Chomsky, the Fraud, on 9/11
With his track record of rejecting one secret-government outrage after another in his trite fashion as just so much “conspiracy theory,” the position on 9/11 of America’s leading pied piper of the left, Noam Chomsky, was as predictable as the sunrise. “Chomsky dispels 9/11 conspiracies with sheer logic” proclaims the headline of Chomsky’s talk to a rapt audience on YouTube. As of this writing, almost 587,000 people have viewed the presentation. Of those weighing in, some 72 percent said they liked what they saw; the others said they disliked it.
One might be dismayed at these numbers, suggesting as they do that a large majority of the viewers of the video found Chomsky’s extremely shallow argument in favor of the government’s case persuasive. On the other hand, one might take heart in that more than a quarter of the viewers of the video turned thumbs down on it. The people who really care about what Chomsky has to say are generally committed leftists, mainly of the academic “intellectual” stripe. These are the ones to whom Chomsky pitches his message and they are bound to make up the lion’s share of the viewers of the video. On most issues, they could almost all be expected to like what Chomsky has to say. It is somewhat encouraging, then, to see that 28 percent clearly don’t. The readers of this article might want to do their part to make that number go higher.
Unfortunately, the opinion of this MIT linguistics professor still carries a lot of weight in some circles, however poorly supported it might be, and it is very poorly supported in this instance. In fact, were it to be made by someone of lesser prestige and intellectual clout, it might even be regarded as downright trivial and silly. The “sheer logic” that he invokes is that had people in the upper reaches of the U.S. government been involved, the news of it would have certainly leaked out and it would have been fatal, both for the perpetrators of the outrage and for the Republican Party.
The argument is quite similar to the one that was made to me concerning the murder of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster during the early days of the Bill Clinton administration:
I had just finished describing the outlines of the case for murder to a friend of long standing who I had not seen for a while. He is a professional historian of a somewhat standard liberal political orientation. "I can't believe," he said, "that if what you are telling me is true that Republicans like Dick Armey or Newt Gingrich wouldn't be making all kinds of political hay over it." The logic is impeccable if one believes that we really do have the vigorous, two-party system that we think we have.
There is something to Chomsky’s logic as well, if we really have the vigorous and aggressive free press that serves as a counterweight to power abuse in government that Chomsky would have us believe that we do. Two compelling questions immediately come to mind. Why would anyone involved in such a heinous criminal scheme leak out the information, and who could he or anyone else who got wind of it tell it to? He is assuming a very different American press from the one that is yet to report the news that the three-judge panel that appointed Kenneth Starr later ordered him to append to his report an addendum submitted by a witness in the case that totally demolished his conclusion that Vince Foster committed suicide. It is also a very different press from the one that failed to report the news that the long-secret official report on the death of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had been released and that it exposed an ongoing cover-up. In fact, the complicity of the press across the board in one major government outrage after another is a hallmark of the times. It is a fact that seems to have completely escaped Chomsky’s attention, and somehow he still manages to keep a reputation as a leading critic of the American system.
What is on display in Chomsky’s talk is really just a smattering of the “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression,” particularly no. 11, “Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance.” As we say, “With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant.” Indeed, Chomsky acts as if addressing the actual evidence is beneath him.
And this brings us to another of the techniques whose use by Chomsky might not be quite so obvious. That is no. 7, “Invoke authority.” It is not obvious because the authority that he invokes is none other than himself, and he does it with his manner. It has probably intimidated generations of students and colleagues. It is really hard to imagine anyone else propounding such complete nonsense with such surpassing confidence.
He embellishes his authoritative image by mixing in a hint of no. 10, “Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.” He does this by alluding to the various loose ends in the official 9/11 story—without specifying them, of course—and comparing them to the loose ends that one finds in even the best controlled scientific experiments. The message is that “this is something that ‘we scientists’ know about and you people of lesser intellect had best not bother yourselves with such complexities,” even if the “complexity” is something as obvious as a building falling as in a controlled demolition or a virtually untrained pilot pulling stunts that are beyond the capacity of the most experienced test pilot.
