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

[Morton K. Brussel]

If only this were to be published in one of our mass circulation newspapers or magazines! 
It is a little lengthy to be a tweet for Rasheed(?) Mendenhall.

--mkb

On May 7, 2011, at 10:38 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> 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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