New Chomsky Interview: "U.S. Is A Leading Terrorist State"

[brad]

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1555839.php

[IrishHand]

Hmm...where have we heard something like that before? [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[brad]

well there are facts and opinions.

facts are things like US trains south american death squads at school of the americas. (they learn torture and stuff) cant dispute that.

opinions are like what the interview with chomsky is about. the important thing i think is that prominent intellectuals like chomsky hold these opinions, which means that honest people need to evaluate whether or not theres something to them.

if you cant evaluate then youre doomed to being brainwashed.

[The_Baron]

I took a course called, "Methods of Development of Viable Intelligence Product From Non-Allied HUMINT Resources." It was taught verbatim from the old School of the Americas curriculum guide. It specifically covered things like pulling toenails, using your vice-grips to crush teeth, electricity to the genitals, etc. The information was taught specifically to illustrate methods that are markedly less effective than simple sleep/sensory deprivation.
Where the idea come from that there needs to be a class taught on how to torture someone? The bible describes perfectly adequate methods of torture Anyone who's had a dentist start drilling before the anesthetic took effect is fully conversant with torture methods.
Where do you get your information on the SOTA curriculum? Are you an alumni? A former instructer? One of the Congressional members with oversight on the facility? Where exactly do you get the information on which you're basing your opinion?
As for being able to dispute it, I most certainly can dispute it. SOTA closed down in the mid 1990s. Nobody is teaching anyone there.
As for Noam Chomsky being a, " prominent intellectual." I'll agree he considers himself an intellectual. I'll agree that he's often heard spouting in any number of venues. He certainly has some sort of prominence among the tree-hugger crowd. Of course he also rides in a gas powered limousine when he travels to and from the airport where he flies on petroleum powered aircraft. That in and of itself tends to lead me to think there's a certain moral flexibility in his politics.
If he wants to consider the US a terrorist state, good for him. Let's have a brief mind experiment here. Let's imagine the United States suspends all of it's activities outside its own borders for a period of 90 days. Nothing to do with any of the geographical areas mr. Chomsky assures us that the US is attempting to control. We just shut down and do nothing.
What do you think the effects would be on the world as a whole? Chomsky is a hypocrite of the first water and the world has the misfortune in that he's found a ready source of believers of his prattle on the Internet.
His commentary on his impending imprisonment that was disrupted because of the Tet Offensive is particularly delicious. I wonder if he'd care to explain the train of causality that lead from violating the Tet ceasefire to his not being tried. Perhaps you could find some resource where he explains that?
As for the folks in Brighton being pepper sprayed for, "just sitting in the street." Yep, they were doing that. And they weren't getting up and moving when the police asked them to. They didn't get up and move when the police told them to do it. They didn't even do it when the police mentioned that they were going to be sprayed with capsicum resin and dragged off. Real bummer their eyes hurt for an hour or so. What about the people who wanted to use the street they were, "just sitting in?" Or do their needs somehow lose significance because somebody want's to protest the government's position?

[brad]

well alex jones thinks chomsky is a total scum and i agree with everything alex says but on the other hand i think chomsky makes some good points.

what u dont think the phoenix program in vietnam operated either? (just cia assassinations, nothing big.)

seriously, do u dispute the northwoods documents as described and verified in james bamford's book body of secrets?

i guess you figure no one in a uniform would ever do anything wrong.

[The_Baron]