Exalted academic figure though he might be, Chomsky is not above using the old schoolyard bully technique of no. 5, calling the skeptics names. Well, he doesn’t exactly call them “conspiracy theorists,” but he says that they engage in conspiracy theories, which is pretty much the same thing, and he says it in a very dismissive fashion. It’s really an unworthy display for someone whose profession ought to give him a fine appreciation of the meaning of words. The term “conspiracy theory” was coined to contrast with the ever-popular “lone, crazed gunman” explanation for assassinations. In the case of 9/11 what we have are competing conspiracy theories, the official one with 19 young Arab fanatics armed with box cutters, and various other theories, probably the most popular of which is that it was an American-Israeli secret-government job. The question at issue is which of the competing conspiracy theories has the most veracity.
To reach that determination there is really no substitute for examining the evidence, which is to say, using the inductive method. Deduction does have its place, though, and, as it happens, it works particularly well in the 9/11 case, but it leads one to the opposite conclusion to the one reached by Chomsky. All one need do is put himself in the place of Osama bin Laden as the supposed master schemer. Is it at all believable that he would sign off on a plan that depended for its success upon the complete incompetence of America’s air defenses? And how could he count on the passengers and crew unanimously knuckling under to a few guys armed with nothing more lethal than box cutters? How could he have any confidence that his novice pilots would be able to fly and navigate these large commercial airliners well enough to carry out their very difficult mission? On its face, the plan would not work, and one really doesn’t need all that great an imagination to come up with any number of schemes that could wreak tremendous havoc that would have a far greater chance to succeed. They wouldn’t even require that the perpetrators commit suicide in the process.
We are given to believe that bin Laden was some kind of great military leader in rallying resistance fighters against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but any military leader given to attempting such hopeless schemes as this one wouldn’t have lasted a week.
“Oh, but it did succeed,” you say. Yes, something succeeded, but believing that it was Osama bin Laden’s plot really requires an exceptional degree of faith in our leaders and our opinion molders.
“Something could have gone wrong with an insiders’ plot,” Chomsky tells us, but the chances of things going wrong with the sort of outsiders’ plot they’re selling us is many times greater. And it looks like some things did go wrong with the actual plot, as opposed to the official fanciful one. For instance, Building 7 fell a few hours after Buildings 1 and 2 fell even though it was not even struck by an airplane. Is that the one that Flight 93 was supposed to hit? It is evident that Flight 93 did not crash intact into the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It really looks like something went wrong and the plane had to be destroyed in the air. Something has certainly gone wrong, as well, when it can be reported that Building 7 has collapsed when it only has a rather minor fire down in one corner.
When the press is covering up for you, you have the luxury of making any number of mistakes in carrying out your plot. The president, himself, can even tell the public on more than one occasion that before he was told of the second plane hitting Tower 2, he had seen on TV images of the first plane hitting Tower 1.
As for what might happen to a real insiders’ plot leaker, as opposed to scenario that Chomsky paints, one need look no farther than the case of Eugene B. Dinkin, the Army cryptographic code operator who got wind of the Kennedy assassination plot a month before it took place. We can find Phillip Nelson’s summary of the story in “Abuse of Psychiatry in the Kennedy Assassination.”
There was a time when I admired and respected Noam Chomsky. I was wrong. My eyes were opened to Chomsky’s essential fraudulence when I became aware of his position on the John F. Kennedy assassination. I put my discoveries in writing in March and April of 2001 with “Chomsky, the Fraud” and “Chomsky, the Fraud, Part 2.” Those articles follow, with updated links.
Originally, I posted on Usenet a simple statement by Noam Chomsky that I found on the Internet expressing disbelief in any high level conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. My simply-stated conclusion was that this would-be leading American dissident must be a fraud to profess such a belief. I offered nothing more to back up my conclusion, until I received the following public reply, which prompted me to respond as we see below "Amerikanski's" statement:
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Amerikanski wrote: “Chomsky is a linguist. As such, he has a fundamental concern for how words are used and the meaning of statements. All he's basically saying is that, in regards to the Kennedy assassination, there are lots of poorly formed theories around regarding conspiracies but few provable facts. I think he's stating the obvious. How does that make him a fraud?” |
I think Chomsky expresses himself quite clearly, and you have thoroughly mischaracterized it. Is that why you snipped the quote, so people could not readily see how you had mischaracterized it? Let's look at it again.
