DUBAI — Bahrain is suing British daily The Independent for alleged libel after veteran writer Robert Fisk slammed the Gulf kingdom for becoming an extension of Saudi Arabia.
The Information Affairs Authority has appointed a UK-based lawyer to sue the newspaper, the official BNA news agency reported on Tuesday, quoting the acting head of press and foreign media, Nawaf al-Maawda.
“The Independent, through unrealistic stories and provocative op-eds, especially by its writer Robert Fisk, has deliberately targeted Bahrain and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to falsify the truth,” BNA quoted him as saying.
The daily reported on Bahrain “without observing objectivity,” he charged.
Veteran Middle East correspondent Fisk wrote on Tuesday that tiny Bahrain, ruled by the Sunni Al-Khalifa dynasty has become a “confederated province of Saudi Arabia, a pocket-size weasel state from which all journalists should in future use the dateline: Manama, Occupied Bahrain.”
Fisk charged that Saudi-led Gulf troops did not wait for a Bahraini invitation when they rolled into Bahrain on the eve of a crackdown on month-long protests demanding democratic change.
“The Saudis are now running the country. They never received an invitation to send their own soldiers to support the Bahraini ‘security forces’ from the Bahraini Crown Prince, who is a decent man,” he wrote.
“They simply invaded and received a post-dated invitation.” read more
Categories: Asia, UK, United Arab Emirates
I very much appreciate Robert Fisk’s reporting about the Palestinian / Israeli conflict. He for instance went to great length to find the source of a rocket that was fired by the Israelis into a ambulance in South Lebanon, where several civilians were killed. He traced back the rocket to US military arsenal of the first gulf war. The Americans, instead of returning surplus ammunition to the USA after the war, passed it on to their friends the Israelis (without any documentation). The rocket could be traced by its serial number to having been supplied to the US marine corps.