AMY GOODMAN: Journalist Robert Fisk wrote in Saturday’s The Independent, “In a major surrender to Israeli diplomatic pressure, BBC officials in London have banned their staff in Britain and the Middle East from referring to Israel’s policy of murdering its guerrilla opponents as 'assassination'. BBC reporters have been told that in future they are to use Israel’s own euphemism for the murders, calling them 'targeted killings'. BBC journalists were astonished that the assignments editor, Malcolm Downing, should have sent out the memorandum to staff, stating that the word 'assassinations' 'should only be used for high-profile … assassinations'.”

Robert Fisk joins us on the line right now from Jerusalem. He is a reporter for the British newspaper, The Independent.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

ROBERT FISK: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about this policy that you’ve exposed in The Independent?

ROBERT FISK: Well, it’s a policy that many of us thought for a long time was actually slowly being implemented in dribs and drabs. We were aware that BBC journalists covering the Middle East, both from London and in the Middle East region, not just in Jerusalem, but Cairo, as well, and other cities, were increasingly reporting events with euphemisms. We were also aware that there had been a series of meetings between Israeli Embassy officials and BBC executives in London, at which the Israelis had repeatedly criticized coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Already there had been problems, which were perfectly evident in the BBC’s very sloppy reporting of the Palestinian complaints about Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. The latest ruling, which actually came out in a memo — it was on paper — merely confirms the general drift of the BBC towards the half-hearted euphemistic reporting of the Middle East, for which CNN has long been famous in the region — that is to say, a reporting that tries desperately not to offend anyone, and, in so doing, manages to make events almost incomprehensible to people who don’t live in the region.

The importance of this was shown even in the BBC’s initial denial of my report. They said it wasn’t an attempt to bow to Israeli diplomatic pressure. They merely thought that “assassination” should be used only for leading figures, i.e. Rabin — Rabin, of course, being Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered, actually, by an Israeli Jew in Israel. He, of course, was the prime minister. Now, the whole point, of course, is that the words which the BBC then, on paper, said the reporters should use, “targeted killings” — an extraordinary phrase when you come to think of it; it doesn’t have a meaning other than someone’s tried to hide something — is precisely the word that the Israeli government and Israeli army and Israeli Foreign Ministry use for their state-sponsored campaign of murder against Palestinian activists and guerrillas. So, in fact, the BBC were being urged to use Israel’s phrase.

And indeed, on the Sunday morning, that’s exactly what they did. The first report that came on the World Service Television used “targeted killings” four times and then went on to use more euphemisms. We were referred at one point to a gun battle between Palestinians in the town of Beit Jala and Israelis in the — what was called the Jewish “neighborhood” of Gilo. Now, what happened, in fact, is that Palestinian gunmen in Beit Jala opened fire on the Jewish settlement in Gilo, and Israeli tanks, as usual, fired back. But the BBC didn’t call it a “settlement.” They called it a “neighborhood.” And even more, they described it as a neighborhood on disputed land. This, of course, is State Department-CNN-Israeli language for occupied territory. The story of Gilo is that it was built illegally as a settlement for Jews, and Jews only, on the land of the people of Beit Jala after the '67 War. It's occupied land, not disputed. And it is not a neighborhood. It is a settlement, because it’s not for all people. It’s only for Israelis. And therefore, in fact, “Gilo” is the Hebrew of the Arabic “Jala.” But none of this appeared in the BBC story. It was made to appear that there was a brutal Palestinian attack on this friendly neighborhood that was just over a question of disputed land, not a settlement illegally built under international law on occupied land.

So, what we’ve seen is a steady erosion of the use of real language to describe this great, historical and very bloody tragedy and to turn it, in a sense, into a question of an odd kind of dispute, in which the Israelis only want peace, and the Palestinians can’t control their own people. Over and over again, BBC reporters have asked, “Can Arafat control his own people?” as if the Oslo agreement was meant to set him up as a sort of colonial ruler, which I suppose, in a sense, it probably was. So, what we’ve had is this erosion of reality.

