Since none of the authors of that scientific paper had ever been to Afghanistan – not even Jablonski, who is a specialist in amphibians and reptiles of Central Asia – the AAN analyst Jelena Bjelica couldn’t help but wonder who actually went there. Who went to Afghanistan back in 1972, hunted down those unfortunate beasts in the God-forsaken deserts and mountains, put them in alcohol, dragged them in jars all around Afghanistan for months and finally brought them to Belgrade.

That’s how she found me. And she wanted the whole story.

Her article "Lizards of Afghanistan: An unknown collection discovered in Serbia”, published on July 30, 2019, says that I introduced myself to her as a then young bird researcher and "an adventurer who had travel in his blood." I told her that the bird map of Afghanistan had been full of blank spaces, and I had wanted to fill those spaces.

Her article further relates how, lugging my backpack, I took a bus from Belgrade to Istanbul, and from there, all the way by land, to Tehran. Finally on July 26, 1972 I entered Afghanistan near the Fortress of Islam (Islam Qala), in the province of Herat.

Indeed, in ten days I had traveled 5,000 kilometers, passing by Ararat, stopping along the way in Tehran and other places, and seeing Mt. Elbrus from the bus window. But all that was nothing compared to what still awaited me on that formative journey of my youth.

Left: Buddha of Bamiyan, which is no longer there. Right: Kabul.

As I happened to be in Kabul on August 19, Afghanistan's Independence Day, I had the opportunity to observe a military parade, the last to be attended by Mohammad Zahir Shah as a monarch. I had no idea that a coup and the overthrow of the ruler was already brewing. In retrospect, now it seems that the Shah and I were the only two people in Afghanistan who didn’t see it coming.

With the AAN 's recent interest in my journey, memories started rushing back. I felt the urge to talk about my almost forgotten travels in Afghanistan in the summer of 1972. To describe the journey of a twenty-seven-year-old naturalist from Belgrade, a completely private and non-hippie venture quite unusual in the times of Tito's Yugoslavia. 

My choice of destination at that time was greatly influenced by the publication of a most extraordinary book on the birds of the Near and Middle East (Les Oiseaux du Proche et du Moyen Orient, Paris 1970) by two famous French researchers named François Hüe and Robert Daniel Etchécopar, with incredible illustrations by Paul Barruel. By the Middle East they also meant Afghanistan.

Of course, that was not all. Given my classical education, the idea of ​​visiting an under-explored country with a rich cultural history was irresistible to me. Especially the land where, like a strange constellation, a handful of Alexander's Alexandrias were scattered towards the east... Also, the very prospect that I would find myself in the presence of Greco-Buddhist monuments for the first time in my life greatly fed my enthusiasm.

As for my decision to embark on a rather uncertain naturalistic research in a distant and unknown country, it should be said that at that time I had just completed my compulsory one-year military training in the Yugoslav National Army, and felt that I possessed enough strength and self-confidence for the greatest journey of my life. 

At that time I was passionately interested in zoogeography, so I thought that a trip from the Bosphorus to the heart of Asia would give me a great opportunity to get to know and truly understand the ecosystems of the steppe and the desert. Until then, I had only encountered its meager, modified fragments on the Balkan Peninsula. In addition, although in my field and mountaineering experience I had conquered almost all off the highest mountain peaks in Yugoslavia, my height record was Mt. Triglav in Slovenia, with an insignificant altitude of 2,864 meters. But out there in Afghanistan, Mt. Hindu Kush was waiting for me, with an average height of 4,500 meters! And I didn't ask myself why the famous traveler Ibn Battuta had called that powerful mountain the Slayer of the Hindus.

My Afghanistan travel itinerary

Of my many ornithological “great expectations”, I will only mention three. The third on my list was my desire to see some spectacular birds of prey, most notably the bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), which I had seen in Yugoslavia only once before, in Macedonia. In general, about fifty years ago, large raptors had already become a rarity in most of Europe. Also, other types of eagles and falcons that I had never seen before were waiting for me in Afghanistan. That's why in one of the two field notebooks I carried, the gray one, I carefully made notes and drew pictures that would later help me identify the yet unseen species of birds of prey in the sky.

