British Journalist and Incisive Critic of US-British Policy in Iraq Barred from Entering U.S.

Details here; an excerpt:

The internationally renowned correspodent for The Independent -- the great British journalist Robert Fisk -- has been banned from entering the United States. Fisk has been covering war zones for decades, but is above all known for his incisive reporting from the Middle East for more than 20 years. His critical coverage of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, and the continuing occupation that has followed it, has repeatedly exposed U.S. and British government disinformation campaigns. He also has exposed how the bulk of the press reports from Iraq have been "hotel journalism" -- a phrase Fisk coined....

I have long admired Fisk's unbeatably first-rate journalism, his intrepid insistence on sticking his nose where the authorities -- of whatever country he's in -- don't want him to go. He constantly shows up the sluggish cowardice and indolent hand-out journalism practiced by so many U.S. foreign correspondents from the safety of their hotel bars. That the U.S. won't allow this great journalist into this country to tell what he has seen and what he knows is a scandal.

One indication of how much the right resents Fisk's lack of the cowardice we have come to expect as a matter of course from most of the U.S. media and blogosphere is that Andrew "I'm a descipable neanderthal except when my own interests are at stake" Sullivan and Glenn "no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath me" Reynolds have aggressively propagated the term "fisking" to describe a point-by-point refutation of a blog posting or newspaper article.  Besides the breathtaking hypocrisy of two right-wing serial liars and shills for inhumanity like Sullivan and Reynolds demeaning a serious journalist's work this way, there is the added irony that the post by Andrew Sullivan held to have been the initial instance of a "fisking" is nothing more than a sanctimonious excretion of bile, without any factual content at all!   No "factual content at all," of course, sums up the American right rather well; no wonder, then, that they want to keep a journalist who doesn't just recycle White House press releases out of the country.