Mantis Claw
12-30-2002, 01:45 PM
Guerrilla of the Year
Editor's Pick, December 30, 2002
He has no peer. Robert Fisk, the intrepid war correspondent for the UK's Independent, is simply the best journalist in the world today. Fearless (he survived a vicious beating in Afghanistan at the hands of a mob), and as well-versed in the rules of the street as he is in the lessons of history, Fisk is the single most imporatant chronicler of the cauldron of hate that is the Middle East. In the past year, he has sent dispatches from the killing fields of Afghanistan, the West Bank, and Iraq, with a laser-sharp sense of detail and moral outrage, all delivered with the highest journalistic standards for accuracy.
Fisk is more than just a journalist, he is a man whose unique insight into that region could go a long way to finding solutions. When asked by the Digital Freedom Network for his views on the best approach to dealing with the growing resentment in the Muslim world towards the west, he advised:
"To study history. To stop regarding those who hate us as our enemies. To stop accepting the world of Western leaders who often obscure the truth and are themselves sometimes ignorant of events. There are very clear injustices that have taken place in the Muslim word for which we in the West are directly or indirectly responsible. I won't go through the list now (Israel/Palestine, the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, the one-sided U.S. approach to the Mideast, etc.). At the same time, it is important in any conversation with Muslims to raise issues which they too must address: civil rights and human rights go largely ignored in much of the Arab world. Why? Why this slavish obedience to dictators?"
That is Fisk's strength in a nutshell. He holds no favorites, all enemies of peace and truth are his target, whether they sit in Whitehall or the White House, the West Bank or Baghdad. While the rest of the so-called mainstream press hides behind the mask of "objectivity," Fisk is not afraid to write with attitude and an opinion (oh, no!, not an opinion!). He demonstrates that sometimes the most honest form of reportage is when you lay your cards on the table, say what you mean, and then back it up.
The following excerpts represent the best of Fisk's reportage from the year gone by:
America's morality has been distorted by 11 September, By Robert Fisk, 07 March 2002
In Afghan fields, the poppies blow. Yes, even as the Americans are moving deeper into the Afghan trap, the warlords and gangsters running much of the western-supported Afghan government are ensuring a bumper new crop of heroin for the world's markets. The UN have warned of this, of course, but nothing is being done. The "war against terror" comes first. The broken roads and highways of Afghanistan are now ribbons of anarchy and brigandage and murder across the country. The pathetic little force of peace-keepers in Kabul cannot control all of the capital, let alone the rest of the country.
The Interim President, Hamid Karzai, can scarcely control the street outside his office. But the "war against terror" comes first. Locked into their "war against terror" - and now discovering that their enemies want to fight them - the Americans remain equally indolent when confronted by the infinitely more dangerous conflict 2,000 miles to the west of Kabul, in the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Nablus, Jenin and Gaza. When the Israeli army goes on a shooting spree in the refugee camps and kills 16 Palestinians, among them two children, the US calls for "restraint".
When a Palestinian suicide bomber murders a crowd of Israelis in Jerusalem, including two babies and a 10-year old, the US boldly blames Yasser Arafat for not "stopping terrorism" by locking up the bad guys. And Ariel Sharon? Why, he's busy destroying the police stations and prisons to make sure Mr Arafat can't do what he's been ordered to do.
[...]
Truth is a scarce commodity as propaganda war gets into its stride, by Robert Fisk, 04 April 2002
Truth, as Winston Churchill notoriously said, must be protected by "a bodyguard of lies". But Churchill, who once described pre-1948 Palestine as a "hell-disaster", could never have known the deception, dishonesty and sheer fantasy of today's propaganda in the Middle East.
Is the conflict here a "war against terror" or a struggle against Zionism? Anyone who does not know the cost of trying to answer that question has only to refer to a document recently published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which asks the question: "Is anti-Zionism different from anti-Semitism?" Here's part of the answer: "Just as anti-Semitism denies Jews their rights as individuals in society, anti-Zionism attacks the Jewish people as a nation ... It is no coincidence that the recent censure of Israel in international forums and the media has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anti-Semitic incidents."