It was very interesting, for example, tragic for the BBC, that in 1999, at the height of the Kosovo War, one of their leading presenters, a very popular presenter working for the BBC, called Jill Dando, was murdered outside her home in London. Since then, a man has been convicted of plotting to kill her and actually going and doing so with a pistol. But the BBC at the time did not refer to her “targeted killing.” They called it “murder.” And, in fact, when you set out to kill someone, without a legitimate — any kind of legal backing to it, it is called “murder.” But the BBC won’t call it “murder” when Palestinians, without evidence, are killed by Israelis. They call it “targeted killing.” So, what we’ve got is a steady bowing down to the pressure of a foreign nation on the BBC to report in the way Israel wants, rather than in the way which the reporters themselves would like to, which is truthfully.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Robert Fisk, let me bring professor Noam Chomsky into this conversation. Mr. Downing, the BBC official who issued the memo that Robert Fisk exposed, went on to say, “There are lots of other words for death.” Your response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, my first response, since I have a chance, is to thank Robert Fisk again for the fantastic reporting that he’s been doing for decades, which is absolutely essential to understanding anything that’s going on in that region of the world and elsewhere, and to Democracy Now! for allowing people here to hear these things.

Sure, he’s right. There’s plenty of ways for referring to killing. You could say it’s sort of an accident that took place when the helicopters were looking somewhere else. But what Fisk said is exactly correct. It’s simply subordination to power, whether it’s the power of Israel or the power of the United States, one could argue — my suspicion is more of the latter than the former. And the U.S. press does the same thing. So, “disputed territories,” which Fisk mentioned, is standard here. Occasionally you’ll read that the Palestinians call them “occupied territories,” which is true. The Palestinians and everyone else in the world outside the United States calls them “occupied territories.”

These assassinations are being carried out by helicopters. What Fisk said here is — many of them. It’s claimed that Israeli helicopters killed somebody in Nablus. That’s not quite accurate. It’s U.S. helicopters that killed somebody in Nablus, U.S. helicopters with Israeli pilots. Israel is unable to produce helicopters, has advanced military society but has its limits. Immediately, going back to the current Intifada, Israeli — U.S. helicopters began attacking civilian targets in Palestine immediately after the fighting broke out, with no military provocation, killing lots of people. This is within days. Instantly, the United States, then the Clinton administration, arranged the largest shipment in a decade of military helicopters to Israel, knowing, surely, that they would be used for these purposes. Shortly after, they began to be used for assassinations. That’s continued right up to the present. There have been new shipments this year again of the most advanced attack helicopters. So what this should be described as is direct and conscious U.S. participation in attacks against civilians in territories under military occupation, including assassinations.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, and we’re going to continue with you, Professor Chomsky, talking about — and, overall, look very quickly at the Bush administration’s major foreign policy issues, particularly Colombia. But before we go, I wanted to ask Robert Fisk, since you’re on the ground with reporters from the BBC, what their response is, sort of off the record, their attitudes toward what the BBC officials want?

ROBERT FISK: Well, if they’re telling me things off the record, I can’t tell you, can I, Amy? Look, their situation is that they’re trying to tell the truth. But you only have to look at one report, that was on not long ago — I mean, a few hours ago — in which a reporter had to refer to “the death of a Palestinian” — and I’m quoting — in what Israelis regard as a targeted killing and what Palestinians called an assassination, almost as if the guy was refereeing a football match, rather than part of a bloody tragedy. And the question immediately came to my mind — this is a terrible demeaning of human life, the human life of both sides, when the BBC is reduced, out of fear of criticism, to reporting the events of this region as if they’re reporting the outcome of a football match.

I would like to add just one more point, that there’s been another interesting development in BBC coverage, whereby they always refer, when they do — it’s less and less — to Sharon’s, Ariel Sharon’s involvement in the 1982 Sabra-Shatila massacre, and they always refer, because the Israeli Embassy always points this out, to the fact that the Kahan Commission report into the massacre, which concluded in '83, referred — said that he was only indirectly responsible. Here again, there's a diminution of the truth, because although the basic content of the report makes this remark, the sum up of the report, the final conclusions of the Kahan Commission report, page 103 in the English edition, actually says he is “personally responsible.” But the word “personally” has been dropped also from all BBC references to Sharon’s connection with Sabra and Shatila. So we have this continuing chip, chip, chipping away at the truth to try and make it amenable, to try and avoid the criticisms.

