Hey, eh - credit where credit is due - you seem to have some evidence for Chomsky not being infallible.
As I'd not read the interview in question, but had quoted Chomsky's analyis in 'Hegemony or Survival' (and had verified his stats - which did show that of around 2000 killed before the bombings, only around 500 were Serbs killing Albanians).
That said, the allegation of a lie is pretty specific - so, it is worthy of closer examination.
Ok - let's see what Chomsky said in the 2006 interview:
Mastery of detail
Chomsky's unremitting clarity and his seeming mastery of detail somehow defy interruption or argument, but they are wondrous to behold. When we talk about Bush, Blair and co being hauled before the War Crimes Tribunal, I mention Milosevic and he switches subjects without pausing. The case against the Bush administration is stronger, he insists, than that against the late Serb president. "Remember, the Milosevic Tribunal began with Kosovo, right in the middle of the US-British bombing in late '99 . . . Now if you take a look at that indictment, with a single exception, every charge was for crimes after the bombing.
"There's a reason for that. The bombing was undertaken with the anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale atrocities in response. As it did. Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings. In fact, if you look at the British parliamentary inquiry, they actually reached the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.
"So later they added charges [against Milosevic] about the Balkans, but it wasn't going to be an easy case to make. The worst crime was Srebrenica but, unfortunately for the International Tribunal, there was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government, which was primarily responsible - their troops were there - and what they concluded was that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it. So it was going to be pretty hard to make that charge stick."
http://www.newstatesman.com/200606190028So, the lie is that the Parliamentary inquiry concluded 'until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.'
I could not see in the quote from paragraph 55 where this is shown not to be true. It says that more 'atrocities' were being committed against Albanians (and in the footnote it says:
Although by no means all: for example, on 14 December 1998 "six Serb teenagers were killed while playing pool when two masked gunmen sprayed a café in Pec with bullets." Weller, p. 290. This followed the killing of 36 KLA men by the Serb army. Ev. p. 26.
)
I could not immediately see in the report where it says that before 1999 the Serbs committed more crimes than were attributed to the KLA - if you can find this reference, perhaps you can post it here.
Edit: On closer reading, there was this quote from para 35 of the previous page of the same document:
The Foreign Secretary told the House on 18 January 1999 that—
On its part, the Kosovo Liberation Army has committed more breaches of the ceasefire, and until this weekend was responsible for more deaths than the [Yugoslav] security forces.[84]
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/p ... 08.htm#n84I'd concede that this is not a 'conclusion' but it is in the report and is pretty clear - KLA committed more breaches and killed more people up until 18 Jan 1999.
Anyway - Chomsky is by no means infallible - and if anything he's a bit anal when it comes to giving references. If he mis-spoke in the interview in 2006 - that doesn't change the mass of evidence and conclusions he has produced on the issue we were discussing - the role of US imperialism and whether they were beneficial to the countries touched by this or not.
And the 2006 interview was just a snap shot - for a fuller account of his analysis see something like this (where he is writing on the subject - rather than talking to a reporter - and gives full references):
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200005--.htmThanks for bringing to my notice the interview of 2006 though.
Cheers,
Shafique