thats a shame, i can understand though - must be a horrible job. last year when israel was smashing up lebanon i read his stuff and there was a bit with a description of little girl who'd been blown up laying in the flowers ... he'd seen that and worse for decades
i've got a brilliant video/lecture of him i can upload if its not online anywhere, i'll have a look
Robert Fisk, writing for the Independent, was the main person in the UK mass media who stood up against the injustices of the world.
I believe he brought into the mainstream the ability to criticize the colonial practices and injustices in the world.
I can totally understand that after 31 years, he has had enough. At the start of the Democracy Now interview in March, Robert did say his introduction made him sound old and maybe he should retire .. he wasn't kidding.
A lot of people in the anti-war movement are v. despondent at the moment .. thinking nothing they did (or could do) will make a difference in this world. There is even a thread on it :
http://couchtripper.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?t=5482
Yesterday I bought his book 'The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East'...I've already read around 50 pages (off 1300+ pages) and I can tell it is full of fine details... I wish someone could make a series based on this book. But I guess the possibility is very low
WHSmith is selling the paperbook edition at a discounted price online. But i just bought it from my local WHSmith store- I couldn't resist
After 30 years and nearly as many wars, Robert Fisk has been a vital eye witness to the fractured recent history of the Middle East www.nox-mag.com
Robert Fisk’s acerbic wit and encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East are both unparalleled. The latter is the result of having spent 31 years in Lebanon, watching the country destroy itself during the 1975-1990 civil war in which more than 200,000 people died, as well as covering the Islamic revolution in Iran, the 1990 Gulf War, the conflict in the Balkans and the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, the list may also account for the aserbic wit.
He has been described as the “world’s most decorated foreign correspondent”, and has become a hero for at least two generations of war junkie journalists who, having read his accounts of the Middle East at war, the Lebanese civil war chronicle Pity the Nation and the 1,000-page The Great War for Civilisation, were desperate the for the smell of cordite.
NOX: August 14th marked the one-year anniversary of the 34-day Israeli offensive in Lebanon. There is an overwhelming sense from the Shia of Lebanon that Hezbullah won the war. From your perspective was Hezbollah successful?
Robert Fisk: Well militarily Hezbollah called it a divine victory – I was in the south during the war, and it didn’t feel very divine to me. Put it this way, clearly the Israelis lost the war. They did not get their soldiers back. They almost had one of their state-of-the-art gunboats sunk. Hezbollah missiles hit the upper part of their top-secret air traffic control centre in northern Galilee. In a period of just 24 hours, they lost 36 soldiers. Thousands of rockets fell upon the cities and towns of northern Israel, and the Israelis couldn’t stop them and they still, to this day, haven’t secured the release of their two soldiers. The Israeli Army could not defend the people of Israel, which is a tremendous military shock.
NOX: The Israeli military is blaming this loss on outside interests, such as Syria and Iran.
Fisk: Well, the fact of the matter is that last summer, Israel persuaded the Americans that it could smash Hezbollah easily, when any sane person in Lebanon – anyone in the US military, for that matter – would know that it was impossible to do that easily. Hezbollah is far too disciplined, far too big and far too well armed. The fact that Bush believed it – and then believed it was a victory for the Israelis – shows the degree to which virtual reality and reality are separated in the White House. As usual, the Israelis thought that if they smashed civilians, the civilians would turn against Hezbollah. It doesn’t happen like that. This is the usual colonial mentality: “Oh, you know the only thing these Africans realise is a firm hand.” And the days when Arab armies run away is long gone!
NOX: Was it a political victory for Hezbollah, as well as militarily?
Fisk: Well, Hezbollah made a number of tactical and political mistakes. Immediately after the war, everyone from all sects was expressing their amazement and their admiration at Hezbollah for being able to crack the Israeli Army. Hezbollah decided they would try and destroy the government. On behalf of who? The Syrians? Possibly. The Iranians? Possibly. But Lebanese Prime Minister Fuoad Siniora then became American backed the moment Hezbollah and the six Shia Cabinet Ministers walked out of the government last November. Sinoira became just another leader in the Arab world. I don’t think he deserves the title.
