Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[CoalTrain]

CoalTrain-I said slanted,it was the tenor of the article,
==========================================================
Fisk has his opinions. He has strong opinions. Brainless seem to think that discredits him. I guess Brainless would prefer that Robots cover the war. Covering wars is Fisk's main thing as best I can tell. He goes into war zones ad stays for the bombings when most other reporters leave for safety. He gets to see the brutal effects of the bombing close up AS THEY HAPPEN. Most reporters leave and then come back after it is safe. I find it bizarre that people try to discredit Fisk because he is "emotional". What does this have to do with the quality of his reporting? Being emotional does not necessarily cloud ones prspective. It sure can. I know several Serbs who think Amy Goodman got emotional and lost perspective on her coverage of Afghanistan. That may be true I heard a tape of one show in question and she sounded quite upset and not herself. I really was not listening to her that much during that time period so I really can't say. In general I find that Goodman's passion is a credit to her reporting. She is passionate and interested in her work and spends more time and energy on her work than most reporters.

I would not call Alan Nairn an unemtional person. He stayed in East Timor during the massacre after the elections for independence. All other Journalsits left for Jakarta along with the weak kneed liberals from Amnesty international and Human rights watch. They sat in the comfort of their hotel rooms and were reporting that there was no blood bath going on in East Timor. They just accepted the government in Jakarta to be worth their word. Meanwhile in East Timor indeed a HUGE blood bath was going on. When Nairns reporting got out via his cell phone every one else had to change their story and get more aggressive with the Government in Jakarta. Had it not been for Alan Nairn the blood bath in East Timor would have been much worse and possibly would have gone largely un noticed. Nairn was in this case a political activist and a reporter. Often the kind of people that like to claim that being "emotional" discredits one as a reporter like to claim that being a political activist disqualifies one as a reporter. I disagree. In Nairns case reporting the facts of the blood bath changed the course of the blood bath. Hardly the kind of "objective" removed from context reporting brainless would prefer. Nairns emotional commitment and courage made him a better reporter in my opinion. The "official" press and the chumps from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were spreading lies for the government in Jakarta.

How would one go about reporting the facts in the story below

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=391165

in a cold "objective" out of context way with out turning the story into a medical report? Fisk is often at the scene of a bombing shortly after it has happend. I would find it strange that he would have a unemotional repsone to seeing a young girl with her foot freshly blown off. I suspect one reason why people get so upset at Fisk's reporting is that he is at the scene of many ugly things and he reports the facts, but reports them in a human context. I find that many of the very people that find Fisk so disturbing gladly welcome emotional reporting from people who share their political views. I have never claimed Fisk was perfect. People often are not perfect. Especially those in places where bombs are falling on them. Maybe robots will be reporting the next war.


Robert Fisk: 'It was an outrage, an obscenity'
27 March 2003


It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.

Two missiles from an American jet killed them all - by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.

It's a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.

How should one record so terrible an event? Perhaps a medical report would be more appropriate. But the final death toll is expected to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told.

For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?

Abu Hassan and Malek Hammoud were preparing lunch for customers at the Nasser restaurant on the north side of Abu Taleb Street. The missile that killed them landed next to the westbound carriageway, its blast tearing away the front of the café and cutting the two men - the first 48, the second only 18 - to pieces. A fellow worker led me through the rubble. "This is all that is left of them now," he said, holding out before me an oven pan dripping with blood.

At least 15 cars burst into flames, burning many of their occupants to death. Several men tore desperately at the doors of another flame-shrouded car in the centre of the street that had been flipped upside down by the same missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman and her three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The second missile hit neatly on the eastbound carriageway, sending shards of metal into three men standing outside a concrete apartment block with the words, "This is God's possession" written in marble on the outside wall.

The building's manager, Hishem Danoon, ran to the doorway as soon as he heard the massive explosion. "I found Ta'ar in pieces over there," he told me. His head was blown off. "That's his hand." A group of young men and a woman took me into the street and there, a scene from any horror film, was Ta'ar's hand, cut off at the wrist, his four fingers and thumb grasping a piece of iron roofing. His young colleague, Sermed, died the same instant. His brains lay piled a few feet away, a pale red and grey mess behind a burnt car. Both men worked for Danoon. So did a doorman who was also killed.

