PAUL Greengrass, the British director of the first mainstream film to tackle the September 11 terrorist attacks directly, has blasted the UK inquiry into the July 7 bombings as “shameful”.

Speaking at a London press conference a week before United 93 was due to for release in UK cinemas (June 2), Greengrass described Britain’s response to the terror attacks on London last year as pitiful, especially in light of the US response to September 11.

The director had been responding to questions concerning the timing of his film – which has been criticised in America for coming too soon.

“In the last few weeks, I must have been asked 300 times: “Is it too soon?” I understand the question, but I’ve never been asked it by a family of 9/11.

“I’ve had many of them say: “Why did it take so long?” But I think what we’re really asking is: “Is it too soon for us?”

“The truth is that these events happen, whether it’s 9/11 or Omagh. But when they happen, we pause for a moment, we’re not touched directly by them – we see the families, we feel sorry for them, we see them as victims and then frankly we want them to go away. Because we want to get on with the rest of our lives. We want to wait for the World Cup, go to the pub, prepare for our summer holidays – we want our lives unchanged and you can see that in the response to 7/7.

“But if you’re a family whose lives have been destroyed, changed forever irrevocably, you rage against that. You refuse to accept the victim-hood. You demand to be heard, you demand that we, untouched by it, address the core questions – such as why has this happened and what are we going to do?”

Greengrass went on to reveal that an early screening of United 93 in the UK had been attended by Rachel North, one of the 7/7 campaigners, who had just come from a meeting with John Reid at the Home Office, to ask for an inquiry to allow the families of the victims to answer “correctly, independently, thoroughly and comprehensively, what happened and why”.

He continued: “You go to America, you make this film, you cannot but be struck by the fact that the American response to 9/11 was to set up the 9/11 Commission.

“Then you cannot read that document – and all the millions of words of the supporting documentation – and not be impressed at their central commitment as a society to answering the question, “why, what happened”?

“Yet we in this country accept, in this slumbering way, the pathetic, pitiful response to 7/7. I don’t know if any of you have read that narrative of events – but it’s a shameful, shameful document.

“It’s like Lord Widgery’s account of Bloody Sunday. But we sit here as a society and slumber through these events.”

The UK response to which Greengrass was referring was a Home Office ‘narrative’ and a report by the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee that were both published earlier in May 2006.

The ‘narrative’ found the bombers were driven by “fierce antagonism to perceived injustices by the West against Muslims” and a desire for martyrdom.

The MPs’ report found a lack of resources prevented security services from intercepting the men responsible, a finding which prompted politicians and relatives of the 52 people killed in the 2005 attacks to reiterate calls for a full independent inquiry.

United 93 depicts, in real-time, the events surrounding the hijacking of the fourth plane on September 11, 2001, during which passengers fought back against the terrorists and eventually caused it to crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All involved were killed.

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