[troy]

This seems to be in the wrong section, don't know of there is a forum for deluded old men !

[ratdog]

troy, on 13 May 2011 - 01:31 PM, said:

This seems to be in the wrong section, don't know of there is a forum for deluded old men !

Maybe you could start one called Troy!


E2a, NC makes a damn sight more sense than you

This post has been edited by ratdog: 13 May 2011 - 01:41 PM

[Perfect Haze]

How dare you insult my fantasy grandad

[troy]

oops ruffled a few feathers there, and the usual ad hominem comments, give yourself a break.
A bit of balance :

Christopher Hitchens: Chomsky’s Follies


Christopher Hitchens May 11, 2011 – 7:30 AM ET | Last Updated: May 10, 2011 4:54 PM ET


Khalil Mazraawi/AFP/Getty Images
Noam Chomsky
Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance — to give it a polite designation — does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaeda’s martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the “operation.” As far as I know, only leading British “Truther” David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.)

In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama bin Laden’s claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky’s own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

I can’t immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaeda, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than Bill Clinton’s earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centres of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven’t been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaeda’s work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the operation to kill bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan would justify a contingency whereby “Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic.” (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, “uncontroversially, [Bush’s] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.”)

So the main new element is the one of intriguing mystery. The Twin Towers came down, but it’s still anyone’s guess who did it. Since “April 2002, [when] 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,” no evidence has been adduced. “Nothing serious,” as Chomsky puts it, “has been provided since.”

Chomsky still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. And in the face of bombardments of official propaganda, he prides himself in a signature phrase on his stern insistence on “turning to the facts.” So is one to assume that he has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker”? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?

With the paranoid anti-war “left,” you never quite know where the emphasis is going to fall next. At the Telluride Film Festival in 2002, I found myself debating Michael Moore, who, a whole year after the attacks, maintained that bin Laden was “innocent until proved guilty” (and hadn’t been proven guilty). Except that he had, at least according to Moore one day after the attacks, when he wrote that: “WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!” So, innocent unless tainted by association with Langley, Va., which did seem to have some heartland flying schools under surveillance before 2001 but which seemed sluggish on the uptake regarding them.

For quite some time, in fact, the whole anti-Bush “narrative” involved something rather like collusion with the evil bin Laden crime family, possibly based on mutual interests in the oil industry. So guilty was bin Laden, in fact, that he was allowed to prepare for a new Pearl Harbor on American soil by a spineless Republican administration that had ignored daily briefings on the mounting threat. Gore Vidal was able to utter many croaking and suggestive lines to this effect, hinting at a high-level betrayal of the republic.

And then came those who, impatient with mere innuendo, directly accused the administration of rocketing its own Pentagon and bringing about a “controlled demolition” of the World Trade Center. This grand scenario seemed to have a few loose planes left over, since the ones that hit the towers were only a grace note to the more ruthless pre-existing sabotage and the ones in Virginia and Pennsylvania, complete with passengers and crews and hijackers, somehow just went missing.

It’s no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn’t trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of “naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes ‘Jew’ and ‘Gypsy.’” Perhaps this is not so true in the case of Tomahawk, which actually is the name of a weapon, but the point is at least as good as any other he makes.

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn’t even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.
http://fullcomment.n...omskys-follies/

This post has been edited by troy: 13 May 2011 - 01:51 PM

[weed_G]

Quote

Prior to 11 September 2001, and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens was highly critical of Bush's "non-interventionist" foreign policy.

Quote

Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. He argues that a continued fight in Iraq against insurgents, whether they be former Saddam loyalists or Islamic extremists, is a fight worth having, and that those insurgents, not American forces, should be the ones taking the brunt of the blame for a slow reconstruction and high civilian casualties.

Quote

In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues. He has also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".

---------------

ahh chomsky insulted Troy's GOD..makes sense now, hitchens got owned by chomsky so left in a huff

Quote

Following the 11 September attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. In October 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation. Chomsky responded and Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky to which Chomsky again responded. Approximately a year after 11 September attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues. This highly charged exchange of letters involved Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn, as well as Hitchens and Chomsky.

