Robert Fisk was that rare phenomenon, a journalist who reported truthfully and indeed courageously for decades on the Middle East. He died October 30 in a Dublin hospital at the age of 74 following a stroke.

In 2005, the New York Times described him as probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain.

The British journalist, who lived in Beirut during Lebanons civil war and long after, was a fluent Arabic speaker. His work spanned nearly five decades and included news articles, comment and analysis, a three-part series From Beirut To Bosnia (1993) for the Discovery Channel, and several books, most notably Pity the nation: Lebanon at war (1990) and The great war for civilisation: The conquest of the Middle East (2005).

One of the most outstanding journalists of his era, he received numerous awards for his work, including the Orwell prize for journalism, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, the Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 and in 2000, and numerous British Press Awards in the categories of international reporter of the year and foreign reporter of the year. He completed a PhD thesis on Irelands neutrality and relations with Britain in World War II at Trinity College Dublin, receiving the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society awards gold medal in 2009, as well as numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world. More recently, his talks on the Middle East attracted huge audiences around the world.

Born in Maidstone, England, he was the only child of William Fisk, a local government official who had served as a young man in the Battle of the Somme in World War I, keeping a diary of the wars horrors. Despite his many disagreements with his father, a right-wing, church-going disciplinarian from whom he became estranged, Robert explained that his fathers punishment for disobeying an order to execute another soldier had a profound influence on him. He said, My fathers refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done. He decided to become a journalist at the age of 12 after seeing the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film Foreign Correspondent.

After working for several local newspapers, he joined the Sunday Express and then theTimes of London, covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Portugal, and then Lebanons civil war, including the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982 and the massacre of the Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war.

While Fleet Street was always conservative, there were spaces for different, dissenting work, and a certain range of views as evidenced by the work of the Insight team at the Sunday Times in the 1960s and 70s. But following the takeover of the Times in 1981 by Rupert Murdoch, with the backing of Margaret Thatcher, journalism changed.

Murdoch, who was opposed to investigative journalismwith its fact-checking and months of interviewsturned the newspaper into a nakedly pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence, leading to increasing conflicts with Fisk. Murdochs shift to production at Wapping and a union busting operation in 1986 saw his journalists crossing picket lines that Murdoch won thanks in large part to a scabbing operation by the EETPU electricians union against sacked printworkers. But it resulted in an exodus of journalists to the newly established Independent. Fisk joined the Independent in 1989 after one of his stories was spiked. There he covered the first Gulf War, the civil war in Algeria, the communal conflicts that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, the NATO assault on Serbia in 1999, the US-led invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the proxy war in Syria.

Fisk was one of a dwindling breed of journalistsalong with John Pilger, Seymour Hersh and, from a significantly different background, Julian Assangethat have dared to question the official narratives from governments and publish what they uncovered. Explaining his approach to journalism, he cited an Israeli journalist who had told him the role of journalists was to monitor the centres of power. Fisk said, I think that is the best definition of my job Ive ever heard. Especially when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4s Desert Island Discs in 2006, he explained that what he had witnessed during his years covering conflicts and wars, with their horrors, cruelty and inhumanityhe called it the pornography of warmade him angry. He hated violence. It made him determined to report history as it happens, so no one could say we didnt know, nobody told us.

He spoke of one of his first assignments, when he was sent at the age of 25 to cover the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He was struck at how poor Belfast was and the brutality of the British army. He couldnt believe the dead bodies that he saw for the first time, none of which figured on television or in the newspapers.

Fisk said, You cannot get near the truth without being there, in This Is Not a Movie, a 2019 documentary about his work. He rejected what he called hotel journalismthe journalism of war reporters, embedded with American or British armed forces, who stayed in their guarded rooms, using their mobile phones and local correspondents who risked their lives conducting interviews on their behalf. Under the Pentagons rules, embedded correspondents were forbidden to report any information that would undermine or compromise the US offensive in Iraq, including reports of military and civilian casualties. Journalists not only had to agree to this but were sucked into life with the troops that altered their perspective on the war.

Fisk was not a socialist. He wrote as a liberal supporter of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism. He cared passionately about the great historical experiences of the twentieth century. Deeply imbued with a sense of the historical processes that shaped the events he witnessed, he believed that every reporter should carry a history book in his or her back-pocket.

Speaking at the University of Sydney in 2005, on a visit to Australia to give the Edward Said Memorial Lecture, he said, In 1992, I was in Sarajevo and once, as Serb shells whistled over my head, I stood upon the very paving stone where Gavrilo Princip stood as he fired the fatal shot that sent my father to the trenches of the First World War. It was as if history was a giant echo-chamber...