It was interesting, though, and here BBC reporters in this region were quite cheered, that the BBC, despite absolutely predictable and utterly slanderous claims of antisemitism and doing things for Hitler’s memory and things like this, in that they produced this program called The Accused, which was about Sharon’s involvement in the Sabra-Shatila massacre. They did go ahead and show the film. And it was interesting that immediately after they showed it, all the accusations of antisemitism against the BBC just stopped. They had obviously failed to achieve their purpose, so they were abandoned. And you would have thought that a major, especially British broadcasting organization — Britain, after all, is not providing helicopters and missiles — that it would have had the courage to carry on. But, indeed, these memos that I’m referring to, with the diminution of truth that they imply, actually followed after the showing of this program called The Accused.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Robert Fisk, joining us from The Independent newspaper of Britain, on the ground in Jerusalem, has been with The Independent for more than 20 years, based in Beirut, Lebanon. We will continue with Noam Chomsky in just a minute. After that, Winona LaDuke and Ralph Nader join us. They have a new organization. It’s called Democracy Rising, and thousands are rallying behind it. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, The Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman.

On Sunday, The New York Times headlined that after six months, the Bush administration was planning a change in focus. The Times explained that Bush would now focus his attention on a, quote, “vigorous discussion of values,” and an emphasis on, quote, “themes that strike Americans in a more emotional, personal way.”

As the Times rhapsodized about the Bush administration’s change in focus, the U.S. Navy continued bombing Vieques. The DEA resumed its aerial fumigation of Colombia. Condoleezza Rice continued to warn that the U.S. might bomb Iraq at any time. Colin Powell continued to insist that the U.N. bow to U.S. demands in its upcoming World Conference on Racism. And U.S. officials of all stripes continue to defend U.S. efforts to undermine or scuttle international agreements on global warming, small arms and biological weapons and tobacco control. We might be forgiven for asking, “Just what has changed?”

Noam Chomsky, last year, you wrote the book on Rogue States, arguing that the U.S. is seen as much as a rogue state — is seen as a rogue state by much of the world. Can you talk about the international reaction to all this, and how Bush, in his months in office, until this big vacation he’s taking, compares to Clinton?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it’s true that the United States was seen as a rogue state in much of the world. In fact, that was recognized even in perfectly mainstream journals like Foreign Affairs. And that’s extended. By now, the U.S. is regularly referred to as a rogue state, even in Europe and even in England, which is the most subordinated country to U.S. power. And it’s pretty obvious why. The litany that you ran through is a good part of it.

The Bush administration has, in fact, made it very clear that it’s not going to pay attention to world opinion. It’s going to move ahead, pursuing what they call U.S. interests, which is not the interests of the U.S. population, but rather the interests of the extremely narrow sectors that Bush represents and that got him into power.

There’s a change from the Clinton administration, but we shouldn’t exaggerate the change. So, the major policies that are being pursued, that are in fact frightening the world, are simply extensions, maybe escalations, but extensions of Clinton administration policies.

Maybe the most extreme of these is the militarization of space, which is now impossible to conceal. For a long time, national missile defense has been described in the framework of what’s called “strategic deception” in the technical literature. That is, you pretend it’s one thing when it’s really another, because you know the population will be against it. That has to do with the current shift to talking about values. You have to try to calm the growing opposition to what they’re in fact doing. So, under strategic deception, which was, incidentally, an official policy right through the '80s on so-called Star Wars — under strategic deception, you pretend that we're somehow defending ourselves. So the word “defense” is in there.

But now it’s becoming impossible to conceal that what’s really going on is an effort to expand the arms race into a new frontier, what’s called the “high frontier,” through militarization of space. That means dismantling the treaty framework which has prevented this, not just the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but also the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which the world — which the U.S. signed, but in recent efforts to reaffirm it — this is under the Clinton administration — the U.S. has voted against it. In 1999, it voted against the world; the U.S. was supported only by Israel. In 2000, again, U.S. and Israel opposed it, joined this time by Micronesia. They want to block — this is Clinton — to prevent the — to undermine the Outer Space Treaty, because that stands in the way of the expansion of the militarization of space, in which the U.S. is much more advanced than anyone else technologically.

