[Media-watch] Mediabeat online

[Tony Sutton]

media-watch-request at lists.stir.ac.ukon 25/4/03 12:28 PM,
media-watch-request at lists.stir.ac.uk at
media-watch-request at lists.stir.ac.uk25/4/03 12:28 PM wrote:

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Today's Topics:

  1. Interesting leak (james doleman)
  2. a prize for the worst in journalism..the Murdoch
     (iainc2003 at tesco.net)
  3. Files 'R' Us (Billy Clark)
  4. What The Independent Would Not Publish.  (iainc2003 at tesco.net)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:02:12 +0100
From: "james doleman" <jamesdoleman at hotmail.com>
Subject: [Media-watch] Interesting leak
To: david.miller at stir.ac.uk, media-watch at lists.stir.ac.uk
Message-ID: <BAY2-F51iD0CWltovgy000056b0 at hotmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed


http://tbrnews.org/Archives/a294.htm





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------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:51:55 +0000
From: <iainc2003 at tesco.net>
Subject: [Media-watch] a prize for the worst in journalism..the
 Murdoch
To: media-watch at lists.stir.ac.uk
Message-ID:
 <20030423135155.GRLL1184.mta2-svc.business.ntl.com@[10.137.101.72]>
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© 2003 The Washington Post Company
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, April 22, 2003; Page A19
Since 1917 the Pulitzer Prizes -- named for their creator, the 19th-century
press baron Joseph Pulitzer -- have been awarded to encourage excellence in
journnalism. I happen to think that more could be accomplished with a prize
for the worst in journalism. It should be called the Murdoch.

The first Murdoch would go to Rupert Murdoch himself, a media mogul who has
single-handedly lowered the standards of journalism wherever he has gone.
His New York Post and his Fox News Channel are blatantly political, hardly
confining Murdoch's conservative political ideology to editorials or
commentary but infusing it into the news coverage itself. It does this, of
course, while insisting it does nothing of the sort.

The most repellent of Murdoch's products is the New York Post. (Full
disclosure: My syndicated column appears in the competing New York Daily
News.) The Post was the paper that, in the name of Americanism, called for a
boycott of entertainment figures who opposed the war in Iraq. Under the
headline "DON'T AID THESE SADDAM LOVERS," the paper's Page Six column on
March 19 listed "appeasement-loving celebs." Among them were Tim Robbins,
Sean Penn, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Susan Sarandon and Danny
Glover. In some cases, the Post called for a boycott of their movies, never
mind who else was in the movies or worked on them.

This is hardly Americanism. In the first place, none of the celebrities can
fairly be called a "Saddam lover." They merely opposed the war. Second, they
were not appeasers because, as the Bush administration itself said, this was
a war of choice, not self-defense. Finally, dissent should be encouraged,
not punished. This is how we learn. This is how we conduct a debate.

But the Murdoch way of conducting a debate is to yell treason or something
very close to that. His organization did so, for instance, in a New York
Post column that virtually called Peter Arnett, the former MSNBC
correspondent, a traitor for what he said in his now-infamous interview with
Iraqi state television. Arnett made himself impossible to defend, but bad
judgment or even craven obsequiousness to a source (the Iraqis) is not
treason. It is merely bad journalism.

The Fox News Channel thought otherwise. In a promotional spot, it said of
Arnett: "He spoke out against America's armed forces; he said America's war
against terrorism had failed; he even vilified America's leadership. And he
worked for MSNBC."

Only the last sentence is true. The rest is such a stretch, such an
exaggeration, that it amounts to a lie. Arnett never mentioned the "war
against terrorism" and he never "vilified America's leadership." He was
critical of the Bush administration -- but so was I on occasion, and I
supported the war.

No single column could do justice to the injustices of the Murdoch empire --
or to its strange omissions. It went after Arnett with a vengeance but
barely mentioned that its own reporter, that burlesqque of a journalist,
Geraldo Rivera, was given the boot by the military for essentially reporting
the position of the unit he was with at the time. Must have been a busy news
day.

It would be fun to imagine how the Murdoch press would cover Murdoch. It
might have noticed that he abandoned his Australian citizenship and embraced
America, apparently to comply with an FCC rule that prohibited foreigners
from owning more than 25 percent of a TV license -- a touching immigrant
saga. He dropped the BBC from his Star TV satellite operation in China
because Beijing had a problem wwith its unbiased reporting. The New York
Post and Fox might call him what they repeatedly called the French and
others -- a "weasel." Alas, that would be editorializing.

Pulitzer and even William Randolph Hearst were pikers compared with Murdoch,
the first truly global media baron. He controls 175 newspapers around the
world, with 40 percent of the newspaper circulation in Britain. He owns
satellite TV worldwide and, in America, a movie studio and book publisher as
well as newspapers and TV outlets. His political influence is immense as
well as baleful. MSNBC now has conservative hosts, and all the cable outlets
either flew the American flag somewhere on the screen or in some other way
insulated themselves from potential criticism from the right.

A piece of me admires Murdoch. He is a buccaneer, a risk-taker who,
seemingly, cares not one whit for the opinion of journalists such as myself.
But as the war in Iraq has shown, he has infected American journalism with
jingoism and intolerance. For that, he gets the very first Murdoch Prize --
a formal citation listing his sins and a bucket of slime with his name on
it. It is well earned.






