Dialogue: Why don't journalists ask the right questions?

By ROBERT FISK

A few months ago, my old friend Tom Friedman set off for the small gulf emirate of Qatar from where, in one of his messianic columns for the

New York Times

, he informed us that the tiny state's

Al-Djezeira

satellite channel was a welcome sign that democracy might be coming to the Middle East.

Ad-Djezeira

had been upsetting some of the local Arab dictators - President Moubarak of Egypt for one - and Tom thought this a good idea. So do I.

But hold everything. The story is being rewritten. Last week, US Secretary of State Colin Powell rapped the Emir of Qatar over the knuckles because - so he claimed -

Al-Djezeira

was "inciting anti-Americanism".

So goodbye democracy. The Americans want the Emir to close down the channel's office in Kabul which is scooping the world with tape of the US bombardments and - more to the point - with televised statements by Osama bin Laden.

The most wanted man in the whole world has been suggesting that he's angry about the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions, about the corruption of pro-Western Arab regimes, about Israel's attacks on Palestinian territory, about the need for US forces to leave the Middle East.

And after insisting that bin Laden is a "mindless terrorist" - that there is no connection between US policy in the Middle East and the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington - the Americans need to close down

Al-Djezeira's

coverage.

Needless to say this tomfoolery by Colin Powell has not been given much coverage in the Western media who know that they do not have a single correspondent in the Taleban area of Afghanistan.

Al-Djezeira

does.

But why, oh why, are journalists falling back on the same sheep-like conformity that they adopted in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo war? For here we go again. The BBC was yesterday broadcasting an American officer talking about the dangers of "collateral damage" - without the slightest hint of the immorality of this phrase.

Tony Blair boasts of Britain's involvement in the US bombardment by talking about our "assets" and by yesterday morning, the BBC were using the same soldier-speak. Is there some kind of rhetoric fog that envelops us every time we bomb someone?

As usual, the first reports of the US missile attacks were covered without the slightest suggestion that innocents were about to die in the country we plan to "save".

Whether the Taleban are lying or telling the truth about 30 dead in Kabul, do we reporters really think that all our bombs fall on the guilty and not the innocent? Do we think that all the food we are reported to be dropping is going to fall around the innocent and not the Taleban?

I am beginning to wonder whether we have not convinced ourselves that wars - our wars - are movies. The only Hollywood film ever made about Afghanistan was a Rambo epic in which Sylvester Stallone taught the Afghan moujahadin how to fight the Russian occupation, helped to defeat Soviet troops and won the admiration of an Afghan boy.

Are the Americans, I wonder, somehow trying to actualise the movie?

To be fair, one of the very few reporters to tell us the truth about the Arab world's revolt against the American-British bombardment was the BBC's Frank Gardner who pointed out with great frankness that the West had totally failed to convince the Arabs of the need to bomb Afghanistan.

He talked of Saudis weeping with sorrow at the air assault on bin Laden. Bin Laden, you see, is a dangerously popular man in much of the Middle East - which is why the Americans want to censor

Al-Djezeira

.

But look at the questions we're not asking. Back in 1991 we dumped the cost of the Gulf War - billions of dollars of it - on Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. But the Saudis and Kuwaitis are not going to fund our bombing this time round. So who's going to pay? When? How much will it cost us - and I mean

us

?

The first night of bombing cost, so we are told, at least $US2 million, I suspect much more.

Let us not ask how many Afghans that would have fed - but do let's ask how much of our money is going towards the war and how much towards humanitarian aid. Bin Laden's propaganda is pretty basic. He films his own statements and sends one of his henchmen off to the

Al-Djezeira

office in Kabul. No vigorous questioning of course, just a sermon. So far we've not seen any video clips of destroyed Taleban equipment, the ancient Migs and even older Warsaw Pact tanks that have been rusting across Afghanistan for years. Only a sequence of pictures - apparently real - of bomb damage in a civilian area of Kabul.

The Taleban have kept reporters out. But does that mean we have to balance this distorted picture with our own half truths? Don't we realise after Nato's lies in 1999 that we may be lied to again?

Remember the scores of Albanian refugees supposed killed by Serb planes but in fact bombed by Nato jets?