And I was not disappointed: throughout Afghanistan, the bearded vulture was the most common species of vulture after the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus), especially in the central mountainous areas, where I saw it every day. It was somewhat rarer in the lower parts. By the way, the bearded vulture is an amazing, huge bird that feeds almost exclusively on marrow-filled bones. Bones previously gnawed by jackals and feathered vultures.

The most numerous scavenger was the Egyptian vulture, especially around villages and nomadic camps, because it feeds on the worst kinds of waste. Once, in the Ajda Valley (Darya e Ajdahar), two men suddenly appeared in front of me with rifles and a freshly killed Egyptian vulture, offering to sell it to me. With their facial expressions and gestures, they explained that it tastes great when cooked. I immediately remembered that street children followed me and every other foreigner in Kabul shouting "Mister Kachalu, Mister Kachalu!" (Mr. Potato, Mr. Potato!). Accordingly, I believe that these two vulture killers also thought that foreigners were complete ignoramuses and fools worth deceiving in any way. That has not changed even to this day: more recently, I hear that seagulls have been offered for sale in Kabul as wild ducks.

A nomad camp in Afghanistan

My second great wish was to get to know the numerous species of wheateaters (genus Oenanthe), desert-steppe birds with white tails. Central Asia is, in all likelihood, the center of biodiversity of this genus, of which there were only two species in Yugoslavia. Each of the species is very slightly different from at least one other similar species, and it is especially difficult to identify females and young individuals in transitional seasonal plumage. Which is exactly what I feared, as they changed plumage in July and August. Keep in mind that, back in 1972, there were no pocket guidebooks for identification, with illustrations of the birds of Afghanistan or the region. My eagerness to find some extremely interesting species of wheateaters was thus coupled with some very serious problems of their reliable identification.

That's why, as soon as I arrived in Kabul from Herat, I went to the Kabul Zoo, that had a small Zoological Museum. It was founded by the German zoologist Jochen Nittamer, the son of the equally or even more famous Günter Nittamer, curator-zoologist of the Berlin, Bonn and Vienna natural history museums. Nittamer Junior had spent 1964-1966 in Kabul as part of Bonn’s collaboration with Kabul University, and studied mammals and birds of Afghanistan. That was when a collection of birds was created there, the specimens of which were identified by Nittamer Jr. himself.

In 1972, the zoo and museum were curated by two other German zoologists, Günter Noge, an assistant professor at Kabul University and later a long-time director of the Cologne Zoo, and M. Boeckler (I don’t know anything about him), to whom I had previously introduced myself in a letter. They welcomed me kindly and allowed me to examine the whole collection of birds in detail, as well as to use their library.

For two weeks, I studied the stuffed birds of Afghanistan learning how to identify them, alive, in the field. I recorded all of this in my gray notebook, which was always in my pocket. I was kept company by an orphaned child chimpanzee who, while I was studying birds, sat on my lap, holding me in the embrace of his long arms. Thanks to my self-training at the Kabul Zoo and Museum during July and August 1972, as well as the notes and drawings I made there, I was later able to identify as many as eight different species of wheateater in the field. And I have seen them in at least twenty different variations and stages.

Finally, at the very top of my Afghanistan bird bucket list, was my wish to see the Afghan snowfinch (Pyrgilauda theresae), an endemic bird species. It should be said right away that birds easily fly long distances, so compared to other animals and plants, endemic species are relatively rare, such as birds whose total distribution is within the borders of one country. After all, it is the only endemic Afghan bird species. The case is quite different with land birds of oceanic island states where, due to isolation, endemic bird species are much more common. But Afghanistan is the place where biodiversity was born. Besides, isn't the Hindu Kush, the only homeland of the Afghan snowfinch, an isolated high-mountain island in its own right?

The Afghan snowfinch is a grayish-brown mountain songbird that lives in a zone of about 3,000 meters above sea level. It is very similar to the previously known white-winged snowfinch (Montifringilla nivalis), which lives in the summer snow zone of the high mountains in the south of Europe (Pyrenees, Alps, Apennines, Balkan mountains), but also in Afghanistan.