------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 12:56:14 +0000
From: Billy Clark <billy.clark at ntlworld.com>
Subject: [Media-watch] Files 'R' Us
To: media-watch at lists.stir.ac.uk
Message-ID: <217DB98C-7654-11D7-B31B-000393A21DAE at ntlworld.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed

There are some interesting anomalies concerning Mr. Galloway's recent
misfortune.  A while ago I passed on a report about the Russians spying
for Saddam based on some documents found in the Iraqi secret service HQ,
and I suggested we might see a bit more of this debris inconveniencing a
few people but nothing compromising the US or the UK's political
business.

Why wasn't this HQ cordoned off by the military?  Why is it open to
looters from the Telegraph?  Are they all fluent in the Iraqi
languages?  Surely the equivalent of CIA HQ at Langley would be of
interest in the great hunt for the track record of the axis of evil,
Saddam & Co.'s hidden Billions and WMD (a rhetorical phrase applied
exclusively to Iraq, although I never seen one unit of soldiers go into
action in any state of preparedness for chemical/biological weapons).
Seemingly not, instead it has been re-opened as 'Files 'R' Us'.  But not
to everyone.

Co-incidently Private Eye (that great recepticle for unattributed
rumour) ran a little story about a business associate of Galloway (whom
I can't stand myself).  It suggested George was on the take from the
Butcher of Bagdad: well, which of our top (particularly US) politician's
haven't been at some point?  And what nonsense to say these documents
were forged - when has this war ever been subject fabrication or
deception?

If it is a smear - why has it exclusively tainted the anti-war
coalition?  Galloway is a Labour party MP: and, just as Hamilton's,
Archer's, Aitken's etc. misdeeds are argued (by Labour) to have tainted
the Tories, this alleged misconduct taints the Labour party - or so it
could be easily argued, particularly by the Tories.  Instead Galloway's
sins have been passed onto that dangerous rabble of communist anarchist
protest threatening national security.  Each and every man, woman and
child are clearly on the payroll of the world's most evil dictator by
dint of the fact that they look to George for leadership - even the
Anarchists for some as yet unexplained reason.

And these allegations (well condemnations really) have come at a bad
time what with this election in Scotland - the smell/coverage will last
long enough to put off the second vote going to (any) left-wing
parties.  This also seems a very localised story, there's no real talk
in the US or anywhere else of tracking down people who have dealt with
Saddam, probably because we'd have to start with Mr Rumsfeld.  If George
has committed a crime why are the Police uninterested?  Lazy bastards!

And why this contrived mechanism to deliver bribes - why not just hand
the hand the cash over via Switzerland, the Vatican bank and the well
trodden path of Anstalts and numbered accounts.  Is it impossible that
of all Galloway's Iraqi business connections one of them would drop him
in it for a few favours in these troubled times.  Tony Blair said the
war wasn't about oil - obviously both the UK and US knew that George had
cornered the market on this and they were out of the game.

In one sense old cold war lefties like Galloway, Benn and Tariq Ali
tended to be soft on Saddam - so he has got off rather lightly: look
what happened to Scott Ritter.

billy clark (signature illegible)



------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 16:22:39 +0000
From: <iainc2003 at tesco.net>
Subject: [Media-watch] What The Independent Would Not Publish.
To: media-watch at lists.stir.ac.uk
Message-ID:
 <20030425162239.YNYZ1184.mta2-svc.business.ntl.com@[10.137.101.71]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Take 10 minutes out of your weekend to read this uncensored personal account
of the war(Ignore the questions), then switch off the PC and think. If this
was your reality would you cope?.

"You know, I say to people over and over again: war is not about primarily
victory or defeat, it's primarily about human suffering and death. And if
you look through the pictures, which I have beside me now as I speak to you,
of little girls with huge wounds in the side of their faces made by the
pieces of metal from cluster bombs, American cluster bombs, it's degoutant,
as the French say, disgusting to even look at".


Robert Fisk: Looking Beyond War
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
April 23, 2003
Goodman: After spending a month in Iraq, could you describe your thoughts?

Fisk: Well, my assumption is that history has a way or repeating itself. I
was talking to a very militaristic Shiite Muslim from Nashas about only five
days ago and a journalist was saying to him "do you realize how historic
these days are?" and I said to him "do you realize how history is repeating
itself?" and he turned to me and said "yes history is repeating itself, and
I knew what he meant. He was referring to the British invasion or Iraq in
1917 and Lt. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, when we turned up in Baghdad and Sir
Stanley Maude issued a document saying "we have come here not as conquerors
but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny." And within three
years we were losing hundreds of men every year in the guerilla war against
the Iraqis who wanted real liberation not by us from the ottomans but by
them from us and I think that's what's going to happen with the Americans in
Iraq. I think a war of liberation will begin quite soon, which of course
will be firs!
t referred to as a war by terrorists, by al Qaeda, by remnants of Saddam's
regime, remnants (remember that word) but it will be waged particularly by
Shiite Muslims against the Americans and the British to get us out of Iraq
and that will happen. And our dreams that we can liberate these people will
not be fulfilled in this scenario.


