Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Free World Vignettes
Just as this was reported in In These Times, George Will devoted his
nationally syndicated column to the case of a 12-year-old boy whose
Russian parents wished to take him with them when they returned to
the USSR, though he chose to remain here. Will scornfully denounced
the “ludicrous governmental brooding about whether, were he returned,
he would face persecution”; such hesitations—which were quickly
overcome—are “ludicrous” in so obvious a case of protection of a person
from persecution. Will also berated the ACLU for concerning itself with
this case, in which the ACLU’s position, upheld by the courts, was that
the parents should have been granted their legal right to a custody
hearing, which the government denied them. This “brooding” over legal
rights is also “ludicrous,” a sign of the ACLU’s “swerve to the left.” The
fears of the Salvadoran woman elicited no such concern, nor, in fact,
may they be expressed to a large audience. 47
The Salvadoran military were trained and advised by Americans,
while the security forces were instructed in torture methods by imported
Argentine neo-Nazis. Elite battalions fresh from their US-training have
regularly been responsible for the worst atrocities. John Loftus, who
investigated Nazi war criminals for the US Justice Department, writes
that “In the year 2025, when the Central American death squad
documents are released in the National Archives to take their place
alongside the records of Nazi genocide, I am going to take my
grandchildren for a visit,” so that they will learn that “those who do not
know the mistakes of history [namely, ignoring hideous atrocities while
they are in progress] are condemned to repeat them.” Loftus also states
that he knows from his investigations of Nazi war criminals brought to
the US after the war that there are connections between them “and US
operations in Central America”—a matter to which we return. 48
Comparisons to some of the most extraordinary murderers of the
modern age do occasionally appear in the press, in this context. Thus, at
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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