Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (18 page)

Now, let me go on with the personal side of this. Two weeks later, I happened to go to Germany—where, incidentally, I was giving a talk at a conference on terrorism. When I got off at the airport in Frankfurt, the first thing I did was pick up the German newspapers, and I also picked up
Der Spiegel
, which is kind of like the German
Newsweek
. The front cover of
Der Spiegel
was a picture of Reagan looking like some kind of madman with missiles going over his head, and at the bottom was the phrase: “Terror Against Terror.”
  ²⁵
Now, that happens to be an old Gestapo slogan: when the Gestapo went after the anti-Nazi resistance, they called it “terror against terror.” And I assume that everybody in Germany knew that it was a Gestapo slogan—I guess that was the point, and especially when you looked at the picture, the associations were pretty obvious: they were saying, “This is like the Nazis.” And the whole journal basically was devoted to exploding the theory that Libya had anything to do with the disco bombing. They said, there’s no evidence for this, it’s a total fabrication, Washington has never provided any evidence. There were speculations as to who might have done it, like it might have been drug-related, some people thought it was Ku Klux Klan-related—the Klan is very strong there, coming out of the American army—but there didn’t seem to be any reason why Libya would bomb a German Third World bar. And in fact, while I was in Germany, I didn’t meet a single person who thought that there was any plausibility whatsoever to the Libyan connection.

Okay, I went to the conference on terrorism, and afterwards there was a press conference. At the press conference, I was asked by German reporters what I thought about all of this, and I told them the little bit I knew. After it ended, a guy came up to me, a black American from Dorchester [in Boston], and introduced himself. He was a G.I. who’d been living in Germany for about twenty-five years—he’d served there, then decided he didn’t want to come back, so he stayed; a fair number of black Americans have done that, actually. Now he was working as a reporter for
Stars and Stripes
, the American army newspaper. Well, he told me that what I had said about the bombing was part of the story, but that I didn’t know the half of it—it was much worse than I had said. I asked him what he meant, and he said that as a reporter for
Stars and Stripes
, he had regularly been interviewing the head of the hundred-person West German investigating team which was studying the disco bombing [Manfred Ganschow], a man who also happened to be the director of the West Berlin equivalent of the F.B.I. [the Berlin Staats-schutz]. And he said that ever since the first day he began interviewing him, this guy had been telling him: “There’s no Libyan connection, there’s no evidence for it, we don’t believe it.” I asked him if he could get me something on paper about this that I could publish, and he said he would.

He flew to Berlin and conducted another interview with this guy, then came back to Frankfurt where I was, and gave me the transcript of the interview. In it, he asked the guy: “Do you have any new information about a Libyan connection?” And the guy said, “You’ve been asking me that ever since the first day. I told you then we don’t have any evidence, we still have no evidence.” The reporter kept pressing. He said, “Look, Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor of Germany, now agrees that there’s some plausibility to Reagan’s Libya story.” And this guy said, “Well, politicians have to do what they have to do, and they’ll say their stuff, but I’m just telling you what the facts are; the facts are, there’s no evidence.”
  ²⁶
And it goes on from there. There never was any evidence. A couple months later it even began to be
conceded
that there was no evidence. So maybe Syrians did it, or maybe it was some other thing, but the idea that there was any credible Libyan connection just disappeared.
  ²⁷

Actually, on the first anniversary of the bombing, the B.B.C. [British Broadcasting Corporation] did a retrospective on the story in which they reviewed all the background and went to European intelligence agencies for assistance: their conclusion was that all of the European intelligence agencies—including those from the most conservative governments—say they see no plausibility to the idea that there was a Libyan connection to the disco bombing.
  ²⁸
The whole thing was a lie. Nevertheless, it continues to be repeated in the U.S. press.
  ²⁹

In fact, the B.B.C. also presented some further interesting information. If you were following all of this at the time, you’ll remember that there was a very dramatic story told in the U.S. media after the disco bombing about how the United States had picked up secret intercepts that Libya was going to bomb some target in West Berlin just before the bombing, so they had declared an alert and were running around to all the places U.S. soldiers go in West Berlin, and they got to the discotheque just fifteen minutes too late—you remember that story?
  ³⁰
It turns out it was a total fabrication. The B.B.C. investigated it: neither the German intelligence and police nor any Western embassy had ever heard about it—it was all completely fabricated.

Well, the point is, all of this stuff was known to American reporters. The
New York Times
had a top-flight correspondent in Germany, James Markham, and he was interviewing the head of West German intelligence too, except he was never reporting any of this.
  ³¹
In fact, none of it was ever reported, the press played the whole thing as if they were completely blind—they pretended all the way through that they didn’t understand the business about the timing; they didn’t mention the fact that there was no evidence of a Libyan connection to the disco bombing right up to the moment of the Tripoli attack; and they have yet to inform people that West Germany itself never saw any evidence of a connection, and has always regarded it as a total fabrication. All of that is just unstatable in the U.S. media—and in this context, it’s not very surprising that the American population still believes the official line. Well, here’s an example of real brain-washings—and it’s just got to be conscious in this case, I can’t believe that the press is that incompetent.

