Monday, March 06, 2006
FLYING FISK PUTS WAR INTO WARMING
“The Independent‘s veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk,” writes Felicity Arbuthnot, “is no conspiracy theorist.” We’ll be the judge of that, Felicity. Consider Fisk’s latest theory:
This is February in Lebanon and early spring should have warmed the air. But it hadn’t.
It hadn’t? Dude, that’s ... that’s ... inexplicable! I blame the Bush clan (and, shortly, so will Fisk).
Right now, flying around the world to launch my new book – travelling more than the average air crew – I’m finding a lot of odd parallels. In Melbourne last autumn, for example, the Australian spring turned out to be much colder than expected.
Something—something terrible—is afoot.
Yet in Toronto at Christmas, all the snow melted. I padded round the streets of the city and had to take my pullover off because of the sun.
Maybe it was all that padding around. Doesn’t Toronto have cars? Or at least sleds?
I should add that those Canadians who welcomed this dangerous thaw seem at odds with reality; it’s a bit like being cold and then expressing pleasure that your house is burning down on the grounds that you now feel warmer.
Ungrateful Canadians; if it had only been colder, more of them might have died. Fisk now seeks a cause for all these pullover-removing, chilly-Lebanon weather anomalies:
A British scientist, Chris Busby, has been digging through statistics from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment which measures uranium in high-volume air samples. His suspicion was that depleted uranium particles from the two Gulf wars – DU is used in the anti-armour warheads of the ordnance of American and British tanks and planes – may have spread across Europe. I’m not a conspiracy theorist ...
So we’ve heard.
... but here’s something very odd. When Busby applied for the information from Aldermaston in 2004, they told him to get lost. When he demanded the information under the 2005 Freedom of Information Act, Aldermaston coughed up the figures. But wait.
Waiting!
The only statistic missing from the data they gave him was for the early months of 2003. Remember what was happening then? A little dust-up in Iraq, a massive American-British invasion of Saddam’s dictatorship in which tons of DU shells were used by American troops. Eventually Busby, who worked out all the high-altitude wind movements over Europe, received the data from the Defence Procurement Agency in Bristol – which showed an increase in uranium in high-volume air sampling over Britain during this period ... Shock and awe indeed.
Depleted uranium used in Kuwait and Iraq is forcing Robert Fisk to remove his pullover in Toronto. When you say it like that, the connection is kind of obvious.
I have a hunch that something more serious is happening to our planet which we are not being told about.
Or perhaps Fisk—currently “flying around the world to launch my new book, travelling more than the average air crew”—is simply trying to avoid blame for his own Gaia-smashing contribution to global warming:
Mark Ellingham, the founder of Rough Guides, and Tony Wheeler, who created Lonely Planet after taking the hippie trail across Asia, want fellow travellers to “fly less and stay longer” and donate money to carbon offsetting schemes. From next month, warnings will appear in all new editions of their guides about the impact of flying on global warming alongside alternative ways of reaching certain destinations.
Given Fisk’s exposure to the Middle East, he’s probably loaded with DU traces, too. He should be quarantined.
UPDATE: ”DU has the potential to destroy all planetary life.”
UPDATE II. It’s a two-fisted Fisking! During an interview with the ABC’s Eleanor Hall, a “baffled” Robert Fisk further explored his earlier theory that someone in Iraq is doing something:
ROBERT FISK: You know, I was at the funeral of a Sunni and asked his brother, you know, he’d been murdered - probably by Shi’ites, I think - I asked his brother if there was going to be a civil war and he said look, I’m married to a Shi’ite. You want me to kill my wife? Why do you westerners always want civil war?
Well, we don’t. Apart from Paul McGeough, that is. Do continue, Robert:
ROBERT FISK: Somebody wants a civil war. I mean, if you really try hard and you kill enough people you may be able to produce this.
ELEANOR HALL: So somebody wants a civil war?
ROBERT FISK: Yes.
ELEANOR HALL: You must have some clues about who.
ROBERT FISK: I don’t have… I have suspicions, I don’t have clues. I spend a lot of time, when I’m in Baghdad, trying to find out who this is and what this is. Clearly, the Interior Ministry have been torturing people to death, and clearly the Interior Ministry have people who do operate death squads.
But you’ve got to remember something, that a very prominent figure in politics, and a close friend of the United States, was accused just before the first elections of executing, quote, “insurgents,” unquote, in a police station, a police station I know very well. This was reported in Australia at the time. I suspect the story is true. I think he was a murderer, and he was working for the Americans, and he was a former CIA operative, as we know.
Fisk bravely declines to name Iyad Allawi. The rest of the interview is gibberish, notable only for Fisk’s claim to possess psychic abilities:
ROBERT FISK: I did a CBC interview in Toronto, which I’ve got a copy of, three years before 2001, and I said an explosion is coming. And obviously …
ELEANOR HALL: But do you think an explosion is still coming?
ROBERT FISK: Oh yes. I don’t … it doesn’t have to be a real physical one like ‘bang’. It might be. But something is coming. I mean, I feel it very strongly.
Hmm; paranormal Bob predicted September 11, and now he foresees another attack. This might justify a series of pre-emptive strikes across the entire Middle East.