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The IDF on Saturday denied a report by the British newspaper The Independent claiming that Israel used uranium-based munitions, including uranium-tipped bunker-buster bombs, during its war against Hizbullah in Lebanon this summer. "The IDF Spokesman's Office wants to make it clear that no munitions containing uranium were used in the war in Lebanon," an IDF spokesman told The Jerusalem Post. According to the report, scientists found two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs which showed "elevated radiation signatures." "Scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting...

Saudi Wealth Fuels Global Jihadism Posted Oct. 27, 2003 By Kenneth R. Timmerman Generations of Muslims in the Middle East have been raised on the anti-Western, anti-Semitic theologies of Ayatollah Khomeini and in the Saudi Wahhabi system of madrassas (religious schools). This foundation set the stage for the rise of Osama bin Laden. Doaa 'Amer is a professional TV anchor who hosts Muslim Woman Magazine on IQRAA TV, a satellite channel broadcasting throughout the Arab world. As she tells it, her job is to educate the next generation of children to be "true Muslims." Readers accustomed to hearing Islam described...

Al-Qaida's list of favorite, least favorite Westerners Latest warning video from terror group names enemies, friends in U.S., Britain WASHINGTON – In the latest video from al-Qaida warning of an imminent terrorist attack on the U.S., five specific "Zionist crusader missionaries of hate" are named, while three Westerners, including one American, are actually praised for their efforts toward "peace." Those singled out as enemies of al-Qaida are Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson, Michael Scheuer and, of course, President Bush. The first three are WND contributors and outspoken media figures who warn about the growing threat of Islamo-fascism. Scheuer is...

Israel's treatment by the main stream media is not exactly positive under any sane analysis, but not according to the Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Fisk. Of all the subjects he could pick to complain about, he claims that Western media is too soft on Israel -- a claim that can be easily disputed. The Jewish state has been hounded, collectively by the UN, and individually by European, Third World, and certain North American nations (The Great White North, eh?), for years regarding its "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza. In contrast, asking someone on the street if they...

ROBERT FISK is Middle East correspondent for the London Independent and the author, most recently, of "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East," published last month by Knopf. I FIRST REALIZED the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have...

Every good reporter knows that prediction is best left to astrologers. But Robert Fisk -- legendary war correspondent, three-time interviewer of Osama bin Laden, witness to Middle Eastern intrigues for three decades -- has a confidence that would make the Oracle blush. In 1991, he scorned the "myth of a short, sharp victory" over Saddam Hussein in the coming war to free Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. Victory came in just six weeks. In 2001, he doubted Afghanistan's Taliban would throw down their arms in the face of the U.S.-led assault after 9/11. Five weeks later, the Taliban abandoned Kabul. In 2003, he...

Robert Fisk, one of leading journalists and commentators on the Middle East, wonders how much the West really cares about what happens to Iraqis. He speaks movingly and candidly of walking in the morgues of Baghdad, seeing the bodies of young women shot at checkpoints for not stopping in time, or ripped to pieces by suicide bombers. Why then, he asks, are the casualty figures for these civilians never released?

U.S. immigration officials refused Tuesday to allow Robert Fisk, longtime Middle East correspondent for the London newspaper, The Independent, to board a plane from Toronto to Denver. Fisk was on his way to Santa Fe for a sold-out appearance in the Lannan Foundation’s readings-and-conversations series Wednesday night. According to Christie Mazuera Davis, a Lannan program officer, Fisk was told that his papers were not in order. Davis made last-minute arrangements Wednesday for Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio’s daily news show, Democracy Now!, to interview Fisk via satellite from a television station in Toronto. He appeared on a large screen...

The London bombings have shocked the world and once again raised the question 'Why?'. But people who hurry to blame fundamentalists and poverty are missing the point: Islam itself. Today there is a lot of talk about the root causes of Islamic terrorism and how to deal with them. So what are these root causes then? UK-US foreign policy? The West’s lust for oil? Illiteracy and poverty in the Muslim world? The hijacking of Islam by a few extremists? These, amongst others, are the reasons most left-wing intellectuals and self-declared liberal Muslim thinkers, from British journalist Robert Fisk to Pakistani...