And this is for offensive purposes. It’s not even disguised. In fact, there was an article in the Times magazine a couple of days ago which did give the essentials. This is for development of offensive weapons from space, which can be highly lethal. And as strategic analysts and foreign countries point out regularly, strategic analysts here, the purpose is not defense. It’s to establish global hegemony.

And the Space Command, Clinton’s Space Command, has been very explicit in saying that this is simply another move carrying out the traditional role of the military. Armies protected the settlement of the West. Navies were developed to protect commercial and investment opportunities abroad. Now the militarization of space will perform the same services. This is unconcealed in internal documents — in fact, emphasized. Just as navies operated in the past, the militarization of space will operate now to guarantee U.S. global domination, ensuring that recalcitrant elements don’t react, protecting U.S. commercial interests and investments throughout the world, now with
an escalation — a sharp, qualitative escalation of the possibilities of lethal force for destruction.

It’s also recognized that this is very harmful to U.S. security, for pretty obvious reasons. Others are behind, well behind, in the advance into militarization of space, which probably could be canceled because of overwhelming agreement in the world that this is highly dangerous. But they’ll react at potential adversaries. They’re not going to sit there. Just as in the case of armies and navies, they will react. And Germany built a powerful Navy to counter the British Navy. Others did, too. They’ll react, and they’ll react in ways that are easy for them. So they won’t develop anti-ballistic missile systems, but they will develop anti-satellite weapons, once that barrier has been broken down by the U.S. undermining of treaties. They’ll develop anti-satellite weapons, which are far simpler than anti-missile defense — anti-ballistic missile defense systems. It’s well understood that anti-satellite weapons will completely destroy any U.S. system in space. Therefore, the U.S. has to be so powerful, has to maintain such overwhelming force in space, what’s called “full-spectrum dominance,” that it can overwhelm any effort by anyone to disrupt the U.S. system of control of space, which means vast escalation of the offensive military capacities in space, which will simply elicit further reactions. And sooner or later, it’ll blow up.

In fact, there’s a phenomenon in the technical literature called “normal accident.” That means the kind of accident that takes place unpredictably and sporadically in any complex system. And anybody who uses a personal computer knows what that means. For unexplained and, like, random reasons, something suddenly goes wrong, and it crashes. Well, when you get a very complex system, of course that’s going to happen. And when your personal computer crashes, you may lose the last email you wrote. When the militarization of space system crashes, as it will under normal accidents, you blow up the world.

So the choice, really, is: Do we, does the U.S., move towards hegemony or towards survival? And that’s not a new dilemma. This goes back to the origins of the contemporary arms race, so, say, 50 years ago. The only threat, security threat, to the United States — and it was potential at the time, not real — was the development of ICBMs, international — inter —

AMY GOODMAN: Intercontinental.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Intercontinental ballistic missiles, thanks. My Alzheimer’s showing. Intercontinental ballistic missiles with hydrogen bomb warheads, that was potential at the time. There’s very strong likelihood that it could have been terminated. The Russians were way behind. They had every advantage, every reason to want these systems not to be developed. The histories of the arms race, like McGeorge Bundy’s, point out that there never — there apparently was never any consideration of the possibility of moving to terminate these weapons, which were potentially of very great danger to the United States. And it continues, without running through the details, right through that. The record is consistent in indicating that the values — to take the word of Bush’s PR advisers — the values are hegemony, not survival. And that continues today. It’s being increased substantially by the Bush administration, that’s true, but these are Clinton-era programs.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that note, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Noam Chomsky. And after a little music respite with Michael Franti, we will turn to Ralph Nader, as we talk about Bush and Clinton, as well as his vice-presidential running mate in the last election, Winona LaDuke. They have a new organization called Democracy Rising.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Listener Supported.” Thank you, Michael Franti.