Perhaps a better, more suitable name for the species would be Afghan undeground finch, because the most striking feature of this bird is that it nests in rodent burrows, most commonly that of ground squirrels. Since it builds its nest from hair and feathers deep at the farthest end of the tunnel, we can really consider it a subterranean bird.

Science discovered the Afghan snowfinch relatively late. It was first recorded in 1937, on the Shibar pass between Kabul and Bamiyan, and described under the name Montifringilla theresae in the same year by British Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen (1878–1967). Meinertzhagen was a controversial mix of boastful soldier, skilled spy, adventurer and ornithologist; such combinations are not that uncommon among ornithologists.

At that time, half a cenutry ago, I regarded Meinertzhagen as one of the greatest British ornithologists, who found many new species and subspecies on expeditions to various continents around the world. It has since been proven that he was in fact a fraud, a writer of false diaries and reports, a forger of documents and a thief of stuffed birds from other people's collections. One by one, his false scientific discoveries were exposed. There is only one left that has been verified to be authentic – and it is precisely our Afghan, endemic, underground Theresa’s finch.

But who is Theresa? Theresa Clay (Theresa Rachel Clay, 1911–1995) was a zoologist (but also a member of MI5 during the Second World War) and a thirty year junior cousin of Meinertzhagen's – they had common ancestors in the second generation. She became his favorite, as well as his goddaughter, at the age of fifteen, and after the mysterious death of his second wife she also became his housekeeper, caregiver, collaborator, secretary, confidant and inseparable companion. "Uncle" and godfather Meinertzhagen dedicated many of his false ornithological discoveries to Theresa – but also his only real discovery.

I managed to see the endemic Theresa's finch in several places in the foothills of the Hindu Kush. When on August 8, 1972 I also found it on Sia Koh, a 3,000-meter high mountain pass between Sharak and Jam, it was the then new, unknown westernmost point of its distribution. There was no end to my happiness. As a young man, I believed that with that discovery I had done a great thing for Afghanistan, and for world ornithology.

All the birds I saw and observed in Afghanistan that summer, I recorded in the second, red notebook of my field diary. After that I published an article in French in the international ornithological journal Alauda (Latin for “Lark”). The chief editor at that time was my slightly older friend, the French ornithologist Jacques Vieillard. Like so many explorers, he died of malaria, while hanging around the tropics in Brazil in 2010. Vieillard also had firsthand experience with the birds of Afghanistan, as did some other French and German explorers of that era. Back then, the English language was not as dominant in science as it is today, which is why I chose to have my article published in French. However, now I see that my paper Observations ornithologiques en Afghanistan is almost forgotten, and that today's authors quote almost exclusively from sources in English.

Thanks to my recent contact with analysts from Kabul (Afghanistan Analysts Network), many memories from that trip came back to me in their full splendor. And I took a look at my diaries, my two precious notebooks. I found out which was the first bird that had caught my attention: already on my first day, in Herat, on the western border of Afghanistan, I was enchanted by the mynas (Acridotheres tristis) – lively, colorful, noisy and curious birds from the starling family. I had never seen them in real life before. Mynas originally dwell in the Middle East, but nowadays they have spread invasively throughout the subtropical and tropical belt of other parts of the world.

During July and August, I managed to travel across most of Afghanistan and to observe and record birds everywhere, but also to catch some reptiles and amphibians for my herpetologist colleague who stayed in Belgrade. I also trekked many desert and mountain trails that none of the earlier explorers-naturalists had traversed, not even my predecessor and role model, Knud Paludan from Danmark.

In all likelihood, no ornithologist before me had passed the great Black Mountain (Sia Koh). None had explored the surroundings of the marvelous Jam Minaret, nor visited the valley of the Hari Rod River upstream of the village of Farsi. By bus, truck, taxi, jeep, as well as by bicycle, horse and camel, I passed almost all parts of Afghanistan, with the exception of Wahan and Nuristan, which were forbidden border zones at that time. In the Yugoslav embassy in Kabul, they had warned me that many parts of Afghanistan were not safe at all, and advised me to give up some remote stages of my planned itinerary. But when you are 27, warnings are easily disregarded.