In December 1996, Robert Fisk of the London newspaper The Independent traveled to the mountains north of Khartoum where he met Osama bin Laden. The opening sentences of the article he wrote about the meeting went as follows: Osama Bin Laden sat in his gold fringed robe, guarded by loyal Arab mujahedin… . With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, Mr Bin Laden looks every inch the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend. Chadored children danced in front of him, preachers acknowledged his wisdom. In a second article he wrote about the same meeting, Fisk upgraded bin Laden’s...

Mr. Robert Fisk: We Are Tired of Your Orientalism April 15 , 2005 Joseph Hitti One more time, Robert Fisk (April 11, 2005; http://www.tayyar.org/tayyar/articles.php?article_id=2846&type=opinions ), of the British leftist daily “The Independent”, propagates the lies and deceptions that the European and American left used for much of the past thirty years to justify the death of Lebanon at the hands of the foreign intervention. It does not seem to matter to Mr. Fisk that the consensus, as well as the preliminary results of an international investigation, point to a foreign responsibility in Prime Minister Hariri's assassination, like the assassination of...

Link below if you can stand the stench from the latest pile by Fisk. All I'm posting is this:

http://pei.ucc.ie/dara/Agenda_End_Hi.mpg - Link To Video April 24, 2004 Screamers: Robert Fisk Brings Back Fond Memories It was "undoubtedly the funniest television moment of the year so far" according to Ian O'Doherty (Robert Fisk freaks out on television, Irish Independent, April 20, 2004). If you missed the item, don't hold your breath, this should appear on the internet fairly soon. And so it has, via Tim Blair.

The judge in charge of Saddam Hussein's trial was in fear for his life today after his identity was revealed by a UK newspaper. The Iraqi Special Tribunal had asked the media to protect his anonymity. But he was named by Robert Fisk, foreign correspondent of The Independent. Downing Street warned that the judge now faced reprisals from Saddam loyalists. A Foreign Office source added: "Obviously this shows questionable judgment about an individual's safety." When TV footage was broadcast yesterday, censors made sure the judge was pictured only from behind. Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent, defended his decision, saying:...

DOWNING Street blasted The Independent yesterday for naming the judge in Saddam’s trial — putting his life at risk. It accused journalist Robert Fisk of breaking an agreement with the Iraqi Special Tribunal not to identify anyone in the court other than the defendants.

'Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi," writes Robert Fisk, famed Middle East correspondent of the London Independent. "Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner's face. No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash." Hmm. Sounds like Fiskie's the one straining at the leash here. You can practically hear him panting. Down, boy. For a week now,...

First, our enemies created the suicide bomber. Now, we have our own digital suicide bomber, the camera. Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi. Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner's face. No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash.The Muslim suicide bomber cries Allahu Akbar, God is great. And what does Lynndie England's partner-in-crime do? Why,...

London - It doesn't take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. But it takes only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin yesterday. Yes, he enthusiastically endorsed suicide bombings - including the murder of Israeli children. Yes, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, in a wheelchair or not. But something went wrong with the narrative of the news story yesterday, and something infinitely more dangerous - another sinister precedent - was set for our brave new world. Take the old man himself....

This is the best article.

Arab states are largely squalid, corrupt, brutal dictatorships. No surprise there. We created most of these dictators 13 February 2004 - For democracy, read fantasy. Iraq is getting so nasty for our great leaders these days that anything - and anyone - is going to be thrown to the dogs to save them. The BBC, the CIA, British intelligence - any journalist that dares to point out the lies that led us to war - get pelted with more lies. The moment we suggest that Iraq never was fertile soil for Western democracy, we get accused of being racists....

The problem I have with the whole Gadhafi saga is that the Libya I know can scarcely repair a drain or install a working lavatory in a hotel. Yet this same Libya, after years of sanctions, was apparently making a nuclear bomb. Libyan nuclear scientists. Say those three words over and over again. Really? And what was that odd word in the Downing Street announcement? "Program"? Wasn't that exactly what Prime Minister Tony Blair accused Iraq of developing after the weapons of mass destruction he had told us all about turned out to be non-existent? According to the usual anonymous...

