by Robert Fisk
186 Quite apart from the fact that most of the journalists who died in Afghanistan during the bombardment and immediately afterwards—three correspondents, one of them a woman, killed in the Kabul Gorge after the fall of the capital, for example—were killed by thieves who had taken advantage of the Taliban’s defeat, Steyn’s article was interesting for two reasons. It insinuated that I in some way approved of the crimes of 11 September 2001—or, at least, would “absolve” the mass murderers. More importantly, the article would not have been written had I ignored the context of the assault that was made on me. Had I merely reported an attack by a mob, the story would have fitted neatly into the general American media presentation of the Afghan war; no reference to civilian deaths from U.S. B-52 bombers and no suggestion that the widespread casualties caused in the American raids would turn Afghans to fury against the West. We were, after all, supposed to be “liberating” these people, not killing their relatives. Of course, yet again my crime—the Journal actually gave Steyn’s column the headline “Hate-Me Crimes”—was to report the “why” as well as the “what-and-where.”
187 After Pearl’s abduction, a Wall Street Journal correspondent called to ask if I would sign a petition pleading for his release—this from a paper whose headline said that I deserved to have faced death by beating in December 2001. I preferred to go one better and made a personal appeal to bin Laden—in an article in The Independent —for his intercession to save the life of Daniel Pearl, whom I referred to as “my friend.” I suspected—correctly as it turned out—that bin Laden, although on the run from the Americans, continued to read my reports. Tragically, Pearl had already been murdered.
188 See pp. 67–68.
189 This applied to both sides. Just before the fall of Kabul, an American cruise missile exploded inside the local office of Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel which had so infuriated the U.S. government with its bin Laden transmissions. No explanation was forthcoming, a particularly ominous precedent, since the station’s offices in Baghdad would be attacked by the U.S. Air Force only seventeen months later.
190 On 27 April 1994, for example, The New York Times carried a prominent review of our series which included some apparently wilful distortions. In his review, Walter Goodman claimed that “most of the three-hour report concentrates on Palestinians,” and that I had made only what he called “references” to the Jewish Holocaust. This was untrue. Less than a third of the series dealt with Palestinians, and we had fully covered the story of the Israeli family’s suffering in the Shoah, filming not only their original Polish home town but at the site of the Treblinka extermination camp. These sequences were not mere “references,” I wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times, asking them to correct these errors of fact. “Mr. Goodman accuses our camera of ‘lingering’ . . . on [wounded] women and children. But why does he object to this?” I asked. “Because he feels these scenes are distasteful? Or because the wounded women and children were Arabs who had been bombed and shelled by Israel? Mr. Goodman may find the facts unpalatable, but that is no excuse for impugning the reputation of a working journalist in so unprofessional a manner.” I forwarded my letter through The New York Times’s London bureau to ensure it reached its head office in the United States. Of course, it was not published.
191 President Woodrow Wilson, who had demanded a new international order in the wake of the 1914–18 war, was one of the midwives of the League that gave birth to Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, a reshaped Europe and, of course, a new Middle East. The modern state of Iraq also owed its creation to the League. But Wilson fell ill, the U.S. Congress declined to join the world body and America turned to isolationism. The future superpower, whose influence for peace would have been so beneficial to the world—and whose growing economic and military power might have made Hitler revise his plans—turned its back on the League. George W. Bush was perhaps not the right man to be giving lectures on this subject.
192 A series of tables that Alford sent me showed that the “Iraq” story started growing—and the Osama saga, by extension, diminishing—just as the Enron scandal broke. Back in January 2002, Enron was receiving 1,137 “mentions” in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, Iraq only 200. The Iraq stories grew by almost 100 per cent by early spring as Enron “mentions” declined by 50 per cent to 618. After a slight dip in early summer, Iraq soared up to 1,529 “mentions,” with Enron down to a mere 310.
