by Noam Chomsky
The whole media campaign on terrorism started with a series of C.I.A. disinformation releases about Libya. In 1981 the C.I.A. leaked a story to the press about U.S. efforts to assassinate Qaddafi, in the hope that this would lead Qaddafi to some kind of erratic reaction which we could then use as an excuse to bomb him. Okay, that was exposed: the first reference to C.I.A. disinformation about Libya appeared in Newsweek in August 1981, when Newsweek stated that it had been subjected to a disinformation campaign by the government. 17 Since then, there have been about a half-dozen similar cases in which Washington floated some lunatic story about Libya and the media bought it, then discovered later that it was disinformation and pretended they were all surprised; I mean, at some point you’d think they would begin to ask what’s going on, but apparently not. And some of these cases were completely crazy—there was a story about Libyan hitmen wandering around Washington, S.W.A.T. teams on alert patrolling the White House, that kind of thing. It was all total madness. 18
Well, every one of these confrontations with Libya has been timed for some domestic purpose. The big one, the bombing of Libya in April 1986, was timed for the contra aid vote in Congress—the point was to build up a lot of hysteria beforehand, and it kind of worked: they rammed through a big aid package a month or two later. 19 It was all a complete set-up, totally prefabricated. First, a confrontation was arranged in which Libyan artillery guns fired at a U.S. fighter plane. You’ll notice that somehow it’s always the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Air Force that Libya is shooting at—they never shoot at Italian planes, or French planes, or Spanish planes, it’s always American planes. Well, what’s the reason? One possibility is the Libyans are insane: they go after the people who are going to wipe them out. The other possibility is that the Americans are trying to get shot at, which is of course the truth. The reason the Libyans only shoot at American planes is because American planes are sent over there to get shot at; nobody else sends planes into the Gulf of Sidra, because there’s no point in doing it, so therefore they don’t get shot at.
See, Libya says the Gulf of Sidra is a part of its territorial waters, and the United States refuses to accept that. Well, there’s a way that countries can resolve such disputes: you take them to the World Court and get a ruling; a law-abiding state does it that way. Alright, that option was raised in the United States, but the State Department said, no, we can’t do it, it’s much too desperate a situation; getting a decision from the World Court will take two years. You know, we can’t put off for two years whether the U.S. Navy can go into the Gulf of Sidra, the United States will collapse. All this stuff is so ludicrous you can barely repeat it. 20
The beginning phase of the 1986 confrontation occurred when American planes penetrated Libyan territorial air space and finally got shot at—happily, because they know they’re never actually going to be hit by the Libyan air defenses. They then flew back to the fleet, and the American Navy bombed a bunch of Libyan navy vessels and killed lots of Libyans. That was great, a real victory.
Following that, on April 5th, 1986, a discotheque in West Berlin was bombed; two people were killed. Rather crucially, one of them was a Turkish woman and the other was a black American G.I.—the reason was, this was a black Third World bar, not an insignificant fact. The White House immediately announced that they had evidence, intercepts and so on, that showed that this terrorist act was perpetrated by Libya, though they never presented any of this evidence. 21 Then nine days later, on April 14th, we bombed Libya.
It was completely obvious that we were going to bomb them. In fact, I have a way of monitoring the Associated Press wires on my personal computer, and there were dispatches coming out all day because it was evident we were going to bomb them. So I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at a ticker-tape, but a story comes out about every minute, and all through the day there were tons of stories coming out about Libya; the last one before the bombing came through at 6:28 P.M. It was bylined West Berlin, and it said: West German and U.S. military intelligence say they have no information about any Libyan connection to the disco bombing, but they suspect a possible Libyan connection. 22
Okay, half an hour later, at precisely 7 P.M.—rather crucial, it was at 7 P.M.precisely—the United States started bombing Libya. Why 7 P.M.? Because that’s when the national news started on the three U.S. television networks: this was the first bombing in history ever timed for prime-time television, and I mean that literally. It was a tricky operation to arrange: you had to synchronize a six-hour flight from England so that a squadron of F-111 bombers would arrive in Libya precisely at 7 P.M., when the three national networks began their newscasts. They had to travel all the way across the Mediterranean, two planes had to turn around and so on, but still they hit it precisely at 7—that means there had to have been extremely careful planning: they didn’t want the bombing to start at ten after seven, say, because that would have lost the effect.
Now, every journalist who isn’t totally insane knew that this was a setup: I mean, how likely is it that you would get a bombing at 7 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, precisely on the nose? And if you watched the news that evening, some of you will remember that the anchormen, Peter Jennings and those guys, started off by saying: “Alright, we’re going to switch over to Tripoli”—then they switched over to Tripoli, and there was the whole A.B.C. news team. What the hell were they doing in Tripoli? They’re never in Tripoli. Well, they were in Tripoli because they knew perfectly well there was going to be a bombing, that’s why. I mean, they didn’t know the exact minute, but everybody was in place in Tripoli because they knew the place was going to be bombed. Of course, they all pretended it was this big surprise.
So, 7 P.M., the United States bombs Tripoli and Benghazi, kills plenty of people: you go to the exciting events live, you hear the loud noises, the television news is preempted because this is so exciting. Then they flash back to Washington, and the Reagan administration spokesman, Larry Speakes, gets on T.V., and for the next twenty minutes they preempt the destruction to give you the State Department line. Meanwhile, the whole Washington press corps is just sitting there, these pussycats like Sam Donaldson and the rest of them, who would never ask an embarrassing question in a million years. Speakes gets up and says, “We knew for certain ten days ago that Libya was behind the disco bombing”—and nobody asked the obvious question: if you knew for certain ten days ago, how come you didn’t know half an hour ago? Barring colossal incompetence in the newsrooms, every journalist there knew what I knew—they read the A.P. wires at C.B.S. as much as I do, I guess, so that means they knew that up until a half-hour before the bombing, American and West German intelligence had no information about a Libyan connection. But Larry Speakes gets up and says, “We knew for certain ten days ago”—and none of them even batted an eyelash. 23 Nobody asked another obvious question: how come the bombing was scheduled for 7 P.M. Eastern Standard Time? How did you set it up so that a six-hour flight from London happened to arrive in Libya at precisely the instant when the television news started in the U.S.? Nobody asked that question. In fact, there’s a whole series of questions which nobody asked—everyone in the press just swallowed the absurdities. Then Reagan got on and pontificated for a while. Next day’s news, a hundred percent—everybody said, this is terrific, we finally showed these Libyans. Not a note of discord. 24
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.
MAN: 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.
WOMAN: 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 …
MAN: I understand the operation was a real military fiasco as well.
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
MAN: 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.
MAN: 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