Robert Fisk on Lebanon: "The Ceasefire Can't Work"

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I was interesting in Mr. Fisk's comments on the casualty figures.

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ROBERT FISK: Oh, well, you can. Hezbollah -- despite the fact the Israelis say they didn’t, Hezbollah actually published some of their casualty figures each day. It was quite remarkable. They’d say, ‘We’ve lost two more men, and their names are so-and-so, and they had so many children. They came from this village.’ Isn’t that amazing? First time it's ever happened that an enemy of Israel actually, as the war goes on, publishes the names of its own casualties, you know?

But, no, we had a pretty good idea who was dying. We had lists of names. We knew who, the age and so on. I mean, you can't say, well, this may be a Hezbollah. I mean, I don't think it's five years old is likely to be a full Hezbollah member. I think, three years old, I doubt that it can fire a missile at a warship or an airplane. No, we have pretty good -- you know, the standards of accuracy during the Lebanese civil war were always open to question, because you’d go to hospitals and they had lost --the hospital had been hit by a bomb and they had lost their papers, and it was a civil war.

But now, you know, the Israelis attacked into a country that had been rebuilt. It was pretty much modern European standards. It isn’t any more. Mobile phones work properly. Ledgers are kept. Computers keep all -- you know, you can go into a hospital, unlike in America, where you’re considered a vulture to prey around a hospital if you’re a reporter. You go to a hospital in Lebanon, and they say, “Please come in, Mr. Fisk. Cup of tea? Do you want to go the mortuary and count the bodies? Do you want the names of the bodies?” And you can pretty much see, if a guy has got a green uniform on, he's a Hezbollah guy.

Hezbollah have said that they had 56 dead. My friends who are close to Hezbollah and most people in Hezbollah I know say their actual figure is nearer to 253 Hezbollah dead. But since the civilian casualty figure was -- I mean, since the overall casualty figure was approaching 1,300, even if the 253 figure is not exaggerated, and I think this might be true -- I saw a lot of wounded Hezbollah, quite seriously wounded Hezbollah -- even if the 253 figure is true, the number of civilians, total civilian casualties, must be in the region of 1,000.

Democracy Now

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Yeah but you know

right wing creeps and freeptards say that Fisk is not reliable so we shouldn't believe anything he has to say.

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2. Mr. Fisk seems like an honest man to me.

He has his opinions and states them, I don't know that I've ever seen him make stuff up. He does have a very good knowledge of Lebanon, and that is what I was interested in here.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. Fisk is just about the best there is on the middle east

and the muslim world. I was referring to the inevitable attacks that appear here whenever he is cited that regurgitate the rightwing claims that Fisk is a liar. The right hates Fisk because he actually tries to report objectively on what is going on, and that cannot be tolerated.

[breakaleg]

3. that still puts a lot of civilians dead, and as he said here and

other times, they welcome the foreign journalists at the hospitals so he would be in a position to know.