hydrarchist writes: "Robert Fisk's latest, from the London Independent 10/09/2001
'The Taliban have kept reporters out; does that mean we have to
balance this distorted picture with our own half-truths?'
09 October 2001
A few months ago, my old friend Tom Friedman set off for the small
Gulf emirate of Qatar, from where, in one of his messianic columns for The New York Times, he informed us that the tiny state's Al-Jazeera satellite channel was a welcome sign that democracy might be coming to the Middle East. Al-Jazeera had been upsetting some of the local Arab dictators – President Mubarak of Egypt for one – and Tom thought this a good idea. So do I. But hold everything. The story is being rewritten. Last week, US Secretary of
State Colin Powell rapped the Emir of Qatar over the knuckles
because – so he claimed – Al-Jazeera was "inciting
anti-Americanism''.
So, goodbye democracy. The Americans want the emir to close
down the channel's office in Kabul, which is scooping the world
with tape of the US bombardments and – more to the point – with
televised statements by Osama bin Laden. The most wanted man in
the whole world has been suggesting that he's angry about the
deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions, about the corruption of
pro-western Arab regimes, about Israel's attacks on the Palestinian
territory, about the need for US forces to leave the Middle East. And
after insisting that bin Laden is a "mindless terrorist'' – that there is
no connection between US policy in the Middle East and the crimes
against humanity in New York and Washington – the Americans
need to close down Al-Jazeera's coverage.
Needless to say, this tomfoolery by Colin Powell has not been given
much coverage in the Western media, who know that they do not
have a single correspondent in the Taliban area of Afghanistan.
Al-Jazeera does.
But why are we journalists falling back on the same sheep-like
conformity that we adopted in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999
Kosovo war? For here we go again. The BBC was yesterday
broadcasting an American officer talking about the dangers of
"collateral damage'' – without the slightest hint of the immorality of
this phrase. Tony Blair boasts of Britain's involvement in the US
bombardment by talking about our "assets'', and by yesterday
morning the BBC were using the same soldier-speak. Is there some
kind of rhetorical fog that envelops us every time we bomb
someone?
As usual, the first reports of the US missile attacks were covered
without the slightest suggestion that innocents were about to die in
the country we plan to "save''. Whether the Taliban are lying or
telling the truth about 30 dead in Kabul, do we reporters really think
that all our bombs fall on the guilty and not the innocent? Do we
think that all the food we are reported to be dropping is going to fall
around the innocent and not the Taliban? I am beginning to wonder
whether we have not convinced ourselves that wars – our wars – are
movies. The only Hollywood film ever made about Afghanistan was
a Rambo epic in which Sylvester Stallone taught the Afghan
mujahedin how to fight the Russian occupation, help to defeat
Soviet troops and won the admiration of an Afghan boy. Are the
Americans, I wonder, somehow trying to actualise the movie?
But look at the questions we're not asking. Back in 1991 we dumped
the cost of the Gulf War – billions of dollars of it – on Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait. But the Saudis and Kuwaitis are not going to fund our
bombing this time round. So who's going to pay? When? How much
will it cost us – and I mean us? The first night of bombing cost, so
we are told, at least $2m, I suspect much more. Let us not ask how
many Afghans that would have fed – but do let's ask how much of
our money is going towards the war and how much towards
humanitarian aid.
Bin Laden's propaganda is pretty basic. He films his own statements
and sends one of his henchmen off to the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul.
No vigorous questioning of course, just a sermon. So far we've not
seen any video clips of destroyed Taliban equipment, the ancient
Migs and even older Warsaw Pact tanks that have been rusting
across Afghanistan for years. Only a sequence of pictures –
apparently real – of bomb damage in a civilian area of Kabul. The
Taliban have kept reporters out. But does that mean we have to
balance this distorted picture with our own half-truths?
So hard did a colleague of mine try, in a radio interview the other
day, to unlink the bin Laden phenomenon from the West's baleful
history in the Middle East that he seriously suggested that the
attacks were timed to fall on the anniversary of the defeat of Muslim
forces at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Unfortunately, the Poles won
their battle against the Turks on 12, not 11, September. But when the
terrifying details of the hijacker Mohamed Atta's will were published
last week, dated April 1996, no one could think of any event that
month that might have propelled Atta to his murderous behaviour.
Not the Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon, nor the Qana
massacre by Israeli artillery of 106 Lebanese civilians in a UN base,
more than half of them children. For that's what happened in April,
1996. No, of course that slaughter is not excuse for the crimes
against humanity in the United States last month. But isn't it worth
just a little mention, just a tiny observation, that an Egyptian
mass-murderer-to-be wrote a will of chilling suicidal finality in the
month when the massacre in Lebanon enraged Arabs across the
Middle East?
Instead of that, we're getting Second World War commentaries
about western military morale. On the BBC we had to listen to how it
was "a perfect moonless night for the air armada'' to bomb
Afghanistan. Pardon me? Are the Germans back at Cap Gris Nez?
Are our fighter squadrons back in the skies of Kent, fighting off the
Dorniers and Heinkels? Yesterday, we were told on one satellite
channel of the "air combat'' over Afghanistan. A lie, of course. The
Taliban had none of their ageing Migs aloft. There was no combat.
Of course, I know the moral question. After the atrocities in New
York, we can't "play fair" between the ruthless bin Laden and the
West; we can't make an equivalence between the mass-murderer's
innocence and the American and British forces who are trying to
destroy the Taliban.
But that's not the point. It's our viewers and readers we've got to
"play fair" with. Must we, because of our rage at the massacre of the
innocents in America, because of our desire to cowtow to the elderly
"terrorism experts", must we lose all our critical faculties? Why at
least not tell us how these "terrorism experts" came to be so expert?
And what are their connections with dubious intelligence services?
In some cases, in America, the men giving us their advice on screen
are the very same operatives who steered the CIA and the FBI into
the greatest intelligence failure in modern history: the inability to
uncover the plot, four years in the making, to destroy the lives of
almost 6,000 people. President Bush says this is a war between good
and evil. You are either with us or against us. But that's exactly what
bin Laden says. Isn't it worth pointing this out and asking where it
leads?"
