Robert Fisk denied entry to US

by **Rigorous Intuition** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 12:14 am

By THE NEW MEXICAN September 22, 2005 Lannan speaker delayed in Canada U.S. immigration officials refused Tuesday to allow Robert Fisk, longtime Middle East correspondent for the London newspaper, The Independent, to board a plane from Toronto to Denver. Fisk was on his way to Santa Fe for a sold-out appearance in the Lannan Foundation’s readings-and-conversations series Wednesday night. According to Christie Mazuera Davis, a Lannan program officer, Fisk was told that his papers were not in order. Davis made last-minute arrangements Wednesday for Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio’s daily news show, Democracy Now!, to interview Fisk via satellite from a television station in Toronto. He appeared on a large screen onstage at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. The controversial British journalist, who is based in Beirut, filed many eyewitness reports on the U.S. invasion of Iraq and criticized Western reporters for “hotel journalism ,” a phrase he coined to describe correspondents who covered the war from heavily fortified hotel suites and offices. <a href="http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/32812.html" target="top">www.freenewmexican.com/news/32812.html</a>

by **Dreams End** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 12:20 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>According to Christie Mazuera Davis, a Lannan program officer, Fisk was told that his papers were not in order. <hr></blockquote> One of the finest reporters in the Middle East or anywhere, though I'm sure that has nothing to do with why he was denied entry.

by **Watchful Citizen** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 2:42 am

Once truth tellers are kept out of the country the decline in civic atmosphere due to chilling effect is likely to be rapid. I suspect that the White House prefers to have George Galloway as their visible critic from across the water since he has already been smeared and espouses socialism, something on par with paedophelia amongst Bush's political base. Right now with approval ratings on the way to single digits the name of the game is hang on to the base at all costs. Fisk can't be smeared as a caricature the way Galloway has and hence is more dangerous to BushCo. This is a message to those outside of this country that it is time to behave or suffer the consequences. Damn.

by **Qutb** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 8:04 am

Outrageous. And I agree, Fisk is dangerous because he knows what he's talking about and he's quite mainstream, at least what mainstream used to be. Galloway fits the caricature of a "Saddam-loving socialist", which is what they want dissidents to be. Qutb means "axis," "pole," "the center," which contains the periphery or is present in it. The qutb is a spiritual being, or function, which can reside in a human being or several human beings or a moment. It is the elusive mystery of how the divine gets delegated into the manifest world and obviously cannot be defined.

by **proldic** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 10:59 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>One of the finest reporters in the Middle East or anywhere<hr></blockquote> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Fisk is dangerous because he knows what he's talking about<hr></blockquote> "The reality of this barbaric bombing If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us think insurgency won’t come to us? " By Robert Fisk - 08 July 2005 <a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article297623.ece">news.independent.co.uk/wo...297623.ece</a> "If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours." There you go, as they say. It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush’s "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. We had, as they say, been warned. The G8 summit was obviously chosen, well in advance, as Attack Day. And it’s no use Mr Blair telling us yesterday that "they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear". "They" are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush’s policies in the Middle East. The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush - and Spain’s subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives - while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali. It is easy for Tony Blair to call yesterdays bombings "barbaric" - of course they were - but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints? When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die, it is "barbaric terrorism". If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe insurgency won’t come to us? One thing is certain: if Tony Blair really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more efficiently protect Britain - fight them there rather than let them come here, as Bush constantly says - this argument is no longer valid. To time these bombs with the G8 summit, when the world was concentrating on Britain, was not a stroke of genius. You don’t need a PhD to choose another Bush-Blair handshake to close down a capital city with explosives and massacre more than 30 of its citizens. The G8 summit was announced so far in advance as to give the bombers all the time they needed to prepare. A co-ordinated system of attacks of the kind we saw yesterday would have taken months to plan - to choose safe houses, prepare explosives, identify targets, ensure security, choose the bombers, the hour, the minute, to plan the communications (mobile phones are giveaways). Co-ordination and sophisticated planning - and the usual utter ruthlessness with regard to the lives of the innocent - are characteristic of al-Qa’ida. And let us not use - as our television colleagues did yesterday - "hallmarks", a word identified with quality silver rather than base metal. And now let us reflect on the fact that yesterday, the opening of the G8, so critical a day, so bloody a day, represented a total failure of our security services - the same intelligence "experts" who claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none, but who utterly failed to uncover a months-long plot to kill Londoners. Trains, planes, buses, cars, metros. Transportation appears to be the science of al-Qa’ida’s dark arts. No one can search three million London commuters every day. No one can stop every tourist. Some thought the Eurostar might have been an al-Qa’ida target - be sure they have studied it - but why go for prestige when your common or garden bus and Tube train are there for the taking. And then come the Muslims of Britain, who have long been awaiting this nightmare. Now every one of our Muslims becomes the "usual suspect", the man or woman with brown eyes, the man with the beard, the woman in the scarf, the boy with the worry beads, the girl who says she’s been racially abused. I remember, crossing the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 - my plane turned round off Ireland when the US closed its airspace - how the aircraft purser and I toured the cabins to see if we could identify any suspicious passengers. I found about a dozen, of course, totally innocent men who had brown eyes or long beards or who looked at me with "hostility". And sure enough, in just a few seconds, Osama bin Laden turned nice, liberal, friendly Robert into an anti-Arab racist. And this is part of the point of yesterday’s bombings: to divide British Muslims from British non-Muslims (let us not mention the name Christians), to encourage the very kind of racism that Tony Blair claims to resent. But here’s the problem. To go on pretending that Britain’s enemies want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralised attack on London as a result of a "war on terror" which Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara has locked us into. Just before the US presidential elections, Bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?" Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.

