CIA propagandist gets boost from Pentagon

[Paul Rigby]

Rethinking Camelot was the most brazen, crude, and, yes, funny, piece of CIA hack-work ever thrown at the JFK assassination research community. It was also the most spectacular act of pseudo-leftist chip-cashing yet undertaken by Langley’s manufacturers of dissent. Just how laughably absurd Chomsky’s performance was is splendidly encapsulated in his treatment of the Pentagon Papers – with which farrago he was intimately concerned in the effort to sell that vast CIA-serving disinformation project to the Left:

Chomsky’s logic, example 1:

The Pentagon Papers, as characterised in Rethinking Camelot (London: Verso, 1993):

Line the first: They’re great and you can trust them…

“The record of internal deliberations, in particular, has been available far beyond the norm since the release of two editions of the Pentagon Papers…While history never permits anything like definitive conclusions, in this case, the richness of the record, and its consistency, permit some unusually confident judgments, in my opinion” (p.32).

Line the second: Er, they’re not, and you can’t…

“This critically important document is grossly falsified by the Pentagon Papers historians, and has largely disappeared from history” (p.41).

A small bonus while we’re on this subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/us/17i....html?_r=2

C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery

By way of demonstrating the above was by no means an aberration...

Chomsky’s logic, example 2:

The kibbutzim I visited in 1953, as characterised in James Peck’s The Chomsky Reader (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992):

Line the first: Freethinker’s paradise

“a functioning and very successful libertarian commune,” that he “liked…very much in many ways”, so much so that he “came close to returning there to live” (p.10)

Line the second: No it wasn’t, it was an intellectual Gulag

“…the ideological conformity was appalling. I don’t know if I could have survived long in that environment because I was very strongly opposed to the Leninist ideology, as well as the general conformism…” (p.10).

My favourite section of the book is that given over to "proving" that claims for JFK's intention to withdraw from Vietnam were nothing more or less than a post-Tet offensive fiction concocted by Camelot hagiographic loyalists:

"In short, the belief remains pure faith, held in the face of abundant counter-evidence from every relevant source" (p.127).

Really?

Wilfrid Burchett. The Furtive War: The United States in Vietnam and Laos (NY: International Publishers Co. Inc., 1963), p.216:

"by April 1963 Washington was already making soundings - either directly or through British, French, Indian and other channels - for the kind of formula under which an "honorable" withdrawal could be negotiated. But as in Laos, Washington was seeking a formula which would provide gains through diplomacy or intrigue that could not be obtained on the battlefield. Thus the favorite formula being offered by Washington's agents in April 1963 was a form of "neutralization" of South Vietnam which would admit some NLF elements into a Diemist-type regime in the South (although without Diem himself), in exchange for "neutralization" of the North, guaranteed by the presence of some Diemists in the government of North Vietnam. Other variants, always including "neutralization" of the North, envision a coalition government in the South formed by Diemist elements on the Right, some members of the NLF on the Left, and some liberal Vietnamese exiles in Paris to provide the neutralist "filling". Again, Diem himself is to be excluded, as all but the most die-hard US diplomats agree he is impossible."

I merely note in passing that in the late 1970s one Noam Chomsky signed a letter of protest to the Aussie government regarding its treatment of a veteran journalist called...Wilfrid Burchett.