Samizdat, keeping truth alive: The real news from Iraq

Thanks to the Lannan Foundation, and many volunteers who swiftly responded to this attempt at censorship, the US Government failed to suppress this important news from Iraq. Amy Goodman interviews Robert Fisk Quotes may not be perfectly exact, but are close.

• In Basra, "militias effectively took over the police"
• 42 murders in Basra which were left untouched
• when Christian alcohol-sellers were murdered, the police did nothing
• Police responsible for murder of journalist with the NYT
• Death squad killings
• Outside of Kurdish areas and the Green Zone, there is a "full-scale insurgency by both Sunnis and Sh'ia" against Western forces." It can't be rolled back.
• On the streets, "it is hell on earth."
• Violent deaths in Baghdad were 1100 in July alone.
• Speaking about what to do: "There is no answer. You've got to go.... The Americans have to leave and the Americans can't leave."
• The whole of the countryside outside of Baghdad is the property of the insurgency.
• "Our lives [journalists] are worth nothing to the insurgents. Our lives are worth nothing to the British or the Americans."
• The error of the Iraq war was that Bush and Blair went to war for ideological reasons. This causes a distortion of intelligence. "If you understand injustice, which is in part what the Middle East is about, you could make sense of it." But without a sense of injustice, the entire intelligence apparatus is useless.
• When a crime is committed, the first thing police look for is a motive. With 9/11, people were prevented from talking about the motive by phony accusations of anti-Americanism or even anti-Semitism.

And my personal favorites:

• "[T]he New York Times should be called 'Intelligence Officials Say'"
• Goodman, "What gives you hope?" Fisk: "Nothing. Nothing.... Ordinary people who speak out, I suppose, but as for governments, nothing."

Fisk also does a reading on broader issues of insurgency in the Middle East