18-08-2013, 08:47 PM
Phil Dragoo Wrote:http://www.ctka.net/reviews/Chomsky_Sick...genio.html
Noam Chomsky's Sickness unto Death
by Jim DiEugenio 11-07- 2012
Excerpt:
Noam Chomsky's attempt to obfuscate President Kennedy's policy to withdraw from Vietnam turned out to be rather unsuccessful. If one recalls, at the time that Oliver Stone's JFK was released, Chomsky wrote an article for Z Magazine and then published a book called Rethinking Camelot. Beneath all the excess verbiage, Chomsky was saying the following:
1.) That NSAM 263, issued in October 1963, did not actually mean what it said. Namely that Kennedy was planning on removing all American advisors from Vietnam.
2.) NSAM 273, signed by LBJ after Kennedy's death, did not actually impact or alter NSAM 263.
3.) All the witnesses that John Newman, Fletcher Prouty and Peter Scott adduced to bolster the fact that Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam, these men were all either biased or wrong.
4.) Vice-President Johnson was not really all that bad of a guy. And there was no real break in Vietnam policy when he took over. After all, he and Kennedy were essentially the same man in the sphere of foreign policy.
To put it mildy, Chomsky's attempt to promulgate this line was not effective. Especially when the Assassination Records and Review Board unearthed even more documents supporting Kennedy's plan. These were enough to influence even the mainstream media into writing news articles about Kennedy's plan to withdraw from Vietnam. (Probe Vol. 5 No. 3 pgs. 19-21) These new documents were released by the ARRB on December 22, 1997. Within days, the New York Times headlined a story with, "Kennedy Had a Plan for Early Exit in Vietnam." The Associated Press story read, "New Documents Hint that JFK Wanted U.S. out of Vietnam." The Philadelphia Inquirer story was bannered, "Papers support theory that Kennedy had plans for a Vietnam pullout."
End Excerpt
Destruction in detail of a disinformation agent
Chomsky demonstrates the centrality of Sibel Edmond's admonition to eschew the partisan in favor of deeper investigation
A friend of mine, who has been an admirer of Chomsky (he holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Princeton) both in his field and for his politics, nevertheless also could never understand his (or Cockburn's) stand on the JFK assassination. I gave him Jim's article to read, and he thanked me profusely for "setting him straight". I asked him if there was a tinge of irony in his reply, and he said, no, you've convinced me that Chomsky is wrong about JFK's Vietnam (and Cuba) policies.
To me, the business about continuity between NSAM 263 and NSAM 273 is as old as the reaction to P.D. Scott's earliest work on this subject. It smacks of the purpose of the "Pentagon Papers" -- lay the blame on the Democrats, and show Kennedy "started" the war.