Like many progressive Americans, my political outlook has been greatly influenced by Noam Chomsky. Beyond his day job as one of the world's leading linguists, Chomsky has, since the 60s, been one of the most prominent and reasoned advocates for a real departure from capitalism and imperialism, and theorists about what the alternative might be.
While I haven't always agreed with Chomsky, I have always considered him to be one of the most reliably intellectual voices out there.
Not any more. Chomsky has gone truther.
Here is Chomsky's response to the bin Laden takedown operation. For the moment, I'm going to leave aside the bulk of the dubious claims there - I just want to get right to where Chomsky reveals his current thinking about the 9/11 attacks:
In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress "suspects."
... Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence [of his guilt for 9/11] — which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”
Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s "confession," but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.
There you have it. According to Chomsky, President Obama was lying when he said that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda, and bin Laden's multiple bragging confessions of his involvement deserve quotes of mockery around 'confession'.
Like I said, in the past I haven't always agreed with Chomsky, but I had always found him a consistently intellectual articulator of what many of us often feel. His analysis of how our media essentially operates as a propaganda system in Manufacturing Consent was ahead of its time and remains true today. Chomsky opposed the US involvement in Vietnam before almost anyone else did. And here are some great thought provoking conversations where Chomsky talks about Libertarian Socialism as an alternative organizing principle to capitalism.
On the other hand, people have criticized his seeming lack of adequate revulsion to tyrants from the Khemer Rouge (2 million dead in the killing fields) to Fidel Castro (gays sentenced to years of hard labor), and his rather un-nuanced analysis of the I/P conflict. What we can be certain of is that Chomsky has always been animated by a complete revulsion to US and other Western imperialism, which is, in general, a good thing.
However this latest statement is a bridge too far. I just can't take seriously someone who is so blinded by their hatred of US imperialism that they cannot admit, to themselves or others, that the 9/11 attacks were carried out solely by radical Islamists, in particular by agents of al Qaeda with the inspiration and financing of Osama bin Laden.
What do you think?