Fisk Follies
: An especially, incredibly, disgustingly unbelievable Fisk in the Independent. He pleads for the release of his “friend,” Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. But his rationale is typically Fiskian: He ‘s advising the terrorist kidnapper slime to let go of Pearl or else reporters will leave (as they did Beirut) and then the terrorist kidnappers’ story won’t be told; Fisk is playing flack to these scum.
Daniel’s kidnappers are now making an identical error. They gave all American journalists until midnight last night to leave Pakistan, the best way of ensuring that the suffering of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, the chaotic, lawless Afghanistan which has emerged from America’s victory, the crisis in Kashmir and the plight of Pakistan’s millions of poor goes unrecorded, and all for a series of demands that will never be met by the United States.
The idiocy does not end there. He goes on to attack us for the way we are treating prisoners at Gitmo — even as he does not bother to attack these slime for keeping a reporter in chains with a gun to his head and threatening to kill him.
Now I happen to think that the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is outrageous, illegal, a scandal for a country that claims to be a democracy. I wrote here earlier that these men were being treated much as the Beirut hostages were treated, complete with the threat of death from drumhead courts. And ñ given the dangerous, infantile State of the Union speech which President Bush gave last week ñ I am not surprised that the US government saw nothing wrong with releasing those disgusting photographs of the shackled, hooded, drugged prisoners.
But much of the world’s anger at this scandal was only provoked after journalists had highlighted the conditions in which the men were held and in editorials and opinion columns explained why their treatment amounted to a form of revenge. Without reporters, we would not have been given such devastating eye-witness proof of the thousands of innocent Afghans killed in those American B-52 bombing raids, nor of the murder of Taliban prisoners by our so-called allies of the Northern Alliance.
But thisreally takes the cake! Fisk tries to claim he is a personal friend of Osama bin Laden’s and thus Osama will listen to Fisk’s appeal. Unfriggingbelieveable, this guy:
I don’t know if Osama bin Laden is alive. But I suspect he is. If so, he knows what is happening around him. I know him and he knows me. And so, if he has the power to do so, and if he reads this article ñ as I think he will if he is alive because my reports are often reprinted in Arabic and Pushtu ñ I want him to do everything he can to secure Daniel’s release.
What a bozo!
7th largest company, 5th Amendment, 1st biggest scam
: Ken Lay decides not to testify before Congress because they might be mean to him.
Pat Buchanan rears his ugly head
: I wasn’t going to post today. I’m too busy moping. But then I came across a Pat Buchanan interview at Beliefnet and that was enough to wake me out of staring stuppor long enough to cut-and-paste this. Inbetween arguing that America has been “deChristianized” (and when did we abandon the separation of church and state to become Christianized in the first place?) and that immigrants are ruining us (sweet), Buchanan argues that Democrats are immoral. When asked whether we are a divided or unified nation after 9.11, he said:
So thereís been tremendous unity behind this war, the sense that this is a moral war. But can this sentiment bring together a nation as divided as we were over the Florida returns? That was over something that went to the heart of what people believed. The best criterion to judge how people voted in 2000 was how often they went to church. People who went to church voted for Bush; people who rarely or never went to church voted for Gore. That is for me the moral and social divide in America. We donít believe the same way anymore. We donít believe in the same ideas of right and wrong, and morally speaking, we live on a different continent.
If only you lived in a different continent, Pat, you pig. And now I’ll crawl back into my hole.
