Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 13:32:07 -0400
Subject: Goodman Interviews Robert Fisk on Democracy Now
From: cs <christina.sharpe-AT-tufts.edu>


Goodman Interviews Robert Fisk on Democracy Now

Goodman: After spending a month in Iraq, could you describe your thoughts?

Fisk: Well, my assumption is that history has a way or repeating itself. I
was talking to a very military Shiite Muslim from Nashas about only five
days ago and a journalist was saying to him "do you realize how historic
these days are?" and I said to him "do you realize how history is repeating
itself?" and he turned to me and said "yes history is repeating itself, and
I knew what he meant. He was referring to the British invasion or Iraq in
1917 and Lt. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, when we turned up in Baghdad and Sir
Stanley Maude issued a document saying "we have come here not as conquerors
but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny." And within three
years we were losing hundreds of men every year in the guerilla war against
the Iraqis who wanted real liberation not by us from the ottomans but by
them from us and I think that's what's going to happen with the Americans in
Iraq. I think a war of liberation will begin quite soon, which of course
will be first referred to as a war by terrorists, by al Qaeda, by remnants
of Saddam's regime, remnants (remember that word) but it will be waged
particularly by Shiite Muslims against the Americans and the British to get
us out of Iraq and that will happen. And our dreams that we can liberate
these people will not be fulfilled in this scenario.

So what I've been writing about these past few days is simply the following.
We claim that we want to preserve the national heritage of the Iraqi people,
and yet my own count of government buildings burning in Baghdad before I
left was 158, of which the only buildings protected by the United States
army and the marines were the Ministry of Interior, which has the
intelligence corp of Iraq and the Ministry of Oil, and I needn't say
anything else about that. Every other ministry was burning. Even the
Ministry of Higher Education/Computer Science was burning. And in some cases
American marines were sitting on the wall next to the ministries watching
them burn. 

The Computer Science Minister actually talked to the marine, Corporal
Tinaha, in fact, I actually called his fiance to tell her he was safe and
well. So the Americans have allowed the entire core and infrastructure of
the next government of Iraq to be destroyed, keeping only the Ministry of
Interior and the Ministry of Oil. That tells it's own story. On top of that
I was one of the first journalists to walk in to the National Archaeological
Museum and the National Library of Archives with all the Ottoman and state
archives and the Koranic Library of the Ministry of Religious Endowment and
all were burned. Petrol was poured on these documentations and they were all
burned in 3000 degrees of heat.

Ironically, with all that irony, I managed to rescue 26 pages of the Ottoman
documentation, the Ottoman library. Documents of Ottoman armies, camel
thieves, letters from the sheriff Hussein of Mecca to Ali Pasha (Ottoman
ruler of Baghdad) and when I got to the Jordanian border the Jordanian
customs authorities stole these documents from me and refused to even give
me a receipt for them, a shattering comment I'm afraid to say on the Arab
world but particularly on the American occupation of Baghdad.

After the Koranic Library was set on fire I raced to the headquarters of the
Third Marine Force Division in Baghdad and I said there is this massive
Koranic Library on fire and I said what can you do? And under the Geneva
Conventions the US Occupation Forces have a moral, whatever occupations
forces there are, and they happen to be American, have a legal duty to
protect documents and various embassies. There was a young officer who got
on the radio and said "there was some kind of Biblical library on fire,"
biblical for heavens sake, and I gave him a map of the exact locations, the
collaterals on the locations to the marines and nobody went there, and all
the Korans were burned, Korans going back to the 16th Century totally
burned. 

So, somebody has an interest in destroying the center of a new government
and the cultural identity of Iraq. Now the American line is these are
Saddamite remnants, remnants of a Saddam regime. I don't believe this. If I
was a remnant of a Saddam regime and say I was given $20,000 to destroy the
library I would say thank you very much and when the regime was gone I would
pocket the money. I wouldn't go and destroy the library, I don't need to,
I've got the money. Somebody or some institution or some organization today
now is actively setting out to destroy the cultural identity of Iraq and the
ministries that form the core of a new Iraq government. Who would be behind
that and who would permit it to happen, and why is it that the US military,
so famed for its ability to fight its way across the Tigris and the
Euphrates river and come into Baghdad will not act under the Geneva
Convention to protect these institutions? That is the question. And I do not
have the answer to it.