by **proldic** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:04 am

"Amid the horrors of the Middle East, it is strange to hear about this European 'crisis'" Why is it that we Europeans can no longer understand our own peace and contentment and safety and our extraordinary luxury and our futuristic living standards and our God-like good fortune and our long, wonderful lives? By Robert Fisk - 25 June 2005 <a href="http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=649424">comment.independent.co.uk...ory=649424</a> ‘What on earth are you Europeans on about? What is this nonsense about Europe breaking apart?’ We were at lunch only a hundred metres from the crater of the bomb which killed Lebanon’s former prime minister last February. The restaurant was almost destroyed in the explosion and the staff bear the scars. The head waiter at La Paillote has a very painful, deep slit down his right cheek. My host was still amazed. ‘Do you people live on planet earth?’ he asked. Point taken. When I open the European papers here in Beirut, I read of European chaos, of constitution rejections in France and Holland, of the possible break-up of the EU, of the return of the lira (of all currencies, the most preposterous!), of shouting matches in Brussels (of all cities, the most preposterous!) about rebates. ‘Blair tells Europe it must ‘renew’,’ the International Herald Tribune informs me. ‘Brown in stark warning to EU,’ my own paper headlines. Only the Eastern Europeans, it seems, like the European Union. And part of the answer to my Lebanese friend’s question may lie among Eastern Europe’s ghosts. But the Western papers, when they reach Beirut, have an awesome perversity about them. Yesterday, for example, the Lebanese papers ” like others in the Arab world ” published a picture that no Western publication would dare to show. At least a quarter of one front page here was given to this horror. It showed an Iraqi man amid the wreckage of a bomb explosion, trying to help a 12-year-old boy to his feet. Well not quite; because the boy’s left leg has been torn off just below the knee and, beneath his agonised face, there is indeed, in colour, the bloody stump, a thing from a butcher’s shop, a great piece of red bone and gristle and hanging flesh. Laith Falah, one of the lucky Iraqis to be ‘liberated’ by us in 2003, was bicycling to a Baghdad bakery to buy bread for his parents and three sisters. For him, for his parents and three sisters, for all Iraqis, for Arabs, for the Middle East, for my luncheon host, the EU’s problems seem as preposterous as Brussels and the lira. So why is it that we Europeans can no longer understand our own peace and contentment and safety and our extraordinary luxury and our futuristic living standards and our God-like good fortune and our long, wonderful lives? When I arrive in Paris on Air France and step aboard the RER train to the city, when I take the Eurostar to London and sip my coffee while the train hisses between the great military cemeteries of northern France where many of my father’s friends lie buried, I see the glowering, sad faces of my fellow Europeans, heavy with the burdens of living in the beautiful First World, broken down by minimum hours of work and human rights laws and protections the like of which are beyond the imagination of the people among whom I live. And when the train eases towards Waterloo and I catch sight of the Thames and Big Ben and I know I shall be curling up that night in the softest bed of the smallest Sheraton in the world (it’s in Belgravia), I call a friend on my mobile, an Iraqi who’s trying to emigrate to Australia or Canada ” he hasn’t decided which yet but I’ve already told him that one can be quite hot, the other very cold ” and he tells me that he can’t cross the border to Jordan even to visit the Australian embassy. No Eurostars for him. Oddly ” and this is part of the perversity which our newspapers accurately reflect ” we want to believe that the Middle East is getting better. Iraq is the world’s newest democracy; our soldiers are winning the war against the insurgents ” at least we are now calling it a war ” and Lebanon is free and Egypt will soon be more democratic and even the Saudis endured an election a couple of months ago. Israel will withdraw from Gaza and the ‘road map’ to peace will take off and there will be a Palestinian state and … It’s rubbish, of course. Iraq is a furnace of pain and fear, the insurrection is becoming bloodier by the day, Lebanon’s people are under attack, Mubarak’s Egypt is a pit of oppression and poverty and Saudi Arabia is ” and will remain ” an iconoclastic and absolute monarchy. ‘Take the greatest care,’ I say this week to a Lebanese lawyer friend whose political profile exactly matches the journalist and the ex-communist party leader who were assassinated in Beirut this month. ‘You too,’ he says. And I sit and think about that for a bit. Maybe we Europeans need to believe that the Middle East is a spring of hope in order to concentrate on our own golden grief. Perhaps it helps us to feel bad about ourselves, to curse our privileges and hate our glorious life if we persuade ourselves that the Middle East is a paradise of growing freedom and liberation from fear. But why? We lie to ourselves about the tragedy of the Middle East and then we lie to ourselves about the heaven of living in Europe. Maybe ” a perverse Fisk now slides into this paragraph ” maybe the Second World War was too long ago. Almost outside living memory, the real hell of Europe persuaded us to create a new continent of security and unity and wealth. And now, I suspect, we’ve forgotten. The world in which my father’s chums died in northern France in 1918 and the world in which my mother repaired Spitfire radios in the Battle of Britain is being ‘disappeared’, permitted to pop up only when Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara wants to compare his horrible little war in Iraq to Britain’s Finest Hour or when we want to enjoy an orgy of cinematic Nazi destruction in The Downfall. Only in the east, where the mass graves litter the cold earth, does memory linger amid the mists. Which might explain their love of the EU. Yet Laith Falah’s terrible wound was more grisly than Saving Private Ryan ” which is why you will not have seen it in Europe this week. And yesterday, before lunch, I went down to Martyrs Square in Beirut to watch the funeral of old Georges Hawi, the former communist party leader who was driving to the Gondole coffee shop on Tuesday when a bomb exploded beneath his car seat and tore into his abdomen. And there was his widow, who had swooned from grief and horror when she actually saw her husband’s body lying on the road, weeping before the coffin. And 2,000 miles away, Europe was in crisis. www.independent.co.uk