So what I've been writing about these past few days is simply the following.
We claim that we want to preserve the national heritage of the Iraqi people,
and yet my own count of government buildings burning in Baghdad before I
left was 158, of which the only buildings protected by the United States
army and the marines were the Ministry of Interior, which has the
intelligence corp of Iraq and the Ministry of Oil, and I needn't say
anything else about that. Every other ministry was burning. Even the
Ministry of Higher Education/Computer Science was burning. And in some cases
American marines were sitting on the wall next to the ministries watching
them burn. 


The Computer Science Minister actually talked to the marine, Corporal
Tinaha, in fact, I actually called his fiance to tell her he was safe and
well. So the Americans have allowed the entire core and infrastructure of
the next government of Iraq to be destroyed, keeping only the Ministry of
Interior and the Ministry of Oil. That tells it's own story. On top of that
I was one of the first journalists to walk in to the National Archaeological
Museum and the National Library of Archives with all the Ottoman and state
archives and the Koranic Library of the Ministry of Religious Endowment and
all were burned. Petrol was poured on these documentations over them and
they were all burned in 3000 degrees of heat.


Ironically, with all that irony, I managed to rescue 26 pages of the Ottoman
documentation, the Ottoman library. Documents of Ottoman armies, camel
thieves, letters from the sheriff Hussein of Mecca to Ali Pasha (Ottoman
ruler of Baghdad) and when I got to the Jordanian border the Jordanian
customs authorities stole these documents from me and refused to even give
me a receipt for them, a shattering comment I'm afraid to say on the Arab
world but particularly on the American occupation of Baghdad.


After the Koranic Library was set on fire I raced to the headquarters of the
Third Marine Force Division in Baghdad and I said there is this massive
Koranic Library on fire and I said what can you do? And under the Geneva
Conventions the US Occupation Forces have a moral, whatever occupations
forces there are, and they happen to be American, have a legal duty to
protect documents and various embassies. There was a young officer who got
on the radio and said "there was some kind of Biblical library on fire,"
biblical for heavens sake, and I gave him a map of the exact locations, the
collaterals on the locations to the marines and nobody went there, and all
the Korans were burned, Korans going back to the 16th Century totally
burned. 


So, somebody has an interest in destroying the center of a new government
and the cultural identity of Iraq. Now the American line is these are
Saddamite remnants, remnants of a Saddam regime. I don't believe this. If I
was a remnant of a Saddam regime and say I was given $20,000 to destroy the
library I would say thank you very much and when the regime was gone I would
pocket the money. I wouldn't go and destroy the library, I don't need to,
I've got the money. Somebody or some institution or some organization today
now is actively setting out to destroy the cultural identity of Iraq and the
ministries that form the core of a new Iraq government. Who would be behind
that and who would permit it to happen, and why is it that the US military,
so famed for its ability to fight its way across the Tigris and the
Euphrates river and come into Baghdad will not act under the Geneva
Convention to protect these institutions? That is the question. And I do not
have the answer to it.


Goodman: There was a report today that said that the US army ignored
warnings from its own civilian advisors that could have prevented the
looting of Baghdad's National Museum – this is from the London Observer. It
said that the Office of the Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance set
up to supervise reconstruction identified the museum as a prime target for
looters in a memo to army commanders a month ago. The memo said it should be
the second priority for the army after securing the national bank. General
Jay Garner, who's taking over, is said to be livid. One angry reconstruction
official told the Observer "we ask for just a few soldiers at each building
or if they feared snipers then at least one or two tanks. The tanks were
doing nothing once they got inside the city, yet the generals refused to
deploy them. 


Fisk: Yeah, well the Observer is always quite a bit late on the story. There
was a website set up between American archaeologists and the Pentagon many
weeks ago listing those areas of vital national heritage to Iraq which might
be looted, damaged, stormed, burned. The museum was on that list. The
museum, I have seem physically marked on the satellite pictures which the
marines have to move around in Baghdad. They know it's there, they know what
it is. Now, when I got to the museum, which is far more than a week ago,
there were gun battles going on between rioters and looters, bullets
skittering up the walls of apartment blocks outside. It was quite clear when
I walked in that looting was quite clearly.... Someone has opened the doors,
the huge safe doors of the storeroom of the museum with a key. The looting
was on a most detailed, precise and coordinated scale. The people knew what
the wanted to go for. Those Grecian statues they didn't want they
decapitated and threw to t!
he floor. Those earrings and gold ornaments and bullring gods that they
wanted to take, they took. And within a few days those priceless heritage
items of Iraq's history were on sale in Europe and in America. I don't
believe that that happened by chance.


Two of the interesting things: number one is the looters knew exactly what
they wanted and they got it out of a country with a speed that we as
journalists cannot get our stories out of the country. Secondly, a much more
serious in the long term. The arsonists, the men who were going around
burning, they must have had maps, they knew where to go, they knew what
would not be defended by the Americans. In one case, you know this is a city
without electricity, without water, I recognized one of the men who was
burning things. He had a small beard, a goatee beard and he had a red
t-shirt, and the second time I saw him, I looked at him and he pointed a
[inaudible] rifle at me, he realized I recognized him. They were coming to
the scenes of arsonists in blue and white buses. God knows where these buses
were from. They weren't city corporation buses, although city corporation
buses were being used by looters. But the arsonists were an army. They were
calculated and they knew where !
to go, they had maps, they were told where to go. Who told them where to go?
Who told them where the Americans would not shoot at them or would not harm
them? This is a very, very important question that still needs to be
reconciled and answered. And I do not have an answer. And none of my
colleagues unfortunately have asked the American military in Qatar, in Doha
what the answer is. Somebody told these people where to go, they had the
maps, they knew the places to go and burn, they knew the American military
would not be there and they went there and they burned. Who gave them those
instructions, I don't know the answer. I really don't know the answer, but
there is an answer, and we should know what this.


