FW: Interview With Robert Fisk

-----Original Message-----
From: NHNE [mailto:nhne@...]
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 5:53 PM
To: *News List
Robert Fisk is probably the most senior and respected western journalist who
covers the mideast. He writes for the Independent in the UK. Much of what he
says is also being said elsewhere these days, we can only hope the white
house is listening to this kind of knowledgeable information.

Dante

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

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT FISK
AT BEIRUT AIRPORT IN LEBANON
MiD-EasT RealitieS
Friday, September 21, 2001

This interview was broadcast on 19 September.

http://www.MERTV.org

KIM HILL [Radio New Zealand on 19 Sept]: Can I talk to you about Osama Bin
Laden? I don't know whether you are in favour of him becoming public enemy
number one at the moment but I do know that you have met him and I wonder if
you could give me some kind of insight into, first of all, is he capable of
this.

ROBERT FISK [The Independent, UK - longest serving Western Reporter in the
Middle East]: Well, I've been trying to explain this in my own paper, the
London Independent over the last few days and I'm not sure. We haven't
actually seen the evidence that directly links him to not just an atrocity
but a crime against humanity that took place in New York and Washington. On
the other hand, the Afghan connection seems to be fairly strong.

Could he have done it? He certainly hasn't condemned it although he denies
being involved. The first time, no the second time I met him in Afghanistan
when he was there with his armed fighters, I asked him if he had been
involved in an attack on American troops at Al Hoba, in Saudi Arabia which
had just taken place -- 24 American soldiers had been killed -- and he said
no, it was not his doing, he was not responsible. He admitted that he knew
two or three men who have since been executed, beheaded, by the Saudi
authorities.

He then said, I did not have the honour to participate in this operation. In
other words, he approved of it. Now, you can go on saying that kind of thing
he did, several times over about other episodes later. At some point you
begin to say, "Come off it Bin Laden, surely you are saying there's a
connection", but he's never said or admitted responsibility for any such
event and he's denied specifically the atrocities in the United States.

Is he capable of it? Look, I'll give you one tiny example. The second time I
met him in Afghanistan, four years ago, at the top of a mountain, it was
cold and in the morning when I woke in the camp tent, I had frost in my
hair. He walked into the tent I was sitting in and sat down opposite me,
cross-legged on the floor and noticed in the school bag I usually carry in
rough country to keep things in, some Arabic-language newspapers and he
seized upon these and went to the corner of the tent with a sputtering oil
lamp and devoured the contents.

For 20 minutes, he ignored us, he ignored the gunman sitting in the tent, he
ignored me and he didn't even know, for example, that it was stated in one
of the stories in the newspaper that the Iranian foreign minister had just
visited Riyadh, his own country, Saudi Arabia -- well, his, until he lost
his citizenship. So he seemed to me at the time to be very isolated, a cut
off man, not the sort of person who would press a button on a mobile phone
and say, "Put plan B into action".

So I don't think you can see this as a person who actually participates in
the sense of planning, step-by-step, what happens in a nefarious attack. In
other words, I doubt very much if he said, "Well, four airplanes, five
hijackers, etc.". But he is a person that has a very large following,
particularly in the rather sinister Jihadi community or culture of Pakistan.
And there is such anger in the Middle East at the moment about the
American's policies here and whether it be the deaths of tens of thousands
of children in Iraq, which Osama Bin Laden has spoken about, whether it be
continued occupation and expansion of Jewish settlements in Arab land which
he's also spoken about, whether it be about the continued dictatorships,
Arab dictatorships, which are supported in large part by the west,
especially in the Gulf area, about which Osama Ben Laden has spoken about
and condemned, I think you find in this region, enough people who admire
what he says, almost to conspire amongst themselves without involving him,
in the kind of bombing attacks that we've seen in Saudi Arabia and I suppose
it's conceivable, in the atrocities in the United States.

