Almost everything you read about the 'war' is pure speculation and will turn out to be untrue

MATTHEW PARRIS

Isuppose we all remember where we were on that fateful morning when the Times and the Daily Telegraph published their graphologists' reports on the handwriting of Osama bin Laden. I certainly do. I was choking on my All-Bran — choking with a mixture of hilarity and derision.

To readers with so much as the intellect of a gnat, a series of fatal objections to these reports would have occurred before they had even reached the end of the first paragraph of the story: (1) How did we know the signature was indeed bin Laden's?

(2) Even if this was bin Laden's, and even if handwriting does betray character, how could you tell anything much from a signature alone, signatures being stylised and often quite unrepresentative of a person's normal handwriting?

(3) How could an English graphologist draw conclusions from an Arabic script? Unless fluent in the written language and familiar with hundreds of examples of its handwritten form, it would be impossible to work from any kind of concept of the norm, or note the deviations from it. There was no claim in either newspaper that their graphologists had specific expertise in Arabic.

(4) Who believes in graphology anyway? Would astrologists be reporting on bin Laden's stars next?

And, as you would expect, the two analyses, one in each newspaper, came up with wholly contrasting claims about bin Laden's personality. These graphologists must be naive creatures and lacking in the precautionary instincts of my own profession, for they did not appear to have consulted among themselves beforehand to make sure they both reported with the same story. One report, as I recall, makes bin Laden out to be unhappy and depressed. 'He's got a lot of weight on his mind and there's a deep feeling in him that he has bitten off more than he can chew.'

The other was headlined 'Giant ego with a wish for vengeance'. Three leading graphologists had said last night' that the faxed signature 'appears to reveal a rampant ego compensating for possible perceived childhood slights'. The signature also implied a strong libido driving the writer's actions. 'He has to discharge this energy; if it gets too pent up he has to release it and he may go into a frenzy. He's a rebel lious individualist and a non-conformist with a hedonistic drive for stimulation. Anticipation of punishment doesn't stop him. He might have difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality.'

He might indeed. So might newspaper readers. Yet the conjuring into reality of these stories about handwriting marked a shrewd editorial judgment. They caught the eye, did they not? You read them, did you not? You remember them now, 1 think. I certainly do.

But I did think them monumentally silly. 'Cripes, I spluttered, *there's so much more serious stuff to go into the papers at a time like this: real stories about real events; serious comment; careful analysis. Reports from all over the globe. Anxious readers are buying newspapers in huge numbers, hungry for information. The press becomes important at a time like this.'

What nonsense. I had drawn precisely the wrong conclusion from those little journalistic adventures into graphology. I had seen them as pointing up a contrast between useful reportage on this 'war', and the merely trivial.

But, of course, the fluff-and-nonsense stories were not piffling exceptions to the general rule. They were the general rule. The only difference between a jolly little story' about a graphologist's claims, and a 2,000-word stonker about the likely size and shape of an imminent invasion, is that the second pretends to be authoritative. The first wears its absurdity on its sleeve.

Nearly all the news-media's reporting and commentary' in the aftermath of this calamity is perfectly useless. Nobody writing this stuff has the least idea what is going on. Anybody with a cock-and-bull tale which includes plenty of phrases like 'hill-tribe'. `US defence experts', 'inside the mind of a mass murderer' or 'vast terrorist network', plus a little map of Afghanistan — another little map of Afghanistan — is being offered the space to print it, by editors desperate for new ways of rearranging headlines containing the words 'Terror', Preparation' or 'Strike' and desperate for copy to run beneath them. If your aunty once knew someone who had a story about what desperados these desperados are, you could find an editor to print it.

I am just about prepared to believe that the little maps of Afghanistan are correct as to the approximate alignment of the boundaries. It may even be that the physical relief indicated bears some relation to the shape of the place and the incidence of mountains. But all other claims-claims as to who, what or where the Northern Alliance are, how the mind of the US President is tending, what advice he is receiving, or what anybody in Afghanistan thinks — are pure speculation, the vast majority of which, if we should ever bother to reread this month's newspapers with the benefit of next year's hindsight, will be seen to have been hopelessly wide of the mark.

Do you remember, in the days immediately following the New York disaster, hearing that American aeronautical expert opining that those suicide pilots must have been fiendishly well-trained and in possession of a mass of detailed information, in order to have hit their targets — and, on the same day, a British aeronautical expert saying that any damn fool could fly a plane into a building? It was at that point that I determined to take it all, all, with a pinch of salt.

For I remember the Gulf War, and the hopelessly inaccurate reports. I remember the Nato bombing of Serbia and the news and information which so often turned out to be utterly adrift. And I remember, as an MP then, the Falklands War (except that that one, which genuinely was a war, we were not encouraged to call a war). The Vulcan bombers — do you recall? — had reduced Port Stanley's runway to a rubble-strewn moonscape. They had done no such thing. To occupy those islands from the sea by means of a fiercely resisted attempted landing would require — do you recall'? —an occupying force which vastly outnumbered the forces already in occupation. It required no such thing. And to this day we haven't really figured out (though the announcement at the time sounded very clear) what happened to the Belgrano.

No, they don't know. Nobody knows. And if anybody did know they wouldn't say. These days I have taken to skipping straight through the first six or seven pages of even the broadsheet newspapers, fast. I have a hunch that millions of other readers are starting to do the same.

Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.