Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

In 1988 LeMoyne had written a story which talked about two people in El Salvador who he claimed were tortured by left-wing guerrillas trying to undermine the elections; it was one part of a whole effort in the American press at the time to maintain support for the U.S. client regime in El Salvador despite its atrocities.19 Well, a freelance journalist in Central America, Chris Norton, saw LeMoyne’s article and was surprised by it, because the atrocities LeMoyne described were supposed to have taken place in an area of the country reporters couldn’t get to, because it was under military occupation. Norton wanted to figure out just how LeMoyne knew about these people being tortured, so he went up as close to that region as he could, and he talked to the mayor, and to the priest, and to people in the community—and he discovered that one of the alleged victims didn’t exist, and the other was perfectly fine. He then went back to San Salvador and did some more checking—and he discovered that LeMoyne had simply taken the story straight from a San Salvadoran newspaper, where it had been attributed to an army officer. It was in fact just straight army disinformation of a standard sort, which LeMoyne then reported in the New York Times as if he knew something about it. Then the State Department picked it up from the New York Times and distributed it to Congress to show that the Salvadoran guerrillas were undermining the election. Well, Norton uncovered this, then another freelance j...