But if you're looking for direct evidence, if you're looking for a
fingerprint, all I can say is, the moment I heard about the World Trade
Center attacks, I saw the shadow of the Middle East hanging over them. As
for the fingerprint of Bin Laden, I think that's a different matter. We
haven't seen it yet. We may. Perhaps the Americans can produce the evidence
but we haven't seen it yet.

HILL: The corollary of that, of course, is that should they decide to strike
against Bin Laden, it will do no good because, you know, there will be a
thousand, a million more, waiting to carry on doing the same thing, will
they not?

FISK: Yes this is the problem. It is very easy to start a war, or to declare
war, or to say you are at war and quite another thing to switch it off. And
after all, let's face it, this is a declaration of war primarily against the
United States. But once America takes up the opponent's role, saying we will
retaliate, then you take the risk of further retaliation against you and
further retaliation by you and so on.

This is the trap that Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, has got
himself involved in Israel with the Palestinians because when the
Palestinians send a suicide bomber wickedly, for example into a pizzeria and
kill many innocent Israelis, the Israelis feel a need to retaliate so they
fire tank shells or helicopters fire American missiles into a police post.
Then a murder squad, or a helicopter fires a missile into a car of a man who
the Israelis believe have plotted bombing. Then the Palestinians retaliate
by sending another suicide bomber and so on and so forth.

It's one thing to use this rhetoric, like "rooting out the weed of world
terror", "dead or alive", "a crusade" -- my goodness me, that's a word that
Mr Bush has been using -- not a word that's likely to encourage much
participation on the American side in the Arab world because the word,
crusade, is synonymous here with Christians shedding Muslim blood in
Jerusalem in 1099 and Jewish blood actually, historically.

So, the real question is, what lies behind this rhetoric? Is there any
serious military thinking going on? If so, are we talking about the kind of
blind, indiscriminate attack which will only provoke more anger among Arabs,
perhaps to overthrow their own regimes which Mr Bin Laden will be very
happy to see, or are we talking about special forces seizing people, taking
them out of Afghanistan, trying to have some kind of international criminal
court where we could actually see justice done as opposed to just
liquidation and murder squads setting out to kill killers.

HILL: George Bush, I suppose is entitled to his internal physical needs --
the needs of Americans -- to put out bellicose rhetoric, such as "the new
war on terrorism", or "we want Osama Bin Laden dead or alive" and so on, but
what he will do remains entirely obscure at the moment, doesn't it?

FISK: Yes, yes it does. You see, I can understand -- anyone should be able
to Understand -- not only how appalled Americans are about what happened, in
such an awesome way -- the images of those aircraft flying through the skin
of the World Trade Center and exploding are utterly unforgettable. For the
rest of our lives we will remember that. And I think therefore the anger of
Americans is perfectly understandable and revenge is a kind of justice,
isn't it, but these days we have to believe in the rule of law.

Once or twice you hear Colin Powell talking about justice and law but then
you hear President Bush using the language of Wild West movies. And that is
very frightening because I don't think that NATO is going to support America
in a blind and totally indiscriminate attack in the Middle East. And the
other question is, how do you make your strike massive enough to suit the
crime. Afghanistan, after all, is a country in total ruins, it was occupied
by the Russians for 10 years which is why it is seeded with 10 million mines
-- I mean it, 10 million mines, more that one tenth of all the land mines in
the world are in Afghanistan. So any idea of America sending its military
across Afghanistan is a very, very dangerous operation in a country where
America has no friends.

It is very significant -- though it's been largely missed, I noticed by
press and television around the world -- but just two days before the
attacks on Washington and New York, Shah Massoud, the leader of the
opposition in Afghanistan, the only military man to stand up to the Taliban,
and the only friend of the west, was himself assassinated by two Arab
suicide bombers -- men posing as journalists, by the way. I've been asking
myself over the last two days, and I have no proof of this whatsoever,
merely a strong suspicion, whether in fact, that assassination wasn't in a
sense a code for people in the United States to carry out atrocities which
we saw last Tuesday. I don't know, but certainly if America wants to go into
Afghanistan, one of the key elements, even with a special forces raid, is to
have friends in the country, people who are on your side. [But they] have
just been erased, in fact erased two days before the bombings in America,
and I find that is a very, very significant thing.

