December 04, 2005

Robert Frisk, veteran mideast correspondant for the BBC, speaks with Toronto's Now Magazine about what's really going on in Iraq. Among other things, he critizes 'hotel journalists' who are credited with first-hand account because they're in Baghdad when a car bomb blows up, though they don't risk stepping out to survey the damage or interview witnesses.

He's gone to morgues in Iraq and read their recurds and concludes "I found that 1,100 civilians had been killed by violence just in Baghdad in July alone... If you include Mosel, Kirkuk, Amara, Najaf, Fallujah, Basra and others, you must be talking about 3,000 to 4,000 a month." I realize that this may not be news, but I enjoyed reading about Robert Frisk, and the article gave me a fresh, more personal perspective on the situation in Iraq.

posted by calimehtar 18 years ago
  • That is one brave old dude. I like how he understands the situations of the "hotel journalists", and he's not telling them to go out and get amongst it, but rather just to fess up that they are not eye witnesses but pushers of official bits of paper.
  • ...read their recurds... Almost ethnic typo. Journalism on journalism. Sort of like Internal Affairs?
  • His name is "Robert Fisk". Apologies for stamping, but some of us have known him pretty well for years.
  • Thanks for this FPP... a moving article.
  • Also, he doesn't work for the BBC, he works for the Independent.
  • Must've been a Freudian slip - he seems like a pretty "frisk-y" fellow. I have a lot of respect for him.
  • His name was Robert Paulson.