by Noam Chomsky
How does the United States square its trumpeting of the free flow of information and democratic rights of expression with its response to WikiLeaks?
The profession of dedication to rights is always tinged with a fundamental hypocrisy: rights if we want them, not if we don’t. The clearest example of this is support for democracy. It’s pretty well established over many decades that the United States supports democracy only if it accords with strategic and economic objectives. Otherwise it opposes it. The United States is by no means alone on that, of course. The same is true of terror, aggression, torture, human rights, freedom of speech, whatever it might be.
So the line that the enormous trove of information that was disseminated through WikiLeaks was somehow compromising U.S. security doesn’t wash.
It compromised the security that governments are usually concerned about: their security from inspection by their own populations. I haven’t read everything on WikiLeaks, but I’m sure there are people who are searching very hard to find some case where they can claim there has been a harm to genuine security interests. I couldn’t find any myself.
One respect in which the United States is unusually open is in declassifying government documents. By comparative standards we have better access to internal government decisions than any country that I know of. The system isn’t perfect, but there’s a regular declassification procedure—the Freedom of Information Act functions to an extent—and there is a fair amount of access. I’ve spent a lot of time working through declassified documents, and most of them are just totally boring. You can read through volume after volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States and maybe you’ll find three sentences that are worth paying attention to. Many of the classified documents have little to do with genuine security but a lot to do with preventing the population from knowing what the government is up to. I think that’s been true of what I’ve seen of WikiLeaks, too.
Take the one example I mentioned, Ambassador Patterson’s comments about Pakistan and the danger of the Bush-Obama policy destabilizing a country with one of the biggest nuclear weapons programs in the world, in fact, one that’s growing fast and interlaced with jihadi elements. That’s something the population ought to know about, but it has to be kept from them. You have to describe our policies in terms of defending ourselves from attack when you’re in fact increasing the threat of attack. That’s true over and over again.
There are other interesting WikiLeaks exposures. At the time of the military coup in Honduras in 2009, the embassy in Honduras carried out an extensive investigation to determine whether the coup was legal or illegal, and they concluded, “The Embassy perspective is that there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch.”10 That assessment was sent back to Washington, which means the Obama administration knew about it, but they discarded the finding and, after various steps, ended up supporting the military coup, as they still do.11 For people who want to understand Obama’s thinking about freedom and democracy, that’s important information. But it’s not something the government wants you to know.
Actually, one of the most interesting aspects of the WikiLeaks exposures is how they were treated. Some of the exposures were heralded as a wonderful event. For example, there were exposures related to diplomatic cables. These are diplomatic cables, so you don’t know how accurate they are. Diplomats tend to report what they know the center wants to hear, so filtering is already taking place. But there were cables from the Middle East embassies saying that the Arab dictators support U.S. policy on Iran. The king of Saudi Arabia was quoted as saying that we have “cut off the head of the snake.”12 That was all over the headlines. There were articles by leading commentators, such as Jacob Heilbrunn, saying that this is fantastic.13 WikiLeaks should be congratulated for showing us how marvelous we are that the Arab dictators support us. It’s as if the CIA is running WikiLeaks.
At the same time this discussion was happening about how the Arab world supports U.S. goals in Iran, a U.S.-run poll showing that the Arab populations are strongly against U.S. policy in Iran was released. So strongly against it that in, say, Egypt about 80 percent of the population thought the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons.14 They’re concerned with the real threats, the United States and Israel.15 But that material was barely published. So here we have applause for the fact that the dictators support us, silence about the fact that the populations strongly oppose us. That tells you something about our commitment to democracy.
There are indications that the cables WikiLeaks exposed about the dictatorship of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia had a big influence on the revolt there.
It’s questionable. The leaks showed that the U.S. government understood very well that Ben Ali was a harsh, corrupt dictator, that the population was very upset and strongly opposed to him.16 But that had no effect on support for his regime.
Do you mean support from Washington?
U.S. support. French support, primarily. France was just outlandish. After the uprising had already started, one French cabinet minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, actually went to Tunisia for a vacation.17 This is a country that’s been under the thumb of France for a long time and is surely penetrated by French intelligence. But how much these leaks influenced the protests is an open question. I doubt that Tunisians cared very much about French and U.S. hypocrisy, which is all that WikiLeaks revealed—nothing that they didn’t know themselves.
Talk about the connection between Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning.
Dan is an old friend. I was involved with him in helping release the Pentagon Papers, which I thought was a quite proper thing to do. I testified at his trial. In the case of Bradley Manning, he’s charged with having released material to Julian Assange, who distributed it on WikiLeaks.18 He’s been in prison now since May 2010, a large part of that in solitary confinement—which is torture. He’s been treated in rotten ways and been bitterly attacked.
Here’s someone who is charged with doing something which, in my opinion, is not a crime but a service to the country. But whatever you think about that, he’s charged, not brought to trial. In fact, at the moment there’s not even any court trial contemplated. They’re treating it as a court-martial inside the military system.19
I think Manning should be applauded and the government should be harshly condemned for throwing out the basic principles of law and human rights.