Chomsky Comment re JFK Assassination
I haven't read the [Michael] Parenti transcript you mention or what he has published on the same topic (I understand that there are articles, also a book, if I recall). You asked me to comment on his statement that (1) neither Cockburn nor I "knows a damn thing about the assassination" and that (2) we "are looking at the issue from a left wing perspective..."
I can't answer for Cockburn, but for me, statement (1) is close to true and statement (2) is gibberish, neither true nor false.
On (1), it's true that I know very little about the assassination. The only thing I've written about it is that the claim that it was a high-level conspiracy with policy significance is implausible to a quite extraordinary degree.
History isn't physics, and even in physics nothing is really "proven," but the evidence against this claim is overwhelming, from every testable point of view, remarkably so for a historical event. Given that conclusion, which I think is very well founded (that I have written about, a lot), I have no further interest in the assassination, and while I've read a few of the books, out of curiosity, I haven't given the matter any attention and have no opinion about how or why JFK was killed.
People shouldn't be killed, whether they are presidents or kids in the urban slums. I know of no reason to suppose that one should have more interest in the JFK assassination than lots of killings not far from the White House.
Given the plain facts about (1), I think it is clear why (2) is gibberish. Parenti or anyone else who reads what I have written can readily determine, if rational, that (2) is gibberish, because of the plain facts about (1). That's simple logic. One cannot adopt a left-wing perspective (or any other perspective) on an issue that one has no interest in and nothing to say about.
On the single matter just mentioned, there is no "left-wing" or "right-wing" perspective. The evidence is so overwhelming that questions of interpretation hardly arise. If someone can show that they do, I'll gladly look. But what I have looked at on this question (for example, various elaborate theories about JFK's alleged intentions on Vietnam, or policy changes resulting from his death, or similar things about Cuba, the Cold War, etc.) simply does not begin to withstand rational inquiry. That's true even of work by personal friends who are serious scholars on other issues, but who become so irrational on this issue that they cannot even read the words that are before their eyes, sometimes in the most remarkable ways.
As for whether "power elites perceived JFK to be a threat to the status quo," the statement is close to meaningless. If someone can produce some coherent version of the statement, and then some evidence for that version, I'll be glad to look at it.
I don't know Parenti's work well, but most of what I've read is quite good and useful, except on this topic. That's not unique to him. The JFK assassination has engendered a kind of cult-like reaction, and ordinarily rational people act in what seem to me very strange ways.
Noam Chomsky
He has nothing to say here about "lots of poorly formed theories" about the Kennedy assassination. Certainly there are, which has nothing to do with the fact that there is obviously a high-level conspiracy here. From the first hour to the present, the entire American press has been trying to sell us on the absurd notion that Lee Harvey Oswald, with a wretched excuse for a rifle with a mismounted scope pulled off not just a superhuman feat of rapid-fire marksmanship, but actually performed black magic to kill the President. What's more, he did it without a single trace of a motive, and then this young man with intelligence-flunky written all over him is silenced by a man with tight connections to Meyer Lansky's mob. The motive for that, we are given to believe, is that the sentimental strip-joint operator, Jack Ruby, wanted to spare poor Jackie Kennedy a trial.
If you want to see the black magic, go to your video store and rent the Zapruder film, which is now available to the public in its original form. We are told, because of time constraints, Oswald only fired three shots. One of them missed and chipped a curb far ahead of the Kennedy vehicle. It is too wild for it to have been a simple miss by Oswald. Shill Gerald Posner says that was Oswald's first shot, which he waited until a tree was between him and Kennedy to fire, and the shot hit a limb and wildly ricocheted. Yeah, right. But that's still not the black magic. That comes on the second shot. That's the one they say entered Kennedy's back about 6 inches below his collar, exited upward at his throat (?) and then changed directions somehow to pass downward through John Connally's back, passed through his wrist, and lodged in his left thigh. This was the "magic bullet." The real magic of it, though, is that it hesitated a few seconds, as you can clearly see from the film, between the time it hit Kennedy and when it hit Connally. The government/press shills that the would-be dissident, Chomsky, would have us believe in here tell us that Connally manifested a delayed reaction in the film. Well, here, Noam my boy, history is physics. The puffing out of Connally's cheeks is not neurological, it is purely physical and could not be a delayed reaction. It comes from the bullet blasting the air out of one of Connally's lungs, the one that it collapsed. Nothing could be clearer than that it is a separate shot, that is, a fourth shot and, therefore, we must have at least two gunners.