Goodman: There was a report today that said that the US army ignored
warnings from its own civilian advisors that could have prevented the
looting of Baghdad's National Museum-- this is from the London Observer. It
said that the Office of the Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance set
up to supervise reconstruction identified the museum as a prime target for
looters in a memo to army commanders a month ago. The memo said it should be
the second priority for the army after securing the national bank. General
Jay Garner, who's taking over, is said to be livid. One angry reconstruction
official told the Observer "we ask for just a few soldiers at each building
or if they feared snipers then at least one or two tanks. The tanks were
doing nothing once they got inside the city, yet the generals refused to
deploy them. 

Fisk: Yeah, well the Observer is always quite a bit late on the story. There
was a website set up between American archaeologists and the Pentagon many
weeks ago listing those areas of vital national heritage to Iraq which might
be looted, damaged, stormed, burned. The museum was on that list. The
museum, I have seen physically marked on the satellite pictures which the
marines have to move around in Baghdad. They know it's there, they know what
it is. Now, when I got to the museum, which is far more than a week ago,
there were gun battles going on between rioters and looters, bullets
skittering up the walls of apartment blocks outside. It was quite clear when
I walked in that looting was quite clearly.... Someone has opened the doors,
the huge safe doors of the storeroom of the museum with a key. The looting
was on a most detailed, precise and coordinated scale. The people knew what
the wanted to go for. Those Grecian statues they didn't want they
decapitated and threw to the floor. Those earrings and gold ornaments and
bullring gods that they wanted to take, they took. And within a few days
those priceless heritage items of Iraq's history were on sale in Europe and
in America. I don't believe that that happened by chance.

Two of the interesting things: number one is the looters knew exactly what
they wanted and they got it out of a country with a speed that we as
journalists cannot get our stories out of the country. Secondly, a much more
serious in the long term. The arsonists, the men who were going around
burning, they must have had maps, they knew where to go, they knew what
would not be defended by the Americans. In one case, you know this is a city
without electricity, without water, I recognized one of the men who was
burning things. He had a small beard, a goatee beard and he had a red
t-shirt, and the second time I saw him, I looked at him and he pointed a
[inaudible] rifle at me, he realized I recognized him. They were coming to
the scenes of arsonists in blue and white buses. God knows where these buses
were from. They weren't city corporation buses, although city corporation
buses were being used by looters. But the arsonists were an army. They were
calculated and they knew where to go, they had maps, they were told where to
go. Who told them where to go? Who told them where the Americans would not
shoot at them or would not harm them? This is a very, very important
question that still needs to be reconciled and answered. And I do not have
an answer. And none of my colleagues unfortunately have asked the American
military in Qatar, in Doha what the answer is. Somebody told these people
where to go, they had the maps, they knew the places to go and burn, they
knew the American military would not be there and they went there and they
burned. Who gave them those instructions, I don't know the answer. I really
don't know the answer, but there is an answer, and we should know what this.

Goodman: Maguire Gibson, a leading Mesopotamian scholar from the University
of Chicago, said he has good reason to believe that the looting or the
stealing of the artifacts from the museum with men going in with forklifts
and even keys to vaults...he has good reason to believe this was
orchestrated from outside the country.

Fisk: There is certainly a reason to believe, Amy, that there were keys
involved because some of the vaults I saw were opened with keys and not with
hammers or guns or explosives. Fork lift trucks? They had the ability to
move heavy statues into trucks. When I got there, they had just done that.
But I don't know if they used fork lift trucks, I think that might be a
little too Hollywood. There were men who were guards to the museum in long
gray beards who had taken rifles, [inaudible] Ak-47's weapons to defend what
was left. But if you're saying to me "do I have evidence of fork lift
trucks?" -- No. 