by **proldic** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:08 am

"We should have listened to Bin Laden" The American 'experts' waffled about whether he was alive - not what he said. Robert Fisk - 02 July 2005 <a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article296254.ece">news.independent.co.uk/wo...296254.ece</a> I belong to that generation of undergraduates who cut their teeth on linguistics...the books we studied invariably included the immensely boring Zelig Harris and the stunningly brilliant Noam Chomsky... Put through Chomsky’s machine, Bush’s speech begins by frightening the audience to death with terrorism and finishes triumphantly by rousing them to patriotic confidence in their country’s future victory... Other elements of the Bush speech were, of course, woefully dishonest. It’s a bit much for Bush to claim that "terrorists" want to "topple governments" when the only guys who’ve been doing that - in Afghanistan and Iraq - were, ahem, ahem, the Americans... It’s strange that for a White House that writes screenplays, the words of Osama bin Laden appear so uninteresting. Whenever Bin Laden speaks, no one bothers to read through his speech. The questions are always: Was it him? Is he alive? Where is he? Never: What did he say? There are real perils in this. Let me show you why. On 13 February, 2003, Bin Laden’s latest audiotape was broadcast by the Arabic satellite channel, al-Jazeera. This, remember, was five weeks before the Anglo-American invasion. In that message, Bin Laden made a statement in which he said that "it is beyond doubt that this crusader war is ... directed against the family of Islam, irrespective of whether the Socialist party and Saddam survive or not ... Despite our belief and our proclamation concerning the infidelity of socialists, in present-day circumstances there is a coincidence of interests between Muslims and socialists in their battles against the Crusaders." And there you have it. Bin Laden, who hated Saddam - he told me this himself, in person - made a call to his followers to fight alongside an Iraqi force which included Saddam’s Iraqi Baathist "Socialists". This was the moment when Iraq’s future guerrilla army fused with the future suicide bombers, the message that would create the detonation that would engulf the West in Iraq. And we didn’t even notice. The US "experts" waffled about whether Bin Laden was alive - not what he said. For once, Bush got it right - but he was too late. Always, as they say, read the text. www.independent.co.uk

