19-10-2012, 12:27 AM
THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL ACADEMIC COMPLEX AND NOAM CHOMSKY'S CURIOUS USE OF SOURCES FOR HIS LATEST LEFT-GATEKEEPING DECONTEXTUALIZATION OF JFK AND THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS.
"Chomsky's reliance on Raymond Garthorf on this is kind of like relying on the old East Germany to evaluate their Olympic swimming team, and just as disturbing a proposition. Garforth is a fellow at the faux left Brooking Institute. "Former" CIA employees jumping to Brookings include Bruce Reidel and Kenneth Pollack, with others having close association with high CIA officials."-- Greg Parker on the recent Noam Chomsky article about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Another key source is, IMO, no less dubious: Piero Gleijeses is, like Garthorf also a Beltway Historian, i.e. a professor at one of the D.C. area universities that function as an academic quarter-way house for bureaucrats "formerly" from the national security state. He teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Similar schools include Georgetown and The Miller Center At U Virginia, the latter being the CIA carwash that employed Philip Zelikow, top dog of the government's 9/11 non-investigation. Chomsky also mentions a much better historian, Sheldon Stern, author of Averting The Final Failure, a book that transcribes the Cuban Missile Crisis Excom meetings inside the Kennedy White House. In that book Stern makes note of some very significant mistakes that Zelikow, Naftali, and May of the Miller Center make in their earlier book of Missile Crisis tapes transcription. All of their mistakes are to the detriment of JFK.
But back to Gleijeses. I was required to read his book Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa for a grad class at City College a few years ago. Having already read tons of original documents, and secondary sources on Kennedy's relations with the CIA, I was amazed at how one sided his writing was: on every single aspect of Cuba policy Gleijeses may as well have been writing copy for the CIA version of events. The background he gave was similarly one sided. It was Cherry Picking of a decidedly North Virginia, "Miller time" variety.
Funny thing happened as soon as Gleijeses gets Che out of Cuba and far away in Africa. Suddenly Gleijeses is giving a very positive portrait of Che in Africa and a seemingly critical view of CIA policy in Congo and elsewhere. Of couse Gleijeses leaves out the most important aspects of Congo policy, in which JFK was working with the UN while the CIA was more aligned with the Dutch and French in Katanga. The idea that the CIA was not under the control of the President is a priori anathema to any academic who wants a job in the United States of the National Security State in 2012. Isn't that the marketing pattern of today's "left" and its feeders from Langley: in exchange for completely distorting the history of the national security state at the last fork in the road before the Vietnam war made it ossified and beyond oversight... here is your Che tee shirt kids! By such quid pro quo marketing do today's publishable ""leftists"" move us further right, one foundation grant at a time.
I urge all readers to order Stern's new book. From the product description I would be very surprised if Noam's sampling of it is in the least representative. His book Averting the Final Failure is a must, for it shows just how hard JFK had to struggle to control a permanent military and intelligence bureaucracy that was showing open contempt for civilian control. That conflict between military and elected politicians no longer exists, but once it did. Noam Chomsky is presented as the leading US spokesman for the left, only to the extent that he smothers this historic moment. Is it any wonder that the left is so successful these days? You will, perhaps, excuse me as I need to get back to the barricades.
"Chomsky's reliance on Raymond Garthorf on this is kind of like relying on the old East Germany to evaluate their Olympic swimming team, and just as disturbing a proposition. Garforth is a fellow at the faux left Brooking Institute. "Former" CIA employees jumping to Brookings include Bruce Reidel and Kenneth Pollack, with others having close association with high CIA officials."-- Greg Parker on the recent Noam Chomsky article about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Another key source is, IMO, no less dubious: Piero Gleijeses is, like Garthorf also a Beltway Historian, i.e. a professor at one of the D.C. area universities that function as an academic quarter-way house for bureaucrats "formerly" from the national security state. He teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Similar schools include Georgetown and The Miller Center At U Virginia, the latter being the CIA carwash that employed Philip Zelikow, top dog of the government's 9/11 non-investigation. Chomsky also mentions a much better historian, Sheldon Stern, author of Averting The Final Failure, a book that transcribes the Cuban Missile Crisis Excom meetings inside the Kennedy White House. In that book Stern makes note of some very significant mistakes that Zelikow, Naftali, and May of the Miller Center make in their earlier book of Missile Crisis tapes transcription. All of their mistakes are to the detriment of JFK.
But back to Gleijeses. I was required to read his book Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa for a grad class at City College a few years ago. Having already read tons of original documents, and secondary sources on Kennedy's relations with the CIA, I was amazed at how one sided his writing was: on every single aspect of Cuba policy Gleijeses may as well have been writing copy for the CIA version of events. The background he gave was similarly one sided. It was Cherry Picking of a decidedly North Virginia, "Miller time" variety.
Funny thing happened as soon as Gleijeses gets Che out of Cuba and far away in Africa. Suddenly Gleijeses is giving a very positive portrait of Che in Africa and a seemingly critical view of CIA policy in Congo and elsewhere. Of couse Gleijeses leaves out the most important aspects of Congo policy, in which JFK was working with the UN while the CIA was more aligned with the Dutch and French in Katanga. The idea that the CIA was not under the control of the President is a priori anathema to any academic who wants a job in the United States of the National Security State in 2012. Isn't that the marketing pattern of today's "left" and its feeders from Langley: in exchange for completely distorting the history of the national security state at the last fork in the road before the Vietnam war made it ossified and beyond oversight... here is your Che tee shirt kids! By such quid pro quo marketing do today's publishable ""leftists"" move us further right, one foundation grant at a time.
I urge all readers to order Stern's new book. From the product description I would be very surprised if Noam's sampling of it is in the least representative. His book Averting the Final Failure is a must, for it shows just how hard JFK had to struggle to control a permanent military and intelligence bureaucracy that was showing open contempt for civilian control. That conflict between military and elected politicians no longer exists, but once it did. Noam Chomsky is presented as the leading US spokesman for the left, only to the extent that he smothers this historic moment. Is it any wonder that the left is so successful these days? You will, perhaps, excuse me as I need to get back to the barricades.