As each survivor talked, the dead regained their identities. There was the electrical shop-owner killed behind his counter by the same missile that cut down Ta'ar and Sermed and the doorman, and the young girl standing on the central reservation, trying to cross the road, and the truck driver who was only feet from the point of impact and the beggar who regularly called to see Mr Danoon for bread and who was just leaving when the missiles came screaming through the sandstorm to destroy him.

In Qatar, the Anglo-American forces - let's forget this nonsense about "coalition" - announced an inquiry. The Iraqi government, who are the only ones to benefit from the propaganda value of such a bloodbath, naturally denounced the slaughter, which they initially put at 14 dead. So what was the real target? Some Iraqis said there was a military encampment less than a mile from the street, though I couldn't find it. Others talked about a local fire brigade headquarters, but the fire brigade can hardly be described as a military target.

Certainly, there had been an attack less than an hour earlier on a military camp further north. I was driving past the base when two rockets exploded and I saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out of the gates and along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions; these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.

Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent yesterday could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned co-ordinates, and the sandstorm would have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek Hammoud's friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn't want to learn about the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems.

And why should he? For this is happening almost every day in Baghdad. Three days ago, an entire family of nine was wiped out in their home near the centre of the city. A busload of civilian passengers were reportedly killed on a road south of Baghdad two days ago. Only yesterday were Iraqis learning the identity of five civilian passengers slaughtered on a Syrian bus that was attacked by American aircraft close to the Iraqi border at the weekend.

The truth is that nowhere is safe in Baghdad, and as the Americans and British close their siege in the next few days or hours, that simple message will become ever more real and ever more bloody.

We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died because of 11 September, we may say, because of President Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction", because of human rights abuses, because of our desperate desire to "liberate" them all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I'll bet we are told President Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan't mention the pilot, of course.
27 March 2003 12:53





some examples-Fisk,compares Guantanamo with POW's,when they aren't POW's at Gitmo,
============================================================
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought that we had Al Qadea prisoners at Guantanamo. A keyword search pulled up this article.. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2886245.stm
I think it implies we had prisoners at Guantanamo recently. Am I wrong?

and goes on to call it hypocritical of the U.S. to accuse the Iraqi's of violating the Geneva Convention,opinion.
============================================================
I have found that in conflicts neither side usually adheres to the letter of the law when it comes to the Geneva convention and mostly such arguments are battles for public opinion. I am a lost less worried about the T.V reports than other things that may be happening to the POW's off camera. I think Americans have forgot what a real war is that they can be so concerned about such small things in the context of a real war. War is about killing people. Since the article was written the U.S. is making claims that public executions of POW's. I think we should focus on this a lot more on the execution rather than the TV reports.


Another- "there were plenty of us writing that this was going to be a disaster and a catastrophe and that they were going to take casualties."

-again,opinion-
=============================
You are wrong on this one. It is a fact. Fisk has been writing for some time that this war was going to be a disaster. I have read tha articles myself.




and not only him,but Jeremy Scahill as well with the "many American casualties" comment.I think his true feelings though come out in this statement- "and I think that, to a considerable degree, the American administration allowed that little cabal of advisors around Bush- I'm talking about Perle, Wolfowitz, and these other people--people who have never been to war, never served their country, never put on a uniform- nor, indeed, has Mr. Bush ever served his country- they persuaded themselves of this Hollywood scenario of GIs driving through the streets of Iraqi cities being showered with roses by a relieved populace who desperately want this offer of democracy that Mr. Bush has put on offer-as reality." Now,if you can't hear Fisks political leanings in that statement,your deaf.
==================================================
If you can point out were I have ever said that Fisk was an unemotional robot, please do. Are you denying that the Bush administration was selling this war to the public as a war that would be a matter of days? And that a significant part of the Iraqi's would defect and welcome us a liberators?



,no matter how well respected he is,don't forget,his respect from his peers,is others who are overwhelmingly liberal in their point of view also(his peers).
==============================================================
If this comment were made about Skahill in reference to his American peers perhaps this statement would be correct. When applied to a london based reporter in the context of world opinion I am not sure what this statement means.


Did you believe Randy Weavers story? Or the Feds story?

CT