[pf] Robert Fisk - is there, and knows (was: Noam Chomsky Interview)

· The main piece here is Robert Fisk's piece in The Independent (UK),
reproduced in the NZ Herald of Sep.9; it's below the: _X_X_ 1/4 the way down

  [It contains:
  “Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the Pakistani press
on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the US in the aftermath
of the September atrocities. 
  One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary",
in the News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who was
arrested in Alabama on September 19 with an expired visa. In prison in
Mississippi, he was beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth. Then,
long after he had sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat him
against a wall with the words: "Hey bin Laden, this is the first round.
There are going to be 10 rounds like this." 
  There are dozens of other such stories in the Pakistani press and most of
them appear to be true.
   ...
  There is another disturbing argument I hear in Pakistan. If, as Bush
claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on
"civilisation", why shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as a
war on Islam? 

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


At 10:18 5/10/2001 +1000, Clinton Fernandes sent-on to PF, with title: 
[pf] Noam Chomsky Interview - {at:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001IV/msg00070.html } _N_B_Sept.26_:-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Noam Chomsky (NC)
interviewed by John Campbell (JC)

Radio New Zealand National Radio.
Saturday Sept. 29, 2001.
Recorded on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001

John Campbell, RNZ: ... it's now more than a fortnight since the attacks on
the world trade center, and the widespread U.S. punitive military strike
many had feared would inevitably follow, hasn't occurred.

JC: So will it happen?

NC: Well, I believe it has happened, but it's happening silently.

... if we put ourselves in the mindset of someone planning the next move, I
think we can make some plausible surmises, and in fact we can see some of
them being implemented.

The reasonable thing to do, from their point of view (I'm not justifying it).

They don't want a massive assault that's going to very visibly kill lots of
innocent Afghans, most of whom incidentally are victims of the Taliban. And
the reason they don't want that is because they know perfectly well, in
fact every foreign leader and specialist in the region, and their own
intelligence specialists, I'm sure, are telling them, that that would be an
answer to bin Laden's prayers. In fact, if he gets killed, so much the
better, then he's a martyr.

I'm assuming it's those networks that are involved if not he personally.
That's the one hope they have for recruiting others to their horrendous
cause. So that would be falling into what the French foreign minister
called a 'diabolical trap.' So they don't do that. So then what do you do?
Well, the next best thing is a kind of silent genocide.

The population of Afghanistan is already virtually facing starvation.
Millions of people are practically just on the border of starvation. Again,
victims of the Taliban, and our victims, too. I mean, all of us.

After the United States and its allies were finished exploiting Afghanistan
for their own strategic purposes in the 1980s, they just left the country
to be destroyed by the warring militias that grew out of the terrorist
forces that they had organized. And they did. They ruined what was left of
the country, which wasn't much.

Out of it came this horrifying regime. And there's been very little
assistance, no attempt to help them reconstruct. Nothing. So it's a wreck.
 ...
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 
_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?thesection=news&thesubsection=&st
oryID=227376&reportID=61564 [all in same line in browser]
  is:

Hypocrites in the West telling us lies 

09.11.2001
ROBERT FISK laments a war in which the world's poorest country is being
battered by the richest. 

PESHAWAR [the closest Pakistan town to Afganistan's Kabul] - "Air
campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"? How much longer must we go
on enduring these lies? 

There is no "campaign" - merely an air bombardment of the poorest and most
broken country in the world by the world's richest and most sophisticated
nation. 

No MiGs have taken to the skies to do battle with the American B-52s or
F-18s. The only ammunition soaring into the air over Kabul comes from
Russian anti-aircraft guns manufactured around 1943. 

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

Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the Jaffna
Peninsula? Or Chechnya, which we have already left in Vladimir Putin's
bloody hands? 

I even seem to recall a huge terrorist car bomb that exploded in Beirut in
1985, targeting Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual inspiration to the
Hizbollah - who now appears to be back on Washington's hit list - and which
missed him but slaughtered 85 innocent Lebanese civilians. 

Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book Veil that the CIA was
behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to finance the operation. So will
US President George W. Bush be hunting down the CIA murderers involved? The
hell he will. 

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

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

You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the subcontinent
to realise why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and Larry King Live
don't amount to a hill of beans. 

The Beirut daily As-Safir ran a widely praised editorial asking why an Arab
who wanted to express the anger and humiliation of millions of other Arabs
was forced to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country. 

The implication, of course, was that this - rather than the crimes against
humanity on September 11 - was the reason for America's determination to
liquidate Osama bin Laden. 

Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the Pakistani press on
the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the US in the aftermath of
the September atrocities. 

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

There are dozens of other such stories in the Pakistani press and most of
them appear to be true. 

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

Because we were more respectful then than now? Or because - the Taleban
remaining unbroken - we've decided to forget about all that "respect"? 

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

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

There were the disgraceful words of Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN,
to his staff. Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting
enemy propaganda, he said. 

"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in
Afghanistan ... we must talk about how the Taleban are using civilian
shields and how the Taleban have harboured the terrorists responsible for
killing up to 5000 innocent people." 

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

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

- INDEPENDENT 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
sent-on by David.
David MacClement [davd @ ihug.co.nz] (remove spaces)
http://davd.tripod.com/GrRR-011109_titles.html#top
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
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