The critique of Chomsky on Cambodia is hardly a canard. Thus, I cannot understand your claim, Michael, that he is a man of, what did you say, "great integrity"?
Consider the following selections from an article by Chomsky and Herman in 1977 (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm Distortions at Fourth Hand that appeared in The Nation.) "Hildebrand and Porter present a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources." "In brief, Hildebrand and Porter attribute "wrecking" and "rebuilding" to the wrong parties in Cambodia." [and thus earn according to Chomsky and Herman the condemnation of the western media] "The Wall Street Journal acknowledged its [H-P's book] existence in an editorial entitled "Cambodia Good Guys" (November 22, 1976), which dismissed contemptuously the very idea that the Khmer Rouge could play a constructive role, as well as the notion that the United States had a major hand in the destruction, death and turmoil of wartime and postwar Cambodia." "In contrast, the media favorite, Barron and Paul's "untold story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia" (their subtitle), virtually ignores the U.S. Government role." "Their scholarship [B-P's] collapses under the barest scrutiny. To cite a few cases, they state that among those evacuated from Phnom Penh, "virtually everybody saw the consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun," citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote, in fact, that "not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route," and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious (The Washington Post, May 9, 1975)." "Nor do they [B-P] try to account for the amazingly rapid growth of the revolutionary forces from 1969 to 1973, as attested by U.S. intelligence and as is obvious from the unfolding events themselves." "The "slaughter" by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss-New York Times creation." "...executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing." [ ] are mine and ( ) are those of Chomsky and Herman, thus C-H call the KR constructive and revolutionaries and dismiss the word "genocide" as "their subtitle" and reports of bloating corpses as "fallacious" and the "slaughter" (their scare quotes) is a "creation" of the mainstream media. These were precisely the tactics of the State Department and UN Security Council when it decided not to intervene to prevent the Rwandan genocide. In fact, the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program (http://www.yale.edu/cgp/cgpintro.html) concludes that at least 1.7 million people were slaughtered from 1975 to 1979, as Chomsky and Herman, from tenured security in Cambridge and Philadelphia penned their review for The Nation. Stephen F. Diamond, J.D., Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Law School of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
