CIA propagandist gets boost from Pentagon

[Paul Rigby]

For keen students of bathos everywhere, I present this contender, the opening paragraph from comedy central:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Choms...5-639.html

October 25, 2009 at 13:40:56

Chomsky Gets Top Pentagon "Honor"

By Sherwood Ross

The Pentagon has paid anti-war activist Noam Chomsky the highest honor any totalitarian entity can bestow upon an author: they've banned his book “Interventions” at Guantanamo Bay prison.

They won't say precisely why they “honored” Chomsky, but Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt told the Miami Herald that “Interventions”(City Lights Books) might negatively “impact on (Gitmo's) good order and discipline.”

The Pentagon, of course, insists on “good order and discipline” running its prison camp. Chomsky likes order, too. What he objects to is the Pentagon spreading disorder globally.

Instead of thanking the Pentagon for his “honor,” Chomsky, is said to be angry. The Herald quotes him as saying, “This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes.”

Indeed! Nazi newsreels show Hitler's brown shirts igniting huge bonfires in German streets into which they pitched banned books. Hitler banned over 4,000 books ranging from anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque to Jack London's “The Call of The Wild.”

And just as Communist Russia wouldn't let its citizens read “The First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, comrades in the Pentagon refused to allow Gitmo prisoner Hamza al Bahlul to read Chomsky's “Interventions,” sent him by a defense lawyer.

The Pentagon's ban mimics Iran's campaign to kill British novelist Salman Rushdie for his 1988 epic “The Satanic Verses.” Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni indicted Rushdie as “blasphemous against Islam.” The Pentagon, according to The Herald, won't authorize a book that is “anti-American, anti-Semitic, (or) anti-Western.” Note the similarities of the Pentagon's objections and the Ayatollah's. Kissin' cousins, maybe? Some might suspect its Pentagon censorship that's “anti-American.”

Censorship of Chomsky is not unique. The Pentagon has long pressured Hollywood to show the military in a favorable light. It also bans photographers from war zones if they snap pictures of slain U.S. troops. “I took pictures of something they didn't like, and they removed me (from Iraq),” complained photographer Zoriah Miller who, like Chomsky, may also be said to be angry. “Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don't see a clearer definition of censorship,” he said.

Back to Chomsky: What has he written the Pentagon doesn't want Gitmo prisoners to read? Perhaps it's where he quotes President Bush's remark “the United States---alone---has the right to carry out ‘preventive war'"using military force to eliminate a perceived threat"” Chomsky adds this is the “supreme crime” condemned at Nuremberg.

If the Pentagon is upset over “Interventions” they'll be really ticked at Chomsky's “Imperial Ambitions(Metropolitan Books).” In that book, he writes about how the Pentagon's troops burst into Falluja General Hospital, (November, 2004) on asinine grounds it was “a center of propaganda against allied forces,” and kicked the patients out of their beds and handcuffed them and their doctors to the floor, which Chomsky rightly branded “a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.”

The Pentagon might also oppose Chomsky for accusing them of genocide: “If civilians managed to flee Falluja, they were allowed out---except for men. Men of roughly military age were turned back. That's what happened in Srebrenica in 1995. The only difference is the United States bombed the Iraqis out of the city, they didn't truck them out. Women and children were allowed to leave; men were stopped, if they were found, and sent back. They were supposed to be killed. That's universally called genocide, when the Serbs do it. When we do it, it's liberation.”

Banning Chomsky will only call attention to his incisive depictions of Pentagon war crimes. While the Pentagon may worry Chomsky's work might get Muslim prisoners angry, maybe it should be concerned that Chomsky's comments such as the following on the Military-Industrial Complex might yet arouse bamboozled and disgusted U.S. taxpayers:

“Empires are costly. Running Iraq is not cheap. Somebody's paying. Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. In both cases, they're getting paid by the U.S. taxpayer. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayers to U.S. corporations"..first you destroy Iraq, then you rebuild it. It's a transfer of wealth from the general population to narrow sectors of the population.” Like the Pentagon, which will reap $664 billion next year.

Time to replace the Pentagon with the Peace Corps.

Time, more like, to replace Chomsky with a real dissident.

[Paul Rigby]

Rethinking Camelot was the most brazen, crude, and, yes, funny, piece of CIA hack-work ever thrown at the JFK assassination research community. It was also the most spectacular act of pseudo-leftist chip-cashing yet undertaken by Langley’s manufacturers of dissent. Just how laughably absurd Chomsky’s performance was is splendidly encapsulated in his treatment of the Pentagon Papers – with which farrago he was intimately concerned in the effort to sell that vast CIA-serving disinformation project to the Left:

Chomsky’s logic, example 1:

The Pentagon Papers, as characterised in Rethinking Camelot (London: Verso, 1993):

Line the first: They’re great and you can trust them…

“The record of internal deliberations, in particular, has been available far beyond the norm since the release of two editions of the Pentagon Papers…While history never permits anything like definitive conclusions, in this case, the richness of the record, and its consistency, permit some unusually confident judgments, in my opinion” (p.32).

