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USA - Stop Lying, Be Honest - Robert Fisk

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torresD

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Sep 16, 2002, 2:04:14 AM9/16/02
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http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=333275

Robert Fisk: America's case for war
is built on blindness, hypocrisy and lies
George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are
wilfully ignoring the realities of the Middle East.

The result can only be catastrophic
15 September 2002

Robert Fisk: America's case for war is
built on blindness, hypocrisy and lies

The case for attacking Iraq is still not made

Neutral? Not on your life!

Years ago, in a snug underground
restaurant in downtown Tehran, drinking duq –
an Iranian beverage of mint and yoghurt –
Saddam Hussein's former head of nuclear
research told me what happened when he
made a personal appeal for the release
of a friend from prison.

"I was taken directly from my Baghdad
office to the director of state security," he said.

"I was thrown down the stairs to an underground cell
and then stripped and trussed up on a wheel attached
to the ceiling.

Then the director came to see me.

" 'You will tell us all about your friends –
everything,' he said.

'In your field of research,
you are an expert, the best.

In my field of research, I am the best man.'

That's when the whipping and the electrodes began."

All this happened, of course,
when Saddam Hussein was still our friend,
when we were encouraging him to go on
killing Iranians in his 1980-88 war against
Tehran, when the US government –

under President Bush Snr –
was giving Iraq preferential agricultural
assistance funding.

Not long before, Saddam's pilots had fired
a missile into an American warship called
the Stark and almost sunk it.

Pilot error, claimed Saddam –
the American vessel had been mistaken
for an Iranian oil tanker –

and the US government
cheerfully forgave the Iraqi dictator.

Those were the days.

But sitting in the United Nations General Assembly last week,
watching President Bush Jr tell us with all his Texan passion
about the beatings and the whippings and the rapes in Iraq,
you would have thought they'd just been discovered.

For sheer brazen historical hypocrisy,
it would have been difficult to beat that
part of the President's speech.

Saddam, it appears,
turned into a bad guy
when he invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Before that,
he was just a loyal ally of the United States,
a "strong man" – as the news agency boys like to
call our dictators – rather than a tyrant.

But the real lie in the President's speech –
that which has dominated American political
discourse since the crimes against humanity
on 11 September last year –

was the virtual absence of any attempt to
explain the real reasons why the United States
has found itself under attack.

In his mendacious article in this newspaper last week,
President Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
also attempted to mask this reality.

The 11 September assault,
he announced, was an attack on people

"who believe in freedom, who practise tolerance
and who defend the inalienable rights of man".

He made, as usual, absolutely no reference to
the Middle East, to America's woeful, biased
policies in that region, to its ruthless support
for Arab dictators who do its bidding –
for Saddam Hussein, for example,
at a time when the head of Iraqi nuclear
research was undergoing his Calvary
– nor to America's military presence in
the holiest of Muslim lands,

nor to its unconditional support for Israel's
occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank
and Gaza.

Oddly, a very faint ghost of this reality did
creep into the start of the President's UN
address last week.

It was contained in two sentences whose
importance was totally ignored by the
American press –

and whose true meaning might
have been lost on Mr Bush himself,
given that he did not write his speech –

but it was revealing nonetheless.

"Our common security,"

he said,

"is challenged by regional conflicts –
ethnic and religious strife that is ancient
but not inevitable.

In the Middle East, there can be no peace
for either side without freedom for both sides."

Then he repeated his old line about the need
for "an independent and democratic Palestine".

This was perhaps as close as we've got, so far,
to an official admission that this whole terrible crisis
is about the Middle East.

If this is a simple war for civilisation against "evil"
– the line that Mr Bush was so cruelly peddling
again to the survivors of 11 September and the
victims' relatives last week –
then what are these "regional challenges"?

Why did Palestine insinuate its way into
the text of President Bush's UN speech?

Needless to say, this strange,
uncomfortable little truth was of no interest
to the New York and Washington media,
whose wilful refusal to investigate the real
political causes of this whole catastrophe
has led to a news coverage that is as bizarre
as it is schizophrenic.

