Posts from — September 2005

Scanning the headlines on Google prompted me to check out the non-biased International Herald Tribune’s account of the story.

The Pentagon is preparing new guidelines governing the use of nuclear weapons that foresee possible pre-emptive strikes against terrorist groups or nations planning to use unconventional weapons against the United States.
…
The scenarios for a possible attack described in the draft include one in which an enemy is using “or intending to use” unconventional weapons against the United States, its allies or civilian populations.
Another scenario for a possible pre-emptive strike is in the event of an “imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy.”

Ambiguity is a hallmark of this administration, that Secretary Rumsfeld seems particularly apt at using.
Apparently, Sagan’s (not Bob Saget) Nuclear Winter isn’t far off, if Secretary Rumsfeld and President G.W. Bush have anything to say. And Noam Chomsky, about whom I was just reading on Wikipedia, has this to say regarding terrorism:
[from the article]

He uses a definition of terrorism from a U.S. Army manual, which describes it as, “the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.

…
[from the horse's mouth]

“One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn’t fail. It works. Violence usually works. That’s world history. Secondly, it’s a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it’s primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror. Now that’s close to universal. I can’t think of a historical exception, even the worst mass murderers view the world that way. So take the Nazis. They weren’t carrying out terror in occupied Europe. They were protecting the local population from the terrorisms of the partisans. And like other resistance movements, there was terrorism. The Nazis were carrying out counter terror.”

For all those in Bozeman, the Procrastinator Theater on campus is to present a cinematic biography on Howard Zinn. Noam Chomsky is a featured commentator, and paying tribute to an inspiration for his “Good Will Hunting”, actor Matt Damon narrates the film.