Goodman: Maguire Gibson, a leading Mesopotamian scholar from the University
of Chicago, said he has good reason to believe that the looting or the
stealing of the artifacts from the museum with men going in with forklifts
and even keys to vaults...he has good reason to believe this was
orchestrated from outside the country.


Fisk: There is certainly a reason to believe, Amy, that there were keys
involved because some of the vaults I saw were opened with keys and not with
hammers or guns or explosives. Fork lift trucks? They had the ability to
move heavy statues into trucks. When I got there, they had just done that.
But I don't know if they used fork lift trucks, I think that might be a
little too Hollywood. There were men who were guards to the museum in long
gray beards who had taken rifles, [inaudible] Ak-47's weapons to defend what
was left. But if you're saying to me "do I have evidence of fork lift
trucks?" – No. 


Do I have evidence that they knew what they were coming for, yes! Do I have
evidence that this was premeditated, yes! Do I believe that the arsonists
were trained and organized from outside who knew whether or not the
Americans would be present or whether the American military would defend
certain buildings, yes! They undoubtedly did know the Americans would not
confront them. And the Americans did not confront them. I actually got to a
point where I was going around Baghdad a few days ago, and every time I saw
a tongue of flame or smoke I'd race off in my car to the area, and the last
place I went to that was burning was the Department of Higher
Education/Computer Science and as I approached it I saw a marine sitting on
the wall. 


I bounded out of the car and raced back and thought I had better see this
guy and I took his name down. His name was Ted Nyhom and he was a member of
the Third Marine Fourth Regiment or Fourth Marine Third Regiment. He gave me
the number of his fiancé Jessica in the states. I actually rang her up and
said "your man loves you dearly" (he's a real person) and I said how the
hell is this happening next door and he said "well, we're guarding a
hospital" and I said "there's a fire next door, a whole bloody government
ministry is burning. And he said, "yeah we can't look everywhere at the same
time." I said, "Ted, what happened?" and he said "I don't know." Now when
you go to sit down...he was a nice guy, I was happy to ring his fiancé up
and tell her that he was safe. But something happened there. There was a
fire, an entire government ministry was burning down next to him and he did
nothing. It didn't seem strange to him that he wasn't asked to do anything.
Now there's something!
strange about that. It's not a question of whether American academic said,
you know, is there something wrong with the moral property of an army that
doesn't stop looting and arson. There's something terribly wrong there.


My country's army in Basra was also remiss in this way. Our Minister of
Defense, Geoff Hoon, said 'oh well they were liberating their own property'
when people were looting hospitals, for god's sakes. So the British don't
get off on this either, but the Americans were the most remiss. And in the
city of Baghdad against all the international conventions, particularly the
Geneva Convention, which have a specific reference to pillage... in fact
pillage appears as a crime against humanity in the Hague Conventions in 1907
upon in which the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were based. There is a whole
reference to pillage and the Americans did nothing. They did nothing to
prevent the pillage of the entire cultural history of Iraq, of the museum,
or the documentary history of the National Archives, or the Koranic Library
of the Ministry of Religious Endowment or of the 155 other government
locations around Baghdad. And one has to ask the question, why was this
permitted to happen. I don'!
t know the answer. 


Goodman: We're talking to Robert Fisk, correspondent for the Independent
newspaper in Britain. He has just come out of Iraq where he has spent the
last month. He is back in Beirut where he is based. Robert, the hospitals,
you spent a good amount of time there. Can you describe what you saw and
perhaps what we're not seeing. If you can follow our coverage at all here in
the United States. 


Fisk: Well as a matter of fact this afternoon, I took several roles of
film...real film, not digitized camera film into my film development shop
here, and was looking again at the film of children who'd been hit by
American cluster bombs in Hilla and Babylon whom I took photographs of. I'm
rather shocked at myself for taking pictures of people in such suffering. I
would have to say, and one must be fair as a correspondent, that I think
that the Iraqis did position military tanks and missiles in civilian areas.
They did so deliberately; they did so in order to try and preserve their
military apparatus in the hope that the Americans would not bomb civilian
areas. The Americans did bomb civilian areas. They may or may not have
destroyed the military targets; they certainly destroyed human beings and
innocent civilians.


War is a disgusting, cruel, vicious affair. You know, I say to people over
and over again: war is not about primarily victory or defeat, it's primarily
about human suffering and death. And if you look through the pictures, which
I have beside me now as I speak to you, of little girls with huge wounds in
the side of their faces made by the pieces of metal from cluster bombs,
American cluster bombs, it's degoutant, as the French say, disgusting to
even look at. But I have to look at them. I took these pictures.


