Boston News Today - BOSTON NOAM

This week we are honored to run an exclusive excerpt from Boston Strong, the book and future movie that readers from around the Hub are chatting about, and for darn good reason. Journalists Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge, the latter a longtime DigBoston contributor, have devoted an inordinate amount of time to the human side of the Boston Marathon bombing story. Their words remind us, especially in the middle of proceedings that cast such an impersonal light on this tragedy, about the people among us for whom every day since the attack has been a trial.

To complement those chapters about the humanity that emerged from the Boylston Street bombing saga, we thought it only right to acknowledge a much less triumphant side, one of a markedly different caliber. We’re talking of course about the United States justice system, the incompetent putzes who are prosecuting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and investigating the attack, and a lot of the drone reporters covering the saga. One must be able to process disparate thoughts in order to understand how several sides, the alleged terrorist as well as the capital forces against him and the hairdo with the microphone outside the courthouse, are depraved in their own unique ways.

To that end we took the liberty of pulling a short but weighty remark from a recent Noam Chomsky speaking engagement at Lilypad in Inman Square. The event, sponsored by The Baffler, was titled “The Tsarnaev Trial and the Rest of Us,” and featured a discussion with Chomsky and Kade Crockford from the ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project. Though Crockford directly addressed the Marathon bombing, Chomsky mostly riffed through parallels and allegories about comparable moments in modern history. We recommend you view the whole chat on the WGBH Forum Network, but for now here’s one gem that we knew belonged on the Media Farm from the moment Noam said it …

There are quite a lot of interesting cases [in which] the US goes after what it calls “propaganda agencies” and destroys them … Some I saw first-hand … I happened to be, by accident, in Islamabad right at the time when US forces invaded Afghanistan. Of course all the journalists in the world flocked to Islamabad because that’s the way to get into Afghanistan. If you’ve ever been to a place where a lot of journalists flock together, you’ll know how it works …

There’s a couple of hotels, they hang around the hotel bar, have fun, have drinks, talk to each other and so on. And the big joke among the journalists in the Islamabad hotel bar was about the bombing of the Al Jazeera television-radio outfit in Kabul. It had been attacked and destroyed by US missiles. The official story, which all of the journalists reported, was that it was an accident, they were aiming at something else. Everyone in the bar was laughing about how ridiculous this is—of course they targeted the Al Jazeera office and destroyed it, but it’s not the kind of thing you report …

That’s routine.

[Media Farm is wrangled by DigBoston News+Features Editor Chris Faraone]