Chomsky on the Death of bin Laden (better vid & sound)

Thanks to egolayer13 for remastering this video and improving the sound!

About the video:

Noam Chomsky speaks about the death of Osama bin Laden at UCLA. Talk hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
Saturday, May 7, 2011
6:00 pm - 10:00 pm, Young Hall - -Trueblood Lecture Hall - Rm CS50

This was a part of the Q&A session. Chomsky began by saying that, as a symbolic figure, bin Laden did a lot for the American imagination. I will try to get up the entire clip soon. Until then, here is a transcript:


Chomsky: "Whatever al Qaeda is, it isn't a membership organization where orders are taken from the top. Specialists that work on it call it 'a network of networks' -- a kind of loosely affiliated groups, mostly local."

[interrupted by audience member]: "Run by the CIA and Mossad."

Chomsky: "It's not run by the CIA and Mossad. But they're [al Qaeda] all over and pretty well studied. Scott Atran and others go through a lot of it. A lot of them are just based on communities -- you know, the same soccer club and things like that -- and they carry out their own operations. Bin Laden was a kind of symbolic figure so people listened to his orations and so on. And besides, increasingly they were becoming marginalized. What happened was that the last year or so almost totally marginalized them. What's going on in the Arab Spring is really significant -- it essentially drove what there is of jihadism into the corner. Nobody cares about it anymore. Why the United States decided to assassinate him at this point -- and it was an assassination, remember -- they've now conceded it was a straight murder, straight murder of an unarmed, defenseless man. They didn't try to capture him. If we take a look at the details, they almost certainly could have. But they didn't want to capture him. They dumped him into the ocean so nobody would find out what happened to him. This is all internal to U.S. ideology and it has nothing much to do with what's going on in the world. The chances are they didn't want to capture him because, if they did [capture him], they'd have had to bring him to trial and that would have been a disaster because they really had no evidence. And you could see this a long time ago. They conceded it a long time ago. It was years ago that the FBI conceded that they had suspicions and beliefs. And the beliefs are probably correct. But beliefs that are 'probably correct' don't stand up in court. But they had no evidence so it's best to murder him and have celebrations in Times Square. But I think it has almost nothing to do with what's going on in Palestine."

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[1844Freddy]

@LibertyDownUnder "America is always right! Anyone who criticizes America is scum! America has never done anything wrong!"

You are exactly the reason why America is becoming a totalitarian state. Stop being like this please.

[Juxtapresupposed]

Ad hominem |ˈad ˈhämənəm|

Attacking an opponent’s motives or character rather than the policy or position they maintain, e.g. when people don't possess the skill(s) to debate the issues they disagree with, they may defer to personal attacks against the individual presenting the argument.

[partisan49]

im against the US's "world police" tactics and all but Osama had it coming sooner or later. it's certainly better for the world that he's off the radar

[HillTribeman]

Dollar collapse

[MarioBrosClassic]

@1844Freddy wtf...you do realize this is youtube right?? that fools trollin hard

[DeflocculatedDentist]

@1844Freddy "becoming"? I can't think of a time in history that it wouldn't be fair to call the US totalitarian.

[UltraProle21]

@irex19 lol the education worl is the world of facts and reality? give me a break. aside from the hard sciences, this is far from the case.

[irex19]

@fodads

Chomsky is the most cited shcolar in the world. Its a fact look it up.

That means i can write a University THESIS, and use his work as PROOF.

Thats means in the Education world, the world of FACTS, and REALITY, Chomsky is BOSS.

[sk8tafrnk]

@1844Freddy When other countries do it it's called terrorism. When the U.S. does it, we're "fighting for democracy," when that is essentially the thing our country tries to keep from happening.