Staying in Afghanistan and moving along busy roads, but also those less traveled, I could not help but notice, as well as in the neighboring Iran, the conspicuous presence of armed soldiers, that is, the army as well as the police. This fit in with my general impression that the government was struggling to keep control of the country. 

Also, everywhere outside the cities, I met groups of civilians wearing turbans, not only armed, but also proudly decorated with bandoleers with rows of bullets crossed on their chest. I noticed that, since the traditional costume did not include any belt over the shirt, revolvers and pistols were carried hanging on a strap diagonally across the left shoulder.

What I didn't expect, and most definitely did not like, was how they sometimes treated a foreigner and a traveler. I found one gesture particularly creepy (especially when it was addressed to me instead of a “hello”): a gesture which consisted of two connected movements of the palm across the throat accompanied by a look of hatred, rolled eyes and a toothy smile: (1) slitting the throat with the edge of the hand and (2) a sudden movement of the fist outstretched upwards, meaning something like "there goes your head!" After some time, I stopped paying attention to that, but I didn’t like the feeling that the Afghans obviously didn’t trust me.

In that relatively peaceful time, in the non-aligned Afghanistan, the influences of the great powers were visible to the naked eye. In Kabul and in the north of the country, along the border with the USSR, the streets were dominated by GAZ-24 Volga cars, while in the south, especially around the American hydroelectric power plant construction sites on the Helmand River, large General Motors vehicles prevailed.

From Lashkar Gah to Kajaki, where the Americans built the Kajaki Dam, which was later celebrated in the film, I was given a lift by a teacher in the role of a taxi driver in his huge 1960 Chevrolet. He charged me 1,500 Afghans – about 20 USD then, or around 40 in today’s money. It was an extremely expensive ride, both for that time and for my budget. On that occasion, the teacher boasted to me that he is a serdar, a tribal leader. At the beginning of our ride, he stopped by his house and picked up three of his cousins, just in case. They all sat in the front, next to the driver. I sat in the back. That trip brought me, among other things, my first encounter with the most beautiful of swallows – the wire-tailed swallows (Hirundo smithii) that chased insects above the waters of the Helmand River, bobbing above the surface like large and colorful water lilies.

Azdar Dare

Finally, I also remember the great and faithful driver-mechanic-interpreter Matin, who drove a Toyota Land Cruiser jeep rented from Hertz in Kabul for three weeks. He found what I was doing very strange and inexplicable, unable to understand why I was exposing myself to such risks, costs and efforts. At first, he was a little shy of me and kept a watchful eye on my every move.

At one point, somewhere in the middle of a mountaneous desert, I was trying to catch a very timid lizard. I was hiding behind rocks, slowly creeping towards the animal. Being focused on my prey, I was completely unaware that the planned trajectory of my attack on the lizard was passing right by Matin, who was standing in the shade, leaning on a rock. However, he saw me and mistakenly concluded that I was sneaking up on him. Of course, he hadn't even noticed the lizard. He must have remembered some of our disputes from that same morning, about which road we should take, and thought that I was trying to attack him.

Judging that the hapless lizard was now within reach, I rushed at it with all my might. Poor Matin understood that his darkest suspicions had come true, so he leapt and began to run away from me, screaming and wailing. When I became aware of this, I was already lying on the ground, covered in dust, holding a squirming lizard firmly in my hand.

I somehow managed to convince Matin to come back, pointing at the lizard in my clenched fist. He sulked for a while and refused to talk. Then I gave him my straw hat, which he had longed for and which, by the way, fit him perfectly. Later he gave me one of his shirts in return. It was too small for me, but it had a cool secret pocket right under the armpit. What was that for? For the dagger, Matin explained.

Matin with my straw hat

It was unequivocally established and recorded in Anna Yelen's travel journal (Tout sur l'Afghanistan, Paris 1977) that, even years later, Matin still remembered the eccentric young man who chased lizards, snakes, geckos and frogs, and looked at birds through binoculars. Her book further explains that Matin considered himself an actor, because he participated in the filming of the movie "The Horsemen" with Omar Sharif and Anthony Quinn, directed by John Frankenheimer, and based on the French novel Les Cavaliers by Joseph Kessel.

I don't know that, apart from one straw hat, any trace was left of my presence in Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan, on the other hand, stayed with me forever.