Do I have evidence that they knew what they were coming for, yes! Do I have
evidence that this was premeditated, yes! Do I believe that the arsonists
were trained and organized from outside who knew whether or not the
Americans would be present or whether the American military would defend
certain buildings, yes! They undoubtedly did know the Americans would not
confront them. And the Americans did not confront them. I actually got to a
point where I was going around Baghdad a few days ago, and every time I saw
a tongue of flame or smoke I'd race off in my car to the area, and the last
place I went to that was burning was the Department of Higher
Education/Computer Science and as I approached it I saw a marine sitting on
the wall. 

I bounded out of the car and raced back and thought I had better see this
guy and I took his name down. His name was Ted Nyhom and he was a member of
the Third Marine Fourth Regiment or Fourth Marine Third Regiment. He gave me
the number of his fiancé Jessica in the states. I actually rang her up and
said "your man loves you dearly" (he's a real person) and I said how the
hell is this happening next door and he said "well, we're guarding a
hospital" and I said "there's a fire next door, a whole bloody government
ministry is burning. And he said, "yeah we can't look everywhere at the same
time." I said, "Ted, what happened?" and he said "I don't know." Now when
you go to sit down...he was a nice guy, I was happy to ring his fiancé up
and tell her that he was safe. But something happened there. There was a
fire, an entire government ministry was burning down next to him and he did
nothing. It didn't seem strange to him that he wasn't asked to do anything.
Now there's something strange about that. It's not a question of whether
American academic said, you know, is there something wrong with the moral
property of an army that doesn't stop looting and arson. There's something
terribly wrong there.

My country's army in Basra was also remiss in this way. Our Minister of
Defense, Geoff Hoon, said 'oh well they were liberating their own property'
when people were looting hospitals, for god's sakes. So the British don't
get off on this either, but the Americans were the most remiss. And in the
city of Baghdad against all the international conventions, particularly the
Geneva Convention, which have a specific reference to pillage... in fact
pillage appears as a crime against humanity in the Hague Conventions in 1907
upon in which the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were based. There is a whole
reference to pillage and the Americans did nothing. They did nothing to
prevent the pillage of the entire cultural history of Iraq, of the museum,
or the documentary history of the National Archives, or the Koranic Library
of the Ministry of Religious Endowment or of the 155 other government
locations around Baghdad. And one has to ask the question, why was this
permitted to happen. I don't know the answer.

Goodman: We're talking to Robert Fisk, correspondent for the Independent
newspaper in Britain. He has just come out of Iraq where he has spent the
last month. He is back in Beirut where he is based. Robert, the hospitals,
you spent a good amount of time there. Can you describe what you saw and
perhaps what we're not seeing. If you can follow our coverage at all here in
the United States. 

Fisk: Well as a matter of fact this afternoon, I took several roles of
film...real film, not digitized camera film into my film development shop
here, and was looking again at the film of children who'd been hit by
American cluster bombs in Hilla and Babylon whom I took photographs of. I'm
rather shocked at myself for taking pictures of people in such suffering. I
would have to say, and one must be fair as a correspondent, that I think
that the Iraqis did position military tanks and missiles in civilian areas.
They did so deliberately; they did so in order to try and preserve their
military apparatus in the hope that the Americans would not bomb civilian
areas. The Americans did bomb civilian areas. They may or may not have
destroyed the military targets; they certainly destroyed human beings and
innocent civilians.

War is a disgusting, cruel, vicious affair. You know, I say to people over
and over again: war is not about primarily victory or defeat, it's primarily
about human suffering and death. And if you look through the pictures, which
I have beside me now as I speak to you, of little girls with huge wounds in
the side of their faces made by the pieces of metal from cluster bombs,
American cluster bombs, it's degoutant, as the French say, disgusting to
even look at. But I have to look at them. I took these pictures.

