Postcards from the edge

By A.C. Thompson

OSAMA BIN LADEN'S foot soldiers were waiting in a pickup truck outside Robert Fisk's hotel in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

It was 1996, and Fisk, a foreign correspondent for the London Independent, wanted to interview the jihadi kingpin. The heavily armed guys in the truck were supposed to drive him to bin Laden's compound.

There was just one problem: he was afraid bin Laden's deputies were actually planning to kill him.

A cagey veteran, Fisk had seen plenty of his journalist colleagues run headlong into ambushes by warlords or militia leaders eager to prove their ruthlessness – and in 1996 bin Laden had already established a sinister reputation. Still, he swallowed his fear and got in the truck.

After six hours of driving, Fisk believed he was safe. "I knew then they weren't going to kill me," he recounted in an interview with us last week. "They would've done it already." Fisk, the first journalist to learn of bin Laden's links to anti-U.S. guerrillas in Somalia, ended up living through three meetings with the most wanted man in the world.

We caught up with the 55-year-old Beirut-based reporter when he visited the Bay Area on a five-day speaking tour arranged by the Middle East Children's Alliance. Fisk has become something of an icon to Americans skeptical of U.S. foreign policy in the Arab world and hungry for alt-news coverage. They seek out his dispatches – some commentary, some spot news – on the Independent's Web site (www.independent.co.uk), tune in to his occasional appearances on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! and KPFA's Flashpoints, and turn out en masse when he lectures at universities and churches.

The ink slinger also has critics – plenty of 'em. Fisk's foes, who include Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz and Hollywood actor John Malkovich, portray him as an inveterate America-basher and a mouthpiece for Yasser Arafat.

Sunburned and slightly dowdy, Fisk has earned his cult following – and die-hard enemies – by doing two things most U.S. journalists refuse to do. First, he gets close to the action – so close he was nearly beaten to death in Afghanistan last year. And after 26 years in battle-blasted Beirut, he simply has sharper instincts and better sources than many reporters at bigger papers.

Second, he documents in detail the bloody excesses of the Israeli security apparatus. One recent story related the horrible fate of three Palestinian kids. The headline sums it up well: "Teenagers Shot by Israelis; Then Run Over by Tank." An April dispatch told of a Palestinian man trapped in his house by Israeli gunfire while his mother and brother, gunned down by the Israeli army, bled to death.

So what does Fisk make of his punch-pulling counterparts in the American press corps? "For many years now, particularly since 1967, your press and your television have largely been frightened of telling the truth about the Middle East, because they know the moment they say anything remotely critical about Israel, they're going to be attacked, they're going to be called anti-Semites," he said. "Many reporters say, 'This is a job. I don't want to be controversial. I don't want endless memos from editors.' "

Indeed, Fisk knows all about controversy. He gets stacks of hate mail. One typical note – scrawled on a Christmas card – describes him as a "leading anti-Semite and pro-fascist Islamophile propagandist."

Fisk's critics don't seem to be well acquainted with his work. While definitely a proponent of Palestinian self-determination, he writes regularly about the misdeeds of Arabs. An April 24 dispatch, for example, offered a graphic account of a Palestinian mob murdering three fellow Palestinians accused of collaborating with the Israelis. Fisk found the West Bank villagers "whooping with glee" and "roaring with delight" as they hurled stones at the strung-up corpses of the alleged traitors. Throughout our two-hour conversation he repeatedly referred to Arafat as "a corrupt old man," and he routinely puts similar comments about the Palestinian leader in print.

Occasionally, Fisk's write-ups fall flat – a couple of preachy, overly simplistic reports from Afghanistan come to mind. But when training his sights on American policies, he generally hits the mark. Case in point: our new plan to carefully control immigration by people from certain Arab states.

"In the future, Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians who want to come to the States will not get visas," he told us. "If they do, they will be fingerprinted, interrogated, and possibly arrested. But there's not a single citizen of those three countries – and these are not nice places – involved in Sept. 11. Most of the men involved in Sept. 11 were Saudis, and Saudis can go right to the American embassy and get a visa and fly right in."