ON CHOMSKY, SANITY, CRIME, AND WAR

Author: Date: SUNDAY, March 16, 1997

Page: N16

Section: Books

``Because Chomsky is given ample space to articulate his views . . .,'' the book jacket tells us, ``this book can also be seen as the autobiography that Chomsky says he will never write.''

Margaret A. Hagen, who teaches at Boston University, picks many bones with the specialists in ``Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice'' (ReganBooks, $25). Hagen, who holds a doctorate in developmental psychology, contends that the psychological helping professions have sold out for money by giving false or worthless testimony in court.

Beyond that specific contention, Hagen dismisses clinical psychology generally, from Freud onward, calling it ``junk science,'' and argues that ``judges and juries, the people alone, must decide questions of insanity, competence, rehabilitation, custody, injury, and disability without the help of psychological experts and their fraudulent skills.''

What hath Parker wrought? It seems Boston is an ever-popular venue for cop thrillers these days, what with its interplay of class, ethnicity, politics, and a colorful setting. A new entry is ``Bag Men'' by pseudonymous ``John Flood'' (Norton, $24). A priest is found murdered on a Logan Airport runway, and 4,000 specially-blessed Communion hosts he was bringing back from Rome are missing. The search for the killer and for the source of a new strain of heroin coincide, we are told, as a prosecutor seeks the first and a police detective the second.

The real mystery, though, may be who is ``John Flood''? The book jacket tells us he is ``a Boston native who works as a federal prosecutor,'' though it doesn't say where. We're told he's working on a second novel -- must have a light workload, or no family.

Wars and near-wars in Lebanon have been eclipsed by more recent miseries in the Balkans, the Horn of Africa and now Albania, but the small and complex society at the crossroads of East and West has often been a thorn in the side of US policymakers. In ``Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945-1958'' (Columbia University Press, $39.95), Irene L. Gendzier maintains that oil, power and business interests were the controlling factors in the decision to send Marines to intervene on one side of the 1958 Lebanese civil war. Gendzier teaches at BU.