The Iraqi regime, which was brutal and cruel and is very happy, was very
happy in every sense of the word, to use these pictures as propaganda, must
also of course have its own responsibility for this. But for me, the most
appalling admission came when the civil coalition, which means the
Americans, the British and a few Australians, decided to bomb an area, a
residential area of Monsur, with four 2000-pound bombs. I hate to use these
childish phrases like "bunker-busters" but these are the same bombs they
dropped on Tora Bora to try and get the caves where Bin Laden was hiding in
2001 in Afghanistan. And these huge bombs destroyed the lives of a minimum
of 14 civilians [in Monsur]. The central command in Doha, Qatar said they
believed Saddam was there, and that they would send forensic experts. But I
went there a week after the Americans entered Baghdad and no forensic
experts had been sent there indeed. And the morning I turned up, I'm talking
about 4 days ago, the decompo!
sing, horribly smelling body of a little baby was pulled out of the rubble
and I can promise you it wasn't Saddam Hussein, but the Americans went on
insisting their forensic scientists were searching to see if Saddam Hussein
had died there. Well, he did not and nor did their forensic scientists
bother; they didn't even care about going there. Outrageous. I'm sorry to
say. Outrageous. I have to be a human being as well as a journalist.


Again, one needs to also say that Saddam Hussein was...is - I'm sure he's
still alive - a most revolting man. He did use gas against the Iranians and
against the Kurds. And I also have to say that when he used it against the
Iranians, and I wrote about it in my own newspaper at the time, the Times,
the British Foreign Office told my editor the story was not helpful because
at that stage of course, Saddam Hussein was our friend - we were supporting
him. The hypocrisy of war stinks almost as much as the civilian casualties.


But let's go back to the hospitals. The Americans used cluster bombs in
civilian areas, where they believed there were military targets. Near Hilla,
I think the Iraqis probably did put military vehicles. That does not excuse
the Americans; there are specific references and paragraphs in the Geneva
Conventions to protect what are called 'protected persons', that is to say
civilians, even if they are in the presence of enemy combatants. But I think
the Iraqis did put military positions amongst civilians. I can go so far as
to say that at the museum, which was looted to the great disgrace of the
Americans, prior to the American entry into Baghdad, it was clear when I got
to the museum after the American entry, that the Iraqi army had placed gun
positions and gun pits inside the museum grounds, at one point next to a
beautiful 3000-year-old statue of a winged bull. There were other occasions
when I could clearly see SAM-6 mobile tracked missiles parked very close to
civilian hou!
ses. The Iraqis did use civilians as cover. And the Americans, knowing they
were there, bombed the civilians anyway. So who is the war criminal? I think
both of them are. There you go. That's the story.


Goodman: Robert Fisk, do you have any idea about casualty numbers right now?


Fisk: No, it's impossible. Amy, it's impossible. You know, I took my
notebook; I can tell you how many people in each ward were wounded in
particular wards, or in particular hospitals. I can tell you which doctors
told me how many people died in A, B, and C hospitals on certain dates, but
when it comes to the overall figure, the losing side has no statistics,
because of course the statistics die with the regime and the winning side
controls all the figures. Thousands of Iraqis must have died.


There was one particularly terrible scene on what was known as Highway 8. It
was the main motorway alongside the Tigris river, with some university of
Baghdad on the other side of the river, where for two and a half days,
American soldiers of the 3rd Infantry division were fighting off ambushes,
most of them members of the Republican Guard. They mounted there and I
talked to all sides here. I talked to survivors, I talked to civilians, I
talked to the Americans on the tanks. The ambush began at 7:30 on the last
Monday of the war in the morning. And the motorway was quite busy with
civilian traffic. The American 3rd Infantry Division commander told me that
he saw civilian traffic and he ordered his men to fire warning shots, which
they did he said two or three times, after which they fired at the cars. And
he said 'I had a duty to protect my men.' I have to be fair and quote what
he said. He said "I had a duty to protect my men, to protect my soldiers and
we didn't know if th!
ey were carrying RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) or explosives.' But cars
which did not stop were fired at by United States tanks of the 3rd Infantry
Division. 


I walked down the line of cars which were torn apart by American tank
shells. There was a very young woman burned black in the back of one car.
Her husband or father or brother beside her, dead. There was the leg of a
man beside another car which had been blown clean in half by an American
M1-A1 tank. There were piles of blankets covering families with children who
had been blown to pieces by the Americans. It was a real ambush. They were
fired at by RPG -7's. In one case, one tank I saw (the American commander
took me around) who'd received five hits, one of them on the engine. And he
had opened fire at a motorcycle carrying two members of the Iraqi Republican
Guard. One had died instantly. I found his body beside the road with his
blood dribbling into the gutter. The other was wounded and the American
brought him back to the tank, gave him first aid and sent him off to a
medical company. The American commander - the same commander who told his
tank crew to open fire on the!
civilian cars - told me that he saved the life of the second Republican
Guard who was on the motorcycle and the guy survived. I have to assume
that's correct. I didn't see him. But three days later, the bodies were
still, including the young woman, were still lying in the cars. And bits of
human remains were lying around in blankets. The stench was terrible. There
were flies everywhere. The American officer then told me that he had asked
the Red Crescent, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross, to move the bodies
and the cars were removed. But they were still there, along with the bodies
the next day. That's a fact. I saw.


Goodman: What about the journalists? It looks like there is the highest
percentage of foreign journalists, as a percentage of foreign casualties,
that we have seen in a long time. It looks like the number at this point is
14 journalists killed as well as the shelling of the Palestine Hotel.


