IAN WILLIAMS apologist for mass murder
Ian Williams -- August 3, 2009
Kofi Annan's greatest achievement as UN
secretary general was his deft steering of
the UN General Assembly to accept the
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine at
the 2005 World Summit.
Rather than attempting the impossible task
of rewriting the UN Charter, Annan got the
assembled delegates to reinterpret it. The
assembled government leaders declared that
the threats to international peace and
security that came under the organization's
remit included crimes against humanity, even
when committed by a sovereign state within
its borders.
Annan's successor Ban Ki Moon is a staunch
supporter of the concept of R2P. The report
www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/index.
php/publications
he delivered last week, as requested in
2005, framed the discussion in a way that
precluded reopening the principle. But
opponents at the General Assembly and their
ideological allies outside were sedulously
determined to weaken R2P in practice as much
as possible.
The Chinese delegate, for instance, stood
the whole concept on its head by declaring
that the UN must not waver from "the
principles of respecting state sovereignty
and non-interference of internal affairs."
In contrast, Ban's report referred with more
nuance to the "abiding principles of
responsible sovereignty." Debating R2P
To avert attempts to reverse the 2005
declaration R2P's proponents, not least the
UN secretariat, are keeping to a tightly
written script. R2P isn't the same as
humanitarian intervention, they argue. Its
three pillars are the responsibility of
sovereign states to prevent crimes against
their people, the responsibility of the
international community to detect and avert
such criminal situations, and the
responsibility to apply varying degrees of
coercion against the perpetrators from
monitoring to sanctions to, if necessary,
military intervention.
Proponents of R2P stress that only the UN
Security Council can authorize such
intervention. Ban Ki Moon's report, however,
does mention the General Assembly's Uniting
for Peace procedure, which the United States
originally invoked to fight the Korean war
in spite of the Soviet veto in the Security
Council. Washington has since dismissed the
procedure after the Palestinians used it to
bypass the U.S. veto for Israel.
Humanitarian intervention -- invoked by
Hitler in the Sudetenland and Japan in
Manchuria -- is indeed a slippery and easily
abused concept. Most recently, Tony Blair's
attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq as
humanitarian intervention and Moscow's
attempt to invoke in Georgia the principle
it denied in Kosovo show the dangers.
Of course, expediency is a global disease.
Cuba, which sent Che Guevara to lead
rebellions across the globe, is a determined
advocate of national sovereignty.
Ironically, some of the most determined
upholders of state sovereignty are heirs to
the Leninist tradition which, in the name of
proletarian internationalism, took the Red
Army variously to Warsaw, Budapest, and
Hungary. One of the most vocal opponents is
Hugo Chavez's government, which has hardly
been reticent to interfere in the politics
of the neighbors. Chomsky's Intervention
The president of the General Assembly
invited noted critic of U.S. foreign policy
Noam Chomsky to address the audience on the
issue of R2P. Chomsky quite rightly raised
the question of why there was no
intervention in East Timor or why the UN
stood by as Israel attacked Lebanon and
Gaza. However, he claimed that the NATO air
raids on Serbia actually precipitated the
worst atrocities in Kosovo. This latter
claim isn't only untrue but morally
unpalatable in its spurious causality, like
claiming that the British air raids on
Germany precipitated the Nazi gas chambers.
But at least Chomsky admitted that
atrocities had taken place in Kosovo, which
is much farther than some of his would-be
acolytes have gone.
It also begs the question: Does Chomsky want
international action to stop atrocities in
Gaza, the Congo, or situations like Timor,
or is he only opposed to "Western"
interventions? Indeed, the astute delegate
from Ghana took him to task
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/ga108
4 7.doc.htm for failing to address the
principle of "noninterference." The African
Union's charter specifically adopted
"non-indifference." Its charter includes the
organization's obligation to intervene.
Chomsky is quite right to point out the core
weakness of the R2P proposals, which puts
the onus of decision-making on the Security
Council. The permanent five members of the
Security Council (P5) use their veto power
to protect their friends even as they accuse
others of doing likewise. China protects
Sudan, North Korea, and Zimbabwe, in the
latter case following in British footsteps,
since Britain vetoed resolutions on Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe) in times past. France covers
for Morocco in Western Sahara. The United
States has until now automatically covered
for Israel, and Russia for Serbia. Britain
and the United States were confident that
they could use their vetoes to prevent their
invasion of Iraq from appearing on the
Security Council agenda just as Beijing
ensures the exclusion of Taiwan from the UN
and the issues of Tibet and the Uighurs from
its agenda.