The message is simple: to criticise Israel risks the charge of racism; better, therefore, to keep to the safe line that Israel is fighting a "war against terror" rather than reoccupying the land of a subject people.
[...]
The bloody battle of Bethlehem, by Robert Fisk, 04 April 2002
Rotting bodies in Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers surrounding Palestinian civilians and militiamen in the place of Christ's birth, unburied corpses in Ramallah - Israel's latest war is turning into a human and political tragedy on a vast scale as the last physical symbols of the Oslo peace agreement are destroyed. For two days, the suicide bombers have been silent. But the coming weeks will decide the future of the Holy Land for years to come. If the Church of the Nativity is now a battleground, what is sacred any longer? The details are as indistinct as the smoke that still rises close to Manger Square, but Christian officials speak of at least 100 Palestinian civilians seeking the sanctuary of the church that marks the spot where Jesus is believed to have been born in a stable. With them, it seems, are at least 10 Palestinian militiamen from the Tanzim movement.
The Israeli army has surrounded the church with tanks. According to the Israelis, the Tanzim men have opened fire on the occupying soldiers. The Palestinians denied it. But no one can deny the carnage elsewhere. Take the phone call I received from Sami Abda yesterday afternoon. On Tuesday, he told me, Israeli soldiers arrived at his house in the centre of Bethlehem and, despite being warned by a neighbour that his home was filled with women and children, opened fire on the building. The Israelis claimed that "terrorists'' were in the house.
[...]
Brutalised by war, a savage mob turns on its own, by Robert Fisk in Hebron, 24 April 2002
The first body was hanging upside down, one grey left foot tied to the electricity pylon with wire, his right leg hanging at an obscene angle, his head lolling below what remained of a black shirt. This was Moussa Arjoub of Doura village. The second body was infinitely more terrible, a butcher's carcass; again, hanging by a left leg, but this time his almost naked torso was riven with stab marks and holes into which Palestinian boys of 10 or 12, whooping with glee, were stubbing cigarettes.
This was Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb. His head was almost severed from his remains, moving slightly in the wind, bearded, face still distorted with terror. He reminded me, oddly, of that fearsome portrait of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, all arrows and open wounds. But Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb was reviled, not honoured, children and middle-aged Palestinian men roaring with delight when stones thumped off the collaborator's bloodied corpse. "This is a lesson to all here." I turned round to find a middle-aged, portly man with a big brown beard, gesturing towards another revolting bag of flesh behind me. "This was Mohamed Debebsi. This is a lesson for the people. Everyone should see this."
[...]
The return to Afghanistan: Collateral damage, by Robert Fisk, 06 August 2002
President George Bush's "war on terror" reached the desert village of Hajibirgit at midnight on 22 May. Haji Birgit Khan, the bearded, 85-year-old Pushtu village leader and head of 12,000 local tribal families, was lying on a patch of grass outside his home. Faqir Mohamed was sleeping among his sheep and goats in a patch of sand to the south when he heard "big planes moving in the sky". Even at night, it is so hot that many villagers spend the hours of darkness outside their homes, although Mohamedin and his family were in their mud-walled house.
There were 105 families in Hajibirgit on 22 May, and all were woken by the thunder of helicopter engines and the thwack of rotor blades and the screaming voices of the Americans. Haji Birgit Khan was seen running stiffly from his little lawn towards the white-walled village mosque, a rectangular cement building with a single loudspeaker and a few threadbare carpets. Several armed men were seen running after him. Hakim, one of the animal herders, saw the men from the helicopters chase the old man into the mosque and heard a burst of gunfire. "When our people found him, he had been killed with a bullet, in the head," he says, pointing downwards. There is a single bullet hole in the concrete floor of the mosque and a dried bloodstain beside it. "We found bits of his brain on the wall."