The third shot looks like it almost makes Kennedy's head explode and it knocks him backward and to the left. That that bullet came from the 6th floor of the Schoolbook Depository is about as unlikely as the first one coming from there, but these two unlikelihoods pale behind the utter and complete impossibility of the magic bullet shot.
The Navy then participated in the cover-up with a fraudulent autopsy, and the FBI did its usual job of intimidating witnesses and misreporting what they said in its work for the Warren Commission. Nothing compares, though, to the work done by the press. The best one example of press cover-up you will ever see was performed by Chomsky's fellow fake leftist critic of the system, Ben Haig Bagdikian, who has matched Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent with his much-cited The Media Monopoly. Bagdikian cut his teeth in journalism by blatant and obvious cover-up work on the Kennedy assassination which you can see here: whatreallyhappened
And this is not a high-level conspiracy? What, pray tell, is it, then? But interviewer Adam Jones is typical of the legions of well-meaning admirers of the man when he says beginning his March 7, 1996, interview, "Noam Chomsky is one of the great moral and intellectual figures of the century." adamjones.freeservers.com
Now I ask you, could anyone truly meeting such a description have written such pernicious nonsense about the pivotal political event of the 20th century for the United States and perhaps for the world? No, the man is an out and out fraud, fraud, FRAUD.
A few days ago I received the following private e-mail in response to my posting of "Chomsky the Fraud" on Usenet and on my web site. My response follows. I had hoped to have an ongoing dialogue, but I have received no response from "Critic" (who left a name, but I don't know that the critic wants to go public with an identity). I sincerely hope that neither "Critic" nor the other readers will be content with reading only what they see here. The cited URLs and materials related to them are extraordinarily informative.
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My Critic I don't see how you have proven [Noam Chomsky] is a fraud. Even if he is wrong about Kennedy, is he then a fraud? This sounds all too Robespierre/St Jus to me. I'm sure you might understand why Chomsky might want to avoid this subject, you may disagree, but I think he is more productive attacking the root to many problems of today. You focus on stuff like Cointelpro and I guess there is a great deal of utility to this (it certainly makes for interesting reading) while he attacks the fundamentals, the basic political and philosophical assumptions that created such programs. Exposing massive discrepancies between the nature of US news and the actual events, and what is said in other sources, Chomsky attacks what is commonly accepted, the mainstream media. I will give you the reason he is such a powerful figure in my eyes: simply, because he doesn’t have to do this, I cannot see how he gains, I cannot see hubris here. He is a very public figure. (EX: Defending the holocaust denier guy's rights to free speech, though a brave show of principle, landed him much controversy: the media picks up on this not his comprehensive treatment of East Timor) He must carefully choose his battles, and his arguments: even you must admit, when you read him in an interview, he really hates speculating on issues he knows less about and is careful to mention when he is just speculating. He uses only public (freely available) sources. He knows that the key for the left- the weak attacking the strong, is in bullets not in caps, in potent/cogent evidence and potent arguments. That he doesn't focus on Monsanto when he criticizes the WTO doesn't mean he is on the take from the biotech sector: a journalist must make choices. Overwhelmingly, those that participate in protests and so on, are in some way familiar to his criticisms of globalization/U.S. foreign policy, many are very much influenced by it. He turned me on to politics. He introduced me to Parenti, and maybe to you. Maybe. Fact is, however detailed an analysis of Chomsky's disavowal of Kennedy plot is: this is still the stuff for an elite group of "anarchist-aristocracy". It could never be as potent as an argument on why we should not care about Kennedy at all, after all he was not really such a King Arthur as history books try to suggest. Whoever planted this CIA-Chomsky to deny the assassination and hence the "biggest crime of all", is doing a horribly fucked up job keeping the general public from dissent. I understand what you mean about providing a safe route for dissent but limiting the scope of it. Chomsky worries about making generalizations. I don't. I think you are a dangerous element on the left. Planted in the left movement to cause division, mistrust. After all let's look at the record. Today he writes an article on the Intifada, and provides