Analysis

Z Sustainer: I'm not really clear about what you mean when you refer to the "declassified
record." Whatever it is that you're referring to is obviously an unbelievably
valuable resource. Again and again, I've seen you expose amazing and very
enlightening facts, citing this "declassified record." I realize it's not a
single source (e.g., all memoranda from any secretary of state to any
president). I have no idea how many documents are classified by the U.S.
government in an average year, but I'm guessing that it would take a single
person more than a lifetime to read even one year's worth. It can't be that you
just read everything that the federal government ever declassifies. How do you
know what to read? How do journalists, academics, etc. know what to ask for in
FOIA requests, when they (as a matter of logic) don't what's in a specific
document or even that it exists? Does everything just get declassified after a
generation or two? What about the Bush administration's (illegitimately?)
reclassifying documents?

Noam Chomsky: There is an official declassification procedure, run by
historians in connection with the State Department. They
review documents of all government agencies that allow it (the
CIA, for example, often does not), and decide which ones to
release. Theoretically, it's supposed to be after 30 years.
In practice, a bit longer. The record is called Foreign
Relations of the United States. It's available in any good
research library (like universities), and by now a lot is
online.

Below is a Q&A from the Z Sustianer System.

Z Sustianer: While I certainly wouldn't characterize the coverage of the Israeli atrocities
as "balanced", it has been far better than I would have expected, at least in so
far as the suffering of the Lebanese is concerned; would you agree? Any idea why
that might be?

Noam Chomsky: My expectations were pretty low, but the coverage has been
worse than I expected, at least. There are scattered and good reports about the
suffering of the Lebanese. But overwhelmingly, it's presented from the Israeli
point of view. And there is only oblique indication of the fact that it is a
US-Israeli attack, not an Israeli-attack. One might do a count of the phrases
"Iranian-supplied" and "US-supplied." The ratio should be about one to 50,
maybe, but I suspect it's more like 50 to 1. And the US influence is vastly
greater than any Iranian influence, but rarely discussed, because it's taken for
granted that it is right and just, even "an honest broker." Same in Iraq. The
journals of the occupying armies report Washington's concerns about Iranian
intervention. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

In the last month, two new battlefronts have emerged in the oldest, longest war ever fought in human history, and by this I do not mean the “Arab-Israeli war.” I mean the oldest, and perhaps the only war in the history of human “civilization”: the war between the haves and the have-nots. In other words, the war between those who make the decisions that line their own pockets with gold, and those who pay with their lives for the nuggets.

Most of the wars of recorded history, raging on every day in every corner of the planet are contrived battlefronts or byproducts of this larger war mostly mounted to confuse the have-nots that belong to one set of the elites into fighting the have-nots of the other, so that optimally all of them can make money in the process. But within these contrived battlefronts and between them, one can identify the numerous points of definable contact and contest in the larger war between those who seek to usurp people of their lives and lands, and those who seek to preserve and restore them.

It's like the post in the supposedly satirical newspaper, The Onion: Terrifying Bill Passed During NBA Playoffs

Last night, June 8, 2006, we saw Game One of the 2006 NBA finals. Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to kill the internet.

No exaggeration. The bill in question, the COPE Act (aptly named, since we're now probably going to have to COPE with this hideous excuse of a bill) was passed by a pretty impressive margin in the House.

Z Sustainer question: Do you think the US/Israeli position of refusing aid/relations with the PA under Hamas is likely to have the effect of making Hamas take a more radical uncompromising stance vis-a-vis Fatah and Israel? If so, do you think this is an intended effect of cutting off relations? It seems that refusing to work with Hamas is an effective way of forcing them to rely on more radical elements such as Iran rather than cooperate with Hamas.

Noam Chomsky: Press reports in Israel indicate that, as expected, the government is delighted with the Hamas victory, which enables the government to persist in its "there is no partner" posture, enabling it to carry forward its programs of taking over the valuable parts of the West Bank and ensuring that remaining fragments left to Palestinians will be unviable -- a second prison alongside of Gaza, decisions now explicit with the announcement of the virtual annexation of the Jordan Valley and steps to expel the population gradually.  The US position is probably more complex.  Washington doubtless welcomes the opportunity to carry forward the Israeli plans for which it has provided decisive support.  On the other hand, it is reasonably clear that Washington would have preferred to pursue these policies within the framework of a powerless Palestinian authority, reduced to weak rhetorical gestures and discrediting the cause of securing Palestinian national rights.  A genuine commitment to realizing these rights was not one of the options.  The non-option is supported by almost the entire world and by a considerable majority of the US population, but that is largely irrelevant, as in many other cases, and will remain so until real progress is made at home in "democracy promotion," to borrow a fashionable phrase.

For those among you who have never come across it before, there is a relatively new weblog titled:

Srebrenica Genocide Blog

Believe it or not.

According to the information on the website, this blog was launched in early December, 2005---so it's only a little more than two months old.