by **proldic** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:13 am

Why Ridley Scott's story of the Crusades struck such a chord in a Lebanese cinema Having lived in Lebanon 29 years, I too found tears of laughter running down my face By Robert Fisk - 04 June 2005 <a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=643941">news.independent.co.uk/wo...ory=643941</a> Long live Ridley Scott. I never thought I'd say this. Gladiator had a screenplay that might have come from the Boy's Own Paper. Black Hawk Down showed the Arabs of Somalia as generically violent animals. But when I left the cinema after seeing Scott's extraordinary sand-and-sandals epic on the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, I was deeply moved - not so much by the film, but by the Muslim audience among whom I watched it in Beirut... But there is an integrity about its portrayal of the Crusades which, while fitting neatly into our contemporary view of the Middle East - the moderate crusaders are overtaken by crazed neo-conservative barons while Saladin is taunted by a dangerously al-Qa’ida-like warrior - treats the Muslims as men of honour who can show generosity as well as ruthlessness to their enemies. It was certainly a revelation to sit through Kingdom of Heaven not in London or New York but in Beirut, in the Middle East itself, among Muslims - most of them in their 20s - who were watching historical events that took place only a couple of hundred miles from us. How would the audience react when the Knights Templars went on their orgy of rape and head-chopping among the innocent Muslim villagers of the Holy Land, when they advanced, covered in gore, to murder Saladin’s beautiful, chadored sister? I must admit, I held my breath a few times. I need not have bothered. When the leprous King of Jerusalem - his face covered in a steel mask to spare his followers the ordeal of looking at his decomposition - falls fatally ill after honourably preventing a battle between Crusaders and Saracens, Saladin, played by that wonderful Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud - and thank God the Arabs in the film are played by Arabs - tells his deputies to send his own doctors to look after the Christian king. At this, there came from the Muslim audience a round of spontaneous applause. They admired this act of mercy from their warrior hero; they wanted to see his kindness to a Christian. There are some things in the film which you have to be out here in the Middle East to appreciate. When Balian comes across a pile of crusader heads lying on the sand after the Christian defeat at the 1187 battle of Hittin, everyone in the cinema thought of Iraq; here is the nightmare I face each time I travel to report in Iraq. Here is the horror that the many Lebanese who work in Iraq have to confront. Yet there was a wonderful moment of self-deprecation among the audience when Saladin, reflecting on his life, says: "Somebody tried to kill me once in Lebanon." The house came down. Everyone believed that Massoud must have inserted this line to make fun of the Lebanese ability to destroy themselves and - having lived in Lebanon 29 years and witnessed almost all its tragedy - I too founds tears of laughter running down my face. I suppose that living in Lebanon, among those crusader castles, does also give an edge to Kingdom of Heaven. It’s said that Scott originally wanted to film in Lebanon (rather than Spain and Morocco) and to call his movie Tripoli after the great crusader keep I visited a few weeks ago. One of the big Christian political families in Lebanon, the Franjiehs, take their name from the "Franj", which is what the Arabs called the crusaders. The Douai family in Lebanon - with whom the Franjiehs fought a bitter battle, Knights Templar-style, in a church in 1957 - are the descendants of the French knights who came from the northern French city of Douai. Yet it is ironic that this movie elicited so much cynical comment in the West. Here is a tale that - unlike any other recent film - has captured the admiration of Muslims. Yet we denigrated it. Because Orlando Bloom turns so improbably from blacksmith to crusader to hydraulic engineer? Or because we felt uncomfortable at the way the film portrayed "us", the crusaders? But it didn’t duck Muslim vengeance. When Guy de Lusignan hands the cup of iced water given him by Saladin to the murderous knight who slaughtered Saladin’s daughter, the Muslim warrior says menacingly: "I did not give you the cup." And then he puts his sword through the knight’s throat. Which is, according to the archives, exactly what he did say and exactly what he did do. Massoud, who is a popular local actor in Arab films - he is known in the Middle East as the Syrian Al Pacino - in reality believes that George Bush is to blame for much of the crisis between the Muslim and Western world. "George Bush is stupid and he loves blood more than the people and music," he said in a recent interview. "If Saladin were here he would have at least not allowed Bush to destroy the world, especially the feeling of humanity between people." Massoud agreed to play Saladin because he trusted Scott to be fair with history. I had to turn to that fine Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf to discover whether Massoud was right. Maalouf it was who wrote the seminal The Crusades through Arab Eyes, researching for his work among Arab rather than Crusader archives. "Too fair," was his judgement on Kingdom of Heaven. I see his point. But at the end of the film, after Balian has surrendered Jerusalem, Saladin enters the city and finds a crucifix lying on the floor of a church, knocked off the altar during the three-day siege. And he carefully picks up the cross and places it reverently back on the altar. And at this point the audience rose to their feet and clapped and shouted their appreciation. They loved that gesture of honour. They wanted Islam to be merciful as well as strong. And they roared their approval above the soundtrack of the film. So I left the Dunes cinema in Beirut strangely uplifted by this extraordinary performance - of the audience as much as the film. See it if you haven’t. And if you do, remember how the Muslims of Beirut came to realise that even Hollywood can be fair. I came away realising why - despite the murder of Beirut’s bravest journalist on Friday - there probably will not be a civil war here again. So if you see Kingdom of Heaven, when Saladin sets the crucifix back on the altar, remember that deafening applause from the Muslims of Beirut. www.independent.co.uk