In my house in Belgrade, there is shallow blue bowl that has been sitting on my dining room table for the past 50 years. It was bought in the village of Istalif, north of Kabul, a place famous for its ceramic workshops. The bowl is still intact just like on the day I bought it, but the village is no longer there.

Her initial refusal was a predictable reaction in a country where abortions are illegal in the majority of circumstances, but in 2006 Dr Lima was confronted with a case that brought home the devastating scale of the hardships faced by Afghanistan's women. It would change her mind on the need for access to safe abortion.

"The girl was 17 years old and pregnant. After her parents found out they secretly gave her some medicine to weaken her – medicine that made it easier for them to suffocate her with a pillow and kill her. After that incident, I decided to help people like her," Dr Lima recalls.

Dr Lima's decision – to start using her medical training to provide healthcare and other support to women – put her own and her family's lives in constant danger.

"Whatever I do, I do in secret. The only person who knows is my husband," she says.

Many of the women that Dr Lima has provided abortions to had become pregnant as a result of rape. She also helped women to take contraceptives secretly when their husbands were forcing them to have more children.

She explains: "That was risky too, sometimes when women did not become pregnant for some time the husbands would ask why and may beat their wives. Then the woman would bring them to me and I would explain to the husband that because his wife had too many children without a [break], her body is now weak and it needs times to return to normal. Then the husbands would accept my [explanation] and the women could stay healthy and enjoy their lives for one or two years before they got pregnant again."

Dr Lima's mission took her to eastern Afghanistan, to a remote, poverty-stricken province on the border with Pakistan. It is a region where the influence of the Taliban is at its strongest, and respect for women's rights is almost non-existent.

Girls are not given access to education, husbands routinely abuse their wives and for many families the preferred response to a girl becoming pregnant outside marriage – even by rape – is to murder her and cover it up as an illness or accident.

In some areas tribal rules dictate that if the people in the community find out that a girl is pregnant outside marriage they will kill the girl in order to "preserve honour" and if the girl's family resist, they too will be killed. If the rapist is identified, he and the victim will both be killed publicly.

One girl in a tribal region who became pregnant as a result of being raped came to Dr Lima to ask for an abortion. The girl told Dr Lima that the pregnancy served as a constant reminder of her ordeal. She was also terrified she would be killed and her family would be torn apart by a "blood feud".

Another woman, a mother of six, was locked up with the livestock by her husband, who had married another woman. "When she came to me I helped her to get in touch with the Ministry of Women's Affairs and after many months of legal arguments she finally managed to get a divorce."

"No matter what a man does in these areas, he will get away with it," says Dr Lima.

While working in Kunar, Dr Lima would wear a burqa to help protect her identity, but that didn't stop the death threats from the Taliban.

"I started to receive warning letters, saying that what I was doing was un-Islamic," Dr Lima says.

In 2009, the peril of Dr Lima's courageous mission was brutally laid bare.

"My son was playing in the front garden of our home in the evening. I heard an explosion and rushed outside the yard to see my son covered in blood," she recalls.

The 11-year-old boy had been the victim of a Taliban grenade attack to Dr Lima's family home. Despite suffering a debilitating leg injury, he survived and is now able to walk with the aid of a stick.

But worse was to come six months later.

After receiving further threats and warnings from the Taliban, Dr Lima's 22-year-old brother was killed in another grenade attack opposite her clinic.

She was forced to move to a secret location, but the experience did not dent Dr Lima's commitment to help the women of Afghanistan. "I want to serve my country and my people who have suffered a lot. I cannot just sit in the corner of my house," she says.

"My son was injured and my brother was killed as a result of my work, but I have never given up. These activities cannot be done without suffering. In Afghanistan, all women are suffering."

Details of an Amnesty campaign calling for greater protection for professional Afghan women like Dr Lima are available at www.amnesty.org.uk/afghanistan

A pseudonym has been used to ensure the security of Dr Lima and her patients

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This article originally appeared on NewStatesman.com

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The article originally published on the National Geographic official website.

NI: What's The War You Don't See about?