Still.  Notice the timing: Shortly after the October 31, 2005 start of The Guardian - Chomsky thing.  (The endless points and counterpoints and recriminations.)  The formal halving of the estimated death-toll to have been caused during the 1992 - 1995 wars over Bosnia and Herzegovina to somewhere around 100,000.  But now, crucially, by researchers working for the Demographic Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICTY.  Similar work being carried out by the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center.  As well as the other contests to have arisen over the questions of body-counts.  Causes and intent.  The historical record. (Who gets to keep it, ultimately?  And who doesn't?)  And the whole series of ludicrous and politically motivated charges these overlapping subject areas have generated the past eight months or so.  But above all those tied to the most ludicrous charges of them all: That there was indeed an event best characterized as the Bosnian Genocide.  (By which the Bosnian Genocide Affirmers and the Bosnian Genocide Promoters mean a project undertaken by ethnic Serbs during the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, not just to kill their enemies in the war and to seize and occupy their enemies' territory, but also to [fill in the blank, as nobody within the camp of Affirmers and Promoters has ever been able to do].)  And that the Truth of this particular Genocide, namely the Bosnian Genocide, which evidently was a Genocide and forever will be a Genocide, whether 250,000, 200,000, or 100,000 people on all sides were killed during the wars, is so well-established, so important, and so incorrigibly true, no one can dispute the use of the term 'genocide' with respect to the events there and then, without also being guilty of the intellectual and moral crimes that go by the names denial and revisionism.  (For an exemplary instance of this political approach to the historical record, and the campaign to scare off challengers to those who'd like to keep the record all to themselves, see "The Guardian, Noam Chomsky, and the Milosevic Lobby," Marko Attila Hoare, The Henry Jackson Society, February 4, 2006.  Though this kind of work is far from alone.)   

There’s been some recent press highlighting Israel’s built environment and the apartheid system it imposes upon Palestinians. Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD), and author of “The Matrix of Control”, has been nominated by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker humanitarian service organization, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. (1) The Matrix of Control is a framework in which Halper identifies Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; the framework created by strategic settlements, settler-only highways and the Separation Wall. (2) Also this week, the London Independent reports that a group including some of Britain's most prominent architects is considering an economic boycott of Israel's construction industry. (3) Like Halper, they protest the building of Israeli settlements and the separation barrier in the Occupied Territories. And yet one more piece of news, Electronic Intifada reports that the “Church of England's most senior decision-making body, the General Synod, voted to disinvest from "companies profiting from the illegal occupation [of Palestine]". (4) Caterpillar manufactures D9 bulldozers used by the Israeli armed forces for house demolitions. All this indicates a vigorous and necessary opposition to Israel’s Apartheid built environment which is arguably today’s most prominent example of how architecture, city planning and geography can be used for oppression, occupation and colonization.

An important heads-up just arrived from a friend at Electric Politics:

"Hague Judge Silences Bin Laden Bosnia Testimony, as NATO’s Claims Questioned," CDelsio, BalkanAnalysis.com, February 8, 2006 

To reproduce the opening three paragraphs of this report:

  Judge Patrick Robinson immediately shut down a Western journalist on the Hague Tribunal witness stand last week, when she disclosed having seen Osama bin Laden waltz into the office of late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic in November 1994.
  Just as veteran British journalist Eve-Ann Prentice, who covered the Yugoslav conflicts for the Guardian and the Times told of the famous OBL, Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice objected, and the judge “…cut off the testimony immediately declaring it ‘irrelevant,’” according to the defense’s recap of a devastating day of testimony.
  However, considering that the defendant, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was trying to make a case that the Bosnian Serbs were fighting because Izetbegovic wanted to create an Islamic state that would not be particularly tolerant of Serbs, it would seem that this “explosive” mention of his connection with the world’s most wanted man would in fact be quite relevant.

A friend who rules at unearthing electronic diamonds from the World Wide Rough just forwarded to me (and to a host of others) a link to a slide-show that I believe is worth posting here: No Bravery.

Produced by GlobalFreePress.com, No Bravery consists of around 50 images (give or take), and runs for maybe four minutes.

Does Oprah Winfrey, the American television celebrity, host of the eponymously named broadcast and cable TV shows, and top-honoree in Forbes Magazine's 2005 "Celebrity 100" Hall of Fame, really expect us to believe that James Frey's 2003 bestseller A Million Little Pieces is a fictional account of a young man facing-down destruction at the hands of his own drug and alcohol demons, rather than a straightforward factual report, otherwise known as autobiography or memoir? And does it really matter? And if so, for whom, exactly? For you? For me? For its author? How about for its publisher, Doubleday? The next thing you know, Oprah is going to turn on J.D. Salinger and denounce him to her devoted 30-million-households-a-week audience. What if the events that Holden Caulfield recounts in The Catcher in the Rye never happened? What if they happened, but in some kinda weird way, and these differed from the way recounted by Holden? Worse, what if it turns out that Holden Caulfield doesn't really exist? That is to say, exists, but exists as a character within a fictional work, and therefore exists without also being real? Leaving us in the end with a kinda nonexistent Holden only? Along with his nonexistent world? A World-Catcher, for those paying attention? Kinda like a World-Lear? A World-Recherche? And a World-War on Terror? Rather than a real world? Wow. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Really. Right-right-right. Uh-huh. We'll be right back.... (Announcements)