NOX: Is the level of US involvement in Lebanon getting close to Syria’s?
Fisk: Look at the C-130 transport planes unloading American weapons at the airport to “fight terrorism.” Many Lebanese say to me, “Where were these planes last summer when we needed them?” Well, they were re-fuelling and bringing weapons to the Israelis to destroy Lebanon! The same Lebanon that Americans now care so deeply about because it’s so democratic and so pro-American. Read The New York Times and The Washington Post – which frankly are incomprehensible on the Middle-East – and you get: “The Americans are helping the Siniora government to arm the sovereign Army of Lebanon to destroy terrorists like Fateh al-Islam.” Many Lebanese take a different view: “We would like weapons to defend ourselves from Israel."
NOX: Do you think the UN tribunal means more stability or instability for Lebanon?
Fisk: Nobody gets murdered in Lebanon unless there is approval from certain parties. In other words, if Syria were involved in Hariri’s death, they would also have found out what other political groups in Lebanon would’ve felt about Hariri. He had many enemies in the business community – there were certain people who were not going to yelp with pain if he was killed. The Iranian security services had been putting out the line – to me, for one – that Hariri was murdered because that same weekend he had a meeting with Iyad Alawi, former CIA man, Iraqi leader for the Americans, at Beirut airport on Alawi’s jet to talk about arms shipments. Alawi was certainly there; there’s no doubt about that. I know Hariri spoke to him. Arms? I don’t know.
NOX: Looking back, September 18th marked the 25th anniversary of the massacre of some 2,000 Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Lebanon – in which Christians Phalangist militia allied with Israeli troops during their invasion and occupation of Beirut in 1982. You, of course, were one of the first journalists to witness the aftermath…
Fisk: Yes. 1,700 Palestinians butchered, raped, eviscerated by Israel’s allies. I promise you it will not be marked by the press in the West. Almost every year since it occurred, I’ve written about it for The Independent, saying each time that it will not be marked in the other papers, and I’ve been right every time. Once or twice by The Guardian in London. Yes, the anniversary is here and nobody’s been held accountable. Nobody. I mean, Ariel Sharon was held accountable and they made him Prime Minister of Israel. But in terms of murderers, not a single person has gone to prison for it. Not one.
NOX: Which hardly helps the accusations of Western hypocrisy…
Fisk: The Israelis were too involved in Sabra-Chatilla for there to be any prosecutions, and there will be no more prosecutions for America’s allies for what they did there than there will be of any other similar crimes. Saddam Hussein, that’s a different matter. Saddam could be held for his crimes, but not what happened in Sabra-Chatilla.
At university, we male students used to say that it was impossible to take a beautiful young woman to the cinema and concentrate on the film. But in Canada, I've at last proved this to be untrue. Familiar with the Middle East and its abuses – and with the vicious policies of George Bush – we both sat absorbed by Rendition, Gavin Hood's powerful, appalling testimony of the torture of a "terrorist suspect" in an unidentified Arab capital after he was shipped there by CIA thugs in Washington.
Why did an Arab "terrorist" telephone an Egyptian chemical engineer – holder of a green card and living in Chicago with a pregnant American wife while he was attending an international conference in Johannesburg? Did he have knowledge of how to make bombs? (Unfortunately, yes – he was a chemical engineer – but the phone calls were mistakenly made to his number.)
He steps off his plane at Dulles International Airport and is immediately shipped off on a CIA jet to what looks suspiciously like Morocco – where, of course, the local cops don't pussyfoot about Queensberry rules during interrogation. A CIA operative from the local US embassy – played by a nervous Jake Gyllenhaal – has to witness the captive's torture while his wife pleads with congressmen in Washington to find him.