Fisk was very aware of role of the imperialist powers in determining the course of events in the Middle East and internationally. He told his audience, After the Allied victory in 1918, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. And in the space of just 17 months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, and most of the Middle East. I have spent my entire career, in Belfast, and Sarajevo, and Beirut, and Baghdad, watching the people within those borders burn.

Returning to the present, he said, America invaded Iraq not for Saddam Husseins mythical weapons of mass destruction which had long ago been destroyed, but to change the map of the Middle East, much as fathers generation had done more than 80 years earlier. The war stemmed from not only the desire to dominate oil supplies, but a visceral need to project power on a massive scale on the part of Washington. It was all supported by the uncritical mainstream media.

Giving the keynote speech at the fifth annual Al Jazeera Forum in May 2010, he noted that the New York Times, cheerleader in chief for the 2003 war against Iraq, was again banging the drums for war, with claims that Iran was working on weapons of mass destruction. He added, And after the war, if there is a war, more self-condemnation, no doubt, if there are no nuclear weapons projects.

Almost every obituary belittled Fisk as an acclaimed but controversial journalist, which says as much about the writers themselves as their subject, who did not shrink from speaking truth to power.

Much of the controversy surrounding Fisk stemmed from his efforts to place the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington within the context of the malign US-led machinations in the Middle East. Fully acknowledging the horrific and criminal nature of the attacks, he said, September 11 was a crime against humanity, but he added, Im actively against the brutal, cynical, lying war of civilisation that he [President George W. Bush] has begun so mendaciously in our name and which has now cost as many lives as the World Trade Center mass murder.

Unlike most of his peers, Fisk was an outspoken critic of US and British wars against Afghanistan and Iraq that followed 9/11, accusing US and British forces of war crimes and his fellow journalists of showing no interest in following up on the killing of prisoners.

In November 2001, he referred to the massacre of Taliban prisoners at the Qala-i-Janghi fortress, writing that US Special Forcesand, it has emerged, British troopshelped the [Northern] Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were executed trying to escape. He added, It is an atrocity. British troops are now stained with war crimes.

Days later, he continued, more executed Taliban members were found in Kunduz. Yet The US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that US air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop if the Northern Alliance requested it.

In December 2001, Fisk was attacked and beaten by Afghan refugees in Pakistan, suffering facial, hand and head injuries. Describing the attack, he said he understood the refugees anger, as many had relatives who had been killed by the US bombing of Afghan city Kandahar the previous week. He wrote a graphic and moving account of the assault because I dont want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. Responsibility for the silly, bloody, tiny incident lay with the West. The refugees had every reason to be angry. In their position, I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find. It was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war.

Fisk wrote about the killing of civilians and the use of collective punishment in Iraq by US-led forces, as well as the looting of Iraq following the 2003 invasion and occupation, noting that the response of American forces shows clearly what the US intends to protect After days of arson and pillage, heres a short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn government ministries and did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraqs history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.

But at the same time, the Americans protected two ministries, And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of coursewith its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraqand the Ministry of Oil. The archives and files of Iraqs most valuable assetits oilfields and, even more important, its massive reservesare safe and sound, sealed off from the mobs and looters, and safe to be shared, as Washington almost certainly intends, with American oil companies.

Washingtons avowed hostility to any expression of independent journalism was aided and abetted by Tony Blairs UK Labour government. Defence Minister Geoff Hoon accused Fisk of being a dupe of Saddam Husseins regime for revealing evidence that two bombings of Iraqi markets had been carried out by the US and not Iraq. Home Secretary David Blunkett attacked not only the media for treating reports from Baghdad as though they were the moral equivalent of reports based on information given by the US and UK armed forces, but also the progressive and liberal public that believe their reports.

As well as bringing to light the brutality of Israels wars and suppression of the Palestinians, he exposed the lies on which the official pretext for the illegal US-British-French bombing of Syria in April 2018 were basedthe claim that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack in eastern Ghouta. He visited Douma, the town in Ghouta where a gas attack supposedly occurred, and spoke with Dr. Assim Rahaibani, who worked at the medical clinic where widely publicised videos were filmed showing children being hosed down with water, ostensibly to relieve poison gas inhalation. Rahaibani explained what had happened, Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia, not gas poisoning.

His account was in line with statements by Russian authorities, who charged that the White Helmets, the anti-Assad rebel organization funded by Britain, staged the gas attack under orders from UK intelligence to provide its Western sponsors with a pretext for intervention. Fisk notes that by the time he arrived in Douma, the White Helmets had already left to join fighters of the Islamic fundamentalist group Jaysh-al Islam, who fled Douma for Idlib under an agreement brokered with Russia. The response of the mainstream media was to bury his report.