Before dawn on 11 September last week,
I watched six American television channels
and saw the twin towers fall to the ground 18 times.

The few references to the suicide killers who
committed the crime made not a single mention
of the fact that they were Arabs.

Last week, The Washington Post and
The New York Times went to agonising lengths
to separate their Middle East coverage from the
11 September commemorations,
as if they might be committing some form of
sacrilege or be acting in bad taste if they did not.

"The challenge for the administration is to
offer a coherent and persuasive explanation
of how the Iraq danger is connected to the
9/11 attacks" is about as far as
The Washington Post got in smelling a rat,
and that only dropped into the seventh
paragraph of an eight-paragraph editorial.


All references to Palestine or illegal Jewish
settlements or Israeli occupation of Arab land
were simply erased from the public conscience
last week.

When Hannan Ashrawi, that most humane
of Palestinian women, tried to speak at
Colorado university on 11 September,
Jewish groups organised a massive
demonstration against her. US television
simply did not acknowledge the Palestinian tragedy.

It is a tribute to our own reporting that at
least John Pilger's trenchant programme
– Palestine is Still the Issue –
is being shown on ITV tomorrow night,
although at the disgracefully late time of 11.05pm.

But maybe all this no longer matters.

When Mr Rumsfeld can claim so outrageously
– as he did when asked for proof of Iraq's
nuclear potential –

that the "absence of evidence doesn't
mean the evidence of absence",

we might as well end all moral debate.

When Mr Rumsfeld refers to the
"so-called occupied West Bank",
he reveals himself to be a very disreputable man.

When he advances the policy of a pre-emptive
"act" of war – as he did in The Independent on
Sunday last week – he forgets Israel's "pre-emptive"
1982 invasion of Lebanon which cost 17,500
Arab lives and 22 years of occupation,
and ended in retreat and military defeat for Israel.

Strange things are going on in
the Middle East right now.

Arab military intelligence reports the shifting
of massive US arms shipments around the region
– not just to Qatar and Kuwait,
but to the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea
and the eastern Mediterranean.

American and Israeli military planners
and intelligence analysts are said to have
met twice in Tel Aviv to discuss the
potential outcome of the next Middle East war.

The destruction of Saddam and
the break-up of Saudi Arabia –

a likely scenario if Iraq crumbles
– have long been two Israeli dreams.

As the United States discovered during
its fruitful period of neutrality between
1939 and 1941, war primes the pumps
of the economy. Is that what is going on today
– the preparation of a war to refloat the US economy?

My Israeli colleague Amira Haas once
defined to me our job as journalists:

"to monitor the centres of power".

Never has it been so
important for us to do just that.

For if we fail, we will become the mouthpiece of power.

So a few thoughts for the coming weeks:

remember the days when Saddam was
America's friend; remember that Arabs
committed the crimes against humanity
of 11 September last year and that they
came from a place called the Middle East,
a place of injustice and occupation and torture;

remember "Palestine";

remember that, a year ago,
no one spoke of Iraq,
only of al-Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden.

And, I suppose, remember that "evil" is a
good crowd-puller but a mighty hard enemy
to shoot down with a missile.


James A. Donald

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Sep 16, 2002, 2:12:28 AM9/16/02
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On Mon, 16 Sep 2002 06:04:14 GMT, "torresD" <torr...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>
> http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=333275
>
> Robert Fisk: America's case for war
> is built on blindness, hypocrisy and lies
> George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are
> wilfully ignoring the realities of the Middle East.

On the one hand, war is the health of the state.

On the other hand, if scum like Fisk are against it, there must be
some good in it.

Jez

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Sep 16, 2002, 7:10:22 AM9/16/02
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Scum like Fisk?????

Please explain.

--
Ho hum.......
Jez
(Remove NOtSPAM to reply)


Robert Burns

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Sep 16, 2002, 8:37:03 AM9/16/02
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Name calling isn't a substitute for reasoning.