The Iraqi regime, which was brutal and cruel and is very happy, was very
happy in every sense of the word, to use these pictures as propaganda, must
also of course have its own responsibility for this. But for me, the most
appalling admission came when the civil coalition, which means the
Americans, the British and a few Australians, decided to bomb an area, a
residential area of Monsur, with four 2000-pound bombs. I hate to use these
childish phrases like "bunker-busters" but these are the same bombs they
dropped on Tora Bora to try and get the caves where Bin Laden was hiding in
2001 in Afghanistan. And these huge bombs destroyed the lives of a minimum
of 14 civilians [in Monsur]. The central command in Doha, Qatar said they
believed Saddam was there, and that they would send forensic experts. But I
went there a week after the Americans entered Baghdad and no forensic
experts had been sent there indeed. And the morning I turned up, I'm talking
about 4 days ago, the decomposing, horribly smelling body of a little baby
was pulled out of the rubble and I can promise you it wasn't Saddam Hussein,
but the Americans went on insisting their forensic scientists were searching
to see if Saddam Hussein had died there. Well, he did not and nor did their
forensic scientists bother; they didn't even care about going there.
Outrageous. I'm sorry to say. Outrageous. I have to be a human being as well
as a journalist. 

Again, one needs to also say that Saddam Hussein was...is - I'm sure he's
still alive - a most revolting man. He did use gas against the Iranians and
against the Kurds. And I also have to say that when he used it against the
Iranians, and I wrote about it in my own newspaper at the time, the Times,
the British Foreign Office told my editor the story was not helpful because
at that stage of course, Saddam Hussein was our friend - we were supporting
him. The hypocrisy of war stinks almost as much as the civilian casualties.

But let's go back to the hospitals. The Americans used cluster bombs in
civilian areas, where they believed there were military targets. Near Hilla,
I think the Iraqis probably did put military vehicles. That does not excuse
the Americans; there are specific references and paragraphs in the Geneva
Conventions to protect what are called 'protected persons', that is to say
civilians, even if they are in the presence of enemy combatants. But I think
the Iraqis did put military positions amongst civilians. I can go so far as
to say that at the museum, which was looted to the great disgrace of the
Americans, prior to the American entry into Baghdad, it was clear when I got
to the museum after the American entry, that the Iraqi army had placed gun
positions and gun pits inside the museum grounds, at one point next to a
beautiful 3000-year-old statue of a winged bull. There were other occasions
when I could clearly see SAM-6 mobile tracked missiles parked very close to
civilian houses. The Iraqis did use civilians as cover. And the Americans,
knowing they were there, bombed the civilians anyway. So who is the war
criminal? I think both of them are. There you go. That's the story.

Goodman: Robert Fisk, do you have any idea about casualty numbers right now?

Fisk: No, it's impossible. Amy, it's impossible. You know, I took my
notebook; I can tell you how many people in each ward were wounded in
particular wards, or in particular hospitals. I can tell you which doctors
told me how many people died in A, B, and C hospitals on certain dates, but
when it comes to the overall figure, the losing side has no statistics,
because of course the statistics die with the regime and the winning side
controls all the figures. Thousands of Iraqis must have died.

There was one particularly terrible scene on what was known as Highway 8. It
was the main motorway alongside the Tigris river, with some university of
Baghdad on the other side of the river, where for two and a half days,
American soldiers of the 3rd Infantry division were fighting off ambushes,
most of them members of the Republican Guard. They mounted there and I
talked to all sides here. I talked to survivors, I talked to civilians, I
talked to the Americans on the tanks. The ambush began at 7:30 on the last
Monday of the war in the morning. And the motorway was quite busy with
civilian traffic. The American 3rd Infantry Division commander told me that
he saw civilian traffic and he ordered his men to fire warning shots, which
they did he said two or three times, after which they fired at the cars. And
he said 'I had a duty to protect my men.' I have to be fair and quote what
he said. He said "I had a duty to protect my men, to protect my soldiers and
we didn't know if they were carrying RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) or
explosives.' But cars which did not stop were fired at by United States
tanks of the 3rd Infantry Division.

I walked down the line of cars which were torn apart by American tank
shells. There was a very young woman burned black in the back of one car.
Her husband or father or brother beside her, dead. There was the leg of a
man beside another car which had been blown clean in half by an American
M1-A1 tank. There were piles of blankets covering families with children who
had been blown to pieces by the Americans. It was a real ambush. They were
fired at by RPG -7's. In one case, one tank I saw (the American commander
took me around) who'd received five hits, one of them on the engine. And he
had opened fire at a motorcycle carrying two members of the Iraqi Republican
Guard. One had died instantly. I found his body beside the road with his
blood dribbling into the gutter. The other was wounded and the American
brought him back to the tank, gave him first aid and sent him off to a
medical company. The American commander - the same commander who told his
tank crew to open fire on the civilian cars - told me that he saved the life
of the second Republican Guard who was on the motorcycle and the guy
survived. I have to assume that's correct. I didn't see him. But three days
later, the bodies were still, including the young woman, were still lying in
the cars. And bits of human remains were lying around in blankets. The
stench was terrible. There were flies everywhere. The American officer then
told me that he had asked the Red Crescent, the Muslim equivalent of the Red
Cross, to move the bodies and the cars were removed. But they were still
there, along with the bodies the next day. That's a fact. I saw.

Goodman: What about the journalists? It looks like there is the highest
percentage of foreign journalists, as a percentage of foreign casualties,
that we have seen in a long time. It looks like the number at this point is
14 journalists killed as well as the shelling of the Palestine Hotel.

Fisk: Well, I think that the number of journalists covering war - indeed,
the number of journalists in general - is increasing all the time. And so I
suppose, it's not a very romantic thing to say, but I suppose that as the
number of journalists increase, the number of casualties among journalists
will increase as well. There were a number of incidents which we seem to
have understood. The ITV reporter, who got north of the American lines near
Basra, was returning and got shot by US Marines, along with his crew.
Another British reporter who may or may not have committed suicide, I don't
know, which has nothing to do with the Americans or the Iraqis per se, if
that's the case. We have the Palestine hotel, which is one of the more
serious cases of all. That particular day began with the killing of the
journalist from Al Jazeera, the Qatari/Doha television chain, which of
course became famous in Afghanistan for producing tapes and airing tapes of
Osama bin Laden. I had by chance, four days before Tariq [Ayoub]'s death, on
the roof of that television station, been giving a broadcast myself live to
Doha. And while I was broadcasting, a cruise missile went streaking by
behind the building and literally moved over the bridge on the right and
carried on up the river Tigris and there was an airstrike behind me. And I
said to Tariq afterwards, I think this is the most dangerous bloody
newspaper office in the history of the world, you know? You're in really
great danger here. There were gun pits on the right. And he agreed with me.
And four days later, while he was on the roof preparing to do a broadcast,
an American jet came in so low, according to his colleagues downstairs, they
thought it would land on the roof, and fired a single missile at the
generator beside him and killed him. About three and a quarter hours later,
an American M1A1 Abrams tank on the Jumeirah River bridge, about three
quarters of a mile from the Palestine Hotel where the journalists were
staying, fired a single round, a depleted uranium round, as I understand, at
the office of Reuters where they were filming the same tanks on the bridge.