The Iraq war largely eliminated whatever media independence remained, with most news organisations accepting this without complaint and those objecting subjected to sustained pressure to fall into line. Today, the best journalists write online, or in foreign publications, or not at all.

Fisk spoke out passionately in defence of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and journalistic freedom, saying that the US prosecution of Assange should set off alarm bells everywhere. In June last year he wrote, The final punishment of Julian Assange reminds journalists their job is to uncover what the state keeps hidden. If we do our job, we will expose the same vile mendacity of our masters that has led to the clamour of hatred towards Assange, [Chelsea] Manning and [Edward] Snowden.

In his revelations of imperialisms criminal and fraudulent wars, its proxy wars, and the shameless lies of governments, Fisk shone a light into the most deeply reactionary machinations of the late 20th and 21st century. That to expose the truth is deemed controversial is an indictment of todays journalism and a tribute to him.

See the rest here:
Robert Fiska courageous and truthful reporter on the Middle East who covered history (19462020) - WSWS

Counter Punch/Garry Knight

THERE is no need to inform the conscious world that the United States is applying all its power and influence to extradite Julian Assange from England in order to put him on trial in America. The case against him is based on his having committed journalism in publishing leaked secret government information on Wikileaks. While it is comprised of multiple charges, crafted with cynicism and malice in order to convict and imprison him for life, not one of them has any legal merit.

In truth, the case is not about commission of crime at all. It is a cruel, vindictive scam by a shamed empire to punish an honourable and ethical man for having revealed damning truths about its barbaric behaviour in brazen, criminal contempt for the laws of peace and war.

Material he published has shown the United States to have been blatantly and contemptibly false to its own people and the world. That an individual could be framed and railroaded into a corrupt process contrived to punish him for exposing Americas monstrous crimes is a moral horror that beggars belief, and yet that is the unstated intention of the government of the United States.

Virtually the whole American and western official press, including all mainstream news organisations, both print and television and their reporters, have not only abandoned Assange as if he were guilty of something other than what they all routinely do much less well, but in their moral cowardice they have made themselves vulnerable to precisely the kind of dirty, dishonest state vendetta he is suffering.

What is most extraordinary about the astonishing length to which the American government has gone to persecute Assange, and the vast amount of money it has wasted on it, is the fact that all he has been accused of exposing, and has been so vilified and anathematised for revealing, is mere incidental trivia when compared with the vast body of Americas horrific state crime so long documented as proven fact, on the public record, and already well known to the entire world.

Beginning with the contorted sham that legitimised black slavery when its Constitution declared all men created equal, and the routine violation of sworn treaties which facilitated the murder of whole native peoples, America has lied, stolen, bullied, and subverted as state policy throughout its era of imperial aggrandisement and continues to do so well into that of its richly deserved, and now inexorable decay.

The extent of blind, mindless loyalty to, and deeply, stubbornly ignorant worship of, this rogue, dishonest nation that unstinting poisoning by infantile propaganda has wrought on the American mind is profoundly sad. Our people never deserved to be traduced and shit on so brutishly. Nothing can justify it. It was done so that predatory, anti-life Capitalism could rape and fleece a people largely made crass, base, and stupid once decent values were replaced by the shallow, dead-end dogma of ethicless materialism. Americans now worship the money none but a tiny few ever see, in thrall to a monstrous criminal racket that scorns them as mindless serfs.

So it is that information readily available that shows, with irrefutable clarity, the villainous history of this morbidly rotten, failing empire is almost universally rejected by a citizenry whose hope of any decent future depends on its absorbing and comprehending that information. The catechism of rank bullshit marshalled for generations to cover the frauds, crimes, betrayals, invasions, assassinations and massacres that are Americas legacy has been exposed and documented for any mind not crippled and poisoned to see, and yet Americans have not had the mental or psychological capacity to take it in and act on it.

That said, its undeniable that more people have more exposure to more sound data than was ever conceivable before, and in spite of Capitalism doing all it can to pollute all information streams, more Americans are more aware, if dimly, that Exceptionalist notions theyve been schooled to embrace are somehow desafinado, as the bossa nova song had it: out of tune. As the Presidential election nears, with the country facing a Hobsons choice between two defective, demented, old white shysters, and the nasty chore of electing another Congress of Pimps to represent their owners and sponsors, there is palpable disgust at the dysfunction of our polity.