This expediency has given opponents of the
R2P plenty of ammunition, even if their
high-minded declarations about the
sacredness of sovereignty tend to conceal an
ugly, oligarchic self-interest. In effect,
apologists for authoritarian sovereignty
imply that they would happily let all
murders go unchecked because some states get
away with it. This argument boils down to
saying that if the United States can do
something, everybody else can as well, an
anti-imperialism that ends up playing into
the hands of leaders like Saddam Hussein,
Slobodan Milosevic, Fidel Castro, and Kim
Jong Il. Despite their disparate ideologies,
these authoritarian leaders share a deep
rhetorical attachment to their countries'
national sovereignty combined with a
cavalier disregard for the sovereignty of
others, including their own citizenry. The
Problem of Implementation
While the 2005 summit overturned the
principle that what governments did within
their national borders was no one else's
concern, it has some way to go before
achieving practical implementation. In fact,
despite Bolivarian bluster from Venezuela
and a few others, the real problem is not
the possibility of a complaisant Security
Council authorizing dubiously humanitarian
interventions. The problem remains the
paralysis of the body in the face of
humanitarian disasters. In fact,
conditioning the principle on reform of the
Security Council is tantamount to making it
contingent on pigs flying in formation past
UN headquarters.
The possibility, the probability, and even
better the certainty, of retribution would
surely give pause to future leaders. The R2P
principle will in the end come to life
because of global public opinion forcing
action. For example, even China was forced
to moderate its support of Sudan in the face
of international public opinion.
But Ban Ki Moon, who is tougher than his
mild diplomatic manner may suggest, strongly
reminded delegates that the
"Secretary-General has an obligation to tell
the Security Council -- and in this case the
General Assembly as well -- what it needs to
know, not what it wants to hear." His report
says that the Secretary General "must be the
spokesperson for the vulnerable and the
threatened when their Governments become
their persecutors instead of their
protectors or can no longer shield them from
marauding armed groups," and he singles out
the P5, who "bear particular responsibility
because of the privileges of tenure and the
veto power they have been granted under the
Charter. I would urge them to refrain from
employing or threatening to employ the veto
in situations of manifest failure to meet
obligations relating to the responsibility
to protect...and to reach a mutual
understanding to that effect."
Ban can do a great deal to foment that
global opinion, and is giving every
appearance of wanting to do so. While the
U.S. press treats Ban as invisible, the rest
of the world has leant him their ears. In a
recent global poll, he was the second most
trusted global figure after Obama. Only
global public opinion can force the P5 to
live up to their responsibilities -- the
first of which is to ensure that no regime,
not even their close friends, has a
guaranteed veto against international
action.
The single most significant step the United
States could take to disarm some of the
critics is to reverse John Bolton's
dubiously legal "unsigning" of the Rome
Treaty on the International Criminal Court.
Washington can hardly call upon the Sudanese
to respect the indictment of a court that it
has refused to accept itself. To ensure
greater global public support for R2P -- and
answer some of the legitimate charges of the
doctrine's critics -- the United States must
end its own double standards on
international treaties and military
intervention. Obama is more likely than any
president in 40 years to make moves in that
direction, so R2P has more of a future than
it did a year ago.
=== COMMENTS =====
Name: Jutu Artoh Date: Aug 03, 2009
Amazing - Ian Williams finds Chomsky
erroneous!! This is a first, I PROMISE!!
Treat it like Christmas!! Background info -
the establishment consensus -- intellectual
lamentation:
http://chomsky-must-read.blogspot.com/2009/0
8 /chomsky-found-to-be-wrong.html
==== CHOMSKY REPLIES ============
Kosovo, East Timor, R2P, and Ian Williams
Noam Chomsky -- August 17, 2009
In a discussion of Responsibility to Protect
(R2P) in Foreign Policy In Focus, Ian
Williams vehemently denies my
uncontroversial observation, well-known to
everyone familiar with the Kosovo events,
that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning
March 24 1999] actually precipitated the
worst atrocities in Kosovo." He declares
that this familiar observation "isn't only
untrue but morally unpalatable in its
spurious causality, like claiming that the
British air raids on Germany precipitated
the Nazi gas chambers."
Williams doesn't explain what he regards as
untrue and morally offensive, so let us
review carefully what he should certainly
know well, and ask what might support his
charges.