by **proldic** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:18 am

I may not be sure about God or the Devil, but I still believe in the United Nations By Robert Fisk - 23 April 2005 <a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=632192">news.independent.co.uk/wo...ory=632192</a> ...The Assam Regiment’s 15th battalion is India’s contribution to the United Nations’ peacekeeping force along the Israeli border - Israel’s listening posts were stitched across the brown snows of Golan high above us yesterday - and its soldiers, from the seven north-eastern states of India, have turned out to be among the most popular of UN units for two simple reasons. They help with much of the veterinary work among the poor farmers and - shades, here, I suppose, of the new hi-tech city of Hyderabad - they repair all the computers in local schools. But there was one salient feature of the battalion’s UN medal parade yesterday; the other units which had sent their officers were almost all non-Western. There were Fijians and Nepalese and Ghanaian soldiers but only a smattering of French and the odd Australian UN observer. When the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon - Unifil - was at its height during the Israeli occupation, its soldiers tended to come from richer countries, from Ireland, Norway, Finland and France. Now it is the poorer countries whose soldiers are spread across the hills between Tyre and Golan. India’s army can also be found on duty in the Democratic Republic of Congo and, shortly, in the Sudan and Ethiopia. Almost all of them have fought in Kashmir - most of the 15th battalion’s men were wearing the red and green medal of Kashmir on their chests yesterday although this was not officially pointed out. After all, most Lebanese are Muslims. The UN’s global reach seems thus to be revolving more and more around non-Nato forces. Our superior Western armies, I suspect, are much happier in Bosnia or illegally invading Iraq. Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara is not going to waste his men on the Israeli border. Cyprus is quite enough for the British. But all this does raise an important question. Do nations which we once called "Third World" make better peacekeepers? Would it not be more appropriate - if this is not already happening - to have soldiers who understand poverty keeping the peace in lands of poverty? When the Irish first deployed to Lebanon in 1978, Ireland was still a comparatively poor nation, and its soldiers instantly formed great affection for the Shia Muslim farmers and their families who lived off their smallholdings in the stony hills and valleys. Ireland, I have to remind myself, now fields a full battalion in Liberia, and Irish troops can be found in Kabul, Pristina and Monrovia. And as the Indians were addressed by their commanders yesterday, there came the names of Somalia, Cambodia and Angola. I can remember now, amid the corruption and terrors of the Bosnian and Croatian wars, how the smartest and the most disciplined contingent turned out to be not the French or the Canadians but the Jordanian battalion on the Serb border. There was a time, back in 2002, when George W Bush was threatening the United Nations - just as he still is with his idiotic choice of John Bolton as the next American ambassador to the UN - when I was asked in New York if I "believed in the UN". It was a bit like being asked if one believed in God or the Devil, which I’m sure George Bush does. But I have to admit that while I’m not at all sure about God - or at least Bush’s version of him - I did reply that, yes, I believed in the UN. And I still do. It was in Bosnia that I had a long discussion with a Canadian UN officer about the worth of the United Nations. We were under quite a lot of shellfire, so this probably concentrated our minds. His theory was quite simple. If we’d had a United Nations in 1914, it might have stopped the First World War. "I don’t think there would have been a Somme or Verdun if the UN had been there," he said. "And despite everything that’s gone wrong in Bosnia, it would have been far worse - much more like the Second World War - if the UN wasn’t here." The débâcle in Somalia hardly supports this view, but have the Americans done any better in Iraq? Once the UN was discarded, in went the US army and Lord Blair’s lads and now they’ve got an insurgency on their hands which is growing in intensity and where no Westerner - or Iraqi for that matter - can walk or drive the streets of Baghdad without fear of instant death. Duty Unto Death might suit the Indian battalion in Lebanon but I doubt if many US troops would adopt this as their regimental motto. For some reason, we believe that our Western armies do the toughest fighting, but I’m not sure that’s true. The Indian army served in Sri Lanka, whose suicide bombers would make even Iraq’s killers look tame. "You had to drive everywhere at a hundred miles an hour," one of India’s Sri Lanka veterans once told me. "I don’t think I’ve ever fought a force like theirs." So here’s a satanic question. What if the UN had sent a multinational force into Iraq in the early spring of 2003? What if we could