ZNET with it, I read it and his analysis is a great supplement to the newswires and opinions pieces I scan throughout the day; or Chomsky delivers a talk to the TEAMSTERS on the effects of globalization, signs a few petitions, responds to MY emails (yes he found the time to do so). You write about Chomsky, and how he failed to grasp the importance of the Kennedy Affair: who helps people, and who doesn’t? Who is an effective force on the left, who isnt? Perhaps it's just a matter of charisma, or webpage design; but I trust him more than I do in you. I am more inclined to think you are an agent of so and so, and a better one than Chomsky would have been. Can you not see that philosophers like Proudhon, Bakunin, Chomsky BIG ET AL., are correct to suggest that proper revolutionary momentum comes from the bottom up. NO less true, a revolution of any form should attempt to change things from the bottom, the foundation up. Do you accept the one party American state, the electoral college, the pervasion of American aristocrats and special interests in politics, the foreign policy choices: all of this except the existence of the CIA? Or is the CIA nothing but an extension of this cancerous political system? Attack the root not the symptom. "Critic" |
My Response
Dear "Critic",
I would like to thank you for your very thoughtful response to my attack on Noam Chomsky. This is the sort of reasoned reply—so unlike the usual orchestrated contrived jibes on Usenet—that permits us to advance toward the truth. I was going to suggest that we take our exchange public, but the only place where one can do so freely is on Usenet, and that would expose us to the host of professional truth-derailers that I have just got through lamenting. Rather, what I am doing, and I hope you don't mind, is copying Hugh Turley and Michael Morrissey. Mr. Turley was a sort of garden variety Republican until he began looking into the mysterious death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster, Jr. You can get some idea as to how far his political education has come by studying the site he co-authored at http://www.fbicover-up.com. Dr. Morrissey is of that school that included me when I was a subscriber to and believer in The New York Review of Books and The Washington Monthly. He is from among the better-informed academic left. He is also probably the most trenchant critic of Noam Chomsky on the Net. I don't know if he has come right out and called Chomsky a fraud, as I have, but he certainly comes pretty darned close. Certainly, what he has written reveals Chomsky as either a fraud or a fool, and who could possibly believe that he is the latter.
You say, "I'm sure you might understand why Chomsky might want to avoid this subject," referring to the Kennedy assassination, suggesting that he has bigger fish to fry and that, were he to do so, he might interfere with this more important larger message. But he has not avoided the subject at all. On numerous occasions he has indicated that he buys into the Warren Commission conclusion of a lone gunman and thoroughly discounts the notion that there has a high level conspiracy. In so doing, he does something that is just as bad or worse. He downplays the charge that there has been a massive cover-up involving the highest levels of the government as well as all elements of the American opinion-molding industry, the newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and book publishing.
Understand what has gone on with the Kennedy assassination and you understand the forces that rule us. You also align yourself with the majority of the American public that doesn't believe the official story, not just with a small minority of left-wing academic types who are always harping on the ills of the "capitalist system." So, no, not only has Chomsky not avoided the subject of the Kennedy assassination, but I certainly don't "understand why he might want to avoid the subject" if he is interested in getting at the truth and in making a difference politically.
Although Chomsky might not have, in a literal sense, avoided the issue of the Kennedy assassination, you are not entirely wrong in a more general sense. He might as well have avoided it for all of the importance he lends it in his larger thesis. And, you or Michael or Hugh can correct me if I am wrong, but he has avoided other outrages in the wake of the JFK assassination, such as the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
Quite logically given his approach to things, he and all the other important opinion molders of the academic left have avoided more recent ongoing outrages like the Foster murder, the Oklahoma City bombing frame-up, the Waco massacre, TWA 800, Pan Am 103, and on and on. One gets the impression that they will still be keeping their powder dry while we are all led off in handcuffs. If Professor Chomsky and his ZNet crew were all fake left opposition it's hard to see how they would behave any differently.