There is massive evidence about Kosovo in
impeccable Western sources, never
questioned. That includes two compilations
of documents by the State Department,
detailed reports of the Organization of
Security and Cooperation in Europe Kosovo
Verification Mission monitors, a British
parliamentary inquiry, reports of NATO, the
UN, and more. As I wrote in the paper on R2P
to which Williams refers, the results are
unequivocal: The worst atrocities began as
the bombing started (to be precise, there
was a slight increase a few days earlier
when the monitors were withdrawn, over
Serbian objections, in preparation for the
bombings). On March 27, NATO Commander
General Wesley Clark informed the press that
the vicious Serbian reaction was "entirely
predictable." He added shortly after that
the sharp escalation of atrocities had been
"fully anticipated" and was "not in any way"
a concern of the political leadership.
Clark clarified the matter further in his
memoirs. He reports that on March 6, 1999,
he had informed Secretary of State Madeline
Albright that if NATO proceeded to bomb
Serbia, "almost certainly [the Serbs] will
attack the civilian population," and NATO
will be able to do nothing to prevent that
reaction. Correspondingly, the Milosevic
indictment kept to crimes after the bombing,
with a single exception, which we know could
not have offended the consciences of the
United States, the United Kingdom, and their
supporters, as discussed in my R2P paper.
We may ask, then, what is untrue and morally
offensive in my repeating uncontroversial
facts that Williams doesn't happen to like.
Was it untrue and morally offensive, for
example, for General Clark to inform the
White House and the press that the bombing
would precipitate the worst atrocities --
correctly, as it quickly turned out?
Considerably more remarkable even than these
apologetics for NATO is what Williams says
about the crimes in East Timor at the same
time. These crimes were far worse than
anything reported in Kosovo prior to the
NATO bombing, and had a background far more
grotesque than anything claimed in the
Balkans. He writes that "Chomsky quite
rightly raised the question of why there was
no intervention in East Timor." It would
have been outlandish to raise that question,
and I did not do so. Since Williams favors
Holocaust analogies, it would be like
raising the question of why Nazis didn't
intervene to stop the slaughter of Jews by
local forces in the regions they occupied.
The question doesn't arise, and for a simple
reason: The United States and United Kingdom
had been intervening for decades, providing
decisive support for atrocities, and
continued to do so right through the
escalation of crimes in 1999, even after the
vast destruction in early September. There
was no secret about the reasons. In my R2P
paper I quoted National Security Council
advisor Sandy Berger who, after the
September atrocities, dismissed the matter
by saying "I don't think anybody ever
articulated a doctrine which said that we
ought to intervene wherever there's a
humanitarian problem" -- in this case, a
"problem" we are directly expediting.
Britain and Australia reacted the same way.
As discussed further in the same paper,
there would have been no need for any form
of intervention: it would have been enough
for the United States, United Kingdom, and
their allies to have withdrawn their
decisive participation in Indonesia's
crimes. That was demonstrated a few days
after Berger's dismissal of the "problem"
when, under strong domestic and
international pressure, Clinton finally
informed the Indonesian generals that the
game was over and they instantly withdrew,
allowing a UN peacekeeping force to enter
unopposed -- a step that could have been
taken at any time during the 25-year horror
story.
It is understandable that Williams doesn't
like to look at the blood on his hands, but
it cannot be so simply washed or wished
away.
If Williams really is uninformed about the
topics he is addressing, he can find easily
accessible sources that review them in some
detail, including my book A New Generation
Draws the Line (Verso, 2000) and a great
deal more since.
On R2P, I have nothing to add beyond what is
in the R2P paper. As pointed out there, the
version of R2P adopted by the 2005 UN summit
affirms what had already been accepted, at
most with a shift of emphasis, which is why
it was so easily adopted. There is, however,
a radically different version of R2P,
presented by the 2001 Evans Commission,
which adds a provision allowing "regional"
organizations to act without Security
Council authorization in their "area of
jurisdiction." That provision is sharply
distinct from the African Union (AU)
exception, which permits AU intervention
within the AU. In practice, the Evans
extension refers solely to NATO, which
claims an extremely broad "area of
jurisdiction." The Evans version of R2P
simply reinstates "the so-called 'right' of
humanitarian intervention," which has always
been vigorously opposed by the non-aligned
countries, the traditional victims.