Wednesday, December 17, 2003 Saddam Hussein, like Adolf Hitler, will live on for millions of people By ROBERT FISK BRITISH COLUMNIST Was this really the man with whom I shook hands almost a quarter of a century ago? I've spent 24 hours looking again and again at those videotapes. The more I look, the more Saddam turns into a wild animal. An American interviewed by The Associated Press said he'd gone straight to church to pray for him. The face I remember from my meeting with him was chubby in an insolent sort of way, the mustache so well trimmed...

The dangers of Fisking David Pryce-Jones accuses the Independent journalist Robert Fisk of hysteria and distortion in his reporting on the Middle East In the www arena where the world speaks invisibly to itself, a new word has appeared: ‘fisking’, meaning the selection of evidence solely in order to bolster preconceptions and prejudices. Just as cardigans or mackintoshes are named after an inventive individual, so fisking derives from the work of Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent, stationed these many years in Beirut. The preconceptions and prejudices that are immortalising Fisk in the English language express an...

David Pryce-Jones accuses the Independent journalist Robert Fisk of hysteria and distortion in his reporting on the Middle East In the www arena where the world speaks invisibly to itself, a new word has appeared: ‘fisking’, meaning the selection of evidence solely in order to bolster preconceptions and prejudices. Just as cardigans or mackintoshes are named after an inventive individual, so fisking derives from the work of Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent, stationed these many years in Beirut. The preconceptions and prejudices that are immortalising Fisk in the English language express an unqualified contempt for America....

David Pryce-Jones accuses the Independent journalist Robert Fisk of hysteria and distortion in his reporting on the Middle East In the www arena where the world speaks invisibly to itself, a new word has appeared: ‘fisking’, meaning the selection of evidence solely in order to bolster preconceptions and prejudices. Just as cardigans or mackintoshes are named after an inventive individual, so fisking derives from the work of Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent, stationed these many years in Beirut. The preconceptions and prejudices that are immortalising Fisk in the English language express an unqualified contempt for America....

Robert Fisk: Frightening winds swirl around the House of Saud 11.11.2003 COMMENT Osama bin Laden has an awful lot of friends in Saudi Arabia. In the mosque, among the disenchanted youth, among the security forces, even - and this is what the West declines to discuss - within the royal family. Saudi ambassadors routinely dismiss these facts as "unfounded", but Sunday's attack in the capital, Riyadh, is part of a growing insurrection against Bin Laden's enemies in the House of Saud. Whether or not the bombers were Saudi security force members - they were certainly wearing Saudi military uniforms -...

Understanding the brain. That's what you have to do in a guerrilla war. Find out how it works, what it's trying to do. Ramadan? An attack on US headquarters in Baghdad and six suicide bombings, all at the start of Ramadan? Thirty-four dead and 200 wounded? Where have I heard those statistics before? And how could they be so well co-ordinated - not sophisticated, perhaps, but well-timed, down to the last second? And why the Red Cross? I knew that building, admired the way in which the International Red Cross staff refused to associate themselves with the American occupation -...

How arrogant was the path to war. As President Bush now desperately tries to cajole the old UN donkey to rescue him from Iraq - he who warned us that the UN was in danger of turning into a League of Nations "talking shop" if it declined him legitimacy for his invasion - we are supposed to believe that no one in Washington could have guessed the future. Messrs Bush and Blair fantasised their way to war with all those mythical weapons of mass destruction and "imminent threats" from Iraq - whether of the 45-minute variety or not - and...

What United Nations country would ever contemplate sending peacekeeping troops to Iraq now? The men who are attacking America's occupation Army are ruthless, but they are not stupid. They know President George W. Bush is getting desperate, that he will do anything - that he may even go to the dreaded Security Council for help - to reduce United States military losses in Iraq. But yesterday's attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad has slammed shut the door to that escape route. Within hours of the explosion, we were being told this was an attack on a "soft target", a...

BAGHDAD, 28 July 2003 — The convoys were humming down the highway from Amman to Baghdad all last week, trucks groaning under the weight of hundreds of tons of pre-stressed concrete, giant blocks and heaps of cement on the trailers, each one higher than the average lorry. I understood what they meant: protection from car bombs. I had seen them so often in Beirut when the US Marines first came under fire in 1983. The “liberators” of Beirut were becoming the occupiers. Now the same is happening in Iraq. The “liberators” are turning into aggressive raiders, kicking down doors and...

