Noam Chomky Promotes Bogus 9/11/J FK Theories
by OILEMPIRE.US
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit
the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that
spectrum."
- Noam Chomsky
"I agree that Professor Chomsky is not a CIA agent. But with respect to his
pronouncements on the JFK assassination he is worse than a CIA agent. Without
being an agent, with his enormous prestige as a thinker, as an independent
radical, as a courageous man, he does the work of the agency. ...
He is unconvinced by the evidence of a conspiracy, but his is utterly convinced
that JFK was a consummate cold warrior who could not have changed and did
nothing to irritate the military industrial intelligence complex."
- Vincent Salandria
www.geocities.com/mdmorrissey/sal1web.htm
"That's an internet theory and it's hopelessly implausible. Hopelessly
implausible. So hopelessly implausible I don't see any point in talking about
it."---- Noam Chomsky, at a FAIR event at New York's
Town Hall, 22 January 2002, in response to a question from the audience about US
government foreknowledge of 9/11.
At that time, 9/11 investigators had already presented substantial documented
evidence for: prior warnings, Air Force stand-down, anomalous insider trading
connected to CIA, cover-up of the domestic anthrax attacks, inconsistencies in
identities & timelines of "hijackers", US connections to al Qaeda in Balkans, a
Pak ISI-al Qaeda funding connection, etc etc etc.
JFK Conspiracy: The Intellectual Dishonesty and Cowardice of Alexander Cockburn
and Noam Chomsky (Michael Worsham, The Touchstone. Feb 1997)
www.rtis.com/reg/bcs/pol/touchstone/february97/worsham.htm
in early 1969 Mr. Chomsky met with several Kennedy experts and spent several
hours looking at and discussing assassination photos. Mr. Chomsky even cancelled
several appointments to have extra time. There was a followup meeting with Mr.
Chomsky, which also lasted several hours. These meetings were ostensibly to try
to do something to reopen the case. According to the Probe article, Mr. Chomsky
indicated he was very interested, but had to give the matter careful
consideration before committing.
After the meeting, Selwyn Bromberger, an MIT philosophy professor who had sit in
on the discussion, said to the author: "If they are strong enough to kill the
President and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront
directly . . . if they feel sufficiently threatened, they may move to open
totalitarian rule." According to the author, Mr. Chomsky had given every
indication that he believed there was a conspiracy at these meetings. However,
Mr. Chomsky never got involved with trying to reopen the case.
Professor Noam Chomsky, one of the country's most famous dissidents, says that
Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas. Anyone who still supports the
Warren Commission hoax after forty years of countering proofs is either
ill-informed, dumb, gullible, afraid to speak truths to power or a
disinformation agent.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Chomsky has worked for
decades, has a very good physics department (MIT is the largest university
contractor to the military). Perhaps he could visit them and learn why it is
physically impossible for Oswald to have been anything more than the "patsy"
that he (accurately) claimed to be.
The truth is that Chomsky is very good in his analysis within certain parameters
of limited debate -- but in understanding the "deep politics" of the actual,
secret government, his analysis falls short.
Chomsky is good at explaining the double standards in US foreign policies - but
at this point understanding / exposing the mechanics of the deceptions (9/11
isn't the only one) the reasons for it (Peak Oil / global dominance / domestic
fascism) and what we can do (war crimes trials / permaculture to relocalize food
production / paradigm shifts) is more important than more repetition from
Chomsky.
Professor Chomsky was apparently part of a study group in the late 1960s that
was investigating what really happened in Dallas (ie. he was a skeptic of the
official story). It seems likely that Chomsky did indeed figure out what
happened - and decided that this was too big of an issue to confront.
Maybe Chomsky gets more media attention these days than most other dissidents
BECAUSE he urges people not to inquire into how the secret government operates.
www.webcom.com/ctka/pr197-left.html
Chomsky and his good friend and soulmate on the JFK case, Alexander Cockburn
went on an (orchestrated?) campaign at the time of Stone’s JFK to convince
whatever passes for the left in this country that the murder of Kennedy was 1)
not the result of a conspiracy, and 2) didn’t matter even if it was. They were
given unlimited space in magazines like The Nation and Z Magazine. But, as
Howard Zinn implied in a recent letter to Schotz defending Chomsky, these
stances are not based on facts or evidence, but on a political choice. They
choose not to fight this battle. They would rather spend their time and effort
on other matters. When cornered themselves, Chomsky and Cockburn resort to
rhetorical devices like exaggeration, sarcasm, and ridicule. In other words,
they resort to propaganda and evasion.
CTKA believes that this is perhaps the most obvious and destructive example of
Schotz’s “denial.” For if we take Chomsky and Cockburn as being genuine in their
crusades--no matter how unattractive their tactics--their myopia about politics
is breathtaking. For if the assassinations of the ‘60’s did not matter--and
Morrisey notes that these are Chomsky’s sentiments—then why has the crowd the
left plays to shrunk and why has the field of play tilted so far to the right?
