UFO Info Week-End

I wanted to know who these men were and why they did what they did

“I wanted to know who these men were and why they did what they did.”It is easy to misinterpret as paranoia his caution among strangers. He has, after all, been diabolised by some of the very papers that have lauded his literary genius. Four years ago he told me he thought British newspapers, by and large, were wedded to the “mad bomber” view and couldn’t – or wouldn’t – apprise themselves of historical intricacies involved. In the current issue of Radio Times he writes that “shorthand descriptions of the [9/11] hijackers as fanatics, cowards and evildoers were inadequate … Something set them on the road to 9/11″.Despite the charm and laid-back persona, Bennett is clearly a man of imperative ideas and impulses, but has learnt, possibly through a reputation some have used to malign him, not to be reckless with them.

Equally clear is his concern at unionist traditions which cry, “Oh Lord, deliver us from the infernal terrors of Catholic nationalism and exempt our spirit from sepulchral larvae.” He is a modern man upon whom his upbringing hangs fairly lightly.There are interesting parallels between Bennett’s approaches to Irish republicanism and modern Islamic fervour (just as his Congo book echoed aspects of the Irish conflict). To others it seemed a symptom of a resentment, the roots of which lay in an insecure childhood and obscure loyalty to resistance of authority.It is quite obvious from a meeting with him that he is not enamoured of the pious Irish nationalism that equates love of country with numerous genuflection to Catholic altars. The slightly built Belfastman, who affects black leather jackets and a contemplative far-distance gaze of Il Penseroso, once declared he wouldn’t hand over the Omagh bombers to the RUC, a “completely discredited force”, in his view. “Alternatives are what the real world works in, and war, if it to be used at all, must be the very last of these.”That virtuous sentiment is widely shared. Later, when two Omagh parents publicly deplored this remark, he issued an apology, saying: “I believe those responsible should be brought to account.” To some critics who saw this as half-hearted, one might counter that his original faux pas was less an expression of support for the killers than one of contempt for the force charged with bringing them to book, since reformed and renamed.

Yet Bennett occasionally can end up expressing sentiments that seem distinctly unvirtuous. “In Ireland it used to be said that only chemists have the right to talk of solutions,” he wrote as the US and Britain were about to invade Iraq. But Bennett, who lives with The Guardian’s deputy editor, Georgina Henry, in east London (they have a four-year-old son), exudes a kind of insouciance in interview. His emotions seem well under control, which is not to say he isn’t passionate about certain things: inter alia, the war in Iraq and phony Anglo-American solutions to world problems. The charges were eventually thrown out.Such tribulations might have embedded a chip on anyone’s shoulder. In 1974 he was tried with three others for the murder of a Royal Ulster Constabulary inspector who was investigating a bank robbery in Belfast. Bennett then came to England where he spent 20 months on remand in Brixton prison on a spurious charge of conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown.