Registered: Jul 2000
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I have decided to post this here as it won't go down like a bomb in the same way. Yes I know its a cut and paste, but an imnteresting piece I thought:

Robert Fisk: Hypocrisy, hatred and the war on terror

"Air campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"? How much longer must we go on enduring these lies? There is no "campaign" – merely an air bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by the world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No MiGs have taken to the skies to do battle with the American B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition soaring into the air over Kabul comes from Russian anti-aircraft guns manufactured around 1943.

Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kandahar, or the Italian air force or the French air force over Herat. Or even the Pakistani air force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed.

Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya – which we have already left in Vladimir Putin's bloody hands? I even seem to recall a massive terrorist car bomb that exploded in Beirut in 1985 – targeting Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual inspiration to the Hezbollah, who now appears to be back on Washington's hit list – and which missed Nasrallah but slaughtered 85 innocent Lebanese civilians. Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book, Veil, that the CIA was behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to fund the operation. So will the US President George Bush be hunting down the CIA murderers involved? The hell he will.

So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbiting on about the "air campaign", "coalition forces" and the "war on terror"? Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle?

Certainly Muslims don't. In fact, you don't have to spend long in Pakistan to realise that the Pakistani press gives an infinitely more truthful and balanced account of the "war" – publishing work by local intellectuals, historians and opposition writers along with Taliban comments and pro-government statements as well as syndicated Western analyses – than The New York Times; and all this, remember, in a military dictatorship.

You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the subcontinent to realise why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and Larry King Live don't amount to a hill of beans. The Beirut daily As-Safir ran a widely-praised editorial asking why an Arab who wanted to express the anger and humiliation of millions of other Arabs was forced to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country. The implication, of course, was that this – rather than the crimes against humanity on 11 September – was the reason for America's determination to liquidate Osama bin Laden. Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the Pakistani press on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the United States in the aftermath of the September atrocities.

One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary", in The News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who was arrested in Alabama on 19 September with an expired visa. In prison in Mississippi, he was beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth. Then, long after he had sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat him against a wall with the words: "Hey bin Laden, this is the first round. There are going to be 10 rounds like this." There are dozens of other such stories in the Pakistani press and most of them appear to be true.

Again, Muslims have been outraged by the hypocrisy of the West's supposed "respect" for Islam. We are not, so we have informed the world, going to suspend military operations in Afghanistan during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. After all, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq conflict continued during Ramadan. So have Arab-Israeli conflicts. True enough. But why, then, did we make such a show of suspending bombing on the first Friday of the bombardment last month out of our "respect" for Islam? Because we were more respectful then than now? Or because – the Taliban remaining unbroken – we've decided to forget about all that "respect"?

"I can see why you want to separate bin Laden from our religion," a Peshawar journalist said to me a few days ago. "Of course you want to tell us that this isn't a religious war, but Mr Robert, please, please stop telling us how much you respect Islam."

There is another disturbing argument I hear in Pakistan. If, as Mr Bush claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on "civilisation", why shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as a war on Islam?

The Pakistanis swiftly spotted the hypocrisy of the Australians. While itching to get into the fight against Mr bin Laden, the Australians have sent armed troops to force destitute Afghan refugees out of their territorial waters. The Aussies want to bomb Afghanistan – but they don't want to save the Afghans. Pakistan, it should be added, hosts 2.5 million Afghan refugees. Needless to say, this discrepancy doesn't get much of an airing on our satellite channels. Indeed, I have never heard so much fury directed at journalists as I have in Pakistan these past few weeks. Nor am I surprised.

What, after all, are we supposed to make of the so-called "liberal" American television journalist Geraldo Rivera who is just moving to Fox TV, a Murdoch channel? "I'm feeling more patriotic than at any time in my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge," he announced this week. "And this catharsis I've gone through has caused me to reassess what I do for a living." This is truly chilling stuff. Here is an American journalist actually revealing that he's possibly "itching for revenge".

Infinitely more shameful – and unethical – were the disgraceful words of Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, to his staff. Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said. "It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ... we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people."

Mr Isaacson was an unimaginative boss of Time magazine but these latest words will do more to damage the supposed impartiality of CNN than anything on the air in recent years. Perverse? Why perverse? Why are Afghan casualties so far down Mr Isaacson's compassion? Or is Mr Isaacson just following the lead set down for him a few days earlier by the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who portentously announced to the Washington press corps that in times like these "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do".

Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the US government's demand not to broadcast Mr bin Laden's words in toto lest they contain "coded messages". But the coded messages go out on television every hour. They are "air campaign", "coalition forces" and "war on terror".

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It's good to have an intelligent voice to cast doubt on things. We do appear to be woefully losing any propaganda battle in the moslem world.

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As a note to one of the points, the war machine is casting about for another target already, this one crumbled too easily.

-m

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Registered: Aug 2000
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This Fisk guy is brutal. I never heard of him so I did a search on him. Every article I found was pro-Taliban, Anti US/UK. anti Bush, anti Jew or pro-bin Laden. Every single one.

I especially liked this little love letter where he waxes about the last time he saw Osama.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?...sk_wtc_19980921

What a joke. This guy has zero credibility.

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He wrote this gem on September 11, published on the 12th

Is the world's favourite hate figure to blame?
Osama bin Laden
By Robert Fisk
12 September 2001
I can imagine how Osama bin Laden received the news of the atrocities in the United States. In all, I must have spent five hours listening to him in Sudan and then in the Afghan mountains, as he described the inevitable collapse of the US, just as he and his comrades in the Afghan war helped to destroy the Red Army.

He will have watched satellite television, he will have sat in the corner of his room, brushing his teeth as he always did, with a mishwak stick, thinking for up to a minute before speaking. He once told me with pride how his men had attacked the Americans in Somalia. He acknowledged that he personally knew two of the Saudis executed for bombing an American military base in Riyadh. Could he be behind the slaughter in America?

If Mr bin Laden was really guilty of all the things for which he has been blamed, he would need an army of 10,000. And there is something deeply disturbing about the world's habit of turning to the latest hate figure whenever blood is shed. But when events of this momentous scale take place, there is a new legitimacy in casting one's eyes at those who have constantly threatened America.

Mr bin Laden had a kind of religious experience during the Afghan war. A Russian shell had fallen at his feet and, in the seconds as he waited for it to explode, he said he had a sudden feeling of calmness. The shell never exploded.

The US must leave the Gulf, he would say every 10 minutes. America must stop all sanctions against the Iraqi people. America must stop using Israel to oppress Palestinians. He was not fighting an anti-colonial war, but a religious one. His supporters would gather round him with the awe of men listening to a messiah. And the words they listened to were fearful in their implications. American civilians would no more be spared than military targets. Yet I also remember one night when Mr bin Laden saw a pile of newspapers in my bag and seized them. By a sputtering oil lamp, he read them, clearly unaware of the world around him. Was this really a man who could damage America?

If the shadow of the Middle East falls over yesterday's destruction, then who else could produce such meticulously timed assaults? The rag-tag Palestinian groups that used to favour hijacking are unlikely to be able to produce a single suicide bomber. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have neither the capability nor the money that this assault needed. Perhaps the groups that moved close to the Lebanese Hizbollah in the 1980s, before the organisation became solely a resistance movement. The bombing of the US Marines in 1983 needed precision, timing and infinite planning. But Iran, which supported these groups, is more involved in its internal struggles. Iraq lies broken, its agents more intent on torturing their own people than striking at the the US.

So the mountains of Afghanistan will be photographed from satellite and high-altitude aircraft in the coming days, Mr bin Laden's old training camps highlighted on the overhead projectors in the Pentagon. But to what end? For if this is a war it cannot be fought like other wars. Indeed, can it be fought at all without some costly military adventure overseas? Or is that what Mr bin Laden seeks above all else?


BTW Sp00k, your boy here just said that bin Laden was responsible for the killings in Somalia.

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quote:

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Originally posted by David Lee Roth
This Fisk guy is brutal. I never heard of him so I did a search on him. Every article I found was pro-Taliban, Anti US/UK. anti Bush, anti Jew or pro-bin Laden. Every single one.

What a joke. This guy has zero credibility.

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Secondly, on the point of evidence. I am willing to bet a years salary that there is not enough evidence to convict bin Laden ina court of law for the Spetember 11 atrocity. Which is exactly why his assassination has been ordered by the Whitehouse.

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"Secondly, on the point of evidence. I am willing to bet a years salary that there is not enough evidence to convict bin Laden ina court of law for the Spetember 11 atrocity. Which is exactly why his assassination has been ordered by the Whitehouse." - sp00ky.

I think that some evidence was found in kabul in some quasi "war room" although I can't find the article - it was the front page of the new york times on Nov 17th.

It's evidence that al queda is connected with the taliban - which links bin laden - anyway, my prof (they guy that I wish you could meet) told our class about this today - had the article with him - who's been making this same case (the bin laden might be innocent case) for some time and he had to concede today that this evidence might prove it ---> however, he doesn't trust the government or the media because he's not a tool so he did a little back ground research with an ex-spook that is a history prof and asked him - if you were going to go in and plant evidence someplace in order to make it look like someone did something, is this how you'd do it ---> to this, the ex-spook replied "actually, that's how I've done it."

He used to work all over africa doing shit like this to further US interest at the order of the US government - so it wouldn't be a shocker to find out if this new "evidence" is just a plant - just a frame to make this conflict credible.

---> and maybe this is all just paranoia on my professors part - I'd guess that we should go with the evidence and allow some non-biased court (hah!) to figure the credibility of the evidence out.

Anyway - I don't want you money

But if you find or if I can find this article - this evidence someone ought to post it - it's kind of strange to read.

Oh, and david lee roth is a fucknut psycho-killer like most americans - don't listen to him - he'll just try to sell you a mcdonalds.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Spooky


Robert Fisk is not pro-taleban. In fact in many articles he has written about how brutal and wrong the Taliban regime is. He has far more credibilty than most as he has been living in and writing on the Middle East as a freelance journalist for over 30 years.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Spooky
Secondly, on the point of evidence. I am willing to bet a years salary that there is not enough evidence to convict bin Laden ina court of law for the Spetember 11 atrocity. Which is exactly why his assassination has been ordered by the Whitehouse.

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quote:

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Originally posted by splAt
I've heard that he has asked people close to him to kill him to prevent his capture. Cerainly he would have a better idea of his legal position than any of us. Why would he rather die than prove his innocence?

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Registered: Nov 2001
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so... if a country doesn't hand over an aleged criminal... then the country who wants him has right to declare war? the last time i checked, that's not how it worked. remember all of that evidence business? to clearly defined crimes. not "the americans are evil". i know that freedom of speech doesn't really exist anymore, but maybe the us is evil (please don't declare war on my country for that statement).

i like how the us gov't sad that "this is clearly a case of good vs evil" (or something close to that). P.S., this isn't a religous war. ha! i love americans. they crack me up. they're like my mother, they can't see the world through another person's eyes. even when they do, they can't see how they're own view could possibly not be the only right one, let alone wrong.

hurray for generalizations!

has any american ever thought for 10 seconds that maybe, just maybe, their country wronged the arabs first? even considered it?

i also like how all of the relief into afganistan (oh, yeah, they were recieving assistance before the americans dropped food next to their bombs. "die you fucking sand niggers! oh, and have a lolly pop.") had to be stopped. so now the only aid that they receive comes with propaganda. i also love that the us gov't and military call it propaganda too. they don't even try to hide it.

and why does thinking that bin Laden may not be quite so bad strip someone of all credibility? nice to see that you're open to view points other than your own.

this is in reply to a bunch of posts... don't everyone take offence to all of it, only the shots aimed at you :P

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quote:

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Originally posted by Orchard
so... if a country doesn't hand over an aleged criminal... then the country who wants him has right to declare war

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quote:

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Originally posted by splAt


What is "the right to declare war"? Afghanistan's government ignored our request to turn over a known criminal, claimed they didn't know where he was, refused to cooperate in any way, and expressed their intention to fight to keep him safe. We can not allow him to continue doing what he does. What can we do?

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It really makes me angry that I am always the one who has to hold people who make this comments accountable for their blatant ignorance...I mean come on people Jesus Christ, I don’t care how much you dislike this country stupid shit like this that is factually wrong should be addressed by any one who values the truth.

Any way....Orchard,

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Orchard
so... if a country doesn't hand over an aleged criminal... then the country who wants him has right to declare war?

The militia group with most of the power over Afghanistan (the Taliban) were actively allowing the training of terrorists cells whom had declared war on the west and in fact acted on that in a way that rendered impossible to react any other way than to seek the destruction of them. And if you havent been able to figure it out yet the Taliban and Al Qaeda are pretty much the same people, the leader of the Taliban and ole Bin are family. And we are not at war with Afghanistan we are ridding our self of a hostile group that seek the deaths of as many westerners as possible and would slit your throat in half a second for being from the west. These are not the Afghani people, and in fact a large number are from outside Afghanistan. I’m not sure where you are getting your news from but every source I read (and you can get news from the middle east on the listing on the drudge page including Iran and Pakistan) says the people of Afghanistan are pretty fucking happy. War was declared on us first Orchard and we didn’t take it too seriously until sept 11. We did not attack a whole country just military elements with in it and that action has had the Afghani people dancing in the street, especially the women who can go to school again and receive medical care.



the last time i checked, that's not how it worked. remember all of that evidence business? to clearly defined crimes.

We showed it to the people we could with out sacrificing or exposing intelligence information to a hostile entity, I guess you don’t pay too much attention to the news?



not "the americans are evil". i know that freedom of speech doesn't really exist anymore, but maybe the us is evil (please don't declare war on my country for that statement).


And that statement has just invalidated anything else you have to say to anyone with half a brain and I wont bother addressing the rest of your uninformed, bigoted, ridiculous post.


I understand (just informed) this might get edited for its content, I hope not seeing as there is not another possible way to respond to the above post, and I feel it was properly adressed and given the respect it deserved.

Last edited by euphorbia on 12-01-2001 at 08:08 PM

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quote:

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Originally posted by euphorbia
I understand (just informed) this might get edited for its content

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quote:

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Originally posted by Spooky
Secondly, on the point of evidence. I am willing to bet a years salary that there is not enough evidence to convict bin Laden ina court of law for the Spetember 11 atrocity. Which is exactly why his assassination has been ordered by the Whitehouse.

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Last edited by euphorbia on 12-01-2001 at 09:28 PM

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quote:

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Originally posted by Dead_Inside


Not to sidetrack, but, what?

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quote:

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Originally posted by euphorbia



I miss understood, I was under the impression that since the Limey take over of this forum debates were supposed to be flame free, but I reread and re-enquired with that person and they were referring to wonderaz's thread posted 09-08-2001 and I guess the normal form of this forum is intact. My bad, I misinterpreted information.

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