Robert Fisk.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: The Progressive Interview

Two common items circulating among progressives on the Internet after September 11 have been Robert Fisk's dispatches for the London Independent and W.H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939." The last stanza of that poem begins: "All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie." That's what Fisk does: He uses his voice to expose falsehoods and highlight injustice and, as Auden put it, to "exchange messages" with the rest of us who are in this together.

The most decorated British foreign correspondent, Fisk has been based in the Middle East for the last twenty-five years, and his knowledge of the area is unparalleled. He has interviewed Osama bin Laden three times, once in the Sudan and twice in Afghanistan, and his take on the man is instructive. So, too, is his warning about the current war, which he views as a trap. Here's what he said in his article of September 13: "A slaughter by the U.S. in retaliation for the New York and Washington bloodbaths might just move the Arab masses from stubborn docility to the point of detonation."

Three years ago, I interviewed Fisk when he came through Madison (see our July 1998 issue). This time, I called him in his hotel room in Islamabad on October 24 and spoke with him for an hour and forty-five minutes.

Unique in his ability to mix first-hand reporting with trenchant analysis, Fisk is a storyteller at heart, and he interrupted his conversation several times to check his notebook to make sure he was giving me precise quotations. Toward the end, he cited the British pacifist poet Siegfried Sassoon, and before we signed off, he invoked Auden, whose "Epitaph on a Tyrant" is about Stalin, Fisk said, "but is perfect for Saddam Hussein." Auden wrote, "When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,/And when he cried the little children died in the streets."

Just then, the operator broke in on the line, and Fisk said, "Matt, we'll have to stop the poetry session."

Here is an excerpt of our talk.

Q: Where were you when you first heard about the September 11 attacks?

Robert Fisk: I was actually on an airliner, about to head from Europe across the Atlantic. The plane hadn't moved away from the stand when I got a phone call from the office saying that it looked like two hijacked planes had just flown into the World Trade Center. I walked back and immediately told the crew members, and they told the captain, who came out and asked me what I knew. We took off anyway and started over the Atlantic. The pilot was talking to Brussels, and the co-pilot was coming back and telling me what they were being told. Then we heard there was a fourth aircraft that had somehow crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania. After a while, they came on in French--it was a French airliner--and said that America had just closed all its air space, so we're turning around. Back I went toward Europe again.

Q: Do you think Osama bin Laden is responsible for the attacks?

Fisk: When you have a crime against humanity that is so awesome in scale and death, it is more than permissible to look around and say, who recently has been declaring war on the United States? Of course, the compass points straight to bin Laden.

But why is it that we go to immense lengths getting the Serbs who were responsible for the massacre of 7,000 at Srbrenica--that's slightly more than the total figure for New York--and we take them to a tribunal in The Hague, and one after another, we arraign them, try them, convict them, and punish them in front of the world, but no plans have been brought forward to get bin Laden and his friends and put them on trial?

Q: What do you make of the evidence against bin Laden?

Fisk: I was very struck by the fact that Colin Powell said he would produce evidence and then never produced it. Then Tony Blair produced a document of seventy paragraphs, but only the last nine referred to the World Trade Center, and they were not convincing. So we have a little problem here: If they're guilty, where is the evidence? And if we can't hear the evidence, why are we going to war?

Q: At the beginning of the war, you said the U.S. might be...