I was actually between the tank and the hotel, when the round was fired. I
was trying to get back from a story, an assignment I'd been on, what I'd put
myself on. And the shell with an extraordinary noise swooshed over my head
and hit the hotel...bang! Tremendous concussion. White Smoke. And when I got
there, two of my colleagues, one from Reuters and one from Spanish
Television, both of whom were to die within a few hours, the first one
within half an hour, were being brought out in blood-soaked bed-sheeting.
And a Lebanese colleague, a woman, Samia, with a piece of metal in her
brain. She recovered. She had brain surgery. She's married to the London
Financial Times correspondent here in Beirut. She survived. The initial
reaction was very interesting because the BBC went on air saying it was an
Iraqi rocket-propelled grenade. Someone wanted to frighten the press. Then
it emerged, thanks be to God for the attempt to get the truth, that TV3, a
French channel, had recorded the tanks' movements and I actually rushed to
their Bureau and they showed me the videotape and you saw the American tanks
for five minutes beforehand, in complete silence - there was nothing
happening - going onto the bridge, moving its turret, and then firing at the
hotel. The camera shakes and pieces of plaster and paint fall in front of
the camera. Clearly, it's the same shot. Four or five minutes in which
nothing is happening. Now I was in between the tank and the hotel and there
was complete silence. And when initially the Americans said they knew
nothing about it, when it became clear the French had a film, before the
Americans realized how long the film was running for prior to the attack,
they said that the tank was under persistent sniper and RPG
(rocket-propelled grenade) fire which is not true. I would have heard it
because I was close to the tank and the hotel and it would have been picked
up on the soundtrack, which it wasn't. This statement was made by General
Buford Blount, the same 3rd Infantry Division commander who boasted that
he'd be using depleted uranium munitions during the war in an interview with
Le Monde in March, a month ago. And he then said that there had been sniper
fire and after the round was fired by the American tank, the sniper fire had
ceased. In other words, the clear implication was that the gunfire had come
from the Reuters office, which was a most mendacious, vicious lie by General
Blount. General Blount lied in order to cover up the death of journalists.
It was interesting that when indeed the Americans actually arrived in
central Baghdad within a day, no journalists were raising these issues with
the Americans who'd just arrived. They should have done...I did actually.
And in fact two days later, I was on the Jumeirah bridge, and climbed onto
the second tank and asked the tank commander whether he fired at the
journalists and he said "I don't know anything about that, sir. I'm new
here." Which he may well have been. How do I know if he was there before or
not? But that tank round was fired deliberately at the hotel and General
Blount's counterfeit - the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division - was a
lie. A total lie. And it was a grotesque lie against my colleagues. Samia
Mahul had a piece of metal in her brain, A young woman who's most bravely
reported the Lebanese civil war. And against the Ukrainian cameraman for
Reuters and against the Spanish cameraman in the room upstairs. It was a
most disgusting lie. And as a journalist, I have to say that. And General
Blount has not apologized for it. So far he has gotten away with his lie.
I'm sorry to say. 

Amy: Nouvelle Observatoure, the French Newspaper, is reporting that a US
Army captain named Captain Wolford said unlike what the military reported,
he did not see sniper fire from the Palestine hotel. But he did see what he
thought was light glinting off of binoculars from one of the hotel's
balconies. He said he had never been told the Palestine Hotel was the home
base for almost all the international journalists in Baghdad and assumed the
---- 

Fisk: Well, yeah I've heard this story. I know this. Well, if American
commanders in the field are not told the intelligence information about
where people are in what hotels, it doesn't say much about the American
military. Look I don't think the American military people are inherently
wrong or awful or bad. You know, I met lots of American soldiers and Marines
of course. Marines insist on telling me they're not soldiers, which is an
odd thing for a Brit to hear, but I have to accept it. They were decent
people. One young Marine came up to me. He wanted to use my mobile phone to
call his home and I let him, of course. And he said "I'm really sorry, sir,
about the death of your colleagues." Like he meant it. I don't think these
are intrinsically bad people. I think the idea that there's some ghastly,
you know, evil moving among the American military is not true. I don't
believe that. I think they're decent people and I think they want to be
decent people. When their generals lie, it must be hard, as Buford Blount
lied. General Blount lied about the journalists. He lied. He was a
[inaudible] soldier.

But the ordinary soldiers I met, I think they were quite sympathetic. I
think they understood. And I think that in some cases, they were very upset
about what had happened to our colleagues, but they were also upset about
civilian casualties whom they'd caused. You know, when on Highway 8, I was
interviewing the American tank commander who'd given the order to fire at
the civilian cars on the road, I thought he was a decent person. I have to
say that when I read my notes afterwards, and I reflected upon the fact that
the bodies of the innocents were still lying in the cars three days later, I
was less inclined to be kind to him. I was less inclined to think he was a
nice person. But I don't think that the American soldiers were bad people. I
think they believed in what they were doing, up to the point that you can. I
think that they believed that their war was an honorable one, even though I
don't think it was. But I think that they had been previously misled and I
think something has gone wrong with the leadership of the American military
when you can have a general like Blount lying about the press. If to see a
flash of what appears to be a camera or some kind of reflecting instrument
in a window is to be the signal for capital punishment for those who are
legitimately filming the war for an international news agency, something has
gone terribly wrong. I think the real problem at the end of the day lies in
the White House, with President Bush.