HILL: If one went to these people, if one went to bin Laden or any other, if
one went to the Jihadians in Pakistan and said, "What do you guys want?"
What would they say?

FISK: Well, you would hear a list of objectives which will be entirely
unacceptable to the west or in many cases, to any sane person here.

Hill: What do they want?

Fisk: Well, look, what you have to understand is, what they want and what
most Muslims in the region want is not necessarily the same thing but they
are trading and treading on the waters of injustice in the region. But what
they want, they will tell you, is they want shariat imposed on all Muslim
states in the region, they want total withdrawal of western forces from the
Arab gulf region. They ask, for example, why does America still have forces
in Saudi Arabia 10 years after the Gulf War, after which they promised they
would immediately withdraw those forces?

Why are American forces in Kuwait? Well, we know the American answer is that
Saddam Hussein remains a danger. Well, that might be a little bit of a
dubious claim now. And why are American forces exercising in Egypt? Why are
American jets allowed to use Jordan? What are they doing in Turkey? On top
of that, they will demand an end to Israeli occupation of Arab land.

But you have to remember that when you go to one end of the extreme, like
the most extreme of the Jihadi culture in Pakistan, you are going to hear
demands that will never be met. But nonetheless, and this is the point, they
feed on a general unease about injustice in the region which is associated
with the west which many, many Arab Muslims -- millions of them -- will
feel.

So, this goes back to the Bin Laden culture. It does mean, I haven't met a
single Arab in the last week, who doesn't feel revulsion about what has
happened in the United States. But quite a few of them would say, and one or
two have, if you actually listen to what Bin Laden demands, he asks
questions that it would be interesting to hear the answers to. What are the
Americans still doing in the Gulf? Why does the United States still permit
Israel to build settlements for Jews, and Jews only, on Arab land? Why does
it still permit thousands of children to die under UN sanctions? And UN
sanctions are primarily imposed by western powers.

So, it's not like you have a simple, clear picture here. But where you have
a large area of the earth, where there is a very considerable amount of
injustice, where the United States is clearly seen as to blame for some of
it, then the people in the kind of Jihadi culture -- the extremists,
terrorists, call them what you like -- are going to be able to find a
society in which they can breathe, and they do.

My point all along is, if there is going to be a military operation to find
the people responsible for the World Trade Center and for the people who
support them and for those who harbour them -- I'm using the words of the
State Department, the President, the Vice-President, Secretary of State
Colin Powell -- then I believe that the wisest and most courageous thing
that the Americans can do, is to make sure that it goes hand-in-hand with
some attempt to rectify some of the injustices, present and historic in this
region.

That could actually do what President Bush claims he wants, that is, end
"terrorism" in this region. But you see, I don't think Mr Bush is prepared
to put his politics where he's prepared to point his missiles. He won't do
that. He only wants a military solution. And military solutions in the
Middle East never, ever work.

HILL: Because it's like a tar baby. I mean as soon as the United States
undertakes a military solution, then a thousand more will instantly join the
Jihadi or Bin Laden because, there you go, the United States has proved
itself to be the great Satan once again.

FISK: Well, there is a self-proving element to that for them, yes, but
again, you see, the point is, I said before, that Bin Laden's obsession with
overthrowing the local pro-American regime has been at the top of his list
of everything he's said to me in three separate meetings in Sudan and two in
Afghanistan. And I suspect, and I don't know if he's involved in this, but
if he was -- or even if he wasn't -- he may well feel the more bloody and
the more indiscriminate the American response is, the greater the chance
that the rage and the feeling of anger among ordinary Arabs who are normally
very docile beneath their various dictatorships, will boil over and start to
seriously threaten the various pro-western regimes in the region, especially
those in the Arabian Gulf.

