It is customary for magazines like this to devote some of the final issue of the year to an appraisal of the national and international highs and lows of the foregoing twelve months; reminding readers who were the winners and the losers, what were the triumphs and the travesties, and so on. But the US election has given 2024 the kind of a cliffhanger ending Netflix would kill for, and the truth is not many people want to look in the rear-view mirror right now, being far more interested in what will happen on 20 January, when Season 2 of Draining the Swamp kicks off. Indeed, if it were digitally possible, many of us would fast-forward through the celebration of the birth of Our Lord to get answers to the questions that have kept us awake in recent weeks: Is he really going to stop those wars? Will he really pull out of those international agreements? Will he really drill those wells and overturn those statutes? And that’s just Episode 1.

Being well past fighting age with no desire to emigrate and holding no fossil fuel stocks, I don’t have much skin in most of these games. But as a crusader for truth (aka hack) there is one Trump election promise I do have an interest in. A promise which was also made by one of his predecessors – ironically, the one who worked as tirelessly to derail the Trump train in 2024 as he did in 2016, and to no better effect. I remember that first occasion because I was living in Washington at the time. When an unwrinkled, un-elected Barack Obama told the families of 9/11 victims that they deserved to know everything the government knew about the events of that terrible day; publication of the official government account having been suppressed for years by the Bush administration ‘in the interests of national security’. Some months after taking office, Obama did authorise the publication of the 9/11 Commission Report, but with large chunks still redacted. It was and still is the contention of  9/11 ‘Truthers’ that these 28 pages describe the relationship between the men who carried out the attacks and senior figures in the Saudi government and, more concerningly, reveal that while every other domestic and international flight out of US airports was grounded in the aftermath of the attacks, flights carrying these Saudis out of US airspace were green-lighted.

Why do I still care about this? Because not far into Obama’s first term I wrote an article about the Truther movement, charting its evolution from a mob of anti-establishment cranks to a well-organised affiliation of architects, pilots and scientists who have no political axe to grind, but who cannot reconcile what the government has told them about 9/11 with what they know as experts in their respective fields. The article was not a scoop; none of the evidence it cited had not already been adduced separately by other writers. So I was quite surprised when, having paid me handsomely for the piece, the editor of a British monthly with even more conservative credentials than the Speccie decided suddenly not to publish it. Even more surprisingly, he declined to give me any explanation for his decision but told me to keep the money, thereby preventing me pitching the piece elsewhere. I scratched my head for a few days, then shrugged, and barely gave the matter another thought until the day five years later, back in Australia, I received an email from someone who’d been my neighbour in DC. I didn’t know her well – we’d only ever spoken when our visits to the building’s laundry room overlapped. But during one of these chats she’d mentioned that she worked in the Pentagon, and I’d told her about my piece, and she’d asked to read it, so later that day I emailed it to her. She never acknowledged receipt, let alone told me what she thought of it, so she may never have even read it. But in the email I received three years ago she told me that she’d recently left her Pentagon job, and a few day after handing back her computer had been visited at home by some serious men who asked her if she knew the whereabouts of the person who’d written an article they’d found on the hard drive. She was writing to me to tell me that she’d been obliged to give them my email address, and to alert me to the possibility that these same people ‘might reach out to you at some stage’.

They haven’t, but on each of the many visits I’ve made to the US since receiving that email, I’ve approached passport control with a frisson of apprehension. If President Trump keeps his promise to still grieving families of 9/11 victims, I will be able to stroll through LAX without a care in the world. But if he doesn’t, and at some stage the title of this column changes to Gitmo Life, you will know why.