This, though miserably painful to the spirit, is a good thing since it indicates a broad wave of actual recognition, an inchoate but definite awareness of the appalling depravity that the smothering gas of Exceptionalist propaganda has always concealed. How many now feel this malaise due to dawning comprehension of the monstrous, anti-democratic, destructive force America has historically been cannot be known, but for a large percentage this has to be true.

Because Americas dark secrets are not secret any more, and havent been for decades. The horror has been told, chapter and verse, in scholarly works that fill libraries, from barbaric rape of the Philippines and violent subversion of poor Central American countries reduced to money farms for Wall Street to the present kill list of Middle Eastern countries droned, blown up, devastated and destroyed by clumsily bungled wars run by stupid, sycophantic Big Brass Whores to feed the War Machine that our psychotic ruling cliques serve and obey.

All this being true, how is it that this sick, raging, giant monster of a nation can muster the free-floating fury to invest so much time and money to destroy one man who simply revealed a relatively minor snippet of its grossly criminal history? Whence comes this obsessive madness? It is the savage, vindictive mania of a failing empire. Like the shameful sixty-year Cuban embargo, it harks back in spirit to the Roman slaughter of Christians or Nazi atrocities at Lidice or Babi Yar. There is no force like humiliating failure to make a decaying empire lash out in insensate ferocity at an object that symbolises its shame.

Assange is one of the rarest of men: those who put principles and personal honour above their safety or gain. America may succeed in destroying him or unexpected justice may save him, but nothing can save this sick empire that has betrayed and fatally envenomed itself.

CounterPunch.org, November 3. Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana.

Read this article:
Assange and the empire - newagebd.net

Register-GuardCuff'im

There are numerous reasons to remove Trump from office: corruption, dishonesty, enriching him and his family, fueling racial division and many more, but maybe none more egregious than his handling of public health:

In 2017 he fired Linda Quick, our CDC representative in Beijing, charged with letting us know about developing epidemics in China.

In 2018 he disbanded the White House-NSC pandemic team that Obama had assembled after two people in the U.S. died from Ebola.

And in 2019 he closed the CDC National Vaccine Program Office so that doctors now have no idea whether any vaccine will be safe in the long run.

This should land him in prison. The evidence cant be any clearer: He needs to be held responsible for 230,000 deaths, millions of infections and lost jobs.

Michael Young, Eugene

I had been away from Eugene/Springfield for about a year.As I drove into the area, I was shocked at what I was seeing.Both cities were void of any activity. There were no cars on the streets, no one was walking on the sidewalks and the businesses where all closed.

This was so strange.

I decided to go to my old neighborhood to visit with friends and ask them what was going on?As I drove though the residential area, I found the streets empty and the houses looking as if no one lived in them. Where was everyone?

I was getting scared and then I awoke from my dream and everything became clear. This week the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States equaled the population of Eugene/Springfield.

Dixie Huffman, Springfield

John Pinney unwisely advises trust in anonymous, invisible, unaccountable fact-checkers (Letters, Oct. 31). These are useful for alerting us not to truth but to what we are not allowed to know, consistently supporting the soporific fictions supplied by our billionaire-controlled print and broadcast news media while honest, reliable, detailed and well-documented online sources are increasingly censored by equally compromised billionaire tech giants.

In a recentwebinaron Julian Assange now deteriorating in a modern Tower of London prison rather than receiving the Nobel Peace Prize he deserves distinguished journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger described journalism as 100% propaganda and retired CIA Russia desk chief Ray McGovern identified our suffocating media censorship as a defining characteristic of fascism.

Our citizenship duties are not satisfied by biannual vote-casting for candidates marketed like fast food or SUVs. No responsible employer hiring for a vital position depends solely on applicant-constructed resumes or promises.Public figures are resourceful at concealment of facts we have a right to know and a duty to discover. Citizenship duties are daily.Turn off the TV and spend that same time searching out truth from many extraordinary books, online writers and broadcasters providing the best journalism of my lifetime.

Jack Dresser, Springfield

The New York Times article in The Register-Guard suggesting we, for all intents and purposes, cancel the holidays was telling. This latest bit of insanity from a media outlet confirms what most clear-thinking individuals already know: This is no longer about the health of the nation; it is about absolute power and control.

Are more government mandates in the mix? On Thanksgiving, can we expect to see "inspectors" randomly knocking on our doors because they saw too many cars in the driveway? The idea of having Thanksgiving dinner on Zoom or some other childish website is absurd. I really don't care that Dr. Fauci doesn't plan to see his grandchildren on the holiday. That's his choice. I will make my own decisions.

Raymond Moreno, Eugene

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Originally posted here:
Letters to the editor for Thursday Nov. 5 - The Register-Guard