Fisk: Well, I think that the number of journalists covering war - indeed,
the number of journalists in general - is increasing all the time. And so I
suppose, it's not a very romantic thing to say, but I suppose that as the
number of journalists increase, the number of casualties among journalists
will increase as well. There were a number of incidents which we seem to
have understood. The ITV reporter, who got north of the American lines near
Basra, was returning and got shot by US Marines, along with his crew.
Another British reporter who may or may not have committed suicide, I don't
know, which has nothing to do with the Americans or the Iraqis per se, if
that's the case. We have the Palestine hotel, which is one of the more
serious cases of all. That particular day began with the killing of the
journalist from Al Jazeera, the Qatari/Doha television chain, which of
course became famous in Afghanistan for producing tapes and airing tapes of
Osama bin Laden. I had by chanc!
e, four days before Tariq [Ayoub]'s death, on the roof of that television
station, been giving a broadcast myself live to Doha. And while I was
broadcasting, a cruise missile went streaking by behind the building and
literally moved over the bridge on the right and carried on up the river
Tigris and there was an airstrike behind me. And I said to Tariq afterwards,
I think this is the most dangerous bloody newspaper office in the history of
the world, you know? You're in really great danger here. There were gun pits
on the right. And he agreed with me. And four days later, while he was on
the roof preparing to do a broadcast, an American jet came in so low,
according to his colleagues downstairs, they thought it would land on the
roof, and fired a single missile at the generator beside him and killed him.
About three and a quarter hours later, an American M1A1 Abrams tank on the
Jumeirah River bridge, about three quarters of a mile from the Palestine
Hotel where the journalis!
ts were staying, fired a single round, a depleted uranium rou!
nd, as I understand, at the office of Reuters where they were filming the
same tanks on the bridge.


I was actually between the tank and the hotel, when the round was fired. I
was trying to get back from a story, an assignment I'd been on, what I'd put
myself on. And the shell with an extraordinary noise swooshed over my head
and hit the hotel...bang! Tremendous concussion. White Smoke. And when I got
there, two of my colleagues, one from Reuters and one from Spanish
Television, both of whom were to die within a few hours, the first one
within half an hour, were being brought out in blood-soaked bed-sheeting.
And a Lebanese colleague, a woman, Samia, with a piece of metal in her
brain. She recovered. She had brain surgery. She's married to the London
Financial Times correspondent here in Beirut. She survived. The initial
reaction was very interesting because the BBC went on air saying it was an
Iraqi rocket-propelled grenade. Someone wanted to frighten the press. Then
it emerged, thanks be to God for the attempt to get the truth, that TV3, a
French channel, had recorded the!
tanks' movements and I actually rushed to their Bureau and they showed me
the videotape and you saw the American tanks for five minutes beforehand, in
complete silence - there was nothing happening - going onto the bridge,
moving its turret, and then firing at the hotel. The camera shakes and
pieces of plaster and paint fall in front of the camera. Clearly, it's the
same shot. Four or five minutes in which nothing is happening. Now I was in
between the tank and the hotel and there was complete silence. And when
initially the Americans said they knew nothing about it, when it became
clear the French had a film, before the Americans realized how long the film
was running for prior to the attack, they said that the tank was under
persistent sniper and RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) fire which is not true.
I would have heard it because I was close to the tank and the hotel and it
would have been picked up on the soundtrack, which it wasn't.


This statement was made by General Buford Blount, the same 3rd Infantry
Division commander who boasted that he'd be using depleted uranium munitions
during the war in an interview with Le Monde in March, a month ago. And he
then said that there had been sniper fire and after the round was fired by
the American tank, the sniper fire had ceased. In other words, the clear
implication was that the gunfire had come from the Reuters office, which was
a most mendacious, vicious lie by General Blount. General Blount lied in
order to cover up the death of journalists. It was interesting that when
indeed the Americans actually arrived in central Baghdad within a day, no
journalists were raising these issues with the Americans who'd just arrived.
They should have done...I did actually. And in fact two days later, I was on
the Jumeirah bridge, and climbed onto the second tank and asked the tank
commander whether he fired at the journalists and he said "I don't know
anything about that, !
sir. I'm new here." Which he may well have been. How do I know if he was
there before or not? But that tank round was fired deliberately at the hotel
and General Blount's counterfeit - the commander of the 3rd Infantry
Division - was a lie. A total lie. And it was a grotesque lie against my
colleagues. Samia Mahul had a piece of metal in her brain, A young woman
who's most bravely reported the Lebanese civil war. And against the
Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters and against the Spanish cameraman in the
room upstairs. It was a most disgusting lie. And as a journalist, I have to
say that. And General Blount has not apologized for it. So far he has gotten
away with his lie. I'm sorry to say.


Amy: Nouvelle Observatoure, the French Newspaper, is reporting that a US
Army captain named Captain Wolford said unlike what the military reported,
he did not see sniper fire from the Palestine hotel. But he did see what he
thought was light glinting off of binoculars from one of the hotel's
balconies. He said he had never been told the Palestine Hotel was the home
base for almost all the international journalists in Baghdad and assumed the
– – 


Fisk: Well, yeah I've heard this story. I know this. Well, if American
commanders in the field are not told the intelligence information about
where people are in what hotels, it doesn't say much about the American
military. Look I don't think the American military people are inherently
wrong or awful or bad. You know, I met lots of American soldiers and Marines
of course. Marines insist on telling me they're not soldiers, which is an
odd thing for a Brit to hear, but I have to accept it. They were decent
people. One young Marine came up to me. He wanted to use my mobile phone to
call his home and I let him, of course. And he said "I'm really sorry, sir,
about the death of your colleagues." Like he meant it. I don't think these
are intrinsically bad people. I think the idea that there's some ghastly,
you know, evil moving among the American military is not true. I don't
believe that. I think they're decent people and I think they want to be
decent people. When their generals!
lie, it must be hard, as Buford Blount lied. General Blount lied about the
journalists. He lied. He was a [inaudible] soldier.