have had Indian troops and Nepalese soldiers rather than the American First Infantry Division moving up the Tigris and Euphrates under a blue banner? Could it have been a worse mess than we have in Iraq today? If Saddam Hussein could have his weapons of mass destruction destroyed by the UN - and they were destroyed by the UN, were they not, because we know that there weren’t any there when we invaded? - might the UN not also have been able to insert military units after forcing Saddam to disband his regime? No? Well, in that case, how come Syria’s regime in Lebanon is crumbling under UN Security Council Resolution 1559? Yesterday, even Jamil Sayyed - the pro-Syrian head of Lebanon’s General Security, a figure more powerful and very definitely more sinister than the Lebanese president - stepped aside, along with one of his equally pro-Syrian underlings. True, it was the French and the Americans who pushed for resolution 1559. But how many of us will stand up today and admit that the UN is doing in Lebanon what the United States has failed to do in Iraq? www.independent.co.uk

by **proldic** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:26 am

We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world By Robert Fisk - 11 September 2004 <a href="http://www.selvesandothers.org/article4754.html">www.selvesandothers.org/article4754.html</a> ...These past two weeks, I’ve been learning a lot about the hatred Iraqis feel towards us. Trowelling back through my reporter’s notebooks of the 1990s, I’ve found page after page of my hand-written evidence of Iraqi anger; fury at the sanctions which killed half a million children, indignation by doctors at our use of depleted uranium shells in the 1991 Gulf War (we used them again last year, but let’s take these things one rage at a time) and deep, abiding resentment towards us, the West. One article I wrote for The Independent in 1998 asked why Iraqis do not tear us limb from limb, which is what some Iraqis did to the American mercenaries they killed in Fallujah last April. But we expected to be loved, welcomed, greeted, fêted, embraced by these people. First, we bombarded Stone Age Afghanistan and proclaimed it "liberated", then we invaded Iraq to "liberate" Iraqis too. Wouldn’t the Shia love us? Didn’t we get rid of Saddam Hussein? Well, history tells a different story. We dumped the Sunni Muslim King Feisal on the Shia Muslims in the 1920s. Then we encouraged them to rise against Saddam in 1991, and left them to die in Saddam’s torture chambers. And now, we reassemble Saddam’s old rascals, their torturers, and put them back in power to "fight terror’’, and we lay siege to Muqtada Sadr in Najaf. We all have our memories of 11 September 2001. I was on a plane heading for America. And I remember, as the foreign desk at The Independent told me over the aircraft’s satellite phone of each new massacre in the United States, how I told the captain, and how the crew and I prowled the plane to look for possible suicide pilots. I think I found about 13; alas, of course, they were all Arabs and completely innocent. But it told me of the new world in which I was supposed to live. "Them’’ and "Us’’. In my airline seat, I started to write my story for that night’s paper. Then I stopped and asked the foreign desk in London by this time the aircraft was dumping its fuel off Ireland before returning to Europe to connect me to the newspaper’s copytaker, because only by "talking" my story to her, rather than writing it, could I find the words I needed. And so I "talked" my report, of folly and betrayal and lies in the Middle East, of injustice and cruelty and war, so it had come to this. And in the days to come I learnt, too, what this meant. Merely to ask why the murderers of 11 September had done their bloody deeds was to befriend "terrorism". Merely to ask what had been in the minds of the killers was to give them support. Any cop, confronted by any crime, looks for a motive. But confronted by an international crime against humanity, we were not to be allowed to seek the motive. America’s relations with the Middle East, especially the nature of its relationship with Israel, was to remain an unspoken and unquestioned subject... I still get letters telling me that my mother, Peggy, was Adolf Eichmann’s daughter. Peggy was in the RAF in 1940, repairing radios on damaged Spitfires, as I recalled at her funeral in 1998. But I also remember, at the service in the chancel of the little stone Kentish church, that I angrily suggested that if President Bill Clinton had spent as much money on research into Parkinson’s disease as he had just spent in firing cruise missiles into Afghanistan at Osama bin Laden (and it must have been the first time Bin Laden’s name was uttered in the precincts of the Church of England) then my mother would not have been in the wooden box beside me. She missed 11 September 2001 by three years and a day. But there was one thing she would, I feel sure, have agreed with me: That we should not allow 19 murderers to change our world. George Bush and Tony Blair are doing their best to make sure the murderers DO change our world. And that is why we are in Iraq.