193 A broad count of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, taken from journalists, aid workers and government authorities since October 2001, included the following details: four UN employees killed by a missile in Kabul on 9 October 2001; between 160 and 200 dead when U.S. bombs destroyed the village of Karam on 11 October; up to 190 dead when the Sultanpour mosque in Jalalabad was bombed twice on 17 October, between 40 and 47 dead in Kandahar bombings the same day; on 18 October, at least 10 killed when the bazaar near Kepten was bombed, 40 killed in Kabul on the same day, several dozen killed in Tarin Kot on 19 October; 60–70 killed in Herat and 50 in Kandahar on 20 October; on 21 October, bombs accidentally hit a 300-bed hospital in Herat, killing approximately 100 civilians, another 20 (including 9 children) killed the same day when their tractor-trailor was bombed at Tarin Kut. Within twenty-four hours, 61 more civilians were killed—including an eight-year-old girl—mostly in Kabul and Kandahar. On 21 October, during bombing of roads and fuel trucks by U.S. forces, another hundred civilians were reported killed; at least 28 dead in the bombing of the villages of Darunta, Torghar and Farmada on 23 October, and at least 52 more the same day at the village of Chowkar Kariz. On 29 October, 25 more civilians were killed in Kabul. On 5 November, 36 civilians were killed by stray U.S. bombs in Ogopruk village, near Mazar. On 10 November, 125 civilians were killed in three villages near Khakrez. On 17 November, 62 were killed when a religious school was bombed in Khost, 42 nomads lost their lives near Maiwand, 30 people were killed in Charikar, 28 in Zani Khel and 13 elsewhere. The following day, scores of gypsies were killed by U.S. bombs in Kundar, up to 150 people in villages near Khanabad, 35 in Shamshad and 24 in Garikee Kha. On 20 November, 40 civilians were killed when their mud huts were hit by stray bombs near Kunduz. On 25 November, 92 people, including 18 women and 7 children, were killed by bombing in Kandahar, another 70 by cluster bombs in Kunduz. On 1 December, about 100 were killed by 25 bombs in the village of Kama Ado. At least 30 died when bombs hit trucks and buses outside Kandahar the same day. Another 20 died in the Agam district, 15 in refugee vehicles in Arhisan, over 30 near Herat. On 2 December, 150 civilians died across Afghanistan and in the same week over 300 villagers were killed during the Tora Bora offensive. False intelligence about a Taliban base led the Americans to bomb Mashikhel in Paktia, killing 10 in the city’s mosque. On 20 December, U.S. AC-130 gunships attacked a convoy—thought to belong to the Taliban but in fact containing tribal elders en route to Hamid Karzai’s inauguration—killing up to 65 people. That same night, between 25 and 40 people were killed in Naka. On 31 December, a B-52 bomber and two helicopters killed over 100 civilians in a village near Gardez. One woman lost 24 members of her family. On 24 January 2002, U.S. commandos accidentally killed 16 government soldiers— the Pentagon’s own figure—in Uruzgan. On 30 June 2002, 48 civilians at a wedding party at Del Rawad in Uruzgan were killed and another 117 wounded when they were bombed by U.S. aircraft; celebratory gunfire was mistaken for hostile fire by the Americans. President Bush later expressed “deep condolences” for this loss of life. On 30 October 2003, 6 civilians, including 3 children and an old woman, died in the home of a provincial governor. On 6 December, U.S. Special Forces killed 6 children and 2 adults in Gardez. Seven boys, two girls and a twenty-five-year-old man were killed when A10 aircraft attacked them with other villagers sitting under a tree at Hutala. Many of the above attacks were carried out near front lines or on villages which were wrongly thought to contain wanted Taliban commanders, or because of sloppy intelligence. Professor Marc Herold of the
University of New Hampshire was to calculate that between 3,000 and 3,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan between 7 October and 7 December 2001, more than were murdered on September 11th. The “mantra” of the “U.S. mainstream corporate media” over each bombing, he wrote, was: “The report cannot be independently verified.”
194 Ahmed Zeidan, a Syrian Al-Jazeera correspondent who met bin Laden several times and attended the wedding feast of bin Laden’s son Abdullah, gave a remarkable account of al-Qaeda’s order of battle in his Arabic-language book Al-Qaeda Unmasked. This 215-page treasure trove revealed that there were 2,742 Afghan “Arabs” from al-Qaeda—in other words, Muslims who fought for bin Laden—in Afghanistan during the Taliban era: they included 62 Britons, 30 Americans, 8 Frenchmen, 1,660 North Africans, 680 Saudis, 480 Yemenis, 430 Palestinians, 270 Egyptians, 520 Sudanese, 80 Iraqis, 33 Turks and 180 Filipinos. During the Taliban rule, Arab fighters were dispersed across Afghanistan as follows: 260 Arabs in four bases around Kandahar, 145 Arabs in Uruzgan in two bases, 1,870 fighters in Kabul in seven bases, 404 around Mazar-e-Sharif, 400 in three bases around Kunduz, 300 in Laghman province, 1,700 in 12 bases in Nangahar opposite Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, 160 in Kunar, 600 in Khost and 740 in Paktia.