But the ordinary soldiers I met, I think they were quite sympathetic. I
think they understood. And I think that in some cases, they were very upset
about what had happened to our colleagues, but they were also upset about
civilian casualties whom they'd caused. You know, when on Highway 8, I was
interviewing the American tank commander who'd given the order to fire at
the civilian cars on the road, I thought he was a decent person. I have to
say that when I read my notes afterwards, and I reflected upon the fact that
the bodies of the innocents were still lying in the cars three days later, I
was less inclined to be kind to him. I was less inclined to think he was a
nice person. But I don't think that the American soldiers were bad people. I
think they believed in what they were doing, up to the point that you can. I
think that they believed that their war was an honorable one, even though I
don't think it was. But I think that they had been previously misled and I
think som!
ething has gone wrong with the leadership of the American military when you
can have a general like Blount lying about the press. If to see a flash of
what appears to be a camera or some kind of reflecting instrument in a
window is to be the signal for capital punishment for those who are
legitimately filming the war for an international news agency, something has
gone terribly wrong. I think the real problem at the end of the day lies in
the White House, with President Bush.


There were a number of American Marines and soldiers I met who were very
helpful to me in understanding what was happening. At one point, I was next
to an American tank that came under fire - I don't know where from - and I
thought the soldiers behaved with great restraint. They could have shot at
civilians. In some cases, I know in other places in Baghdad, they did and
killed people and I think it was a war crime to have done so. But in the
American tank I was close to, they did not. And those soldiers behaved
admirably. I have to say that. I think they were frightened, I think they
were tired. They hadn't washed etc. but I'm sorry, I don't get too romantic
about soldiers who invade other peoples' countries. But I thought their
discipline was probably pretty good, to be frank. In other places, it was
not. But again, you know, war is primarily about suffering and death, not
about victory and defeat and not about presidents who - oh, I'm so tired of
talking about your preside!
nt. Or indeed the president of Iraq who's a pretty vicious man frankly if
he's still alive. Where is he? That should be your last question, Amy: Where
is Saddam Hussein? 


Goodman: Well. I'm not there yet. But you mentioned your colleague – –


Fisk: You're going to ask me where he is, aren't you?


(they laugh) 


Goodman: OK, where is he?


Fisk: You know what, I have this absolute fixation that he's in Belarus, the
most horrible ex-Soviet state that exists: Minsk. I tell you why I think
this. This is long before the Iran - sorry, Freudian slip - long before the
Iraq war, I had this absolute obsession that Minsk - I've been to Minsk;
it's a horrible city! It's full of whiskey, corruption, prostitutes and damp
apartments. Very, very favorable to the Ba'ath party of Iraq. And I noticed
in the local newspaper here in Beirut, I fear about six or seven weeks ago
an article that said that the Olympic committee of Belarus in Minsk had
invited Uday Hussein, beloved son of the 'great ruler of Iraq', to a chess
tournament in Minsk and I thought, My God, this is where they're going to
go. And if you think of all the stories which may be complete hogwash of how
they got out by train with the Russian ambassador through Syria, where else
to go but Minsk? I actually mentioned it to my foreign desk and my foreign
editor said "!
Off you go to Belarus!" and I said "No please, please, not Belarus! I've
been there before. It's awful!" But I do have this kind of suspicion maybe
he's there. But there you go. He may be in Baghdad. He may be captured
tonight. I really have not the slightest idea.


Goodman: Robert Fisk, you mentioned your Lebanese colleague who has shrapnel
in her head and said she covered the civil war in Beirut, which brings us to
a piece you did about questioning whether what we're going to see in Iraq is
the beginning of a civil war between the Sunni and the Shiia. What do you
think now? 


Fisk: Well, if it's not the beginning of a civil war between the Sunni and
the Shiia in Iraq, it will be the beginning of a war of liberation by the
Sunni and the Shiia themselves against the Americans. My feeling is that
there will be a war - it may already have begun - against the Americans by
the Iraqis. The Kurds will play a different role for all kinds of reasons,
but the Sunnis and the Shiias may well find some unity in trying to get rid
of their occupiers. You know, one can't help in the Middle East but be
struck by the ironies of history. Just over a week before - no, two weeks
before America invaded Iraq, a document went on auction. It's a public
auction in Britain at Swinden in southwestern England. And I made a bid for
it. As a matter of fact, I found out it was going to go on sale and it was
the official British document issued by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude
after he invaded Iraq with the British Army in 1917. And it was his
proclamation to the people of!
the Zilayah, that's to say the governerate of Baghdad. And I quote from the
first paragraph: "We come here not as conquerors, but as liberators to free
you from the tyranny of generations," just like President Bush says he's
come now. I actually wrote about this document in the newspaper and said it
was going to come up for auction which was a very bad mistake because the
auctioneers rang me up from Swinden, England to Beirut when I was actually
interviewing, ironically enough, three Iraqi refugees here in Beirut. And
they said do you want to bid for it, the bidding has started. I said yes I
will bid for it. And it was originally going to go for US $156. And so many
readers of the Independent who'd read my article turned up - it actually
went for $2000. And God spare me, I bought it. So now I am the owner of Sir
Stanley Maude's document, telling the people of Baghdad that the new
occupiers, the British Army of 1917, had come there as liberators, not as
conquerors, to free t!
hem from the tyranny of generations of tyrants and dictators.!
And now, you know, a few weeks later, there I am in Baghdad, listening to
the American Marine Corps issuing an identical document, telling the people
they'd come not as conquerors, but as liberators, and I wonder sometimes
whether people ever, ever read history books.


