"C. G. Estabrook" wrote:
>
> I quoted the Chomsky piece from the fall of 2001 to point out that other
> options were suggested at the time -- not just by Chomsky (he quotes
> others), and not just in hindsight.
>
Doug set a trap (though he has not had enough experience in organizing to know that it was a trap). What can one get on one side of a leaflet with a lot of white space or in a two minute speech? Certainly one cannot get a map to the bureaucratic process by means of which one could answer Doug's question. The reader would have thrown the leaflet away.
It is strange that the people who complain about left writing being dull are the same as those who argue that the left's message should consist of content which no one outside the left will ever read. If the municipal water supply were polluted, we would demand clean water, and if the reply was a demand that we explain the necessary technology our answer would be go fuck yourself -- that's your job.
A mass movement can insist (and raise hell if its insistence is not responded to) that the government not commit war crimes and not violate civil rights. It's up to the technocrats in the government to figure out how to honor that demand. This is one of the reasons that it takes so long for mass movements to gain momentum and become really visible in the halls of power: in the early stages the movement gets tied in knots trying to give detailed recipes for what they want. After a year or two, more and more people in the movement simply don't pay any attention to questions such as Doug asks.
Probably a criminal investigation obeying the rules would not have caught bin laden; apparently the CIA & the DoD didn't do much better. We couldn't have done much at the time anyhow. Mass pressure takes time to become effective, and that is another thing that slows up movements in their early stages. All sorts of amateurs are standing around weeping about we've got to do something NOW. Nothing gets done right then, and because the movement worried too much about "NOW" it takes a year or two more than it would have had if the movement had focused on the future (a year or two down the road) from the beginning.
Carrol
Carrol