DUBLIN, June 10: British journalist Robert Fisk of the London newspaper, The Independent, on Tuesday accused the United States and Britain of lying about Iraq.

Mr Fisk, just back from Baghdad, said the Anglo-American authorities had set up a press censorship committee, a fact which, he said, had not been published in the West.

“Officially it’s not called that but Louis Bremer’s so-called Coalition Provisional Authority has set up a legal committee to examine how restrictions should be clamped on Iraq’s new and free press, to eliminate, in the words of a diplomat, the wilder stories that might provoke incitement to ethnic hatred.”

He recalled the incident in which an American tank had fired at a Baghdad hotel in which the foreign press was lodged, killing two pressmen.

The American army had claimed shots had been fired from the hotel at the tank and the shots had stopped when the tank fired, Fisk said, adding: “This was a lie. I was between the tank and the hotel and there was no shooting.

“Had there been, I would not have been on the streets myself that morning. French television was running videotape of the tank for four minutes before it fired.—AFP