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Fisk, who till a few years ago was on top of my list of great journalists, has taken to embedded journalism with a vengeance since the Syrian uprising began, when he suddenly chucked away everything he had previously written about the regime - I say suddenly, because if you look back to the 2005-6 period you'll probably find Fisk to be exaggeratedly anti-Assad if anything - and began writing articles embedded with Syrian regime tank crews and even warplanes. In the worst case, he "reported" on an infamous Assadist massacre of many hundreds of civilians in the south Damascus working-class suburb Daraya, a centre of the revolution, by "interviewing" terrified residents in front of his Assadist military minders. They reported, as you would, that the rebels had been responsible for everything.
But now he seems to have outdone even himself. In this piece http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/inside-bashar-al-assads-syrian-jail-an-islamist-prisoner-talks-of-the-regret-for-his-killing-a7113556.html, Fisk "interviews" a Nusra prisoner from inside the Assadist gulag itself. That is, from inside a prison which is part of a torture archipelago about which a UN report, referring to the tens of thousands murdered under torture, claimed "the mass scale of deaths of detainees suggests that the Government of Syria is responsible for acts that amount to extermination as a crime against humanity" (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-09/mass-deaths-in-syrian-jails-amount-to-crime-of-extermination/7150842). Yet Fisk reports that this Nusra prisoner repents and now accepts the Assad/Fisk narrative about the conflict! Like, who wouldn't?
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