he had to head towards home. Said goodbye and marched south, down to the hole in the sky.

Late Saturday afternoon, almost five. Hundreds of people looking up at nothing. Hundreds of people looking into the pit. Everyone had come to see what wasn’t there. Flowers stuck into the fence; journals and candles, gifts, votaries, offerings, messages. The daily crop, removed at dusk. To my surprise they didn’t just throw up a fence, but put up a series of signs that explained the history of the site, back to the Hudson Terminal Towers and beyond. The historical plaques, the fence, the reactions of the visitors - it felt like a death camp site. If you had no idea what had happened here you would know almost at once that it this place had suffered a hideous calamity. It had an emptiness I can’t describe, an emptiness made all the more obvious by all the congestion around the site. It was like entering a parlor whose walls and tables were filled with framed photos, and you notice that there’s nothing on the mantelpiece.

One building had a gigantic mural devoted to hope and remembrance. I’m sure it’s just an accident that this wretched culture of ours didn’t put up something reminding us to smite the bearded foreigners and run their blood into the gutters. An oversight. Last minute mistake.

Walked around, up the walkway. You look down and see the new construction; you see the naked subterranean floors still exposed, still raw. Back down the stairs, and there’s-a few square yards of painted wood, smothered with the words of the grieved, the widowed, the friends and neighbors and people who always bought smokes from that store in the concourse and only knew the woman behind the counter as Maria, and everyone else who probably brought a Sharpie intent on saying what they had to say, and so what if they paint it over, it’ll be there still. Something isn’t gone just because it’s buried.

T-SHIRTS TWO DOLLA, TWO DOLLA, TWO DOLLA said the vendor near the bottom of the steps, and I felt like walking over and kicking him in the nuts. But. Well. No. I went south instead, and once I was half a block away I was suddenly in a different world. South of the WTC site is the Deutsche Bank building, now wrapped in black fabric, abandoned. There was no one here, and there were no sounds. I’ve never ever been anywhere in Manhattan where it was this quiet. No horns, no voices, no car alarms, nothing. Absolute silence. The wind had picked up, and was rippling the shroud over the DB tower. All the ripples went up. It looked as if the building was still shedding souls, and they were running beneath the thin dark blanket, looking for the way out.

I paused at the plaza on Liberty, took a picture of the empty sky, and turned around -

And there were old friends. The Trinity Building. The Equitable Building, God bless its unlovable bulk. I walked around and saw the other giants of lower Manhattan - 40 Wall, Cities Service. The Woolworth building. One after the other - giant monoliths old and new, gargantuan towers assembled in the sky by human hands, each one just another piston stroke in the motor of American commerce. You can’t begin to knock all these down. And if you managed to fell them all, you’d have to head north and work on that Olympian lance on 34th, and if you brought that down - it would take you years to make your way ten blocks.

The men who brought down the towers did nothing more than take a hammer to the tooth of a sleeping lion. Oh, you can do that.

But you can only do it once.

No, this isn’t Watergate; it’s bigger than that. The version of the story that still fits the facts is in that Bob Novak Sun-Times column from July. Novak wanted to know why Wilson had been chosen to go to Africa. It’s one thing not to be a card-carrying neocon, quite another to be as antipathetic to the administration and the war as this fellow. The White House asked the CIA, the CIA recommended Wilson, and their recommendation was accepted automatically. But what the original leakers told Novak was that it was Mrs Wilson who’d proposed her husband for the job. The Company responded that their counter-proliferation officials came up with Wilson and they only used the wife to contact him.

It doesn’t really matter which version you believe, because the end result’s the same: an agency known to be opposed to war in Iraq sent an employee’s spouse also known to be opposed to war in Iraq on a perfunctory joke mission. And, after eight days sipping tea and meeting government officials in one city of one country, Ambassador Wilson gave a verbal report to the CIA and was horrified to switch on his TV and see Bush going on about what British Intelligence had learned about Saddam and Africa. As I wrote in this space last July:

‘The intel bureaucracy got the Sudanese aspirin factory wrong, failed to spot 9/11 coming, and insisted it was impossible for any American to penetrate bin Laden’s network, only to have Johnnie bin Joss-Stick from hippy-dippy Marin County on a self-discovery jaunt round the region stroll into the cave and be sharing the executive latrine with the A-list jihadi within 20 minutes. So, if you’re the President and the same intelligence bureaucrats who got all the above wrong say the Brits are way off the mark, there’s nothing going on with Saddam and Africa, what do you do? Do you say, “Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day”? Or do you make the reasonable assumption that, given what you’ve learned about the state of your humint (human intelligence) in the CIA, is it likely they’ve got much of a clue about what’s going on in French Africa? Isn’t this one of those deals where the Brits and the shifty French are more plugged in?’

If sending Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger for a week is the best the world’s only hyperpower can do, that’s a serious problem. If the Company knew it was a joke all along, that’s a worse problem. It means Mr Bush is in the same position with the CIA as General Musharraf is with Pakistan’s ISI: when he makes a routine request, he has to figure out whether they’re going to use it to try and set him up. This is no way to win a terror war.