Much of the discussion underway evades or
obscures this crucial distinction, as well
as the fact, which I also discussed, that
the great powers right now are adopting
Berger's principle, refusing to exercise the
responsibility they like to orate about, as
could be done in some cases in quite
straightforward ways. I also discussed the
AU exception, and why it differs so
radically from the OAS Charter. Judging by
the irrelevant question on non-intervention
he raises, Williams did not hear or read
that section of my talk. I cannot, of
course, take responsibility for his baseless
beliefs about my views on this and other
matters.
======================
Response to Chomsky
Ian Williams -- August 21, 2009
I am afraid that simply because Noam Chomsky
makes an ex cathedra observation does not
make it "uncontroversial" -- not even when he
hyperbolically accuses me of having "blood
on my hands." He still defends his statement
that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning
March 24, 1999] actually precipitated the
worst atrocities in Kosovo," and is
surprised that I find this untrue -- let
alone morally unpalatable.
One hesitates to teach logic, let alone
linguistics, to the distinguished professor,
but his use of the world "precipitate"
shifts the blame for the massacres and mass
deportations that he admits took place from
the actual perpetrators to those who were
trying to stop them. (Incidentally, at the
time Bogdan Denitch and I called for
intervention
http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/conten
t /article/190/38823.html but also condemned
the form of intervention that President
Clinton chose -- high-level bombing.)
One can certainly accuse the West of
neglecting the plight of the Kosovars, but
it was Milosevic and his regime that
deprived the Kosovars of their rights and
then began to kill and deport them. It was
that regime that had recently killed up to
8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, whose
dismembered and reburied bodies are still
being found. There was no NATO bombing to
blame for that rather shameful inaction.
In fact, faced with that cold-blooded
massacre, NATO leaders had every reason to
fear the worst in Kosovo.
I would recommend that Chomsky read the
judgment of the UN war crimes tribunal,
after it had considered the evidence of 113
witnesses for the prosecution and 118 for
the defense, not to mention tens of
thousands of pages of documents submitted by
both sides. It found five Serb officials
guilty of the "criminal enterprise" that he
attributes to NATO. It concludes that "the
direct testimony from many witnesses
demonstrates that the Kosovo Albanian
population was fleeing from the actions of
the forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia] and Serbia, rather than the NATO
bombing and the KLA."
For a flourish that should excite some
indignation, the report added that "there is
no doubt that a clandestine operation
consisting of exhuming over 700 bodies
originally buried in Kosovo and transferring
them to Serbia proper took place during the
NATO bombing" and adds that the "great
majority of the corpses moved were victims
of crime and civilians, including women and
children."
In finding the Serbian officials guilty, the
tribunal noted that "the NATO bombing
provided an opportunity to the members of
the joint criminal enterprise -- an
opportunity for which they had been waiting
and for which they had prepared by moving
additional forces to Kosovo and by the
arming and disarming process described above
-- to deal a heavy blow to the KLA and to
displace, both within and without Kosovo,
enough Kosovo Albanians to change the ethnic
balance. And now this could all be done with
plausible deniability because it could be
blamed not only upon the KLA, but upon NATO
as well [italics mine]." The blame-shifting
certainly seems to have worked with Chomsky,
but the judges looked at the mass of
evidence and decided to the contrary.
Chomsky betrays a persistent Manichaean
worldview in which the United States is
always the source of evil in the world. Even
with that in mind he would surely like to
reconsider his implied comparison of the
United States with Nazis. ("It would be like
raising the question of why Nazis didn't
intervene to stop the slaughter of Jews by
local forces in the regions they occupied.")
The United States is often, but not always
wrong, and its enemies are sometimes, but
not always right. The United States was
certainly wrong in East Timor, and indeed in
the near contemporary situation in Western
Sahara, and I have been reporting on those
injustices for many decades. Along with the
other members of the Security Council the
United States had a clear duty to intervene
to assert international law. In the absence
of effective international (i.e., U.S.)
intervention, the Indonesian military would
have been every bit as brutal and
aggressive.
We could deplore this intervention as much
as we like, but I fail to see what was going
to stop Indonesia's brutality otherwise.
Indeed, Chomsky points out that it was
Clinton's intervention that persuaded the
Indonesian general's that the game was up in
East Timor. Yes it was long overdue, but it
was an American intervention, which deserves
some grudging credit. Also, by delegating
U.S. forces to the UN on the Macedonian
border, the United States successfully
prevented yet another former Yugoslav
republic being sucked into Milosevic's
bloodstained mire. There are hundreds of
thousands of dead Rwandans who would have
welcomed a U.S. intervention there.
