Wat Tyler writes:

>Chomsky says law-abiding states should refrain from using
>violence and try to prosecute the perpetrators of terrorist
>attacks, rather than resorting to the same tactics.

"Same tactics"? Did we deliberately target innocent civilians? Last I
checked we took out a VX nerve gas facility and the perpetrators' meeting
place. According to news reports, a second plant in a densely populated
area was not targeted precisely because of the civilian casualties that
would result. We did not attack the sponsor governments. Meanwhile they
took out 2 embassies, killing over 200 people (most of them African), and
if news reports are accurate, twice planned to assassinate our head of
state.

If Chomsky is really asserting a moral equivalence between the 2 acts,
he's losing my respect. Maybe he needs to revisit his oft-quoted
definition of terrorism: the use of violence against civilians for
political ends. If self-defense is terrorism, the definition is
meaningless.
>
>``People who carry out terrorist attacks are culpable and
>should be punished just like any other crime.''
Easy to say, difficult to carry out, no? The Taliban unsurprisingly has
said that they would never turn over bin Laden to international
authorities. Meanwhile Chomsky is willing to risk that thousands of
civilians, US or otherwise, will get VX dumped on them while we spend
years trying to bring these people to justice? If he is, he should have
the courage to say so, or expect that people who live in the real world
will see his rhetoric as armchair moralism made risk-free by the umbrella
of force he professes to despise.

_________
Tresy Kilbourne, Seattle WA
"The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't
betray it I'd be ashamed of myself." --Noam Chomsky, responding to an
accusation of betrayal by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.