JP: The film asks: 'What is the role of the media in rapacious wars like Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do so many journalists beat the drums of war and not challenge the spin and lies of governments? And how are the crimes of war reported and justified when they are our crimes?' It's a film about truth and justice. In the opening sequence, I refer to David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during much of the First World War, who had a private chat with the editor of The Guardian, CP Scott, at the height of the carnage. 'If people really knew the truth,' said Lloyd George, 'the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know.' My film is about people's right to know. It has always seemed odd to me that as journalists we examine people's professional lives, but not our own. We treasure our myths. Edmund Burke called the press a 'fourth estate' that would check the other great institutions of democracy. It was a quintessentially liberal view. It was also romantic nonsense – honourable exceptions aside. Up till the arrival of the corporate press at the turn of the 20th century, newspapers were often fiercely independent and saw themselves as voices of ordinary people. The media – press and broadcasting – has long since become an extension of the established order, and frequently its mouthpiece and valet. These days, we surely owe it to the public to come clean about the pressures and seductions, crude and subliminal, that subvert our independence. War – the industrial killing of people and the destruction of their society – is the ultimate test. One of my favourite quotations is Claud Cockburn's: 'Never believe anything until it's officially denied.' I suggest some of us might engrave that on our bathroom mirrors.

What led you to do a film on this theme? Was there a specific trigger for it?

The first trigger was the sight of children burned almost to death by Napalm B – which keeps on burning beneath the skin – then finding out that such an atrocity was not an aberration. It was realizing the racism in colonial warfare, and how apologetic reporting perpetuates this.

You've said 'the media is not covering war. It is promoting war.' Are there any media outlets whose activities have especially shocked or outraged you?

Well, you get crude examples of war promotion on Fox television in the United States. However, Fox has the virtue of leaving us in no doubt where it stands; and that's true of most of the Murdoch empire. Murdoch himself has said that war is OK. Too bad about the innocents; war is necessary, says the great baron. Certainly, it is necessary for the arms corporations which are a pillar of the US war economy. The more insidious and perhaps more powerful war promoters are in the respectable media, such as the New York Times and the BBC. Two important studies following the invasion of Iraq received little media attention. Cardiff University found that the BBC overwhelmingly promoted the Blair government's war agenda; and Media Tenor, based in Berlin, found that of the world's principal broadcasters, the BBC gave just three per cent of its pre-invasion coverage to anti-war voices. Only CBS in the United States was worse. Censorship by omission is, in my view, the most virulent form of warmongering. 'When the truth is replaced by silence,' said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, 'the silence is a lie.'

Do you think the reporting of war is actually worse now than it was at the beginning of your career? Is the modern 'embedding' of journalists a major factor?

It's not worse, it's just better organized – though in many respects it's far less successful. The last British war completely free of state censorship was the Crimea, which produced some of the greatest war reporting of all time: William Howard Russell's exposé of the disaster of the charge of the Light Brigade. He and his editor at The Times, John Delane, were almost charged with treason for telling the truth. This changed completely during the First World War, when journalists saw their job, wrote Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle, as telling 'only tales of gallantry'. The modern idea of 'embedding' is similar. More than 700 journalists were embedded with US and British forces during the invasion of Iraq. They told good action stories and showed us a little of the obligatory 'bang-bang' but they managed to pass over or obscure the truth that the brutal conquest and plunder of a defenceless country was under way. That said, the reporting on the worldwide web was an important antidote; look at Dahr Jamail's powerful, independent reporting from Fallujah and the independent filmmaking that gave civilians a voice. We show some remarkable examples in The War You Don't See.

You have talked about 'wars of perception' in which the news media plays a major role. What do you mean by this?

The term belongs to General David Petraeus, the current US commander in Afghanistan, who wrote in the 2006 US Counterinsurgency Manual that what mattered was not so much military superiority as persuading the public at home that you were winning, regardless of the reality. In other words, the public is the true enemy of governments that pursue unpopular colonial wars which can only be 'won' if the public is successfully deceived. This owes much to Edward Bernays, who is said to have invented the term 'public relations' soon after the First World War. Bernays' dictum was that the facts didn't matter as much as the success of 'false reality', and that the manipulators of public thinking belonged to an 'invisible government that is the true ruling power in our country'. Of course, none of this can succeed without the media as its transmitter and amplifier. And these days it hasn't really succeeded. Some 77 per cent of the British public is opposed to the colonial adventure in Afghanistan, and most were against the invasion of Iraq.