195 For a long time, British tabloid newspapers had been setting up their readers for war. During the critical first anniversary of the New York and Washington attacks, Express newspapers slavishly followed the Blair–Bush line and their bogus “intelligence.” On 8 September 2002, the Sunday Express announced that a “senior Washington intelligence source” had revealed to it “the chilling extent of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” Under the headline “Saddam: We Have the Evidence,” the paper listed Saddam’s weapons as “Enough germ weapons to kill everyone in London and New York, 30,000 litres of deadly botulism and six tons of nerve gas, Six nuclear plants run by Russian and Korean scientists” and, incredibly, “Kidney machines adapted to trigger atom bombs.” On the following day, the Daily Express, under the headline “Nuclear Attack in Just Months,” claimed that Blair was warning that a “devastating assault by the Butcher of Baghdad against Britain could ‘explode’ in a matter of months.” All of this later proved to be fiction.
196 The Egyptian retreat may have been hastened by the Israeli execution of at least forty-nine Egyptian soldiers who had been taken prisoner in the Sinai Desert. According to Arye Biro, the Israeli officer who ordered the killings, he and his men had been stranded with the prisoners behind Egyptian lines. “I didn’t have the troops to guard them,” he said years later. “We had to move on to Ras Sudar. So I decided to liquidate them.” The murders only came to light in 1995 after the publication of an internal Israeli army research paper, Political and Military Aspects of the 1956 Sinai War. The soldiers responsible for the executions were members of Israeli Parachute Battalion 890, commanded by Rafael Eytan, who was later to become chief of staff of the Israeli army and a Knesset member for the right-wing Tsomet party. The Egyptians initially censored the revelations from Cairo newspapers but later demanded an explanation from the Israeli government.
197 British military papers of the time—many others, like Eden’s records of the secret Sèvres meeting, were deliberately destroyed in the months after Suez—make no reference to Othman’s allegation, although I spent three weeks at the Public Record Office in London trying to find some record of the interrogation of prisoners. One file showed that intelligence officers of the British 2nd Corps reported after the Port Said battle that “interrogation of Prisoners of War in Port Said has not produced the full result which was hoped for. No HQs have been located . . .” Oddly, the files from Port Said contain no entries for the dates 6 to 8 November 1956. PRO archives did show that the International Red Cross in Egypt asked if any prisoners had been transferred to Cyprus. The War Office was also questioned as to whether Egyptians had been asked to speak over a British propaganda radio station in Cyprus. “We have not extended our enquiries to the radio station which operated from Cyprus under the name of the Voice of Britain during the Suez landings,” a British official responded unhelpfully, “but although you may like to ask the Ministry of Defence to follow this line of enquiry I do not think it is likely to be fruitful.” Sefton Delmer, who was the Daily Express correspondent in prewar Berlin and the director of a wartime “black” German propaganda station during the Second World War, was flown to Cyprus to help operate this mysterious radio station.
198 By mid-January of 2003, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Rockwell Schnabel, was also comparing Saddam to Hitler. “You had Hitler in Europe and no one really did anything about him,” Schnabel lectured the Europeans in Brussels. “We knew he could be dangerous but nothing was done. The same type of person [is in Baghdad] and it’s there that our concern lies.” Mr. Schnabel ended this infantile speech by adding that “this has nothing to do with oil.” History, said Blair—who had never seen a war in his life—had important lessons for this crisis. Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Hitler were the work of “a good man who made the wrong decision,” he told us. President Jacques Chirac, defending France from charges of political cowardice, recalled that when his country wanted to take action in the Balkans, it found itself alone, recalling “the West’s appeasement of Hitler.” Provoked by a promised French veto at the UN Security Council, the New York Post printed a photograph of American soldiers’ graves in Normandy. “They died for France but France has forgotten,” the paper announced—as if liberation from the Nazis in 1944 involved France’s surrender of free speech fifty-eight years later. “Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put their soldiers on the line to fight today’s Hitler, Saddam Hussein?” the Post asked. Saddam himself joined in these contemptible parallels. In an interview with the British elder statesman Tony Benn, the “Hitler of Baghdad” advised his British visitor that “if the Iraqis are subjected to aggression or humiliation, they would fight bravely—just as the British in the Second World War had defended their country in their own way.” Saddam’s prime minister, Tariq Aziz, later told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that “the truth is that Bush is dismantling the United Nations, like the Third Reich in the 1930s nullified the League of Nations.” And so it went, on and on. Barbara Amiel, wife of the former Daily Telegraph owner Conrad Black, told readers of the Canadian Maclean’s magazine that “destroying Saddam’s regime will genuinely be a liberation for the people of Iraq, and when it happens the liberators will be greeted with the same extraordinary joy that met the Allies in France in 1945 . . .” The “liberators” of Iraq were not, of course, greeted with such joy—and France was liberated in 1944, not 1945. But no matter. We had to forget that one of those nations that wanted to use its veto in the UN Security Council—Russia—lost up to 30 million citizens in its battle against the Nazis. Yet even the BBC was by early 2003 talking about the “Allies” who would invade Iraq. When Bush, Blair and Spanish prime minister Aznar met in the Azores on 16 March, the Second World War symbolism reached its apogee. The Big Three—Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin—met in Yalta to decide the future of the post-Nazi world. Now the Little Three were meeting on an obscure Portuguese island to decide the future of the Middle East. Everyone, it seemed, suffered under Second World War delusions. In his second interview with me, in 1996, bin Laden himself drew a parallel between the French resistance to German occupation and Muslim resistance to U.S. “occupation” in the Gulf.
199 And all the while, the American media continued their servile support for the Bush administration. As I reported in my own paper on 26 January, we were now being deluged with yet more threats from Washington about “states that sponsor terror.” “Take Eric Schmitt in The New York Times a week ago. He wrote a story about America’s decision to ‘confront countries that sponsor terrorism.’ And his sources? ‘Senior defence officials,’ ‘administration officials,’ ‘some American intelligence officials,’ ‘the officials,’ ‘officials,’ ‘military officials,’ ‘te
rrorist experts’ and ‘defence officials.’” Why not, I asked, “just let the Pentagon write its own reports in The New York Times?”
200 A 27 January 2003 CNN instruction— Reminder of Script Approval Policy—fairly took the breath away. “All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval,” it said. “Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved . . . All packages originating outside Washington, LA [Los Angeles] or NY [New York], including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW in Atlanta for approval.” The “ROW” was the row of script editors in Atlanta who could insist on changes or “balances” in the reporter’s dispatch. “A script is not approved for air unless it is properly marked approved by an authorised manager and duped [duplicated] to burcopy [bureau copy] . . . When a script is updated it must be re-approved, preferably by the originating approving authority.” I noted the key words: “approved” and “authorised.” CNN’s man or woman in Kuwait or Baghdad—or Jerusalem or Ramallah—may know the background to his or her story; indeed, they would know far more about it than the “authorised manager” in Atlanta. But CNN’s chiefs would decide the spin of the story. The results of this system were evident from an intriguing exchange in 2002 between CNN’s reporter in the occupied Palestinian West Bank town of Ramallah, and Eason Jordan, one of CNN’s top men in Atlanta, who resigned in 2005 over a remark about the American military shooting of journalists in Iraq. The correspondent’s first complaint was about a story by reporter Michael Holmes on the Red Crescent ambulance-drivers who were repeatedly shot at by Israeli troops. “We risked our lives and went out with ambulance drivers . . . for a whole day,” Holmes complained. “We have also witnessed ambulances from our window being shot at by Israeli soldiers . . . The story received approval from Mike Shoulder. The story ran twice and then Rick Davis [a CNN executive] killed it. The reason was we did not have an Israeli army response, even though we stated in our story that Israel believes that Palestinians are smuggling weapons and wanted people in the ambulances.” The Israelis refused to give CNN an interview, only a written statement. This statement was then written into the CNN script. But again it was rejected by Davis in Atlanta. Only when, after three days, the Israeli army gave CNN an interview did Holmes’s story run—but then with the dishonest inclusion of a line that said the ambulances were shot in “crossfire” (i.e., that Palestinians also shot at their own ambulances). The reporter’s complaint was all too obvious. “Since when do we hold a story hostage to the whims of governments and armies? We were told by Rick that if we do not get an Israeli on-camera we would not air the package. This means that governments and armies are indirectly censoring us and we are playing directly into their own hands.” All this was relevant to the coming war in Iraq. Clearly a U.S. Army officer would have to be ready to deny anything contentious stated by the Iraqis if Baghdad reports were going to get on air. In fact, a 31 January 2003 memo ensured that CNN’s system of “script approval” became stricter. CNN staff were now told that a new computerised system of script approval would allow “authorised script approvers to mark scripts [i.e., reports] in a clear and standard manner. Script EPs [executive producers] will click on the coloured APPROVED button to turn it from red (unapproved) to green (approved). When someone makes a change in the script after approval, the button will turn yellow.” Yellow indeed.
