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Sunday, January 13th, 2008Fisk excused the attackers of responsibility (”I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing,”) and said that, in his view, their “brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the ‘War for Civilisation’ just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them ‘collateral damage.’”[12] In August 2007 Fisk publicly expressed, for the first time, doubts about the historical record of the September 11 attacks. In an article for The Independent, he raised such concerns as missing aircraft parts, the melting point of steel, the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, and other familiar criticisms that have circulated within the 9/11 Truth Movement, although he said that many other criticisms were “crazed”.[13] [edit] Iraq War During the 2003 Iraq War, Fisk was stationed in Baghdad and filed many eyewitness reports. He has criticized other journalists based in Iraq for what he calls their “hotel journalism”, arguing that they were out of touch with the events and atmosphere of the Baghdad streets.[14] [edit] Awards In 1991, Fisk won a Jacob’s Award for his RTÉ Radio coverage of the first Gulf War.[15] He received Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and again in 2000 for his articles on the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. He received the British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year seven times, and twice won its “Reporter of the Year” award.[16]. More recently, Fisk was awarded the 2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize along with $350,000.[17] He was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of St Andrews on June 24, 2004. The Political and Social Sciences department of Ghent University (Belgium) awarded Fisk an honorary doctorate on March 24, 2006. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the American University of Beirut in June 2006. [edit] The Great War for Civilisation Dust jacket of The Great War for Civilisation, 2005 (UK edition) Publishers Weekly said this about Fisk’s 2005 book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East “ Combining a novelist’s talent for atmosphere with a scholar’s grasp of historical sweep, foreign correspondent Fisk has written one of the most dense and compelling accounts of recent Middle Eastern history yet. Fisk possesses deep knowledge of the broader history of the region, which allows him to discuss the Armenian genocide of 1915, the 2002 destruction of Jenin, and the battlefields of Iraq with equal aplomb. But it is his stunning capacity for visceral description—he has seen, or tracked down firsthand accounts of, all the major events of the past 25 years—that makes this volume unique. Some of the chapters contain detailed accounts of torture and murder, which more squeamish readers may be inclined to skip, but such scenes are not gratuitous. They are designed to drive home Fisk’s belief that “war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death.”[18] †Gary Kamiya, a writer fisk