AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I'm Amy Goodman, as we return to my public conversation with Noam Chomsky, the acclaimed
linguist and dissident, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
We recorded this in April at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hundreds of people packed into the church.
AMY GOODMAN: I last interviewed you on April 4th, just a few weeks ago, on Democracy Now!.
It was the 50th anniversary of Dr. King giving his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, why he opposed
the war in Vietnam, where he called the U.S. "the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world."
And I wanted to turn from North Korea and Iran to Syria.
It was the day of the gas attack in Syria, so we didn’t get to talk about it very much.
And I’m wondering your thoughts on what you think happened, and then the ensuing U.S.
bombing that President Trump would later talk about, saying he was having chocolate cake
with the Chinese president—very, very good chocolate cake—when they launched the Tomahawk
missiles into Iraq, he said.
And he was corrected by the interviewer—right?—who said it was actually Syria.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Bunch of "ragheads"; it’s all about the same.
But, well, there are some things we know for sure.
There was a serious chemical weapons attack.
Nobody doubts that.
It’s plausible that it was the Syrian government, which does raise some questions.
It’s not so obvious why the Assad regime would have carried out a chemical warfare
attack at a moment when it’s pretty much winning the war, and the worst danger it faces
is that a counterforce will enter to undermine its progress.
So it does raise some questions.
It also—even though maybe you can think up some reason why the Assad regime, which
is a murderous, brutal regime, might have done it, there’s even another question as
to why the Russians would have allowed it.
Now, remember, this is a—the air base is a joint Russian-Syrian base.
Russia has plenty of clout in Syria.
And for them, it’s a total disaster.
They have global concerns, not just local concerns in Syria.
So there are some concerns.
And there are further concerns.
There has been—the White House did put out a careful—you know, a justification, an
intelligence report, to explain and account for, showing why they had absolute confidence
that it was a Syrian government attack.
This was analyzed closely by a very serious and credible analyst, Theodore Postol, professor
at MIT, who has a long record of highly successful, credible analysis.
He’s a highly regarded strategic analyst and intelligence analyst.
And he gave a pretty devastating critique of the White House report.
You might—you can pick it up online and take a look at it.
So there certainly are some questions.
That there’s—that Syria is capable of a monstrous act like that, the Syrian government,
that much is not in doubt.
But one question that arises is: Before doing something, could you find out what happened?
OK?
I mean, let’s have an inquiry, take a look and see what in fact actually happened.
There are plenty of cases where things—where it looked as though things happened, but they
didn’t.
And remember that reporting from Syria is extremely difficult.
If reporters go into the rebel-held areas and don’t do what they’re told, you know,
get your head cut off.
Patrick Cockburn and others have written about this.
You just can’t seriously report from those areas.
There are obvious questions when you’re reporting from the government side.
So the reporters are—there are very good reporters doing a serious, courageous job,
but there’s not much you can do.
So we just don’t know a lot.
Well, those are the circumstances in which the 59 Tomahawk missiles were launched.
That’s pretty easy.
It’s easy to sit in Washington and push a button and say, "Go kill somebody."
That’s considered courage, you know, macho, showing how strong we are.
What did they actually do?
Well, apparently, the Tomahawk missiles were targeting a part of the airfield that doesn’t
seem to be used.
And, in fact, the next day, planes were taking off.
And, in fact, the village that was attacked by the chemical weapons has been even more
heavily attacked by straight bombing from the Assad government after the 59 Tomahawk
missiles.
So whatever they were intended to do doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Syria.
I suspect that what they were intended to do was pretty much what you described, to
shore up Trump’s image as—I think it was Nikki Haley at the U.N., said, "There’s
a new sheriff in town."
So now we’ve got Wyatt Earp, you know, pulling out his gun and getting rid of the bad guys.
No more of this soft stuff.
So, it was probably an attempt to shore up that image.
Pretty much like the bomb in Afghanistan.
Nobody knows what it was for, what it had to do with.
Probably destroyed a large part of Afghanistan.
Shortly after that, there was a mass—an incredibly brutal and successful Taliban attack,
which killed a couple hundred recruits, most of them unarmed.
The young draftees didn’t know what they were doing.
It was so bad, the defense minister resigned.
Doesn’t seem to have any effect on—it was supposedly aimed at ISIS.
Maybe it was.
Maybe it wasn’t.
They don’t seem to be affected by it.
So these look like—there doesn’t seem to be any strategic analysis behind any of
these actions, as far as anyone can tell.
They seem like kind of about at the level of the twitters that keep coming out: something
that kind of occurs to me, so why not do it?
It’s cheap.
It may kill a lot of people, makes me look good and, you know, makes it seem as if I’m
defending the country, and so on.
It’s hard to see it as anything but that.
That these things help the people of Syria and Iraq is very hard to imagine.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to be done to solve the crisis, the humanitarian catastrophe,
in Syria?
NOAM CHOMSKY: In Syria, it’s a terrible catastrophe.
And, you know, unfortunately, there isn’t a lot that can be done about it.
There are some things that can be done.