However, Chomsky takes an absolutist
position on intervention in principle, which
would have had him picketing the Normandy
beaches to stop the war against German
workers.
The United States is culpable in many ways
over East Timor, but that should not detract
from the primary role of the Indonesian
government and military. Nor should any
person of ethics try to shield the Milosevic
regime from its unique culpability for
events in Srebrenica and Kosovo. Chomsky's
quasi-theological conception of the United
States as the supreme evil power tends to
exonerate the less evil powers, turning
Ariel Sharon, the Indonesian generals,
Milosevic, and the others into mere
secondary agents. Meanwhile, condemning in
principle any effective action to stop these
malign actors actually lends them aid and
comfort -- while doing nothing for their
victims.
====================
Response to Williams
Noam Chomsky -- September 1, 2009
Ian Williams angrily denied that "NATO air
raids on Serbia [beginning March 24 1999]
actually precipitated the worst atrocities
in Kosovo" and charged that it is deeply
immoral for me to say so, "like claiming
that the British air raids on Germany
precipitated the Nazi gas chambers."
In response, I asked the obvious question:
Why does he issue this quite serious charge
against NATO Commander General Wesley Clark
and the White House, comparing them to Nazi
apologists? The question is quite apt. I
quoted Clark's statement, made to the press
a few days after the bombing began, that
Serbian atrocities in reaction to the
bombing were "entirely predictable," "fully
anticipated," and "not in any way a concern
of the political leadership"; and several
weeks earlier to the White House, that if
NATO attacked, "almost certainly [Serbia]
will attack the civilian population" and
NATO will be able to do nothing about it.
Thus Clark very explicitly predicted, and
the White House recognized, that NATO
bombing would precipitate Serbian atrocities
-- exactly what happened, as the voluminous
Western record demonstrates.
In responding, Williams ignores all of this
completely and instead haughtily affirms
exactly what I wrote: that the Serbian
crimes followed the bombing. Throughout, he
pretends not to understand the difference
between "perpetrate" and "precipitate" (my
accurate paraphrase of Clark's warning). He
writes that the bombing provided "an
opportunity" for which Milosevic had been
waiting. Perhaps true, but if so that
clearly reinforces the conclusion of General
Clark and the White House that the NATO
bombing would precipitate these crimes, as
it did. (I'll put it aside here because it
is irrelevant, but there is a good deal more
to say about the nature and timing of the
Serbian buildup to which he refers, matters
I've reviewed elsewhere, relying on the
Western records). He writes further that
NATO "had every reason to fear the worst in
Kosovo," because of what had happened in
Bosnia. It is quite true that NATO had
"every reason to fear" the atrocities it
regarded as an "entirely predictable"
consequence of its bombing -- a small fact
that Williams omits.
I can only interpret the bluster and
evasions as his way of admitting that his
charges are groundless, mere slander, and
that he recognizes, at some level, his own
complicity.
Much more shocking are Williams' continued
efforts to deny U.S.-UK crimes in East
Timor. His reference to Bosnia as a
justification for bombing Serbia illustrates
again the depth of his commitment to denial
of Western crimes. As I wrote, the crimes in
East Timor -- carried out with decisive
U.S.-UK support throughout -- were vastly
greater than anything charged in Bosnia,
coming as close to authentic genocide as
anything in the modern period. If he means
what he is saying, Williams should have been
calling for the bombing of Jakarta,
Washington, and London as the crimes in East
Timor escalated again in 1999, to a level
far beyond Kosovo before the NATO bombing,
always with firm U.S.-UK support. And as I
also pointed out in the article to which
Williams is responding, East Timor is only
one of many such cases as NATO prepared to
bomb Serbia, facts that tell us a lot about
the orgy of self-congratulation that
accompanied the bombing, part of the
hypocrisy about R2P that continues
dramatically to the present, one of the
topics of the paper of mine to which
Williams responds in his curious way.
Williams writes that the United States was
"certainly wrong" in failing to intervene to
prevent the horrendous Indonesian crimes.
That has been the standard line of
apologists: We "looked away" instead of
intervening to stop the crimes. But as
Williams and others who resort to this
evasion know very well, the United States
and United Kingdom most definitely did not
fail to intervene during the quarter-century
of Indonesian aggression and atrocities.