[...]
Afghanistan is on the brink of another disaster The Americans now leave the beatings to Afghan allies, but the CIA are there during the beatings, by Robert Fisk 14 August 2002
The garden was overgrown, the roses scrawny after a day of Kandahar heat, the dust in our eyes, noses, mouth, fingernails. But the message was straightforward. "This is a secret war," the Special Forces man told me. "And this is a dirty war. You don't know what is happening." And of course, we are not supposed to know.
In a "war against terror", journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely on the good guys to sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about human rights. How many human rights did the mass killers of 11 September allow their victims? You are either with us or against us. Whose side are you on? But the man in the garden was worried. He was not an American. He was one of the "coalition allies", as the Americans like to call the patsies who have trotted after them into the Afghan midden. "The Americans don't know what to do here now," he went on. "Their morale in Afghanistan is going downhill - though there's no problem with the generals running things in Tampa. They're still gung-ho. But here the soldiers know things haven't gone right, that things aren't working. Even their interrogations went wrong". Brutally so, it seems.
[...]
The Dishonesty of This So-Called Dossier, by Robert Fisk, 25 September 2002
Tony Blair's "dossier" on Iraq is a shocking document. Reading it can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof - if the contents are true - that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction are correct - and I will come to the "ifs" and "buts" and "coulds" later - it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us - for nothing.
Let's go back to 12 May 1996. Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, had told us that sanctions worked and prevented Saddam from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Our Tory government agreed, and Tony Blair faithfully toed the line. But on 12 May, Mrs Albright appeared on CBS television. Leslie Stahl, the interviewer, asked: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" To the world's astonishment, Mrs Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." Now we know - if Mr Blair is telling us the truth - that the price was not worth it. The price was paid in the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. But it wasn't worth a dime.
The Blair "dossier" tells us that, despite sanctions, Saddam was able to go on building weapons of mass destruction. All that nonsense about dual-use technology, the ban on children's pencils - because lead could have a military use - and our refusal to allow Iraq to import equipment to restore the water-treatment plants that we bombed in the Gulf War, was a sham. This terrible conclusion is the only moral one to be drawn from the 16 pages that supposedly detail the chemical, biological and nuclear horrors that the Beast of Baghdad has in store for us. It's difficult, reading the full report, to know whether to laugh or cry. The degree of deceit and duplicity in its production speaks of the trickery that informs the Blair government and its treatment of MPs.
[...]
President Bush Wants War, Not Justice - And He'll Soon Find Another Excuse For It, by Robert Fisk 18 September 2002
Major Scott Ritter, Iraq's nemesis-turned-savior, was indeed - as an inspector - regularly traveling to Tel Aviv to consult Israeli intelligence. Then Saddam accused the UN inspectors of working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it emerged, was using the UN's Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's government communications. And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", it turned out that virtually every one of the bombing targets had been visited by UN inspectors over the previous six months. Far from being an inspectorate, the UN lads - though they didn't all know it - had been acting as forward air controllers, drawing up an American hit list rather than monitoring compliance with UN resolutions.
[...]
How to shut up your critics with a single word, by Robert Fisk, 21 October 2002
Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described the "Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer - there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy."
Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians". Where else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories". Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan - a close personal friend of Mr Sharon - believes in "liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat because "if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live". You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv, Ha'aretz or Yediot Ahronot because in much of the Western world, a vicious campaign of slander is being waged against any journalist or activist who dares to criticise Israeli policies or those that shape them.
The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone - people who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing of children - in an attempt to shut them up.
[...]
George Bush crosses Rubicon - but what lies beyond?, by Robert Fisk, 09 November 2002
When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river, he wrote, in his Gallic Wars: "Alea iacta est [The die is cast]." Just after 5pm yesterday, when the United Nations Security Council voted 15-0 to disarm Iraq, the US President George Bush crossed the Rubicon. "The world must insist that judgement must be enforced," he told us.