by **proldic** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:35 am

In his last recorded interview, Usama bin Ladin tells Robert Fisk why he so despises America. Osama bin Laden is a tall, slim man, and when he walks towards me surrounded by his Arab mujahideen guerillas in the mountains of Afghanistan, he towers over his companions. Huge insects fly through the night air, settling like burrs on his Saudi robes and on the clothes of his men. Bin Laden's narrow eyes and long beard were familiar amid the battlefields of Afghanistan where he and his guerillas fought the Soviet invasion army of the '80s. His appearance is little changed, the beard a trifle greyer, perhaps, but the fierceness unquenched. Then he fought the Russians. Now, determined to overthrow the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and oust the Americans from that kingdom, he is describing the bombings that slaughtered 24 Americans in Riyadh [in 1995] and Khobar-Dhahran [in 1996] as a symbol of Saudi anger, the presence of US forces as an "insult" to the Saudi people. For bin Laden, the betrayal of the Saudi people began 24 years before his birth, when Abdul Aziz al-Saud proclaimed his kingdom in 1932. "The regime started under the flag of applying Islamic law, and under this banner all the people of Saudi Arabia came to help the Saudi family take power," he says as the night wind moves through the darkened trees, ruffling the robes of the Arab Afghan fighters around us. "Abdul Aziz did not apply Islamic law; the country was set up for his family. Then, after the discovery of petroleum, the Saudi regime found another support - the money to make people rich and give them the services and life they wanted and to make them satisfied." He is picking his teeth with a piece of miswak wood, a habit that accompanies many of his conversations. History - or his version of it - is the basis of almost all his remarks. And the pivotal date is 1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. "When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the land of the two holy places [Mecca and Medina], there was a strong protest from the ulema [religious authorities] and from students of the sharia law all over the country against the interference of American troops. This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception. They had given their support to nations that were fighting against Muslims. They helped the Yemeni communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and helping [Yasser] Arafat's regime fight Hamas [who opposed the peace process in the Middle East]. After it insulted and jailed the ulema 18 months ago, the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy ... "The Saudi people have remembered now what the ulema told them and they realise America is the main reason for their problems. The ordinary man knows that his country is the largest oil producer in the world, yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services. Now the people understand the speeches of the ulemas in the mosques - that our country has become an American colony. They act decisively with every action to kick the Americans out of Saudi Arabia. What happened in Riyadh and Khobar [when 24 Americans were killed in two bombings] is clear evidence of the huge anger of Saudi people against America. The Saudis now know their real enemy is America." IT was a construction company that made bin Laden's family into millionaires, but it was its convoys of earth-moving trucks, bulldozers and quarrying equipment that took him to war. The Afghan conflict against the Russians moulded bin Laden, taught him the meaning of his religion, made him think. Anyone who wants to understand the man whom Bill Clinton dubbed "America's Public Enemy No1" should study this moment in his life. The West regarded him as a hero. In those days the young Arabs whom he brought to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation army were treated as heroes; in Britain, The Times used to call them "freedom fighters". Few noticed, or bothered to study, the theological implications of the West's support for the mujahideen. One of the reasons Leonid Brezhnev was persuaded to send his troops into Afghanistan was the reports that large areas of the country had fallen under the sway of Muslim fundamentalists. Schoolteachers, installed by the communist regime in Kabul, were being assassinated. Even when the mujahideen were shooting at civil airliners with British-made Blowpipe missiles, they were not called "terrorists". Bin Laden saw his comrades die in their hundreds, while he survived Russian kidnap attempts. Eventually, he was sickened by the factional fighting among the Afghans that followed the departure of the Russians and he moved to Sudan, using his wealth to finance road construction projects north of Khartoum. It was while he was here, in the years after the Afghan war, that reports came from Egypt and Algeria of Arabs returning home in Afghan clothes, many of them deeply religious, contemptuous of the corruption of secular governments, doctrinal to the point of self-righteousness. When I first met bin Laden, in 1993, he was building a highway to connect the village of Almatig to Khartoum for the first time, shaking hands with the grateful villagers, worshipped by the local sheikh. Bin Laden shook hands with each man, watched by the young Arab fighters and clearly enjoying the adoration. There is something of the evangelist about bin Laden; not the friendly apostle but the fire-breathing preacher, a hermit of such conviction that argument is out of the question. For the Americans, his epic certainties constitute his greatest danger. Bin Laden is not a man who does deals. He embarked on another construction; a new motorway between Khartoum and Port Sudan. By now, Egyptian newspapers were claiming that bin Laden was helping to organise an Islamist resistance to President Hosni Mubarak's rule from "training camps" in Sudan. "The rubbish of the media and the embassies," bin Laden retorted. He kept a home in Khartoum, only a small apartment in his native Jeddah. His four wives lived with him in Sudan. Three of them were later to follow him back to Afghanistan, along with his two sons. He had watched his beloved Afghanistan torn apart by greedy men who had forgotten their religion. Now he saw corruption in Egypt, in all the Arab nations that had adopted a facade of Western life; above all, in Saudi Arabia. Under pressure from the Americans, the Sudanese told bin Laden to leave and so he returned to the land where he had been a hero. Some say he travelled back to Afghanistan via Saudi Arabia; certainly, he has many sympathisers there, including some members of the royal family. In those initial months back in Afghanistan, he must have decided that if he could defeat the Russians he could also defeat America... "We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together," he replied. "We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon. The explosion at Khobar did not come as a direct result of American occupation but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims ... When 60 Jews are killed inside Palestine [in suicide bombings earlier this year] all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children [after UN sanctions were placed on Iraq] did not receive the same reaction. Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam. We, as Muslims, do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future." Ultimately, all Muslims will unite in the fight against America, says bin Laden. "I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against all Muslims everywhere. Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans. The solution to this crisis is the withdrawal of American troops ... their military presence is an insult for the Saudi people." Yet did not the Americans support the mujahideens' war against the Soviets? "We were never at any time friends of the Americans. We knew that the Americans support the Jews in Palestine and that they are our enemies. Most of the weapons that came to Afghanistan were paid for by the Saudis on the orders of the Americans because Turki al-Faisal [the head of Saudi external intelligence] and the CIA were working together." So what kind of Arabian Islamic state does he wish to see? Would thieves and murderers still have their heads cut off, for example, in a sharia-governed state? Bin Laden's answer is unsatisfactory. All Muslims would love to live under true sharia, he said. A guilty man would only be happy if he was justly punished. Dissident bin Laden may be. But moderate, never. The Independent