The Arab interrogator – who starts with muttered questions to the naked Egyptian in an underground prison – works his way up from beatings to a "black hole", to the notorious "waterboarding" and then to electricity charges through the captive's body. The senior Muhabarat questioner is, in fact, played by an Israeli and was so good that when he demanded to know how the al-Jazeera channel got exclusive footage of a suicide bombing before his own cops, my companion and I burst into laughter.
Well, suffice it to say that the CIA guy turns soft, rightly believes the Egyptian is innocent, forces his release by the local minister of interior, while the senior interrogator loses his daughter in the suicide bombing – there is a mind-numbing reversal of time sequences so that the bomb explodes both at the start and at the end of the film – while Meryl Streep as the catty, uncaring CIA boss is exposed for her wrong-doing. Not very realistic?
Well, think again. For in Canada lives Maher Arar, a totally harmless software engineer – originally from Damascus – who was picked up at JFK airport in New York and underwent an almost identical "rendition" to the fictional Egyptian in the movie. Suspected of being a member of al-Qa'ida – the Canadian Mounties had a hand in passing on this nonsense to the FBI – he was put on a CIA plane to Syria where he was held in an underground prison and tortured. The Canadian government later awarded Arar $10m in compensation and he received a public apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
But Bush's thugs didn't get fazed like Streep's CIA boss. They still claim that Arar is a "terrorist suspect"; which is why, when he testified to a special US congressional meeting on 18 October, he had to appear on a giant video screen in Washington. He's still, you see, not allowed to enter the US. Personally, I'd stay in Canada – in case the FBI decided to ship him back to Syria for another round of torture. But save for the US congressmen – "let me personally give you what our government has not: an apology," Democratic congressman Bill Delahunt said humbly – there hasn't been a whimper from the Bush administration.
Even worse, it refused to reveal the "secret evidence" which it claimed it had on Arar – until the Canadian press got its claws on these "secret" papers and discovered they were hearsay evidence of an Arar visit to Afghanistan from an Arab prisoner in Minneapolis, Mohamed Elzahabi, whose brother, according to Arar, once repaired Arar's car in Montreal.
There was a lovely quote from America's Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney general at the time, that the evidence again Arar was "supported by information developed by US law enforcement agencies". Don't you just love that word "developed"? Doesn't it smell rotten? Doesn't it mean "fabricated"?
And what, one wonders, were Bush's toughs doing sending Arar off to Syria, a country that they themselves claim to be a "terrorist" state which supports "terrorist" organisations like Hizbollah. President Bush, it seems, wants to threaten Damascus, but is happy to rely on his brutal Syrian chums if they'll be obliging enough to plug in the electricity and attach the wires in an underground prison on Washington's behalf.
But then again, what can you expect of a president whose nominee for Alberto Gonzales's old job of attorney general, Michael Mukasey, tells senators that he doesn't "know what is involved" in the near-drowning "waterboarding" torture used by US forces during interrogations. "If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional," the luckless Mukasey bleated.
Yes, and I suppose if electric shocks to the body constitute torture – if, mind you – that would be unconstitutional. Right? The New York Times readers at least spotted the immorality of Mukasey's remarks. A former US assistant attorney asked "how the United States could hope to regain its position as a respected world leader on the great issues of human rights if its chief law enforcement officer cannot even bring himself to acknowledge the undeniable verity that waterboarding constitutes torture...". As another reader pointed out, "Like pornography, torture doesn't require a definition."
Yet all is not lost for the torture lovers in America. Here's what Republican senator Arlen Spector – a firm friend of Israel – had to say about Mukasey's shameful remarks: "We're glad to see somebody who is strong, with a strong record, take over this department."
So is truth stranger than fiction? Or is Hollywood waking up – after Syriana and Munich – to the gross injustices of the Middle East and the shameless and illegal policies of the US in the region? Go and see Rendition – it will make you angry – and remember Arar. And you can take a beautiful woman along to share your fury.
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