I can't help contrasting Chomsky and his crowd to some of the real radical opponents to the system we had in the earlier part of the century. I think, in particular, of Upton Sinclair. I believe that Sinclair was misguided in his support for U. S. participation in World War I, and in his generally socialist orientation, but he was certainly completely genuine in his convictions. I simply do not believe that Chomsky genuinely believes what he has said and written about the Kennedy assassination. He can't be that stupid. His defenders on Kennedy, I think, probably agree with me, but buy in to his larger arguments and think that he is forgivably dissembling on Kennedy for tactical reasons. Contrast that with this passage in Sinclair's The Brass Check.
"Also I met one of the high editors of the '[Los Angeles] Times,' and important personage whom they feature. Talking about the question of journalistic integrity, he said: 'Sinclair, it has been so long since I have written anything that I believed that I don't think I would know the sensation.'
"My answer was: 'I have written on public questions for twenty years, and I can say that I have never written a single word that I did not believe.'"
That LA Times editor, I believe, could be any prominent American journalist today, and virtually all who are not so prominent as well. Upton Sinclair, by contrast, had to self-publish The Brass Check. Noam Chomsky gets his stuff widely published, and he is in big demand on America's campuses. That, unfortunately, is the difference between the real thing and a fraud.
As I said, Michael Morrissey has devoted a lot more attention to Chomsky than I have. Let me call your attention to some of Morrissey's URLs with an excerpt from each:
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/morrisseyrethinkingchomsky1993.shtml
Rethinking Chomsky
Rethinking Camelot (Boston: South End Press, 1993) is Noam Chomsky's worst book. I don't think it merits a detailed review, but we should be clear about the stand that "America's leading intellectual dissident," as he is often called, has taken on the assassination. It is not significantly different from that of the Warren Commission or the majority of Establishment journalists and government apologists, and diametrically opposed to the view "widely held in the grassroots movements and among left intellectuals" (p. 37) and in fact to the view of the majority of the population.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010505055330/http://www.geocities.com/mdmorrissey/chomcorr.htm
What does all this mean?
What is the message we are hearing from Chomsky and CAIB/CAQ? It is clear:
No AIDS conspiracy
No assassination conspiracy
No connection between Vietnam and the assassination
Surely it cannot escape our attention that this is precisely the same message we have been hearing from the government, from the mainstream press, and the so-called "scientific community." Nor should it escape our attention, as I think even this brief summary shows, that the argumentation presented to support these conclusions is patently false in each case.
Of course it is not necessarily wrong to agree with the government. But when "radical dissidents" agree so completely with the government, on such important questions, and the reasoning employed is so clearly wrong, the warning bells should sound.
Ding dong.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020205225821/http://www.geocities.com/mdmorrissey/sal1web.htm
From Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, by Robert F. Barsky, p. 114, we learned what Prof. Chomsky thinks of us:
Chomsky employs this appeal to reason in probing two important issues; the relevance of the irrational and the role of the intellectual in society. To the irrational he consigns "fundamentalist religion; JFK conspiracy cults...”
Also of interest to me are pages 140 and 141, which tell us about Chomsky's position regarding his vigorous defense of Walt Rostow returning from governmental service as the quintessential hawk to be a professor at MIT. With an enemy such as Prof. Chomsky, Walt Rostow needs no friends.
Finally, I note your observations about Chomsky's writings on the latest Intifada. I received it through the Middle Eastern Realities mailing list. I was quite favorably impressed with it and was going to spread it around except for its daunting length. I was particularly impressed with his mention of the USS Liberty incident. Then I read it again carefully. Chomsky's account of the incident is misleading and inaccurate.
Here's Chomsky: "There was also another case. There was an Israeli attack on a U.S. spy ship, USS Liberty, which killed about 35 sailors and crewman and practically sank the ship. The Liberty didn't know who was attacking it. The attackers were disguised. Before they were disabled, they got messages back to the 6th Fleet Headquarters in Naples, who also didn't know who was attacking it. They sent out Phantoms, which were nuclear-armed, because they didn't have any that weren't nuclear-armed, to respond to whoever was attacking it, and they didn't know who they were supposed to bomb - Russia, Egypt, you know, anybody. Apparently the planes were called back directly from the Pentagon sort of at the last moment. But that event alone could have lead [sic] to a nuclear war."