This post has been edited by weed_G: 13 May 2011 - 02:29 PM

[Underwater]

Logik, on 13 May 2011 - 01:55 PM, said:

Quote

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama bin Laden that his group was the one responsible.

Fucking Loonytoon

He's wildly off the mark as usual, that statement is completely untrue. Bin Laden denied having anything to do with 11/9.

That claim of responsibility came on another (for shock) unauthenticated audio tape. One of several to have surfaced via the US military since Bin Ladens dissappearance (and death according to Egyptian media and US government sources) in 2001. Thats the trouble with quoting idiots like Hitchen, he's frequently wrong and writes hearsay,opinion and just plain old bollocks as fact.

Here is how Bin Laden actually responded to the accusations (from CNN no less, 16th Sep 2001) five days after it happened.

Quote

Bin Laden says he wasn't behind attacks

CNN September 16, 2001

Islamic militant leader Osama bin Laden, the man the United States considers the prime suspect in last week's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, denied any role Sunday in the actions believed to have killed thousands.

In a statement issued to the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, bin Laden said, "The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.

"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons," bin Laden's statement said.
Advertisement

"I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations," bin Laden said.

Asked Sunday if he believed bin Laden's denial, President Bush said, "No question he is the prime suspect. No question about that."

Since Tuesday's terrorist attacks against the United States, Bush has repeatedly threatened to strike out against terrorism and any nation that supports or harbors its disciples.

Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi-born exile, has lived in Afghanistan for several years. U.S. officials blame him for earlier strikes on U.S. targets, including last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.

Bin Laden's campaign stems from the 1990 decision by Saudi Arabia to allow U.S. troops into the kingdom after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait -- a military presence that has become permanent.

In a 1997 CNN interview, bin Laden called the U.S. military presence an "occupation of the land of the holy places."

Immediately after the attacks that demolished the World Trade Center's landmark twin towers and seriously damaged the Pentagon, officials of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban said they doubted bin Laden could have been involved in carrying out the actions.

The Taliban -- the fundamentalist Islamic militia that seized power in Afghanistan in 1996 -- denied his ties to terrorism and said they have taken away all his means of communication with the outside world.

The repressive Taliban regime has received almost universal condemnation, particularly for their harsh treatment of women. Only three countries, including Pakistan, recognize them as the country's rightful government.

A high-level Pakistani delegation was set to travel to Afghanistan on Monday to urge Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to hand over bin Laden, CNN learned Sunday.

The Taliban, which controls more than 90 percent of the country, has threatened any neighboring country that allows its soil to be used to help the United States stage an attack on Afghanistan.

Of course, why bother with facts when you can simpy make some shit up and have it published.

[troy]

To underwater,: You didn't read the article properly, hitchens attributed those thoughts ( in bold) to chomsky, he was being ironic. And of course there is plenty of evidence to implicate al qaeda.

This post has been edited by troy: 14 May 2011 - 02:14 PM

[Boojum]

Can't watch the video, but liberal media ?

I've often heard the right wing American media talk about a 'liberal media' (well, not so much talk as froth at the mouth), but I'm buggered if I've ever seen it, there's nothing liberal about ANY of the mainstream media.

[Underwater]

troy, on 14 May 2011 - 02:11 PM, said:

To underwater,: You didn't read the article properly, hitchens attributed those thoughts ( in bold) to chomsky, he was being ironic. And of course there is plenty of evidence to implicate al qaeda.

No, no. I understood and replied accordingly Troy. He mentions this 'claim of responsibility' which of course is not accurate. Bin Laden denied the attack as shown in the tabloid CNN article.


However your reply just then allowed you to move the goalposts a bit and bring the so far unmentioned Al Quaeda into the conversation, as if I had mentioned 'them' already which, of course, I hadn't.

[Hughie Green]

troy, on 13 May 2011 - 01:50 PM, said:

oops ruffled a few feathers there, and the usual ad hominem comments, give yourself a break.

I imagine people resort to Ad Hominem comments because you usually do not have a discernible point nor provide any credible evidence to back your opinions.

[Billowin'smoke]

Everyone's gotta have some respect for Chomsky, whatever their politics - the guy invented modern linguistics, was a major figure in overturning behaviourist psychology, is a better philosopher than many philosophers etc.