The Rubicon is a wide river. It was deep for Caesar's legions. The Tigris river will be more shallow - my guess is that the first American tanks will be across it within one week of war - but what lies beyond? For Rome, civil war followed. And, be assured, civil war will follow any American invasion of Iraq. "Cheat and retreat will no longer be tolerated," Mr Bush told us yesterday - forgetting, of course, UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 which call for Israel to withdraw from the Arab territories occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
And after eight weeks of debate in the Security Council, no one mentioned the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, because - of course - Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 11 September. If the United States invades Iraq, we should remember that.
[...]
With runners and whispers, al-Qa'ida outfoxes U.S. forces, by Robert Fisk 06 December 2002
The Americans take them shackled and hooded on to transport aircraft to Kandahar. They live in pens of eight or 10 men. They are given cots with blankets but no privacy. They are forced to urinate and defecate publicly because the Americans want to watch their prisoners at all times. But United States forces have not only failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden while they are preparing for war in Iraq: they are finding it almost impossible to crack the al-Qa'ida network because Bin Laden's men have resorted to primitive methods of communication that cut individual members of al-Qa'ida off from all information. This extraordinary, grim scenario comes from an American intelligence officer just back from Afghanistan who agreed to talk to The Independent - and to supply his own photographs of prisoners - on condition of anonymity. His prognoses were chilling and totally at variance with the upbeat briefings of the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Even in Pakistan, he says, middle-ranking Pakistani army officers are tipping off members of al-Qa'ida to avoid American-organised raids.
[...]
Did Saddam's army test poison gas on missing 5,000? by Robert Fisk 13 December 2002
Why didn't Tony Blair and George Bush mention Saddam Hussein's most terrible war crime? Why, in all their "dossiers", did they not refer to the 5,000 young men and women who were held at detention centres when their families - of Iranian origin - were hurled over the border to Iran just before President Saddam invaded Iran in 1980? Could it be because these 5,000 young men and women were used for experiments in gas and biological warfare agents whose ingredients were originally supplied by the United States?
Just months before his September 1980 invasion of Iran - in which tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers died an appalling death by gas burns and blisters - Saddam's Interior Ministry issued directive No 2884, dated 10 April 1980, stating that "all youths aged between 18 and 28 are exempt from deportation and must be held at detention centres until further notice". Most, though not all, of the young men and women affected by this order were Kurds. None of their families ever saw their loved ones again, but they have since been told that the detainees were killed during experiments in gas and chemical warfare centres in Iraq.
[...]
Journalists are under fire for telling the truth, by Robert Fisk, 18 December 2002
First it was Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel, who advised the US President to take the "harshest measures possible" against those who attacked America on 11 September, 2001. Let us forget, for a moment, that Fox News's Jerusalem bureau chief is Uri Dan, a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the author of the preface of the new edition of Sharon's autobiography, which includes a revolting account of the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinian civilians and Sharon's innocence in this slaughter.
Then Ted Koppel, one of America's leading news anchormen, announced that it may be a journalist's duty not to reveal events until the military want them revealed in a new war against Iraq.
[…]
I will tell you. Journalists are being attacked for telling the truth, for trying to tell it how it is. American journalists especially. I urge them to read a remarkable new book published by the New York University Press and edited by John Collins and Ross Glover. It's called Collateral Language and is, in its own words, intended to expose "the tyranny of political rhetoric". Its chapter titles - "Anthrax", "Cowardice", "Evil", "Freedom", Fundamentalism", "Justice", "Terrorism", Vital Interests" and - my favourite - "The War on..." (fill in the missing country) tell it all.
Meanwhile, rest assured, the journalists are getting onside, to tell you the story the government wants you to hear.
[...]