Actually, there’s even one more part to the Tripoli bombing story, that I know of at least. Remember the Pentagon’s version of why we had to bomb Libya the first time: it was that American planes had been flying over the Gulf of Sidra to establish our right to be there, they were in international waters forty miles off the Libyan coast, they detected Libyan planes pursuing them, they disabled the Libyan radar, then in international waters, the Libyans shot at our planes—therefore we had to shoot them down and sink their naval boats, and ultimately bomb Tripoli a few days later and kill lots of Libyan civilians. That was the Pentagon’s story. Well, a couple days after that, a very good, highly respected British correspondent, a guy named David Blundy, went to Libya to investigate the story, and he discovered the following. It turns out that at the time of the first American attack, there were a bunch of British engineers in Libya who were there making repairs on the Libyan radar systems—it was Russian radar, but the Russians couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so they had to call in British engineers to fix it. So these engineers were there working on the radar, and by the time of the incident with the American fighter planes, the radar was working perfectly well and they were in fact monitoring the whole episode right as it transpired. And what they claim is that the American planes were not in international waters, they had in fact flown directly over Libyan ground territory: they had followed Libyan commercial jets at first so they wouldn’t be picked up on radar, then they revealed themselves when they were over Libyan ground territory, and at that point they picked up ground fire.
  ³²
And the purpose just had to be to
elicit
Libyan ground fire. Then when they’d been shot at, they went back out to sea and bombed the boats and shot down the planes and so on.

Well, that has never been reported in the United States. And that was very cautious non-reporting—because the
New York Times
and others just had to have been aware of this story, they just never mentioned any of this information.

M
AN
: I have a student who was on active duty in the Mediterranean at that time, and he says that the American Navy went within a very short physical distance of the Libyan shoreline—not only within twelve miles, but within three miles. He was right there on the deck and saw it
.

That’s probably the same story; that’s interesting.

W
OMAN
: What was the point of it, though?

The immediate point was pretty clear: right then the Reagan administration was trying to create fanaticism in time for the Congressional vote on aid to the Nicaraguan contras, which was coming up a few days later. In fact, if anyone didn’t understand this, Reagan drew the connection explicitly in a speech he made. He said: you know these Libyans, they’re even trying to set up an outpost in our Hemisphere—namely, in Nicaragua.
  ³³
In case anybody didn’t understand …

M
AN
: I understand the operation was a real military fiasco as well
.

Yes, there’s a very good study of that by Andrew Cockburn, who’s quite a good military correspondent.
  ³⁴
A couple of the planes broke down, the bombs were going all over the place. I mean, they used laser-guided bombs—“smart” bombs—and when laser-guided bombs miss, it means that something got screwed up in the control mechanism, so they can go ten miles away, they can go anywhere. I mean, no high-technology works for very long, certainly not under complicated conditions, so all of these gadgets were screwing up and the servicemen couldn’t figure out where they were. The night radar didn’t work, a plane was shot down—it goes on and on. And remember, this was with no enemy opposition.

It was the same with the Grenada invasion [in 1983], actually—that was also a military fiasco. I mean, seven thousand American elite troops succeeded, after three days, in overcoming the resistance of about three dozen Cubans and a few Grenadan military men; they got 8,000 Medals of Honor for it.
  ³⁵
They mostly shot themselves, or shot each other. They bombed a mental hospital. The airplanes were on a different radio frequency than the ground troops. They didn’t know there were two medical campuses. In fact, there was an official report about it later by some Pentagon guy [William Lind], who just described it as a total fiasco.
  ³⁶

M
AN
: They had to use tourist maps
.

They had the wrong maps—and this is like bombing the Rowe Conference Center [i.e. where Chomsky and the group were meeting], about that hard.

M
AN
: Are these military planners rational?

There’s a kind of rationality. But remember, they’re not really expecting to fight a war against anybody who can fight back—like, they’re not planning on fighting the Russians or anything like that. They’re mostly doing counterinsurgency stuff against defenseless targets like Libya and Grenada, so it doesn’t really matter whether the equipment works. The top brass in the Pentagon, they basically want a lot of high-powered, heavily automated gadgetry that’s expensive, because that’s what makes you a big bureaucracy and able to run a lot of things. I mean, there’s an
economic
purpose to the Pentagon, like I was talking about before: it’s a way to get the public to fund the development of high technology, and so on. But the generals also want all this stuff too—it’s kind of a power play. So these generals would rather have high-tech fancy aircraft than simple aircraft which just do the job, because you’re more powerful if you control more complicated stuff. The perception they encourage is that everything’s getting fancier and fancier, and more and more complicated, so they need more and more money, and more and more assistance, and more and more control—and it doesn’t really matter very much whether it works properly or not, that’s kind of secondary.
  ³⁷

W
OMAN
: Gore Vidal refers to us as “the proud victors of Grenada.”

Yeah, that’s when Reagan got up and said, “We’re standing tall again.”
  ³⁸
We’re laughing—but remember, people didn’t laugh at the time. The Grenada invasion was considered a big shot in the arm: we’re standing tall, they’re not going to push us around anymore, all hundred thousand of them, We overcame their nutmeg.

The U.S. and the U.N
.

M
AN
: Noam, do you see any positive role that the U.N. can play, for instance sending U.N. peacekeeping forces to places instead of U.S. intervention forces?

Well, the U.N. can only play a positive role if the great powers let it play a positive role. So where the great powers more or less agree on something and they just need a mechanism to effect it, the U.N. is useful. But if the great powers are opposed—like, say the United States is opposed to something—okay, then it just doesn’t happen.

M
AN
: What about if the U.N. didn’t have a Security Council, or didn’t give veto power to the five permanent Security Council members? [The U.N. Security Council has 15 seats, 5 of which are permanently assigned to the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China, and for “substantive” Security Council resolutions to go into effect none of the 5 permanent members can have voted against them; unlike the General Assembly, the Security Council has enforcement powers.]