Goodman: We're talking to Robert Fisk, the correspondent for The
Independent. He is tired. He has just come out of Iraq after a month....


Fisk: He's definitely tired, Amy. He's very definitely tired, yeah.


Goodman: Well, I wanted to ask you about - you might have heard about Judith
Miller's report in the New York Times, saying a former Iraqi scientist has
told a US military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological
warfare equipment only days before the war began and also said Iraq secretly
sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria starting in the 80's and
that more recently...


Fisk (overlapping): How amazing....how amazing...how very fortunate that
that special report should come out now. Listen, every time I read Judith
Miller in the New York Times, I nod sagely and smile. That's all I'm going
to say to you, Amy. I'm sorry. Don't ask me to even comment upon it. It's
not a serious issue.


Goodman: Then let me ask you about the targeting of Syria right now.


Fisk: Look, Syria will not be invaded by the United States because it
doesn't have enough oil. It will be threatened by the United States, on
Israel's behalf perhaps, but it doesn't have sufficient oil to make it worth
invading. So the answer is: Syria will not be invaded.


Goodman: As you leave Iraq and you look back at what you saw, what are key
areas that you see as different, for example, than the Persian Gulf War and
what happened afterwards and what are you going to pursue right now?


Fisk: Well, we've got the first occupation of an Arab capital by a Western
army since General Allenby entered Jerusalem and since Sir Stanley Maude
entered Baghdad. We did have the brief period of French and American armies
entering Damascus and indeed Beirut in the second World War. But that was
part of a Vichy French Allied War. It wasn't part of a colonial war. We now
have American troops occupying the wealthiest Arab country in the world. And
the shockwaves of that are going to continue for decades to come, long after
you and I are in our graves, if that's where we go. And I don't think we
have yet realized - I don't think that the soldiers involved or the
Presidents involved have yet realized the implications of what has happened.
We have entered a new age of imperialism, the life of which we have not
attempted to judge or assess or understand. Well, I'm 56 now - maybe I'll
never see the end of it, I probably won't. But my goodness me, I've never
seen such historical ac!
ts take place in the 27 years I've been in the Middle East. And the results
cannot be good. I don't believe we've gone to Iraq because of weapons of
mass destruction. If we'd done that, we would have invaded North Korea. I
don't believe we've gone there because of human rights abuses because we
connived at those abuses for many years when we supported Saddam. I think
we've gone there for oil. And though we may get the oil, I think the price
will be very high. More than that, I don't know. You know, my crystal ball,
as I always say, has broken a long time ago. But I'll keep on watching the
story, I guess, because like my father who was much older than my mother,
was a soldier in the first World War, I want to keep watching history
happen. I would, however, yet again, for the umpteenth time on your program,
Amy, quote Amira Haas, that wonderful journalist for Ha'aretz, the Israeli
newspaper, who said "the purpose of journalism is to monitor the centers of
power" and we still d!
o not do that, and we must monitor the centers of power and w!
e must try to question why governments do the things that they do and why
they lie about it. And we don't do that. We don't do that.


Goodman: Well Robert Fisk, I want to thank you for doing that.
NEW AT COLDTYPE.NET - April 24

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MEDIABEAT / Norman Solomon
 
Media nix ­ Blix, Kucinich, and the Dixie Chicks
Hans Blix, Dennis Kucinich and the Dixie Chicks are in very different lines
of work ­ but they¹re in the same line of fire from big media for the sin of
strongly challenging the president¹s war agenda. Let¹s start with Blix, who
can get respectful coverage in American media ­ unless he¹s criticizing the
U.S. government. Belatedly, in mid-April, he went public with accusations
that the Bush administration faked evidence on Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. And Blix declared that the United Nations ­ not the U.S.
government ­ should deploy arms inspectors in Iraq now.
Read Norman Solomon at http://www.coldtype.net/mediabeat.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------

WORDS AGAINST WAR / John Pilger
Read John Pilger at http://www.coldtype.net/pilger.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------

LONDON CALLING / George Monbiot
Read George Monbiot's weekly column from London's Guardian at
http://www.coldtype.net/London.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------

DEADLINE BAGHDAD / Robert Fisk
Read Robert Fisk's final reports from Baghdad for London's Independent at
http://www.coldtype.net/baghdad.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------

CRITICAL MASS
Read Antonia Zerbisias's reports at http://www.coldtype.net/azerb.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------

GETTING A GRIP
Read Michael I. Niman at http://www.coldtype.net/Grip.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------

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