Robert Fisk, The Independent, March 4:
Five years ago, Time magazine offered to buy one of my photographs of Bin Laden in Afghanistan for its front cover. I refused to sell it. Time wanted, so their picture desk told me, to use a computer to “age” him in my snapshot. Again, I refused. “So how much do you want?” the Time picture desk asked. They didn’t understand. Bin Laden may have no integrity, but my pictures did: they showed a man in his 30s and 40s, not in his 60s or 70s.
But now he is 50 years old. I don’t think he’ll be celebrating in his cave. Just reflecting that, white-flecked though his beard now is, he remains the West’s target number one, as iconic as any devil, so embarrassing to Mr Bush that the President dare no longer pronounce his name, lest it remind his audience that Bin Laden is the one that got away.
I read the “experts”, telling me that Bin Laden has cancer, that he needs medical machines to survive. But we say this about all our enemies. Bin Laden uses now a stick to walk – unusual for a man of 50 – but we know he was wounded in Afghanistan. The truth is – and forget the “experts” who might tell you otherwise – that Bin Laden is still alive. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he may be damned and elusive, but he remains on this earth. Aged 50.
I must say I found Fisk’s account in “The Great War for Civilization” of his meeting with bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan to be rivetting. I would have packing shit!
Viva,
It was most interesting, wasn’t it? It would be nice to put them together again and read Fisk’s account of the meeting. The questions he could ask! Assuming Usama is still alive that is.
Hi Andrew
Yes it was. I thought it was one of the best parts of the whole book. I bought the book wanting to immerse myself in the world of something I would never have the courage to do myself – a foreign affairs reporter in the world’s hotspots.
I was disappointed however, that the bin Laden section was one of the very few that actually read like the adrenaline rush of such a reporter. Even all the minute details of which airline to catch, how to bribe locals to fax copy from hotels and so on really grabbed me.
His descriptions of bin Laden’s mien, the transportation by bin Laden’s flunkies, and most compellingly when he was sitiing in a tent and suddenly bin Laden burst in with a whispered proposition that Fisk wasn’t sure whether it was a take it or leave it (life or death) offer to convert to their jihad.
All of that kind of stuff was great. As you no doubt know if you read this site regularly, my sympathies are not at all with the Islamists, but with Israel, the US, Australia, and the West in general. Still, that really would not affect my appreciation of a reporter’s tales though.
Unfortunately, Fisk spent far too much time editorializing and sermonizing. I have quite a solid grasp of history and particularly international law. Fisk was totally at sea here and it was on these topics that he dropped his reportage and tried to turn historian. He failed.
Still, it is one of those books that one never puts back into the library. It is always lying around my house, and I’m always dipping into it.