And that is what he's talked about. And indeed, Mr Mubarek of Egypt, not you
might think, a great conceptual thinker, two weeks' ago, only a few days
before the World Trade Center bombing, and it's always interesting to go
back before these events to see what people said, warned what he called "an
explosion outside the region", very prescient of him and he also talked
about the danger for the various Arab governments and regimes -- he didn't
call himself a dictator, though effectively he is -- if American policy
didn't change. And indeed, he sent his Foreign Minister to Washington to
complain that the Egyptian regime itself could be in danger unless American
policy changed. And what was the Foreign minister told? He was told to go
back to Cairo and tell Mr Mubarek that it will be very easy for Dick Cheney
to go to Congress and to cut off all American aid to Egypt.

HILL: The trouble with arguing, as you do, as many other people do, that,
you know, 1800 people were killed in Sabra and Shatila, maybe half a million
people have died in Iraq as a result of the sanctions, how many Palestinians
have died as a result of the Israeli attacks, it begins to sound like moral
relativism in some peculiar way. I talked to David Horovitz [editor,
Jerusalem Report] earlier this morning. You won't be surprised to hear that
he disagrees with a lot of the things you say. And he said, look, this
terrorist attack on the United States last week was beyond the pale, was
unacceptable, cannot be compared with anything else. This is it. How do you
respond to that?

FISK: I'm not surprised that David, who I know quite well, would say that. I
don't think it's a question of moral relativism. When you live in this
region. I go to New York and I've driven past the World Trade Center many
times. This is familiar architecture for me too, and familiar people, but
when you live in this region, it isn't about moral relativism, it sometimes
comes down to the question of why when some people have brown eyes and
darker skin, their lives seem to be worth less than westerners.

Let's forget Sabra and Shatila for the moment and remember that on a green
light from Secretary of State Alexander Haig, as he then was, Israel invaded
Lebanon and in the bloody months of July and August, around 17,500 people,
almost all of them civilians -- this is almost three times the number killed
in the World Trade Center -- were killed. And there were no candlelight
vigils in the United States, no outspoken grief, all that happened was a
State Department call to both sides to exercise restraint.

Now, it isn't a question of moral relativism, it isn't a question in any way
of demeaning or reducing the atrocity which happened -- let's call it a
crime against humanity which it clearly was -- is it possible then to say
well, 17,500 lives, but that was in a war and it was far away and anyway
they were Arabs which is the only way I can see you dismiss the argument
that, hang on a minute, terrible things have happened out here too. That
does not excuse what happened in the United States. It doesn't justify by a
tiny millimetre anything that happened there but we've got to see history,
even the recent history of this region if we are going to look seriously at
what happened in the United States.

HILL: That's like setting out on a marathon though. I mean, of course David
Horovitz says, look, we made the Palestinians a fantastic offer and they
turned it down. What more can we do? They keep coming at us. We're trying,
we're trying, we're trying. If you say, yes.

FISK: Wait a second, there's an inaccuracy in this, and this is not meant to
be a criticism of David, this is my view, they were not made a great offer,
they were not offered 96% of the West Bank, they were offered 46% roughly,
because they were not being offered Jerusalem or the area around it, or the
area taken illegally into the new Jerusalem and its municipality, or certain
settlements elsewhere, and they were to have a military buffer zone that
would further reduce the so-called 96%. It was not a good offer to the
Palestinians. You see, it has become part of a narrative to get away from
the reasons for injustice and not to deal with these issues.

HILL: I didn't reproduce it in order to say, it was a fantastic offer. I did
it to illustrate that very point, that there are narratives going on and the
narratives are of different pages, different books, different libraries and
they are getting increasingly different. I can't see how we can ever align
those narratives and it's getting harder and harder. How do we do it?

FISK: Well, I think this is wrong. I think I disagree with you. Look, you
can't say that you don't understand the narrative of children dying in Iraq.
Nobody is going around claiming that they are not dying. They are. They
clearly are. And if they were, and I'm going to stick my neck out, if they
were western children, believe me, they would not be dying.

Now this is a major problem. Again, you see, anyone who tries to argue this,
then you get smeared with, "O, you are on Saddam Hussein's side". Now Saddam
is a wicked, unpleasant, dirty dictator. But the fact remains, there are
children dying. And if they were western children I do not believe they
would be. And this is a major problem.