Anyone today who was around in the ‘60’s will tell you that the Kennedys, King,
and Malcolm X electrified the political debate, not so much because of their
(considerable) oratorical powers, but because they were winning. On the issues
of economic justice, withdrawal from Southeast Asia, civil rights, a more
reasonable approach to the Third World, and a tougher approach to the power
elite within the U.S., they and the left were making considerable headway. The
very grounds of the debate had shifted to the center and leftward on these and
other issues. As one commentator has written, today the bright young Harvard
lawyers go to work on Wall Street, in the sixties they went to work for Ralph
Nader.
knowing, that our last progressive president was killed in a blatant conspiracy;
that a presidentially appointed inquest then consciously covered it up; that the
mainstream media like the Post and the Times acquiesced in that effort; that
this assassination led to the death of 58,000 Americans and two million
Vietnamese; to us that’s quite a consciousness raiser. Chomsky, Cockburn and
most of their acolytes don’t seem to think so.
In the ‘80’s, Bill Moyers questioned Chomsky on this point, that the political
activism of the ‘60’s had receded and that Martin Luther King had been an
integral part of that scene. Chomsky refused to acknowledge this obvious fact.
He said it really wasn’t so. His evidence: he gets more speaking invitations
today ( A World of Ideas, p. 48). The man who disingenuously avoids a conspiracy
in the JFK case now tells us to ignore Reagan, Bush, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Stern
and the rest. It doesn’t matter. ...
... what Probe is trying to do here is not so much explain the reaction, or
non-reaction, of the Left to the death of John Kennedy. What we are really
saying is that, in the face of that non-reaction, the murder of Kennedy was the
first step that led to the death of the Left. That’s the terrible truth that
most of these men and organizations can’t bring themselves to state. If they
did, they would have to admit their complicity in that result.
Left Denial on 9/11 Turns Irrational
by Jack Straw
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/05/1736367.php 6 May 2005
www.globalresearch.ca 8 May 2005
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/STR505A.html
People like Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill are turning toward the irrational as
they continue to deny increasing signs that 9/11 was an inside job.
Ever since the events of 9/11, the American Left and even ultra-Left have been
downright fanatical in combating notions that the U.S. government was complicit
in the attacks or at least had foreknowledge of the events. Lately, this stance
has taken a turn towards the irrational.
In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky has made an incredible assertion:
"There's by now a small industry on the thesis that the administration had
something to do with 9-11. I've looked at some of it, and have often been asked.
There's a weak thesis that is possible though extremely unlikely in my opinion,
and a strong thesis that is close to inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they
knew about it and didn't try to stop it. The strong thesis is that they were
actually involved. The evidence for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a
failure to understand properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific
experiments one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences,
loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical science
journals and you'll find plenty of samples. In real world situations, chaos is
overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside, they'd have had to be
quite mad to try anything like that. It would have had to involve a large number
of people, something would be very likely to leak, pretty quickly, they'd all be
lined up before firing squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever.
That would have happened whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at
best a long shot; it would have been extremely hard to predict what would
happen."
[note: The "it would have had to involve a large number of people" claim is a
tired cliche that completely ignores the role of compartmentalization in covert
operations, something Professor Chomsky has probably read about during his long
career.
On the other hand, the "Left Denial" article is generally very good about the
strange myopia of the "left" about 9/11, but it is marred by a strange focus on
alleged, unprovable assertions of temperature inside the burning towers that
supposedly means they were demolished, and most of the web links for additional
information are bogus. The "Left Denial" article ignores the evidence about
foreknowledge, warnings to insiders, the stock trades on United and American
Airlines just before 9/11, the anthrax attacks on the media and the Democrats,
the motivation of Peak Oil and creating the pretext for invading the Middle East
oil fields, among other issues that have very strong evidence for complicity.
These omissions allow the leftists in denial to avoid the issue of complicity. ]
Published on Thursday, October 30, 2003 by Reuters
U.S. Dissident Says Bush Needs Fear for Re-election
by Anthony Boadle
HAVANA - U.S. linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said on Wednesday
that President Bush will have to "manufacture" another threat to American
security to win reelection in 2004 after U.S failure in occupying Iraq.
Chomsky, attending a Latin American social sciences conference in Cuba, said
that since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration
had redefined U.S. national security policy to include the use of force abroad,
with or without U.N. approval.
"It is a frightened country and it is easy to conjure up an imminent threat,"
Chomsky said at the launching of a Cuban edition of a book of interviews
published by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, when asked how Bush could get
reelected.
"They have a card that they can play ... terrify the population with some
invented threat, and that is not very hard to do," he said.
After the "disaster" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush could turn his sights on
Communist-run Cuba, which his administration officials have charged with
developing a biological weapons research program, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology professor of linguistics said.
Chomsky said the military occupation of Iraq, to topple a "horrible monster
running it but not a threat to anyone," was a failure.
"The country had been devastated by sanctions. The invasion ended sanctions. The
tyrant is gone and there is no outside support for domestic dissidence," he
said. "It takes real talent to fail in this endeavor."
Chomsky said it was reasonable to assume the Bush administration would try to
"manufacture a short-term improvement in the economy" by incurring in enormous
federal government debt and "imposing burdens on future generations."