I mean, the idea that you can send in the Marines and bomb and so on, that has a small
problem.
If you do, you probably set off a nuclear war, and not only is Syria destroyed, the
rest of Syria, but the rest of the world, too.
So there’s a little difficulty in that scenario, whatever one thinks about the justification
for it.
So what can be done?
Well, one thing that can be done, which is really easy, very easy, is to take care of
the people fleeing from this disaster.
I mean, there are huge numbers of people fleeing from the disaster.
What do we do about them?
Make sure they don’t come here, you know, kind of like people fleeing from—you know,
my relatives, in fact, fleeing, trying to flee from Eastern Europe under the—before
when the Nazis were coming along.
"We don’t want ’em.
Not here."
You know.
So the Syrians don’t come—maybe a tiny trickle, but very few come here.
Europe’s not that much better—in fact, pretty horrible, too.
So one thing you could do is just take care of the people who are fleeing the disaster.
Another thing you can do is provide humanitarian aid for those in the region.
Now, there are countries who are absorbing refugees, remember, like take Lebanon.
It’s not a rich country like us.
Poor country.
About 40 percent of the population are refugees, many of them fleeing from the Israeli wars
as far back as '48, many—huge number of Syrians.
Jordan, another poor country, has absorbed a huge number of refugees.
Turkey has a couple of million.
Iran has accepted refugees.
So there are very—there are poor countries that are accommodating refugees, but not the
rich countries.
The rich countries, it's not our business, certainly not us.
It’s even a more serious problem with regard—for us, moral problem, with regard to Central
America, but let’s keep to Syria.
So another thing you could do is provide badly needed aid and assistance for those who have
succeeded in fleeing the disaster, or who remain in parts of Syria where survival is
possible, but are living under horrible conditions.
Now, that’s all cheap and easy, a tiny fraction of increasing the military budget to cause
more destruction.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, I wanted to, before we get to your book, your latest book, ask you
about this latest development in the United States.
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency gave his first major address, and he focused
on WikiLeaks.
And it looks like now the U.S. is preparing an arrest warrant for Julian Assange, who’s
been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for almost five years now.
Pompeo calling WikiLeaks a "hostile non-state intelligence service," calling Julian Assange
himself a "demon," and said he’s not protected by the First Amendment.
Your thoughts?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I think it speaks for itself.
WikiLeaks has released lots of information that governments don’t like.
It’s overwhelmingly information that citizens should have.
It’s information about what their governments are doing.
And perfectly natural that systems of power don’t want to be exposed, so they’ll do
what they can to prevent exposure.
I think it’s a disgraceful act.
In fact, I think it’s disgraceful even to keep Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorean
Embassy.
I did visit him there once, but you can guess yourself.
It’s, in many ways, worse than imprisonment.
At least if you’re in prison, you can see other prisoners, and you can get out and look
at the sunshine now and then.
He’s in a small apartment, where he can’t go out.
You know, he can go to the balcony, but that’s about it, a small—basically, a couple of
rooms inside a small apartment.
It’s not a big embassy.
The embassy is like a kind of an apartment in London, surrounded by police and so on.
There’s been no credible basis for any of this.
And to go on to try to raise it to the level of criminal prosecutions, I think, is, again,
one of these efforts to look tough at home, and the kind of effort that a government would
carry out that is dedicated to trying to protect itself from exposure of facts that citizens
should have, but systems of power don’t want them to have.
I think that’s the crucial issue.
AMY GOODMAN: The suggestions are it has to do with his aiding and abetting perhaps Chelsea
Manning and also Edward Snowden, doing that with Edward Snowden, which he openly admits,
while he’s trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy.
NOAM CHOMSKY: If the charge is true, he should be honored for it.
Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden carried out heroic, courageous acts.
They fulfilled the responsibility of somebody who takes citizenship seriously—that is,
who believes that the people of a country ought to know something about what their government
is up to.
OK?
Like if their government is carrying out murderous, brutal attacks in Iraq, people should know
about it.
Takes us back to Martin Luther King’s talk in 1967.
If the government is, and corporations, too, incidentally, are listening in to your telephone
conversations and what you’re doing, you know, tapping this discussion and so on, we
should know about it.
Governments have no right to do things like that.
And people should know about it.
And if they think it’s OK, fine, let them decide, not do it in secret.
And I think people wouldn’t agree to it.
That’s why it’s kept secret.
Why else keep it secret?
You know?
And these are people who exposed it at great risk to themselves.
So those are heroic, courageous acts.
If WikiLeaks was abetting them, more power to them.
That’s what they should be doing.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, President Trump endorsed WikiLeaks, right?
He said, "I love WikiLeaks," during the campaign.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, when it was releasing things that he liked, yeah.
Any system of power will do that.
"You release information that I like, it’s great.
But I don’t want to be exposed."
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Noam Chomsky in conversation in April at the First Parish Church in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
When we come back, he’ll talk about the media’s coverage of the Trump administration,
and his new book, Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration
of Wealth & Power.
We’ll be back in a minute.