Back in Baghdad, the Independent's Robert Fisk told his readers on Thursday: "At the Alastrabak grocery store, I bought 25 loo rolls." Ah, the bog of war. When we Bush poodles say, "Let's roll!", this is definitely not the kind of roll we have in mind. Fisk is either settling in for a long siege or padding his expenses, but I can't say this strikes me as a 25-roll war. On the television, the network pretty boys are riding on the backs of tanks going full throttle through the southern desert, hour after hour. Will it all be over before...

So they are dead. Or are they? Even Baghdad exploded in celebratory, deafening automatic rifle fire at the news. The burnt, bullet-splashed villa in Mosul, the four bullet-ridden corpses, America's hopes - however vain - that the death of Saddam Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, will break the guerrilla resistance to Iraq's US occupation troops, all conspired to produce an illusion last night: that the unidentified bodies found after a four-hour gun battle between Iraqi gunmen and US forces must be those of the former dictator's sons - because the world wants them to be. Of course, they might...

A few days ago, the American forces in Baghdad drove 17 truckloads of rubble and dirt up to the secret military area of Baghdad airport to air-freight to the United States. No journalists reported on this macabre operation, even if they knew about it. For the muck came from the site of an atrocity committed by the US Air Force at the end of its bombardment of Iraq. The Americans believed Saddam Hussein was hiding in a suburb called Mansour and so, despite knowing that the area was packed with civilians - the operation would not be "risk-free", as one...

US Leans On Belgians to Spare Sharon From Trial Friday, July 11 2003 @ 07:06 PM GMT By Robert Fisk For The Independent Mohamed Shaukat Abu Rudeina believes that his family will never receive justice. “It’s all over,” he says. “The world has changed since Sept. 11, 2001. The Americans rule the world.” A few yards from his concrete breeze-block home, the bullets that killed his father and uncle still puncture the walls. In 1982 up to 1,700 Palestinians were massacred here, in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla. The Israeli Kahan Commission stated that Ariel Sharon — then the...

8.30amIndependent introduces web chargesCiar ByrneThursday April 24, 2003The Guardian The Independent: hoping to bring its website into the black  The Independent is following in the footsteps of the Times and the Financial Times by charging users to access parts of its website.Selected areas of Independent.co.uk, including opinion pieces, articles by celebrated Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, the news and sport archive and the cryptic crosswords, will carry a charge from this week.While much of the site's content will remain free, the Independent is hoping to bring the website into the black by erecting barriers in these four areas as part...

What is a journalist’s life worth? I ask this question for a number of reasons, some of them – frankly – quite revolting. Two days ago, I went to visit one of my colleagues wounded in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Samia Nakhoul is a Reuters correspondent, a young woman reporter who is married to another colleague, the Financial Times correspondent in Beirut. Part of an American tank shell was embedded in her brain – a millimetre difference in entry point and she would have been half paralysed – after an M1A1 Abrams tank fired a round at the Reuters...

WAR WITH IRAQ Rioters Stab L.A. Times ReporterBy Paul WatsonTimes Staff Writer April 16, 2003 MOSUL, Iraq --[...] But the mob wanted blood, and I could see two men who had pulled out knives. "Let me through — I want to kill him!" screamed one. After several minutes of struggling and stone-throwing, the mob knocked me to the ground and kicked me repeatedly in the head and back before stabbing me in the buttocks.[...]

BAGHDAD, 15 April 2003 — So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives — a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents including the old royal archives of Iraq — were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the Islamic Library of Qur’ans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze. I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy who could have...

Reading Robert Fisk April 06, 2003 I've been reading the Iraq War reports of Robert Fisk. There's a certain loonyness there: "So it's a "truly remarkable achievement"... General Tommy Franks says so... the British still have not "liberated" Basra... the Iraqis... launch a scud missile from the Fao peninsula... the Americans... lose an Apache helicopter to the gun of an Iraqi peasant farmer... spend four days trying to cross the river... confronted by their first suicide bomber.... Even the "siege of Baghdad" -- a city which is 30 miles wide and might need a quarter of a million men to...