There were a number of American Marines and soldiers I met who were very
helpful to me in understanding what was happening. At one point, I was next
to an American tank that came under fire - I don't know where from - and I
thought the soldiers behaved with great restraint. They could have shot at
civilians. In some cases, I know in other places in Baghdad, they did and
killed people and I think it was a war crime to have done so. But in the
American tank I was close to, they did not. And those soldiers behaved
admirably. I have to say that. I think they were frightened, I think they
were tired. They hadn't washed etc. but I'm sorry, I don't get too romantic
about soldiers who invade other peoples' countries. But I thought their
discipline was probably pretty good, to be frank. In other places, it was
not. But again, you know, war is primarily about suffering and death, not
about victory and defeat and not about presidents who - oh, I'm so tired of
talking about your president. Or indeed the president of Iraq who's a pretty
vicious man frankly if he's still alive. Where is he? That should be your
last question, Amy: Where is Saddam Hussein?

Goodman: Well. I'm not there yet. But you mentioned your colleague ----

Fisk: You're going to ask me where he is, aren't you?

(they laugh) 

Goodman: OK, where is he?

Fisk: You know what, I have this absolute fixation that he's in Belarus, the
most horrible ex-Soviet state that exists: Minsk. I tell you why I think
this. This is long before the Iran - sorry, Freudian slip - long before the
Iraq war, I had this absolute obsession that Minsk - I've been to Minsk;
it's a horrible city! It's full of whiskey, corruption, prostitutes and damp
apartments. Very, very favorable to the Ba'ath party of Iraq. And I noticed
in the local newspaper here in Beirut, I fear about six or seven weeks ago
an article that said that the Olympic committee of Belarus in Minsk had
invited Uday Hussein, beloved son of the 'great ruler of Iraq', to a chess
tournament in Minsk and I thought, My God, this is where they're going to
go. And if you think of all the stories which may be complete hogwash of how
they got out by train with the Russian ambassador through Syria, where else
to go but Minsk? I actually mentioned it to my foreign desk and my foreign
editor said "Off you go to Belarus!" and I said "No please, please, not
Belarus! I've been there before. It's awful!" But I do have this kind of
suspicion maybe he's there. But there you go. He may be in Baghdad. He may
be captured tonight. I really have not the slightest idea.

Goodman: Robert Fisk, you mentioned your Lebanese colleague who has shrapnel
in her head and said she covered the civil war in Beirut, which brings us to
a piece you did about questioning whether what we're going to see in Iraq is
the beginning of a civil war between the Sunni and the Shiia. What do you
think now? 

