Fisk on Mumbai, Obama, Torture camps

[cricketplaya]

interesting read, thought I’d share, maybe more of a moderate opinion but Robert Fisk’s work is always interesting.

…

An oddly similar parallel has emerged since the election of Obama. During the campaign,** President Ahmadinejad of Iran announced that the “Israeli regime” would be destroyed. That’s actually what he said in Farsi – not “Israel”, though the distinction might appear to be splitting hairs. Immediately, Mrs Hillary Clinton announced that if Tehran attacked Israel, she would “flatten Iran”**. And now she is to be secretary of state, the Iranians are understandably a little bit angry. Was the new pussycat in the State Department going to take over from the previous pussycat by threatening violence against Iran when Obama supposedly wants “dialogue”?

And a kind of inverted hypocrisy immediately followed. Mrs Clinton, American “officials” let on, should not be taken too seriously because this was an election campaign. Indeed, Obama – putting distance between the mutual recriminations of both Democrat candidates a few months ago – this week blithely dismissed their own election speeches. What he meant was that they both told lies to get votes. Yet the crackpot president of Iran’s threat was still to be taken with the greatest seriousness. Not difficult to get the message, is it? The future secretary of state should not be believed when she threatens Iran – but Iran must be taken seriously when it threatens Israel.

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**And I rather suspect that the “highly disciplined” and “professional” killers of Mumbai come from the same stable. The Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence? Quite possibly. The Pakistani army – many of whose men have been mysteriously captured and equally mysteriously vanished in the tribal territories? Maybe. Or the Indian security services, whose inter-religious makeup is never discussed, but against whom there is substantial evidence of massacres in Kashmir? These days, all such acts of cruelty should be referred to by what the police used to call an '“open mind”.
**
Just look how we’ve forgotten the CIA’s secret prisons. In Afghanistan, a Fisk source who has never – ever – been wrong, **tells me that there are at least 20 of these torture centres still active in the country, six in Zabol province alone. **But we don’t care about Afghans. Yet I was struck by a tiny – irrelevant, you might say – incident at Herat airport a couple of weeks ago when two Afghans invited me for lunch beside the runway. Our small Kandahar-Kabul aircraft was refuelling while I shared their bread and tea and boiled egg, leaving my web of eggshells on the burned grass. Imagine my embarrassment when I stood up and turned to find them gently collecting each piece of eggshell and placing them in a plastic bag. Keep Afghanistan clean. Will we? Ping. Welcome to Afghanistan.

Robert Fisk’s World: Whenever I’m in Tajikistan, my mobile phone says I’m in Dubai - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent