In point of fact -- and just for the record -- however ill-conceived Bill Clinton's decision to launch a missile into the Sudan, it was not remotely comparable to the World Trade Center massacre. It was, in its very design, precisely the opposite -- a defensive response that attempted to minimize casualties. Clinton's missile was launched in reaction to the blowing up of two of our African embassies, the murder of hundreds of innocent people and the injury to thousands, mostly African civilians. It was designed with every precaution possible to prevent the loss of innocent life. The missile was fired at night, so that no one would be in the building when it was hit. The target was selected because the best information available indicated it was not a pharmaceutical factory, but a factory producing biological weapons. Chomsky's use of this incident to diminish the monstrosity of the terrorist attack is a typical Chomsky maneuver, an accurate measure of his instinctive mendacity, and an index of the anti-American dementia which infuses everything he writes and says.

This same psychotic hatred shapes the "historical" perspective he offered to his disciples in an interview conducted a few days after the World Trade Center bombing. It was intended to present America as the devil incarnate -- and therefore a worthy target of attack for the guerilla forces of "social justice" all over the world. This was the first time America itself -- or as Chomsky put it, the "national territory" -- had been attacked since the War of 1812. Pearl Harbor doesn't count in Chomsky's calculus because Hawaii was a "colony" at the time. The fact that it was a benignly run colony and that it is now a proud state of the Union counts for nothing, of course, in Chomsky's eyes.

"During these years [i.e., between 1812 and 1941], the U.S. annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change."

Listening to Chomsky, you can almost feel the justice of Osama bin Laden's strike on the World Trade Center.

If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of young people who had been exposed to his propaganda -- and the equally vile teachings of his academic disciples -- you too would be able to extend your outrage against America into the present.

  • According to Chomsky, in the first battle of the postwar struggle with the Soviet Empire, "the United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off."

  • According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, American operations behind the Iron Curtain included "a 'secret army' under U.S.-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s."

  • According to Chomsky, in Latin America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments against communist subversion led to U.S. complicity under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler's extermination squads."

  • According to Chomsky, there is "a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid."

  • According to Chomsky, America "invaded" Vietnam to slaughter its people, and even after America left in 1975, under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, "the major policy goal of the U.S. has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing."

  • According to Chomsky, "the pretext for Washington's terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust."

  • In sum, according to Chomsky, "legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They've all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."

    • What decent, caring human being would not want to see America and its war criminals brought to justice?

    According to Chomsky, what America really wants is to steal from the poor and give to the rich. America's crusade against communism was actually a crusade "to protect our doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor." That is why we busied ourselves in launching a new crusade against terrorism after the end of the Cold War:

    "Of course, the end of the Cold War brings its problems too. Notably, the technique for controlling the domestic population has to had to shift ... New enemies have to be invented. It becomes hard to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been 'the poor who seek to plunder the rich' -- in particular, Third World miscreants who seek to break out of the service role."

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