| > Yes it was an example of one of Chomsky's half-truths. Except he himself explicitly says that there were killings multiple times. > Neither Cazaux nor Shanberg were cited as evidence for the passage quoted. I don't understand what you are trying to say. Chomsky claims Cazaux wrote that '“not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route,” and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious', that seems to provide a conflicting account of the "passage quoted" (i.e. "virtually everybody saw..."). > This was an example of Chomsky dishonest borrowing of authority As I said maybe you could argue that if he didn't explicitly describe the evidence and the source at length in the very next paragraph. > an article that stated (correctly) that there were a million civilian deaths. What we are arguing about is whether there was a basis for those figures. I can't find the Economist article online at the moment but as far as I know the only source of those high figures at the time was Lacouture which Chomsky showed to be fabricated. I assume if you knew of another source you would have cited it already. ---- I will re-iterate that the key issue is not any of the above but that the most important piece of evidence, the Lacouture number, was fabricated and would have failed the most basic fact-checking, yet was loudly promoted. In contrast the US government's own numbers, which conflicted with La Couture, were ignored. These hard figures were the most important pieces of evidence and the fact they were treated as they were is what proves Chomsky's point about distortion of information, the Cambodia case being only one example. |