The Bush administration was a continuation of the Ronald Reagan presidency that
declared a national emergency over the threat posed by Nicaragua's leftist
government in the 1980s, he said.
"The same people were able to present Grenada as a threat to the survival of the
United States the last time they were in office," Chomsky said, in reference to
the U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island in 1983 to thwart Cuban influence.
from the archives: Noam Chomsky & JFK
In January of 2002, Noam Chomsky was asked the following question by an audience
member at a speaking engagement for FAIR in New York: "Is there credible
evidence that some part of the US government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks?"
His answer: "That's an internet theory and it's hopelessly implausible.
Hopelessly implausible. So hopelessly implausible I don't see any point in
talking about it." As a matter of fact, the accusation of evidence for USG
complicity had been made just days before by former top German minister and
widely recognized intelligence expert Andreas von Buelow in an interview with
Tagesspiel, adding weight to a number of independent investigations that had
already been very effectively raising serious questions for several months. No,
not quite an "internet theory."
For those who had spent every spare minute of their time for months studying the
issue of 9/11 prior knowledge and discovering the utter absurdity of the
official narrative, Chomsky was obviously out to lunch. But, you can't fault him
for not being consistent. His attitude, post-9/11, is in many ways a repeat of
an episode a decade ago, when he and a handful of other "leftist" figures signed
onto a savage establishment media attack on Oliver Stone and his film JFK, which
brought an interpretation of the JFK assassination conspiracy to the public. In
addition to defending the Warren Commission report's "lone gunman" findings,
these anticonspiratorialists made a peculiar far-fetched hedge, claiming that
the assassination did not result in any significant changes to US policy or the
political power structure, and hence need not concern Left political analysis in
the slightest!
Hmmm. Not only have the latter arguments been very soundly demolished by recent
(mainstream) historical work, but another recent news item made light of the
whole situation, although it slipped by with very little notice during the
uproar over Israel's incursion into Palestinian territory last Spring. This was
the completion of a top-flight official scientific study of audio recordings
from Dealey Plaza, reported in the Washington Post, which finally confirmed the
existence of a second gunman at the notorious "grassy knoll" with almost total
certainty (repeating the results of a similar study carried out for the House
Assassinations Cmte. in the 1970s). So, now science has spoken: those who
continue to accept the "lone gunman" findings of the Warren Commission Report
are, well, frauds.
Still, a lot of people seem gullible enough to believe that "America's leading
intellectual dissident" can be trusted to give them the real scoop on 9/11; his
lightweight pamphlet, '9/11', has been a bestseller, becoming for many the
default "dissident" view of the "War on Terror". Meanwhile, a number of
political scholars and security experts are now openly discussing the very
strong evidence suggesting that 9/11 was probably an inside job and the al Qaeda
terrorists were setup patsies, with the overwhelmingly critical implication that
the trigger for the "War on Terrorism" was a fabricated deception. Chomsky, true
to form, seems to pretend the evidence doesn't exist.
There is one piece of documentation, however that Chomsky did seem to find
interesting, which he made sure to include in his book's appendix: The US State
Department's Report on Foreign Terrorist Organizations, from the Office of the
Coordinator of Counterterrorism.
Noam Chomsky disdains to consider such a conspiracy ("I think such speculations
lead us away from issues of prime significance, not towards them . . .
Personally, I don't think it's worth the effort."). But I find such a conspiracy
from the inside of the U.S. government far more likely than the absurd cartoon
which is the official story--made up of physical impossibilities, incapable
pilots, hard-drinking Muslims, indestructible passports, et cetera--a cartoon
that both Corporate and supposedly "Left" media continue to parrot and thereby
promote.
An interview with 9/11 antiwar author Don Paul
By Bob Feldman www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/061303Feldman/061303feldman.html
Michael Parenti on Noam Chomsky and JFK, as a characteristic example of Left
anticonspiracism:
Conspiracy Phobia on the Left www.questionsquestions.net/documents2/conspiracyphobia.html
Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky vs. JFK: A Study in Misinformation (Citizens
for the Truth About the Kennedy Assassination, May 1994) www.webcom.com/lpease/media/cockburn.htm
My Beef With Chomsky (Michael Morrissey, Sep 2000) www.geocities.com/mdmorrissey/chomcorr.htm
Concerning Chomsky's arrogant evasions of fact and truly bizarre double
standards about trusting official sources, in regards to several critical
conspiracy issues (including the JFK assassination). Also, he points out
Chomsky's change of mind from his keen interest in the JFK assassination in the
late 60s, something he doesn't seem to have anything to say about these days.
Rethinking Chomsky (Michael Morrissey, May 1994) www.realhistoryarchives.com/media/chomsky.htm
Rethinking Camelot (Boston: South End Press, 1993) "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."
Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and The Nation (Gary Aguilar, PROBE.
Sep 2000) www.webcom.com/ctka/pr900-holland.html
A very detailed and lengthy rebuttal of Max Holland (who has been featured in
The Nation) and his defence of the Warren Commission. On the subject of the JFK
assassination, Holland is roughly in the same camp as Chomsky and Cockburn.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.oilempire.us/chomsky.html