What do you think can be done to improve the coverage of war, so that the public gets a picture of what is really going on?

The answer is: tell the obvious truth; and the truth of war is the grotesque. It is trees hanging with the body parts of children. It is people going insane before your eyes. It is terrified soldiers with their trousers full of shit. It is human damage that runs through countless families: civilians and soldiers. That's war. The coverage of war should be this eyewitness but it should also try to tell us the why. That means journalists not colluding but investigating. One of the most revealing documents released by Wikileaks was a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document that equated investigative journalists with terrorists. That reflects the lethal stupidity that runs like a current through the war-making industry. It says they are afraid of the truth.

Should we be giving more space to local reporters who are from the regions where the wars are being fought?

Only if they try to tell the why of a war, not dispense sentimentalized tales about soldiers from local families – which the military relish.

You have also talked about 'a war against journalism'. What do you mean by this?

Journalism ought to be about telling as much of the truth as possible in the circumstances. And governments can be expected to wage a constant war on truth-tellers, be they whistleblowers or fearless reporters. That's why the Pentagon recently set up a department to fight 'cyberwar'. To the military propagandists, cyberspace is unconquered and, worse, populated by mavericks they can't control. This is only partly true, of course, but there are enough good journalists writing exclusively for the web to justify the war-makers' alarm.

Do you draw a distinction between the corporate media world of Murdoch, CNN and the BBC and independent media in terms of which stories are told and the ways in which they are told?

Yes, but mostly in style. Look at Andrew Marr's recent interview with Tony Blair to mark, or celebrate, Blair's self-serving memoirs. Marr didn't ask a single probing question about Blair's record on Iraq and allowed Blair to promote an attack on Iran. That's not much different from an interview conducted in the Murdoch media, which I doubt would be as compliant. Look at the BBC's coverage of the day of the invasion of Iraq; it's an echo chamber: the message is that Blair is vindicated. Fox did the same in America for Bush.

Do you see any glimmers of hope in the way important issues are being discussed in the mass media?

There are some superb reporters in the mainstream – Patrick Cockburn in The Independent has been a most honourable exception in Iraq. Ian Cobain of The Guardian has brilliantly exposed the torture and injustice of the so-called War on Terror. On the web, there is some exciting new journalism – not to be confused with top-of-the-head blogging. Look at some of the work posted on Tom Feeley's excellent Information Clearing House and on ZNet. In Britain, Media Lens has broken new ground with the first informed and literate analysis and criticism of the liberal media. This is the new fifth estate.

Is there another issue on which you think the public is currently being massively deceived?

The major deception in Britain today is the political/media consensus that there is an economic crisis requiring a devastation of public finances and people's lives. If you look back on the coverage of the 'crash' in the autumn two years ago, the shock of it forced the media to tell the truth: corrupt banks and an unregulated financial sector were rightly identified as the source of the problem, and that was the news. Within a year, journalists were back 'on message' and the assumptions of the media echoed the nonsense of the political élite that 'we are all in this together': a deception so gross it insults the nation's intelligence. Britain is not on the edge of bankruptcy: this is one of the world's wealthiest economies; the richest 10 per cent control $6,300 billion with an average per household of $6.3 million. An equitable rate of tax would see off the so-called deficit in no time. In any case, the 'deficit' is ideological: the product of an almost cultish obsession of central banks and financiers with shifting the wealth of nations to the very top and keeping it there. At the end of the Second World War, Britain was officially bankrupt yet the Labour government created some of the country's greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service. None of this would be a mystery to a media that saw itself as an agency of people, not power.

What is the good news?

The good news is that much of direct and indirect propaganda is not working. As I say, most people oppose colonial wars. There is a critical public intelligence that runs counter to the authority of the media in all its wondrous digital forms. Perhaps people sense the historical moment: that their social democracy is being appropriated by insatiable corporatism, regardless of which party is in power. In many countries – Greece, France, Spain – this is well understood and is being translated into direct action. In Britain, it is still a seed beneath the snow. But that will change; it has to.