Editor's Pick, December 30, 2002
He has no peer. Robert Fisk, the intrepid war correspondent for the UK's Independent, is simply the best journalist in the world today. Fearless (he survived a vicious beating in Afghanistan at the hands of a mob), and as well-versed in the rules of the street as he is in the lessons of history, Fisk is the single most imporatant chronicler of the cauldron of hate that is the Middle East. In the past year, he has sent dispatches from the killing fields of Afghanistan, the West Bank, and Iraq, with a laser-sharp sense of detail and moral outrage, all delivered with the highest journalistic standards for accuracy.
Fisk is more than just a journalist, he is a man whose unique insight into that region could go a long way to finding solutions. When asked by the Digital Freedom Network for his views on the best approach to dealing with the growing resentment in the Muslim world towards the west, he advised:
"To study history. To stop regarding those who hate us as our enemies. To stop accepting the world of Western leaders who often obscure the truth and are themselves sometimes ignorant of events. There are very clear injustices that have taken place in the Muslim word for which we in the West are directly or indirectly responsible. I won't go through the list now (Israel/Palestine, the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, the one-sided U.S. approach to the Mideast, etc.). At the same time, it is important in any conversation with Muslims to raise issues which they too must address: civil rights and human rights go largely ignored in much of the Arab world. Why? Why this slavish obedience to dictators?"
That is Fisk's strength in a nutshell. He holds no favorites, all enemies of peace and truth are his target, whether they sit in Whitehall or the White House, the West Bank or Baghdad. While the rest of the so-called mainstream press hides behind the mask of "objectivity," Fisk is not afraid to write with attitude and an opinion (oh, no!, not an opinion!). He demonstrates that sometimes the most honest form of reportage is when you lay your cards on the table, say what you mean, and then back it up.
The following excerpts represent the best of Fisk's reportage from the year gone by:
America's morality has been distorted by 11 September, By Robert Fisk, 07 March 2002
In Afghan fields, the poppies blow. Yes, even as the Americans are moving deeper into the Afghan trap, the warlords and gangsters running much of the western-supported Afghan government are ensuring a bumper new crop of heroin for the world's markets. The UN have warned of this, of course, but nothing is being done. The "war against terror" comes first. The broken roads and highways of Afghanistan are now ribbons of anarchy and brigandage and murder across the country. The pathetic little force of peace-keepers in Kabul cannot control all of the capital, let alone the rest of the country.
The Interim President, Hamid Karzai, can scarcely control the street outside his office. But the "war against terror" comes first. Locked into their "war against terror" - and now discovering that their enemies want to fight them - the Americans remain equally indolent when confronted by the infinitely more dangerous conflict 2,000 miles to the west of Kabul, in the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Nablus, Jenin and Gaza. When the Israeli army goes on a shooting spree in the refugee camps and kills 16 Palestinians, among them two children, the US calls for "restraint".
When a Palestinian suicide bomber murders a crowd of Israelis in Jerusalem, including two babies and a 10-year old, the US boldly blames Yasser Arafat for not "stopping terrorism" by locking up the bad guys. And Ariel Sharon? Why, he's busy destroying the police stations and prisons to make sure Mr Arafat can't do what he's been ordered to do.
[...]
Truth is a scarce commodity as propaganda war gets into its stride, by Robert Fisk, 04 April 2002
Truth, as Winston Churchill notoriously said, must be protected by "a bodyguard of lies". But Churchill, who once described pre-1948 Palestine as a "hell-disaster", could never have known the deception, dishonesty and sheer fantasy of today's propaganda in the Middle East.
Is the conflict here a "war against terror" or a struggle against Zionism? Anyone who does not know the cost of trying to answer that question has only to refer to a document recently published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which asks the question: "Is anti-Zionism different from anti-Semitism?" Here's part of the answer: "Just as anti-Semitism denies Jews their rights as individuals in society, anti-Zionism attacks the Jewish people as a nation ... It is no coincidence that the recent censure of Israel in international forums and the media has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anti-Semitic incidents."