I have no doubt the Phoenix program operated. It was conducted by SFOD-B52 under the auspices of the Studies and Observation Group. The assassinations under this program were based on intelligence gathered in part by the CIA but weren't "CIA assassinations", in and of themselves. The primary objective of the Phoenix program and its successors was the disruption of the low and mid-level authority, financial and political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.
If you're asking me if I think it's wrong to pop a round into the head of the local VC regimental paymaster; nope. I not only don't think it's bad, I think it's nearly essential and should have been part of the overt operations being conducted at the time. They should have put out active bounties on members of the Viet Cong power structure. The primary failing of Phoenix was that it was born from the military/intelligence heirarchy who'd been humiliated at the Bay of Pigs. To generate an overt program of planned assassination would have been political suicide for the generals in power at the end of the Kennedy administration and who'd been saddled with Johnson as Commander in Chief. From my perspective, the missions weren't wrong in any way, the fact they were hidden was what caused the problems.
Since I haven't seen the actual documents relating to Operation: Northwoods, I can't really say a lot about it. Do I believe that there is/was a section of the US military/intelligence community who would advocate deliberate acts of violence against US citizens and interests in order to further their view of the overall national interest? Absolutely. I have no doubt about it at all. I've personally known people in both the military and intelligence communities who regularly advocated such actions.
Do I think that nobody in uniform would ever do anything wrong? Calley. Though not in uniform, Aldrich Ames. Until I can actually read the Northwoods OpPlan and formative directives, I can't really give an educated opinion about it.
As for Mr. Bamford. I think he made a name for himself by writing-- The Puzzle Palace-- and is now trying to cash in on that fame. Unfortunately for most conspiracy afficionados, the US intelligence gathering system is both tedius and filled with venal gits just as any other business enterprise. It's very unlikely that there are many terrorist scenarios that haven't been at least discussed somewhere in one of the alphabet agencies. Very likely most of those have been put on paper somewhere and eventually made it to the National Archives. The fact that an overachieving imbecile put pen to page and wrote out a sordid plan for US dominance based on terror directed against US citizens really doesn't do much more than prove that imbecile put the pen to the page. There are literally tens of millions of scenarios in every stage of development from the Post-It note saying, "Hey, what if the following?"; all the way to fully developed War Plans with specific Orders of Battle. The unfortunate thing is the tremendous number of people who want to believe that anything written down by a "spook" must somehow have such horrendous importance. Most of what's written down by the spooks is either make believe or is a badly worded summary of information you can now get from CNN.
I wish Mr. Bamford the best. The NSA weenies I've had opportunity to work with have been universally either computer geeks or telecommunication wonks. Not very spooky at all.

[andyfox]

Probably not of much interest to many here, but a few words about Phoenix.

Phoenix was developed by the CIA in 1967, intended to "neutralize" the Vietcong infrastructure. "Neutralize" was a eupehmism for kill, capture, or make to defect, and "infrastructure" refered to those civilians suspected of "supporting" North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers.

Under Phoenix, there was no such thing as due process. South Vietnamese civilians (ie, citizens of the "country" we were supposedly defending) whose names appeared on blacklists, could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or murdered, on the word of an anonymous informer. Phoenix managers imposed, at its height, quotas of 1800 hundred "neutralizations" per month on the people running the program in the field, opening it up to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians. CIA officer Lucien Conein called Phoenix "a very good blackmail scheme for the central government. 'If you don't to what I want, you're VC.'"

Phoenix "neutralizations" were often conducted at midnight while its victims were home asleep. People were brutally murdered along with their familities or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the neighboring population into a state of submission. Such acts were often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy. My Lai was a not unexpected outcome of the Phoenix program and our more general program of murder and mayhem.

The primary failing of Phoenix was that it made us into terrorists. Those, like Chomsky, who attempted to stop the murder, deserve our thanks. Those who subverted America's values and disgraced her name in Vietnam deserve everlasting shame.

[The_Baron]

Okay, I stand corrected. I worded things poorly. The CIA was the promulgating agency for Phoenix and it's offspring. The majority of the actual work was conducted by US Army Special Forces seconded to the program or physically reassigned. In addition the use of "indigenous assets" was emphasized to provide the necessary deniability. Because of its complexity, Phoenix became subject to an alarming amount of abuse for personal gain. Regardless, the basic concept was valid and I still think, essential.
Now I've got to ask. How was My Lai in any way connected to Phoeinx?

[andyfox]

In some areas where the population was believed to support the NLF strongly, entire provinces were subjected to campaigns of destruction and mass killing. One such province was Quang Ngai, where by late 1967, 70% of the villages had been destroyed. This was before Tet; after Tet, the killing was itensified. There is evidence that the CIA, via Phoenix, perpetrated the My Lai massacre and also concealed it, that the killing in My Lai was part and parcel of the Phoenix program.

[rounder]