Rather, they did intervene, and massively:
By providing decisive support for these
crimes, continuing to do so as the crimes
accelerated again in 1999, even after the
destruction of Dili in September, which
elicited from Clinton's National Security
Adviser Sandy Berger the statement that "I
don't think anybody ever articulated a
doctrine which said that we ought to
intervene wherever there's a humanitarian
problem" -- so therefore the United States
and United Kingdom continued their crucial
participation.
Even more remarkably, Williams writes that
"Chomsky points out that it was Clinton's
intervention that persuaded the Indonesian
generals that the game was up in East Timor.
Yes it was long overdue, but it was an
American intervention, which deserves some
grudging credit."
The intervention Williams praises was
Clinton's termination of U.S. participation
in the aggression and atrocities. By
Williams' logic, he should praise Russia for
intervening in Afghanistan by withdrawing
its troops in 1989. It would be instructive
to see if even the most extreme Communist
Party loyalist stooped to that.
The nature of his apologetics becomes even
clearer when we consider the statement of
mine to which he is responding:
To end the atrocities in [East Timor]
would not have required bombing, or
sanctions, or indeed any act beyond
withdrawal of participation. That was
demonstrated shortly after Berger's
reaffirmation of Western policy, when, under
strong domestic and international pressure,
Clinton formally ended US participation. The
invaders immediately withdrew, and a UN
peacekeeping force was able to enter facing
no army. That could have been done any time
in the preceding quarter-century.
Astonishingly, this horrendous story was
soon reinterpreted as vindication of R2P, a
reaction so shameful that words fail.
Williams' reiteration of this shameful
stance leaves one truly speechless.
In responding to Williams' praise for
Clinton's "intervention," I wrote: "Since
Williams favors Holocaust analogies, it
would be like raising the question why the
Nazis did not intervene to stop the
slaughter of Jews by local forces in the
regions they occupied." Williams claims
falsely that I was implying a comparison of
the United States to the Nazis (the
reference, explicitly, is to his stance),
and omits the phrase in boldface, which
shows that I was borrowing the resort to
Nazi analogies from him -- and I agree with
him that his resort to this practice is
objectionable. The analogy referring to his
stance is, however, quite accurate, unlike
his slanderous Holocaust analogy, which was
flatly and unequivocally false.
The rest is an effort to blow smoke that
merits no comment. Along with his evasion of
everything relevant, it merely underscores
the fact that, as I wrote, the blood on his
hands is not easy to wish or wash away.
====== WATCH THIS VIDEO =====
The Responsibility to Protect, Noam Chomsky and Friends Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS9bSUdW6b4
10:01
joins three other panelists at the UN to discuss R2P, the "Responsibility to Protect" This panel took place on July 23rd, 2009 ... noam chomsky united nations r2p serbia ...
The Responsibility to Protect, Noam Chomsky and Friends part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rru2oCBadRI
10:00
The Responsibility to Protect, Noam Chomsky and Friends Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdriafZgFZU
10:00
The Responsibility to Protect, Noam Chomsky and Friends Part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoeeMEi50jU
10:00
The Responsibility to Protect, Noam Chomsky and Friends Part 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOQ47FUHQ0o
07:00
The Responsibility to Protect, Noam Chomsky and Friends Part 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq0bqb11C8U
05:48
IAN WILLIAMS
Born in Liverpool, Ian Williams graduated from Liverpool University despite several years. suspension for protests against its investments in South Africa.
Consequently, his variegated career path included a drinking competition with Chou En Lai and an argument about English literature with Mme Mao at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution.
He has been living in New York since 1989.
He has written for newspapers and magazines around the world, ranging from the Australian, to The Independent, from the New York Observer and the Village Voice to the Nation and the New Statesman and Newsday, to the Financial Times and the Guardian.
His byline has been in the Baptist Times, Penthouse, and Hustler.
He has also "pundited" on BBC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CBC and innumerable radio stations, for example appearing on "Hard Ball," "the O.Reilly Factor," etc on Fox, where he plays the liberal lion thrown to the Christian Right.
His first book was The Alms Trade, a study of the role of charities in Britain and the second was The UN For Beginners. Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Own Past was published by Nation Books July 2004 and his latest is Rum: A Social & Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776. He is currently writing a book on the Americans who blame the UN for all the US's ills.
http://www.maximsnews.com/107ianwilliamsdeskhead.jpg
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He is an embedded reporter with a shocking neglect of intellectual honesty and apologist for mass murder.
He truly has blood on his hands!
Stumble It!
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