by **proldic** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:37 am

because there's plenty more if you want...

by **Dreams End** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:45 am

I had a friend who said that being disillusioned was a good thing. Who wants Illusions? Next time someone says to you that something or someone or something has "disillusioned them" say "congratulations." I'll read more carefully when I have time.

by **Watchful Citizen** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 1:15 pm

I can't tell what you're trying to convey. Would you put it in your own words? I've have read Fisk, who lives in the war zone of the Middle East and sees the carnage right in his face along with the corpses made by NATO in the Balkans, report the crimes of murder and terror for what they are, no matter who commits them.. Are you suggesting that he is pro-terror and murder or an apologist for al-Queda? Or some other journalistic liability? Sorry, I'm really not getting your message and I'm interested. Thanks.

by **Qutb** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 12:31 pm

Yes, proldic, I do, but I don't agree with it. As I wrote, Robert is mainstream. He doesn't spend his time surfing conspiracy sites. He has, however, spent much of it in the Middle East, which is why he "knows what he's talking about" regarding that region. He won't risk his reputation by engaging in conspiratorial speculation (though I think he actually did, shortly after 9/11, comment on the implausibility of ceretain aspects of the official story). He has also met Bin Laden on several (two?) occations, and conveyed his impressions of the man based on those meetings. I understand you're convinced that he's working for the MI6, and that his job during the last twelve years has been to contribute to the Bin Laden legend. I think this is highly unlikely. If anything, I think he may have been used, unwittingly, by those who wanted to create a certain image of Bin Laden. He also recounts an attempt by Bin Laden to recruit him, which is interesting: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>"Mr Robert," he began, and he looked around at the other men in combat jackets and soft brown hats who had crowded into the tent. "Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed that you came to us one day on a horse, that you had a beard and that you were a spiritual person. You wore a robe like us. This means you are a true Muslim." This was terrifying. It was one of the most fearful moments of my life. I understood Bin Laden's meaning a split second in front of each of his words. Dream. Horse. Beard. Spiritual. Robe. Muslim. The other men in the tent were all nodding and looking at me, some smiling, others silently staring at the Englishman who had appeared in the dream of the "brother." I was appalled. It was both a trap and an invitation, and the most dangerous moment to be among the most dangerous men in the world. I could not reject the "dream" lest I suggest Bin Laden was lying. Yet I could not accept its meaning without myself lying, without suggesting that what was clearly intended of me - that I should accept this "dream" as a prophecy and a divine instruction - might be fulfilled. For this man to trust me, a foreigner, to come to them without prejudice, that was one thing. But to imagine that I would join them in their struggle, that I would become one with them, was beyond any possibility. The coven was waiting for a reply. Was I imagining this? Could this not be just an elaborate, rhetorical way of expressing traditional respect towards a visitor? Was this not merely the attempt of a Muslim to gain an adherent to the faith? Was Bin Laden really trying - let us be frank - to recruit me? I feared he was. And I immediately understood what this might mean. A Westerner, a white man from England, a journalist on a respectable newspaper - not a British convert to Islam of Arab or Asian origin - would be a catch indeed. He would go unsuspected, he could become a government official, join an army, even - as I would contemplate just over four years later - learn to fly an airliner. I had to get out of this, quickly, and I was trying to find an intellectual escape tunnel, working so hard in digging it that my brain was on fire. "Sheikh Osama," I began, even before I had decided on my next words. "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim." There was silence in the tent. "I am a journalist." No one could dispute that. "And the job of a journalist is to tell the truth." No one would want to dispute that. "And that is what I intend to do in my life - to tell the truth." Bin Laden was watching me like a hawk. And he understood. I was declining the offer. In front of his men, it was now Bin Laden's turn to withdraw, to cover his retreat gracefully. "If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim," he said. The men in the tent in their combat jackets and beards all nodded at this sagacity. Bin Laden smiled. I was saved. As the old cliché goes, I "breathed again". No deal.<hr></blockquote> He also comments on the unreality of the image of Bin Laden the global terrorist commander: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>And there, for half an hour, ignoring almost all of us, he read his way through the Arabic press, sometimes summoning the Egyptian to read an article, at others showing a paper to one of the other gunmen in the tent. Was this really, I began to wonder, the centre of "world terror"? Listening to the spokesman at the US State Department, reading the editorials in The New York Times or The Washington Post, I might have been forgiven for believing that Bin Laden ran his "terror network" from a state-of-the-art bunker of computers and digitalised battle plans, flicking a switch to instruct his followers to assault another Western target. But this man seemed divorced from the outside world. Did he not have a radio? A television?<hr></blockquote> Bin Laden seemed to have a capable intelligence network assisting him, though: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>And so it was that one hot evening in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. "Mr Robert, a friend you met in Sudan wants to see you," said a voice in English but with an Arabic accent. I thought at first he meant Kashoggi, though I had first met Jamal in 1990, long before going to Khartoum. "No, no, Mr Robert, I mean the man you interviewed. Do you understand?" Yes, I understood. And where could I meet this man? "The place where he is now," came the reply. I knew that Bin Laden was rumoured to have returned to Afghanistan but there was no confirmation of this. So how do I reach him? I asked. "Go to Jalalabad - you will be contacted." 5 JULY 1996. "CLACK-CLACK-CLACK." It was as if someone was attacking my head with an ice-pick. "CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK." I sat up. Someone was banging a set of car keys against the window of my room in the Spinghar Hotel. "Misssster Robert," a voice whispered urgently. "Misssster Robert." He hissed the word "Mister." Yes, yes, I'm here. "Please come downstairs, there is someone to see you." It registered only slowly that the man must have climbed the ancient fire escape to reach the window of my room. I dressed, grabbed a coat - I had a feeling we might travel in the night - and almost forgot my old Nikon. I walked as calmly as I could past the reception desk and out into the early afternoon heat. The man wore a grubby, grey Afghan robe and a small round cotton hat but he was an Arab and he greeted me formally, holding my right hand in both of his. He smiled. He said his name was Mohamed, he was my guide. "To see the Sheikh?" I asked. He smiled but said nothing. I followed Mohamed all the way through the dust of Jalalabad's main street until we arrived next to a group of gunmen in a pick-up truck in the ruins of an old Soviet army base, a place of broken armoured vehicles with a rusting red star on a shattered gateway. There were three men in Afghan hats in the back of the pick-up. One held a Kalashnikov rifle, another clutched a grenade-launcher along with six rockets tied together with Scotch tape. The third nursed a machine gun on his lap, complete with tripod and a belt of ammunition. "Mr Robert, these are our guards," the driver said quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to set off across the wilds of Afghanistan's Nangarhar province under a white-hot afternoon sun with three bearded guerrillas. A two-way radio hissed and crackled on the shoulder of the driver's companion as another truckload of Afghan gunmen drove up behind us.<hr></blockquote> Where's Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's "Cheney" or "handler"? Conveniently not around when Robert Fisk is invited. Quotes from: <a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10374.htm">www.informationclearingho...e10374.htm</a> Qutb means "axis," "pole," "the center," which contains the periphery or is present in it. The qutb is a spiritual being, or function, which can reside in a human being or several human beings or a moment. It is the elusive mystery of how the divine gets delegated into the manifest world and obviously cannot be defined.

Robert Fisk denied entry to US

Robert Fisk denied entry to US

Re: Robert Fisk denied entry to US

Damn. Fisk is THE best. This is a very bad sign.

Re: Damn. Fisk is THE best. This is a very bad sign.

Fisk

Fisk

"We Should Have Listened to Bin Laden"

More

not sure about God or Devil, Fisk still believes in the UN

Eichmann's Grandson

Fisk's People Magazine Celebrity Profile of Bin Laden

get the point?

Re: get the point?

No. What is your message? Your bold letters don't tell me.

Re: get the point?

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