And many, many Arabs put this point of view forward, not in hating the
United States, but simply saying, why? And of course why is one of the
questions you are not supposed to ask in this region is about the motives of
the people who committed this mass murder in the United States. Actually, I
have to point out, they haven't told us, have they, the people behind this
haven't even bothered, they've just given us this theatre of mass murder,
which is the most disgusting thing.

But you've got to come back and realize, these things don't happen in
isolation. These 20 suicide bombers did not get up in the morning and say,
let's go hijack some planes. Nor did the people who organized it and funded
it. They knew they were doing it in a certain climate. Otherwise it would
never have been able to happen. That is the problem. That is why we need to
get at the question, why.

Hill: It's very nice to talk to you. We hope to do it again soon. Thank-you,
Robert Fisk.

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

THEY CAN RUN AND THEY CAN HIDE.
SUICIDE BOMBERS ARE HERE TO STAY
By Robert Fisk

[The Independent, UK, 13 September 2001]

Not long before the Second World War, Stanley Baldwin, who was Britain's
Prime Minister, warned that "the bomber will always get through". Today, we
can argue that the suicide bomber will always get through. Maybe not all of
them. We may never know how many other hijackers failed to board domestic
flights in the United States on Tuesday morning, but enough to produce
carnage on an awesome, incomprehensive scale. Yet still we have not begun to
address this phenomenon. The suicide bomber is here to stay. It is an
exclusive weapon that belongs to "them" not us, and no military power
appears able to deal with this phenomenon. Partly because of the suicide
bomber, the Israelis fled Lebanon. Specifically because of a suicide bomber,
the Americans fled Lebanon 17 years earlier. I still remember Vice-President
George Bush, now George Bush Senior, visibly moved amid the ruins of the US
Marine base in Beirut, where 241 American servicemen had just been
slaughtered. "We are not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist
cowards, shake the foreign policy of the United States," he told us.
"Foreign policy is not going to be dictated or changed by terror." A few
months later, the Marines upped sticks and ran away from Lebanon,
"redeployed" to their ships offshore.

Not long ago, I was chatting to an Indian soldier, a veteran of Delhi's
involvement in the Sri Lanka war now serving with the UN in southern
Lebanon. How did the Tamil suicide bombers compare those of the Lebanese
Hizbollah I asked him? The soldier raised his eyebrows. "The Hizbollah has
nothing on those guys," he said. "Just think, they all carry a suicide
capsule. I told my soldiers to drive at 100 miles an hour on the roads of
Sri Lanka in case one of them hurled himself into the jeep. " The Hizbollah
may take their inspiration from the martyrdom of the prophet Hussain, and
the Palestinian suicide bombers may take theirs from the Hizbollah.

But there is no military answer to this. As long as "our" side will risk but
not give its lives (cost-free war, after all, was partly an American
invention) the suicide bomber is the other side's nuclear weapon. That
desperate, pitiful phone call from the passenger on her way to her doom in
the Boeing 767crash on the Pentagon told her husband that the hijackers held
knives and box-cutters. Knives and box-cutters; that's all you need now to
inflict a crashing physical defeat on a superpower. That and a plane with a
heavy fuel load.

But the suicide bomber does not conform to a set of identical
characteristics. Many of the callow Palestinian youths blowing themselves to
bits, with, more often than not, the most innocent of Israelis, have little
or no formal education. They have poor knowledge of the Koran but a powerful
sense of fury, despair and self-righteousness to propel them. The Hizbollah
suicide bombers were more deeply versed in the Koran, older, often with
years of imprisonment to steel them in the hours before their immolation.

Tuesday's suicide bombers created a precedent. If there were at least four
on each aircraft, this means 16 men decided to kill themselves at the same
time. Did they all know each other? Unlikely. Or did one of them know all
the rest? For sure, they were educated. If the Boeing which hit the Pentagon
was being flown by men with knives (presumably, the other three aircraft
were too) then these were suicide bombers with a good working knowledge of
the fly-by-wire instrument panel of one of the world's most sophisticated
aircraft.