Now here's a much better-informed account:
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June 1993, Page 19 Twenty-six years have passed since that clear day on June 8, 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty with aircraft and torpedo boats, killing 34 young men and wounding 171. The attack in international waters followed over nine hours of close surveillance. Israeli pilots circled the ship at low level 13 times on eight different occasions before attacking. Radio operators in Spain, Lebanon, Germany and aboard the ship itself all heard the pilots reporting to their headquarters that this was an American ship. They attacked anyway. And when the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime. There is no question that this attack on a U.S. Navy ship was deliberate. This was a coordinated effort involving air, sea, headquarters and commando forces attacking over a long period. It was not the "few rounds of misdirected fire" that Israel would have the world believe. Worse, the Israeli excuse is a gross and detailed fabrication that disagrees entirely with the eyewitness recollections of survivors. Key American leaders call the attack deliberate. More important, eyewitness participants from the Israeli side have told survivors that they knew they were attacking an American ship. |
There was never any doubt in the minds of the United States government, from the Liberty to the White House, as to who was doing the attacking. They had seen the earlier surveillance planes and they had heard the radio communications back and forth. Lyndon Johnson personally allowed the attack to continue. For more information on this subject go to http://home.roadrunner.com/~gidusko/liberty/ and http://www.gtr5.com/ and follow their leads, leads that are not likely to be advertised on ZNet.
As you will see from reading Morrissey, Chomsky has misrepresented the effects on U.S. Vietnam War policy of the Kennedy assassination. I believe the case can be made that the effect on U.S. Middle East policy was even greater. But fake opposition leaders wouldn't want us looking under that rock, would they?
p.s. The people at ZNet predictably ignored me when I sent them this absolutely definitive information on the cover-up of the murder of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster.
More Morrissey and Chomsky
Readers should not be surprised that Noam Chomsky’s predictable defense of the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory has intersected with Michael Morrissey’s continued writing about government outrages. We found this short piece by Kevin Barrett on the Internet, which begins this way:
In my dialogue-gone-wrong with Noam Chomsky, I was shocked when Chomsky argued that controlled
demolition doesn't mean anything, because that would just mean Bin Laden did
the demolitions.
Obviously nobody with a three-digit IQ, much less a four-digit one like
Chomsky's, could fail to realize that only high-level Western insiders would
have the access, expertise, and high-tech explosives to take down the three
tallest skyscrapers ever intentionally demolished. Even more obviously, Bin
Laden, a terminal (circa 2001) kidney patient in a cave, was hardly in a
position to order NIST, FEMA and the FBI to cover up the demolitions…
In his new essay Controlled Demolition as Limited Hangout, Michael Morrissey explains why the fairly obvious fact that there were no passenger airliner crashes on 9/11 is...well, important.
And still there are people who score well on IQ tests who follow Chomsky’s lead on important political matters. I think that this left-wing version of the late William F. Buckley is much better suited for his new cameo role in MIT Gangnam Style (minute 3:21).
David Martin
November 8, 2012
Addendum
A reader has alerted me to the news that the friendly-fire-slain Pat Tillman had been in contact with Chomsky. Chomsky can be heard very uncomfortably confirming it here.
How about that? I was going to say it, but I find that J. Bruce Campbell in “Killing Pat Tillman” has already made at least one key point for me:
Tillman had naively made contact with the CIA’s Noam Chomsky to discuss his plans to reveal what he knew about the lies of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in the War on Terror. He was apparently also angry about the US Army’s support of the Afghan opium trade, started up by the army after the Taliban had eradicated it one hundred percent during their four-year reign. The US Army authorized the Northern Alliance to resume poppy production, according to Fox News shortly after we invaded Afghanistan. (Emphasis added)
Campbell doesn’t say how he knows that Chomsky is CIA (maybe John Coleman’s book) or what Tillman had said and was planning to say further to Chomsky, but it all sounds very plausible given what we already know. The parallels with William F. Buckley may well be even greater than we thought, because Buckley was known to have worked for the CIA.
And speaking of Chomsky’s posited 9/11 leaker, as Campbell suggests, Pat Tillman’s attempt to leak to the fake dissident Chomsky might well have been what got him killed. That’s one of the reasons the secret government creates phony critics. They serve as magnets for would-be whistleblowers. It’s really a very devious business. It’s also pretty obvious that Tillman, unfortunately, had not read my earlier “Chomsky, the Fraud” articles.
David Martin
November 11, 2012
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