Remember the bombs rained by the Americans on a railway bridge? And how Nato ran the videotape of the train at twice its actual speed? And how it was only revealed later that the target was bombed a second time after the train was clearly seen to have halted on the bridge?

And how the Serbs were said to have bombed the centre of Pristina early in the war when in fact Nato had bombed it and how we were told of the dozens of Serb tanks destroyed by our smart weapons when the true figure turned out to be just 12?

Asking those questions in 1999 immediately bought accusations of being "pro-Serb" - or "pro-Iraqi" if one pointed out in 1991, correctly as it turned out, that the Americans were to blame for much of the oil pollution in the Gulf.

It's still not time to allege that journalist are "pro-bin Laden" - that would really be a bit too much - but our potential muzzlers have discovered a useful smear: to question the "war on terrorism" - which is actually not a war on terrorism but a war against America's enemies - is to be "anti-American".

It's an old cliche dragged back from the Cold War, redolent of long hair and pot and the campaign for nuclear disarmament and opposing the Vietnam war.

And after watching the mass murders in New York, who would dare to criticise American's polices in the Middle East? So hard did a colleague of mine in a radio interview the other day attempt to unlink the bin Laden phenomenon from the West's baleful history in the Middle East that he seriously suggested the September 11 attack was timed to coincide with the defeat of Muslim forces at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

Unfortunately, the Poles won their battle against the Muslim Turks on September 12, 1683, not September 11. But when the terrifying details of hijacker-killer Mohamed Atta's will were published last week - dated April, 1996 - no one could think of anything which happened that month that might have propelled Atta to his murderous behaviour. Not the Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon nor the Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilians by Israeli artillery in a UN base - more than half of them children. For that's what happened in April, 1996.

No, of course that slaughter is not an excuse for the crimes against humanity in the United States last month. But isn't it worth just a little mention, just a tiny observation, that an Egyptian mass-murderer-to-be wrote a will of chilling suicidal finality in the month when the massacre in Lebanon enraged Arabs across the Middle East?

Instead of that, we're getting World War II commentaries about Western military morale and talk on CNN about Pakistan's role as "a key and strong ally of the US" - this when general Pervez Musharraf (a military dictator, though of course we no longer call him so) is desperately trying to prevent his country falling into anarchy.

No, on the BBC we had to listen to how it was "a perfect moonless night for the air armada" to bomb Afghanistan.

Pardon me? Are the Germans back at Cap Gris Nez? Are our fighter squadrons back in the skies of Kent, fighting off the Dorniers and Heinkels?

Yesterday, we were told on one satellite channel of the "air combat" over Afghanistan. A lie, of course. The Taleban had none of the ageing Migs aloft. There was no combat.

Of course, I know that after the atrocities in New York we can't 'play fair' between the ruthless bin Laden and the West; we cant' make an equivalence between the mass-murderers and the American and British forces who are trying to destroy the Taleban.

But that's not the point. It's our viewers and readers we've got to 'play fair' with. My postbag from the Kosovo war - and the start of my new postbag now - and a sample of our readers' letters in the

Independent

- suggest that the great British public, indeed the great American public too, can be deeply insulted by the way we are reporting war. Most of them want to hear us ask the tough questions.

Why have we waited until now - when two million Afghans are dead in wars we encouraged and largely armed - to show our sympathy for Afghanistan?

Why, when President Bush tells us he's not against the Afghan people - only the Taleban and bin Laden's "network of terror" - don't we remind our readers and viewers that President Reagan said the same of the Libyans before he bombed Libya? And that President Bush Senior said the same of the Iraqis before he bombed Iraq?

Must we, because of our rage at the massacre of the innocents in America, because of our desire to kowtow to the elderly 'terrorism experts', lose all our critical faculties? Why at least not tell us how these 'terrorism experts' came to be so expert? And what are their connections with dubious intelligence services?

In some cases, in America, the men giving us their advice on screen are the very same operatives who steered the CIA and the FBI into the greatest intelligence failure in modern history: the inability to uncover the plot, four years in the making, to destroy the lives of almost 6,000 people.

President Bush says this is a war between good and evil. You are either with us or against us. But that's exactly what bin Laden says. Isn't it worth pointing this out and asking where it leads?

-

INDEPENDENT