The message is simple: to criticise Israel risks the charge of racism; better, therefore, to keep to the safe line that Israel is fighting a "war against terror" rather than reoccupying the land of a subject people.
[...]
The bloody battle of Bethlehem, by Robert Fisk, 04 April 2002
Rotting bodies in Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers surrounding Palestinian civilians and militiamen in the place of Christ's birth, unburied corpses in Ramallah - Israel's latest war is turning into a human and political tragedy on a vast scale as the last physical symbols of the Oslo peace agreement are destroyed. For two days, the suicide bombers have been silent. But the coming weeks will decide the future of the Holy Land for years to come. If the Church of the Nativity is now a battleground, what is sacred any longer? The details are as indistinct as the smoke that still rises close to Manger Square, but Christian officials speak of at least 100 Palestinian civilians seeking the sanctuary of the church that marks the spot where Jesus is believed to have been born in a stable. With them, it seems, are at least 10 Palestinian militiamen from the Tanzim movement.
The Israeli army has surrounded the church with tanks. According to the Israelis, the Tanzim men have opened fire on the occupying soldiers. The Palestinians denied it. But no one can deny the carnage elsewhere. Take the phone call I received from Sami Abda yesterday afternoon. On Tuesday, he told me, Israeli soldiers arrived at his house in the centre of Bethlehem and, despite being warned by a neighbour that his home was filled with women and children, opened fire on the building. The Israelis claimed that "terrorists'' were in the house.
[...]
Brutalised by war, a savage mob turns on its own, by Robert Fisk in Hebron, 24 April 2002
The first body was hanging upside down, one grey left foot tied to the electricity pylon with wire, his right leg hanging at an obscene angle, his head lolling below what remained of a black shirt. This was Moussa Arjoub of Doura village. The second body was infinitely more terrible, a butcher's carcass; again, hanging by a left leg, but this time his almost naked torso was riven with stab marks and holes into which Palestinian boys of 10 or 12, whooping with glee, were stubbing cigarettes.
This was Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb. His head was almost severed from his remains, moving slightly in the wind, bearded, face still distorted with terror. He reminded me, oddly, of that fearsome portrait of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, all arrows and open wounds. But Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb was reviled, not honoured, children and middle-aged Palestinian men roaring with delight when stones thumped off the collaborator's bloodied corpse. "This is a lesson to all here." I turned round to find a middle-aged, portly man with a big brown beard, gesturing towards another revolting bag of flesh behind me. "This was Mohamed Debebsi. This is a lesson for the people. Everyone should see this."
[...]
The return to Afghanistan: Collateral damage, by Robert Fisk, 06 August 2002
President George Bush's "war on terror" reached the desert village of Hajibirgit at midnight on 22 May. Haji Birgit Khan, the bearded, 85-year-old Pushtu village leader and head of 12,000 local tribal families, was lying on a patch of grass outside his home. Faqir Mohamed was sleeping among his sheep and goats in a patch of sand to the south when he heard "big planes moving in the sky". Even at night, it is so hot that many villagers spend the hours of darkness outside their homes, although Mohamedin and his family were in their mud-walled house.
There were 105 families in Hajibirgit on 22 May, and all were woken by the thunder of helicopter engines and the thwack of rotor blades and the screaming voices of the Americans. Haji Birgit Khan was seen running stiffly from his little lawn towards the white-walled village mosque, a rectangular cement building with a single loudspeaker and a few threadbare carpets. Several armed men were seen running after him. Hakim, one of the animal herders, saw the men from the helicopters chase the old man into the mosque and heard a burst of gunfire. "When our people found him, he had been killed with a bullet, in the head," he says, pointing downwards. There is a single bullet hole in the concrete floor of the mosque and a dried bloodstain beside it. "We found bits of his brain on the wall."
[...]
