[GPSCC-chat] Noam Chomsky on Osama

[Brian Good]

I never heard of Guernica Magazine, so I suppose there's some slight chance
it's a hoax.  


http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2652/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/

   It’s
 increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, 
multiply violatingelementary norms of international law. There appears 
to have been no attempt to 
apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably 
could have been done by 80commandos facing virtually no 
opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, wholunged towards them. 
In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended
 and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head
 of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive 
investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and
 Germany. What 
they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t 
know 8 months earlier, when 
Washington dismissed tentative offers by the
 Taliban (how serious, we do not know, 
because they were instantly 
dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented 
with 
evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama 
was 
simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we 
quickly learned that 
the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

 
   Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin 
Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won 
the Boston Marathon. He boasted of 
what he regarded as a great 
achievement.

 
   
There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan 
didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and 
security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said 
about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded 

their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American 
fervor is already very 
high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to 
exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, 
predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim 
world.
   
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos 
landed at 
George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his 
body in the Atlantic.
 Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin 
Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but
 uncontroversially the “decider” 
who gave the orders to commit the “supreme 
international crime differing
 only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself 
the 
accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for 
which Nazi 
criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, 
millions of refugees,
 destruction of much of the country, the bitter 
sectarian conflict that has now 
spread to the rest of the region.

 

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just
 died 
peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” 
that societies that
 harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists 
themselves and should be treated
 accordingly. No one seemed to notice 
that Bush was calling for invasion and
 destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

 

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so 
profound, 
throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they
 are glorifying bin
 Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance 
against genocidal invaders.
 It’s like naming our murder weapons after 
victims of our crimes: Apache, 
Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were 
to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts 
should provide us with a good deal to think about.

----end of Chomsky statement---


Last fall Dr. Chomsky told Iranian TV that at the time of the attack on Afghanistan,the US had no evidence that al Qaeda had done 9/11.  There's a good 5-minute 
video about that here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mprzq1mA9Jk








 		 	   		  
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