Fisk: Well, if it's not the beginning of a civil war between the Sunni and
the Shiia in Iraq, it will be the beginning of a war of liberation by the
Sunni and the Shiia themselves against the Americans. My feeling is that
there will be a war - it may already have begun - against the Americans by
the Iraqis. The Kurds will play a different role for all kinds of reasons,
but the Sunnis and the Shiias may well find some unity in trying to get rid
of their occupiers. You know, one can't help in the Middle East but be
struck by the ironies of history. Just over a week before - no, two weeks
before America invaded Iraq, a document went on auction. It's a public
auction in Britain at Swinden in southwestern England. And I made a bid for
it. As a matter of fact, I found out it was going to go on sale and it was
the official British document issued by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude
after he invaded Iraq with the British Army in 1917. And it was his
proclamation to the people of the Zilayah, that's to say the governerate of
Baghdad. And I quote from the first paragraph: "We come here not as
conquerors, but as liberators to free you from the tyranny of generations,"
just like President Bush says he's come now. I actually wrote about this
document in the newspaper and said it was going to come up for auction which
was a very bad mistake because the auctioneers rang me up from Swinden,
England to Beirut when I was actually interviewing, ironically enough, three
Iraqi refugees here in Beirut. And they said do you want to bid for it, the
bidding has started. I said yes I will bid for it. And it was originally
going to go for US $156. And so many readers of the Independent who'd read
my article turned up - it actually went for $2000. And God spare me, I
bought it. So now I am the owner of Sir Stanley Maude's document, telling
the people of Baghdad that the new occupiers, the British Army of 1917, had
come there as liberators, not as conquerors, to free them from the tyranny
of generations of tyrants and dictators. And now, you know, a few weeks
later, there I am in Baghdad, listening to the American Marine Corps issuing
an identical document, telling the people they'd come not as conquerors, but
as liberators, and I wonder sometimes whether people ever, ever read history
books. 

Goodman: We're talking to Robert Fisk, the correspondent for The
Independent. He is tired. He has just come out of Iraq after a month....

Fisk: He's definitely tired, Amy. He's very definitely tired, yeah.

Goodman: Well, I wanted to ask you about - you might have heard about Judith
Miller's report in the New York Times, saying a former Iraqi scientist has
told a US military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological
warfare equipment only days before the war began and also said Iraq secretly
sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria starting in the 80's and
that more recently...

Fisk (overlapping): How amazing....how amazing...how very fortunate that
that special report should come out now. Listen, every time I read Judith
Miller in the New York Times, I nod sagely and smile. That's all I'm going
to say to you, Amy. I'm sorry. Don't ask me to even comment upon it. It's
not a serious issue.

Goodman: Then let me ask you about the targeting of Syria right now.

Fisk: Look, Syria will not be invaded by the United States because it
doesn't have enough oil. It will be threatened by the United States, on
Israel's behalf perhaps, but it doesn't have sufficient oil to make it worth
invading. So the answer is: Syria will not be invaded.

Goodman: As you leave Iraq and you look back at what you saw, what are key
areas that you see as different, for example, than the Persian Gulf War and
what happened afterwards and what are you going to pursue right now?

Fisk: Well, we've got the first occupation of an Arab capital by a Western
army since General Allenby entered Jerusalem and since Sir Stanley Maude
entered Baghdad. We did have the brief period of French and American armies
entering Damascus and indeed Beirut in the second World War. But that was
part of a Vichy French Allied War. It wasn't part of a colonial war. We now
have American troops occupying the wealthiest Arab country in the world. And
the shockwaves of that are going to continue for decades to come, long after
you and I are in our graves, if that's where we go. And I don't think we
have yet realized - I don't think that the soldiers involved or the
Presidents involved have yet realized the implications of what has happened.
We have entered a new age of imperialism, the life of which we have not
attempted to judge or assess or understand.

Well, I'm 56 now - maybe I'll never see the end of it, I probably won't. But
my goodness me, I've never seen such historical acts take place in the 27
years I've been in the Middle East. And the results cannot be good. I don't
believe we've gone to Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. If we'd
done that, we would have invaded North Korea. I don't believe we've gone
there because of human rights abuses because we connived at those abuses for
many years when we supported Saddam. I think we've gone there for oil. And
though we may get the oil, I think the price will be very high. More than
that, I don't know. You know, my crystal ball, as I always say, has broken a
long time ago. But I'll keep on watching the story, I guess, because like my
father who was much older than my mother, was a soldier in the first World
War, I want to keep watching history happen. I would, however, yet again,
for the umpteenth time on your program, Amy, quote Amira Haas, that
wonderful journalist for Ha'aretz, the Israeli newspaper, who said "the
purpose of journalism is to monitor the centers of power" and we still do
not do that, and we must monitor the centers of power and we must try to
question why governments do the things that they do and why they lie about
it. And we don't do that. We don't do that.

Goodman: Well Robert Fisk, I want to thank you for doing that. 



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