Line the second: Er, they’re not, and you can’t…

“This critically important document is grossly falsified by the Pentagon Papers historians, and has largely disappeared from history” (p.41).

A small bonus while we’re on this subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/us/17i....html?_r=2

C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery

By way of demonstrating the above was by no means an aberration...

Chomsky’s logic, example 2:

The kibbutzim I visited in 1953, as characterised in James Peck’s The Chomsky Reader (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992):

Line the first: Freethinker’s paradise

“a functioning and very successful libertarian commune,” that he “liked…very much in many ways”, so much so that he “came close to returning there to live” (p.10)

Line the second: No it wasn’t, it was an intellectual Gulag

“…the ideological conformity was appalling. I don’t know if I could have survived long in that environment because I was very strongly opposed to the Leninist ideology, as well as the general conformism…” (p.10).

My favourite section of the book is that given over to "proving" that claims for JFK's intention to withdraw from Vietnam were nothing more or less than a post-Tet offensive fiction concocted by Camelot hagiographic loyalists:

"In short, the belief remains pure faith, held in the face of abundant counter-evidence from every relevant source" (p.127).

Really?

Wilfrid Burchett. The Furtive War: The United States in Vietnam and Laos (NY: International Publishers Co. Inc., 1963), p.216:

"by April 1963 Washington was already making soundings - either directly or through British, French, Indian and other channels - for the kind of formula under which an "honorable" withdrawal could be negotiated. But as in Laos, Washington was seeking a formula which would provide gains through diplomacy or intrigue that could not be obtained on the battlefield. Thus the favorite formula being offered by Washington's agents in April 1963 was a form of "neutralization" of South Vietnam which would admit some NLF elements into a Diemist-type regime in the South (although without Diem himself), in exchange for "neutralization" of the North, guaranteed by the presence of some Diemists in the government of North Vietnam. Other variants, always including "neutralization" of the North, envision a coalition government in the South formed by Diemist elements on the Right, some members of the NLF on the Left, and some liberal Vietnamese exiles in Paris to provide the neutralist "filling". Again, Diem himself is to be excluded, as all but the most die-hard US diplomats agree he is impossible."

I merely note in passing that in the late 1970s one Noam Chomsky signed a letter of protest to the Aussie government regarding its treatment of a veteran journalist called...Wilfrid Burchett.

[Helen Reyes]

Madam Nhu agrees(fast forward to 5 minutes 8 seconds) with Paul and disagrees with the author of Manufactured Dissent oops Manufacturing Consent, Youth Zionist Movement leader Noam Chomsky.

[Paul Rigby]

Madam Nhu agrees(fast forward to 5 minutes 8 seconds) with Paul and disagrees with the author of Manufactured Dissent oops Manufacturing Consent, Youth Zionist Movement leader Noam Chomsky.

For a few years in the mid- to late-1970s, we were permitted glimpses of what really happened in Vietnam, and elsewhere, in 1963. Here's one such:

George T. Altman, “Letters: JFK’s assassination and the war,” The Nation, 21 June 1975, p.738:

Reports urging re-examination of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy have begun to stir throughout the land. These are no longer isolated situations of dissatisfaction with findings that lack the appearance of reason. They show now careful study and determination. Moreover, they suggest connections that go far beyond the assassination of one President of the United States…

Suspecting the existence of such broad connections I wondered if they might include the so-called coup in Vietnam just three weeks before the assassination. Accordingly I went to Europe shortly after the assassination to make a probe of the coup. My particular purpose was to question Madame Nhu, widow of Ngo Dinh Nhu, one of the two leaders struck down in the coup. The other was his brother, Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam. Madame Nhu was active in the government there herself; after the coup she escaped to Rome.

I was able to arrange a meeting with her at the Vatican. I questioned her closely, through her son, on the events which preceded the coup, seeking especially to learn whether, in her opinion, Mr. Kennedy had supported it.

Madame Nhu informed me that, contrary to reports published here, the two brothers had sought to negotiate an end to the conflict, and that it was to prevent this that the coup was carried out. She declared emphatically that Mr. Kennedy had activated the brothers in this effort to achieve peace; he had no part in fomenting the coup.

In my opinion, the war, the coup and the Kennedy assassination are closely linked. Thus the necessity of covering up the assassination of a President with the insanely empty notion that no one but the reported assassin had any part in it. Thus also the long history of assassination of foreign leaders, for a single purpose, the maintenance of armed conflict – and always on the same side, the support of large industry and wealth.

And if a coup in Vietnam, why not another in this country, for the same purpose? Our government has shown itself equal to the task.

A Kennedy peace-initiative run directly from the White House without recourse to Langley and/or State? But, of course, as the apertura a sinistra demonstrated.