May I say to Robert Fisk: Your work has been a great influence. Don't despair, sir.
"Legendary Reporter Robert Fisk announces his retirement in an Interview on NZ's 'Campbell Live'. He gives his reasons & explains his sense of despair on how little impact his work has had."
He has much to say about why we have troops all over the Middle East. He gets digs in at our media in the US. Says the LA Times and the New York Times should be called "American officials say". The last 2 minutes are powerful.
Here is a video from You Tube announcing his retirement. I can't view the video at You Tube because it is apparently of questionable nature? I would have to sign in as a member. Here's the link if you can see it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDxezvEhHP0However I did find the video at
at this link with some of Fisk's words about his retirement. It is from November 2007.
And then I am exhilarated to be reminded of reporters like Robert Fisk who have spent the past thirty years of their professional lives on the front lines, bringing the public from around the world, a true glimpse into the devastation and destruction that the United States has single handedly instigated around the world. Apparently, he is retiring. The reason? Mr. Fisk says, "My work here has been an entire failure." How completely untrue! We need so desperately reporters with the ethical and moral compass that guides his every news story. We need morality to be infused into all the coverage of this war that has been so completely devoid of morality on every level. It is Mr. Fisk's personal integrity that translates to his reporting and then brings back to the public a fuller picture of all of the loss and devastation. But I understand that thirty years of doing this with only a handful or others, ultimately is depleting and extremely difficult to sustain. But he did. For thirty years. And now he needs peace.
He has spoken passionately of our role in Afghanistan.
Robert Fisk speaks of Afghanistan in 2002 and 2008. Wonders why we think we can win there?The garden was overgrown, the roses scrawny after a day of Kandahar heat, the dust in our eyes, noses, mouth, fingernails. But the message was straightforward. "This is a secret war," the Special Forces man told me. "And this is a dirty war. You don't know what is happening." And of course, we are not supposed to know. In a "war against terror", journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely on the good guys to sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about human rights.
..."In the early weeks of this year, the Americans raided two Afghan villages, killed 10 policemen belonging to the US-supported government of Hamid Karzai and started mistreating the survivors. American reporters – in a rare show of mouse-like courage amid the self-censorship of their usual reporting – quoted the prisoners as saying they had been beaten by US troops. According to Western officials in Kandahar, the US troops "gave the prisoners a thrashing".
Things have since changed. The American forces in Afghanistan, it seems, now leave the beatings to their Afghan allies, especially members of the so-called Afghan Special Forces, a Washington-supported group of thugs who are based in the former Khad secret police torture centre in Kabul. "It's the Afghan Special Forces who beat the Pashtun prisoners for information now – not the Americans," the Western military man told me. "But the CIA are there during the beatings, so the Americans are culpable, they let it happen." This is just how the Americans began in Vietnam. They went in squeaky clean with advisers, there were some incidents of "termination with extreme prejudice", after which it was the Vietnamese intelligence boys who did the torture.
And more about Afghanistan from September of last year in
The Independent UKIt seems an age since Donald "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld declared,"A government has been put in place (in Afghanistan), and the Islamists are no more the law in Kabul. Of course, from time to time a hand grenade, a mortar explodes – but in New York and in San Francisco, victims also fall. As for me, I'm full of hope." Oddly, back in the Eighties, I heard exactly the same from a Soviet general at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan – yes, the very same Bagram airbase where the CIA lads tortured to death a few of the Afghans who escaped the earlier Russian massacres. Only "terrorist remnants" remained in the Afghan mountains, the jolly Russian general assured us. Afghan troops, along with the limited Soviet "intervention" forces, were restoring peace to democratic Afghanistan.
..."And Obama and McCain really think they're going to win in Afghanistan – before, I suppose, rushing their soldiers back to Iraq when the Baghdad government collapses. What the British couldn't do in the 19th century and what the Russians couldn't do at the end of the 20th century, we're going to achieve at the start of the 21 century, taking our terrible war into nuclear-armed Pakistan just for good measure. Fantasy again.
Joseph Conrad, who understood the powerlessness of powerful nations, would surely have made something of this. Yes, we have lost after we won in Afghanistan and now we will lose as we try to win again. Stuff happens.
Not sure when he retired, can't find the exact date. But I hope he keeps writing about the injustices of war.
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