<p>Cable News Network reported that of 400 initial tanks in the Iraq army at the outbreak of war, only an estimated 12 remain.</p>

United States troops have begun moving through downtown Baghdad.United States Officials said members of the 3rd Infantry Division began driving through the center of the Iraqi capital on Saturday.They said the unit did not sustain casulties.'This was an operation conducted by two task forces of the Third Infantry Division,' Major General Eugene Renuart Chief of Operations for Central Command, said.They had been south of the city and conducted a raid through the city, proceeding North to the Tigris River and continuing out to the West in the direction of the airpoirt.'Officials said the show of United States troops was meant...

SADDAM HUSSEIN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT - So where are the Americans? I prowled the empty departure lounges, mooched through the abandoned customs department, chatted to the seven armed militia guards, met the airport director and stood beside the runways where two dust-covered Iraqi Airways passenger jets -- an old 727 and an even more elderly Antonov -- stood forlornly on the runway not far from an equally decrepit military helicopter. And all I could hear was the distant whisper of high-flying jets and the chatter of the flocks of birds which have nested near the airport car park on this, the...

In Al-Mussayib, central Iraq — The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armored vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves...

'Iraq will become a quagmire for the Americans. Our troops will not surrender' 24 March 2003 Iraq stunned the Americans and British last night by broadcasting video tape of captured and dead American troops – the nightmare of both George Bush and Tony Blair. The body of one American soldier was seen with a great red gash on his neck, while five US prisoners appeared on screen. One, a black female soldier, had been wounded, while a male serviceman said he had been "only following orders". The film will increase internal support for Saddam Hussein, because it will be...

In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with World War II jingoism and scare stories and false information and student essays dressed up as “intelligence”. We are sick of being insulted by little men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes of George W. Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map of the Middle East to their advantage. No wonder, then, that Hans Blix’s blunt refutation of America’s “intelligence” at the UN on Friday...

YOU'VE got to hand it to Saddam. In one brisk, neat letter to Kofi Annan, he pulled the rug from right under George Bush's feet. There was the American president last week, playing the role of multilateralist, warning the world that Iraq had one last chance through the UN to avoid Armageddon. "If the Iraqi regime wishes peace," he told us all in the General Assembly, "it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long range missiles and all related material." And that, of course, is the point. Saddam would do everything...

http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0395/9503079.htm Middle East History?It Happened In March Israel Charged With Systematic Harassment of U.S. Marines By Donald Neff March 1995, pgs. 79-81 It was 12 years ago, on March 14, 1983, that the commandant of the Marine Corps sent a highly unusual letter to the secretary of defense expressing frustration and anger at Israel. General R.H. Barrow charged that Israeli troops were deliberately threatening the lives of Marines serving as peacekeepers in Lebanon. There was, he wrote, a systematic pattern of harassment by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that was resulting in "life-threatening situations, replete with verbal degradation of the officers,...

The rise and rise of Robert Fisk must surely rate as one of the more curious developments of the past year in our country's news media. Only 11 months ago he was just a relatively obscure Beirut-based correspondent for the British Independent and the author of a couple of well-received books on Ireland and Lebanon. But then came September 11 and, seemingly overnight, the unknown journalist reinvented himself as a pundit on the entire Muslim world -- and he has had many antipodean takers since then. Although Dr Fisk (he earned his PhD at Trinity College, in Dublin) nowadays enjoys...

BEIRUT, 23 May — As 12 of the 13 Palestinian fighters exiled by Israel left Cyprus for European countries yesterday, the International Red Cross stated that their “transfer” outside the occupied Palestinian West Bank was illegal under humanitarian law. Citing Article 49 of Annex 4 of the Geneva Conventions, Vincent Lusser, spokesman for the Middle East department of the ICRC in Geneva, told The Independent that “transfers outside occupied territory are illegal and that covers the 13 men.”The EU has claimed that “humanitarian” concern prompted them to give temporary exile to the 13 Palestinians, all of whom spent weeks in...