James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote in message
news:5gtaouc9fu9tluppp...@4ax.com...

torresD

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Sep 16, 2002, 2:04:30 PM9/16/02
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"Jez" <aoq...@NOtSPAMdsl.pipex.com

> James A. Donald wrote:
> http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=333275
> Robert Fisk: America's case for war
> is built on blindness, hypocrisy and lies
> George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are
> wilfully ignoring the realities of the Middle East.

> On the one hand, war is the health of the state.

> On the other hand, if scum like Fisk are against it, there must be
> some good in it.


Robert Fisk, is one of the very few honest, on the ground,
expert on what he reports, not parachuted in for the occassion,
journalist out there.


James A. Donald

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Sep 16, 2002, 9:02:58 PM9/16/02
to
--

On Mon, 16 Sep 2002 18:04:30 GMT, "torresD"
<torr...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Robert Fisk, is one of the very few honest, on the ground,
> expert on what he reports, not parachuted in for the
> occassion, journalist out there.

Fisk sided with Milosevic in Serbia, and the Taliban in
Afghanistan, the common factor being not the muslim religion,
not the arab Israeli conflict, but allegiance to tyranny. He
told us we were making war on the Afghan people, that the
Taliban had the support of the Afghan people, that the war
would be bitterly resisted, and would fail ignominously. He
rationalized and justified the crimes of the Taliban. He
denied that Bin Laden was behind the attack on the towers.

--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
DiTGOCtZJjYW6yXvvRVCusmeq/F7agQKNtPfbj0
4gsWoXPK//EU9WYc9TLqPnUwdOh5Gdw6Bdugd6wQG


ottoman

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Sep 17, 2002, 1:25:43 AM9/17/02
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"torresD" <torr...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<O2ph9.353$YC1...@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com>...

Robert Fisk is the moron who expressed great understanding, even
delight, at his beating in the hands of an Afghan mob. He favors
people attacking unarmed and undernumbered civilians for the crime of
being white. He considers Afghans and other third-worlders to be
savage animals who cannot muster the same moral obligations as other
humans. He is all pissed about a war that removed the bigots of
Taliban from power. In Frisk's world, Taliban is not to be disturbed,
westerners are to be beaten to death on the streets, and Muslims are
to be morally judged like wild beasts. Of course he is scum.

Peter Veness

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Sep 17, 2002, 6:43:05 PM9/17/02
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"James A. Donald" wrote.
.Robert Fisk... "denied that Bin Laden was behind the attack on the
towers."

Well, James. Prove to me that Bin Laden is behind those attacks. I still
haven't seen any proof.

Peter.

James A. Donald

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Sep 18, 2002, 12:43:09 PM9/18/02
to
--
James A. Donald

> > .Robert Fisk... denied that Bin Laden was behind the
> > attack on the towers.

Peter Veness


> Well, James. Prove to me that Bin Laden is behind those
> attacks. I still haven't seen any proof.

We have a couple of videos issued by Bin Laden taking credit,
and a letter from one of the hijackers thanking Bin Laden for
making the hijacking possible.

The same people who see the hand of the CIA whenever anyone
anywhere does anything to resist socialism, find themselve
unable to see the onnection between one enemy of freedom and
another, no matter how plain the connection.

--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG

98lbuYoWAVChApfUNB0pq213szv564NnXTvzRkSK
4CpRIxAHwEdcxBKSqFKnqjVvXDpdC8DpLeVTYdzau


Peter Veness

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Sep 18, 2002, 7:18:04 PM9/18/02
to

> Peter Veness
> > Well, James. Prove to me that Bin Laden is behind those
> > attacks. I still haven't seen any proof.
>
> We have a couple of videos issued by Bin Laden taking credit,
> and a letter from one of the hijackers thanking Bin Laden for
> making the hijacking possible.
>
> The same people who see the hand of the CIA whenever anyone
> anywhere does anything to resist socialism, find themselve
> unable to see the onnection between one enemy of freedom and
> another, no matter how plain the connection.


How many times have we seen organisations like the IRA or the Tamil Tigers
claim responsibility for something they haven't done. I'm sorry but i want
real cold hard evidence, not just Bin Laden saying he did it. Of course he's
going to say he did it, he hates America.


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