Afghanistan is on the brink of another disaster The Americans now leave the beatings to Afghan allies, but the CIA are there during the beatings, by Robert Fisk 14 August 2002
The garden was overgrown, the roses scrawny after a day of Kandahar heat, the dust in our eyes, noses, mouth, fingernails. But the message was straightforward. "This is a secret war," the Special Forces man told me. "And this is a dirty war. You don't know what is happening." And of course, we are not supposed to know.
In a "war against terror", journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely on the good guys to sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about human rights. How many human rights did the mass killers of 11 September allow their victims? You are either with us or against us. Whose side are you on? But the man in the garden was worried. He was not an American. He was one of the "coalition allies", as the Americans like to call the patsies who have trotted after them into the Afghan midden. "The Americans don't know what to do here now," he went on. "Their morale in Afghanistan is going downhill - though there's no problem with the generals running things in Tampa. They're still gung-ho. But here the soldiers know things haven't gone right, that things aren't working. Even their interrogations went wrong". Brutally so, it seems.
[...]
The Dishonesty of This So-Called Dossier, by Robert Fisk, 25 September 2002
Tony Blair's "dossier" on Iraq is a shocking document. Reading it can only fill a decent human being with shame and outrage. Its pages are final proof - if the contents are true - that a massive crime against humanity has been committed in Iraq. For if the details of Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction are correct - and I will come to the "ifs" and "buts" and "coulds" later - it means that our massive, obstructive, brutal policy of UN sanctions has totally failed. In other words, half a million Iraqi children were killed by us - for nothing.
Let's go back to 12 May 1996. Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, had told us that sanctions worked and prevented Saddam from rebuilding weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Our Tory government agreed, and Tony Blair faithfully toed the line. But on 12 May, Mrs Albright appeared on CBS television. Leslie Stahl, the interviewer, asked: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" To the world's astonishment, Mrs Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." Now we know - if Mr Blair is telling us the truth - that the price was not worth it. The price was paid in the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. But it wasn't worth a dime.
The Blair "dossier" tells us that, despite sanctions, Saddam was able to go on building weapons of mass destruction. All that nonsense about dual-use technology, the ban on children's pencils - because lead could have a military use - and our refusal to allow Iraq to import equipment to restore the water-treatment plants that we bombed in the Gulf War, was a sham. This terrible conclusion is the only moral one to be drawn from the 16 pages that supposedly detail the chemical, biological and nuclear horrors that the Beast of Baghdad has in store for us. It's difficult, reading the full report, to know whether to laugh or cry. The degree of deceit and duplicity in its production speaks of the trickery that informs the Blair government and its treatment of MPs.
[...]
President Bush Wants War, Not Justice - And He'll Soon Find Another Excuse For It, by Robert Fisk 18 September 2002
Major Scott Ritter, Iraq's nemesis-turned-savior, was indeed - as an inspector - regularly traveling to Tel Aviv to consult Israeli intelligence. Then Saddam accused the UN inspectors of working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it emerged, was using the UN's Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's government communications. And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", it turned out that virtually every one of the bombing targets had been visited by UN inspectors over the previous six months. Far from being an inspectorate, the UN lads - though they didn't all know it - had been acting as forward air controllers, drawing up an American hit list rather than monitoring compliance with UN resolutions.
[...]
How to shut up your critics with a single word, by Robert Fisk, 21 October 2002
Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described the "Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer - there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy."
Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians". Where else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories". Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan - a close personal friend of Mr Sharon - believes in "liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat because "if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live". You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv, Ha'aretz or Yediot Ahronot because in much of the Western world, a vicious campaign of slander is being waged against any journalist or activist who dares to criticise Israeli policies or those that shape them.
The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone - people who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing of children - in an attempt to shut them up.