I found it oddly revealing when, a few hours later, an American reporter
quizzed me about my conviction that these men must have made "dummy runs",
must have travelled the same American Airlines and United Airlines scheduled
flights many times. They would have to do that at least to check the X-ray
security apparatus at airports. How many crew, the average passenger
manifest, the average delays on departure times. They needed to see if the
cabin crew locked the flight deck door. In my experience on US domestic
flights this is rare. Savage, cruel these men were, but also, it seems,
educated.

Like so many of our politicians who provide us with the same tired old
promises about hunting down the guilty and, Mr. Blair's contribution
yesterday, "dismantle the machine of terror". But this misses the point. If
the machinery is composed of knives and box-cutters, Mr. Blair is after the
wrong target. Just as President Ronald Reagan was in the hours before he
ordered the bombing of Libya in 1986. "He can run, but he can't hide," he
said of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. But Colonel Gaddafi could hide, and he is
still with us.

Instead of searching for more rogue states, President George W Bush's
reference to those who stand behind the bombers opens the way for more
cruise missiles aimed at Iraq or Afghanistan, or wherever he thinks the
"godfathers of terrorism may be". The Americans might do better to find out
who taught these vicious men to fly a Boeing 767. Which Middle East airlines
train their pilots for this aircraft? Indeed which nations are generous in
their pilot-training schemes for Third World countries? I recall one of
Iran's best post-revolutionary helicopter pilots telling me he was given a
full course on the Bell Augusta (the Vietnam-era gunship) by the Pakistan
air force, which itself paid retired American pilots to teach them.

And if Osama bin Laden is behind the New York massacre, it's worth
remembering one of his aims: not just to evict the US from the Middle East
but to overthrow the Arab regimes loyal to Washington.

Saudi Arabia was top of the list when I last spoke to him, but President
Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Jordan, ruled by King Abdullah II, were among his
other enemies. He would keep talking about how the Muslims of these nations
would rise up against their corrupt rulers. A slaughter by the US in
retaliation for the New York and Washington bloodbaths might just move the
Arab masses from stubborn docility to the point of detonation.

Within the region, the suicide bomber is now admired. Not because he is a
mass killer but because something invincible, something untouchable,
something that has always dictated the rules without taking responsibility
for the results, has now proved vulnerable. It was the same when the first
suicide bombers struck in Lebanon.

The Lebanese could scarcely believe that Israeli soldiers could die on this
scale. The Israeli army of song and legend had been brought low. So, too,
the reaction when the symbols of America's pride and power were struck. The
vile, if small, Palestinian "celebrations" were a symptom of this, albeit
unrepresentative. They matched the "bomb Baghdad into the Dark Ages"
rhetoric we heard from the American public a decade ago.

In the Middle East, Arabs now fear America will strike them without waiting
for proof, or act on the most flimsy of evidence. For it is as well to
remember how the US responded to the 1983 Marine bombings. The battleship
USS New Jersey fired its automobile-sized shells into the Chouf Mountains,
killing a couple of Syrian soldiers and erasing half a village. The arrival
of US naval craft off the American East Coast yesterday was a ghostly replay
of this impotent event.

But to this day, the Americans have never discovered the identity of the man
who drove a truck-load of explosives into the Beirut Marine compound. That
was in another country, in another time. Today's suicide bombers are a
different breed. Nurtured in whatever despair or misery or perhaps even
privilege, in 2001, the suicide bomber came of age.

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

NHNE News List:

To subscribe, send a message to:
nhnenews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To unsubscribe, send a message to:
nhnenews-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

To review current posts:
/nhnenews/messages

Published by NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE)
eMail: nhne@...
NHNE Website: http://www.nhne.com/
Phone: (928) 282-6120
Fax: (815) 346-1492

Appreciate what we are doing?
You can say so with a tax-deductible donation:
http://www.nhne.com/main/donations.html

P.O. Box 2242
Sedona, AZ 86339

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/