[Peace-discuss] Chomsky's Reaction to Osama bin Laden's Death

[C. G. Estabrook]

Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death
May 6, 2011

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination,
multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears
to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably
could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no
opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged 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.

[Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling
political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror,
The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his
writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza
in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects...]

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