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George Bush crosses Rubicon - but what lies beyond?, by Robert Fisk, 09 November 2002
When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river, he wrote, in his Gallic Wars: "Alea iacta est [The die is cast]." Just after 5pm yesterday, when the United Nations Security Council voted 15-0 to disarm Iraq, the US President George Bush crossed the Rubicon. "The world must insist that judgement must be enforced," he told us.
The Rubicon is a wide river. It was deep for Caesar's legions. The Tigris river will be more shallow - my guess is that the first American tanks will be across it within one week of war - but what lies beyond? For Rome, civil war followed. And, be assured, civil war will follow any American invasion of Iraq. "Cheat and retreat will no longer be tolerated," Mr Bush told us yesterday - forgetting, of course, UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 which call for Israel to withdraw from the Arab territories occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
And after eight weeks of debate in the Security Council, no one mentioned the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, because - of course - Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 11 September. If the United States invades Iraq, we should remember that.
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With runners and whispers, al-Qa'ida outfoxes U.S. forces, by Robert Fisk 06 December 2002
The Americans take them shackled and hooded on to transport aircraft to Kandahar. They live in pens of eight or 10 men. They are given cots with blankets but no privacy. They are forced to urinate and defecate publicly because the Americans want to watch their prisoners at all times. But United States forces have not only failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden while they are preparing for war in Iraq: they are finding it almost impossible to crack the al-Qa'ida network because Bin Laden's men have resorted to primitive methods of communication that cut individual members of al-Qa'ida off from all information. This extraordinary, grim scenario comes from an American intelligence officer just back from Afghanistan who agreed to talk to The Independent - and to supply his own photographs of prisoners - on condition of anonymity. His prognoses were chilling and totally at variance with the upbeat briefings of the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Even in Pakistan, he says, middle-ranking Pakistani army officers are tipping off members of al-Qa'ida to avoid American-organised raids.
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Did Saddam's army test poison gas on missing 5,000? by Robert Fisk 13 December 2002
Why didn't Tony Blair and George Bush mention Saddam Hussein's most terrible war crime? Why, in all their "dossiers", did they not refer to the 5,000 young men and women who were held at detention centres when their families - of Iranian origin - were hurled over the border to Iran just before President Saddam invaded Iran in 1980? Could it be because these 5,000 young men and women were used for experiments in gas and biological warfare agents whose ingredients were originally supplied by the United States?
Just months before his September 1980 invasion of Iran - in which tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers died an appalling death by gas burns and blisters - Saddam's Interior Ministry issued directive No 2884, dated 10 April 1980, stating that "all youths aged between 18 and 28 are exempt from deportation and must be held at detention centres until further notice". Most, though not all, of the young men and women affected by this order were Kurds. None of their families ever saw their loved ones again, but they have since been told that the detainees were killed during experiments in gas and chemical warfare centres in Iraq.
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Journalists are under fire for telling the truth, by Robert Fisk, 18 December 2002
First it was Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel, who advised the US President to take the "harshest measures possible" against those who attacked America on 11 September, 2001. Let us forget, for a moment, that Fox News's Jerusalem bureau chief is Uri Dan, a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the author of the preface of the new edition of Sharon's autobiography, which includes a revolting account of the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinian civilians and Sharon's innocence in this slaughter.
Then Ted Koppel, one of America's leading news anchormen, announced that it may be a journalist's duty not to reveal events until the military want them revealed in a new war against Iraq.
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I will tell you. Journalists are being attacked for telling the truth, for trying to tell it how it is. American journalists especially. I urge them to read a remarkable new book published by the New York University Press and edited by John Collins and Ross Glover. It's called Collateral Language and is, in its own words, intended to expose "the tyranny of political rhetoric". Its chapter titles - "Anthrax", "Cowardice", "Evil", "Freedom", Fundamentalism", "Justice", "Terrorism", Vital Interests" and - my favourite - "The War on..." (fill in the missing country) tell it all.
Meanwhile, rest assured, the journalists are getting onside, to tell you the story the government wants you to hear.
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