Didn’t Obama, a constitutional law professor, make a prejudicial comment about Bradley Manning?
Yes, he immediately said he’s guilty.20 That’s unconscionable. Even if Obama wasn’t a constitutional lawyer, he’s the president. He should know that the president shouldn’t say that about a person who is facing criminal charges.
There are worse things—say, assassinating Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t tried in a court. He’s innocent until proven guilty. But you assassinate him if you don’t like him.
As they also did to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, a U.S. citizen.21
That case got a little attention because al-Awlaki is a U.S. citizen. Maybe he’s guilty of something, maybe not. But if, say, Iranian terrorists killed somebody tomorrow—say, Leon Panetta, the defense secretary—because he’s involved in planning attacks against Iran, which he is, would we think that’s okay?
It seems that many liberals who criticized war crimes during the presidency of George W. Bush have been relatively muted during the Obama period.
They have. Some people are talking, but not many. Obama has also made it clear that nobody is going to be punished for war crimes in the Bush period, which is quite understandable.22 If people were punished for that, then he could be punished for similar crimes today.
That brings me to a comment that you made years back that every president since 1945 could be tried for war crimes.23 Do you still hold to that?
I think I was pretty careful. I said that wou
ld be a fair statement by the principles of Nuremberg. Not by the practice of Nuremberg, which departed sharply from the principles.
The principle being that “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances” is an international war crime.24
That was the primary charge, but there were many others. So, for example, one of the main charges against Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, who was hanged after the war, was that he either permitted or was complicit in a preemptive strike against Norway. Norway really posed a threat to Germany. The British were there and were planning an attack on Germany. Compare this to what happened to Colin Powell when he was complicit in a preemptive strike against Iraq. Powell was not tried for having gone to the United Nations and producing fabricated stories calling for an attack on Iraq, where there was no threat at all, in fact not even a remote threat.
So there are the principles of Nuremberg. But, of course, the practical outcome is quite different. The Nuremberg tribunal was the most authentic and significant of any of the international war crimes tribunals that have taken place, but it had fundamental flaws. And they were known to the prosecutors. For example, Telford Taylor commented on them right away. Effectively, he said, the tribunal defined war crimes as something you did and we didn’t do.25 That was the criterion. So, for example, the bombing of civilian concentrations, urban bombing, was not considered a war crime because the Allies did much more of it than the Axis. In fact, German admiral Karl Dönitz was able to reject the charges against him because he got testimony from the British admiralty and from the American navy saying we did the same thing, so it definitely isn’t a war crime.26
One of the things that you say about yourself, which often stuns people, is that you’re an old-fashioned conservative. What do you mean by that?
For example, I think Magna Carta and the whole legal tradition that grew out of it made some sense. I think the expansion of the moral horizon over the centuries, particularly since the Enlightenment, is important. I think there’s nothing wrong with those ideals. A conservative, at least as it used to be understood, is somebody who cares about traditional values. Today those values are regularly being thrown out the window. We should condemn that.
Then why are you seen as a wild-eyed radical?
Because holding on to traditional values is a very radical position. It threatens and undermines power.
A perennial question that you get at your talks is, “Well, there’s an election coming up, Professor Chomsky. What should I do? Should I vote? Should I stay at home?”
The first point is, I think you should spend about five minutes on the question. There are much more important questions, such as, “What should I be doing to try to change the country?” But the question about elections doesn’t take much thought, in my opinion. When we get to the presidential election—let’s put aside the primaries—you’re going to have a small range of choices. There will be two candidates, neither of whom you like. One will be plausibly much more dangerous than the other. If you’re in a so-called safe state, where you know how the vote is going to come out, you have choices. You can say, “Okay, I won’t vote—or I’ll vote for some party that’s trying to become an independent alternative, say, the Greens.” If you’re in a swing state, you have to ask yourself, “Do I want to help the worse candidate be elected or do I want to prevent that?” It doesn’t mean you like the other candidate. But, in fact, that is the choice. So you have to ask, “Is it better to help the worse candidate to be elected?” You can make a case for doing that. In fact, there was an old Communist Party principle back in the early 1930s: “the worse, the better.” If you get the worse candidate in, it’s going to be better, because then there will be more support for a revolution. That was the choice some people made in Germany, and you know where that led. So it’s a question you have to think about, but I don’t think you have to think about it very hard.
Do you think the Occupy movements should be involved in electoral politics or work from below without engaging in the system?
As they stand, they’re not an electoral force. First of all, I don’t think they can take a unified position. They have no mechanism for making a unified decision, and I think that’s a good thing. It’s better to have a variety of opinions and attitudes, as well as interchange and interaction about what to do, and to accept and tolerate opposing opinions within a general framework. I think that’s much more important than having a general assembly vote saying we support X or Y or Z.
What are some practical steps that you think the movements can undertake?
They’ve already undertaken practical steps. So, for example, they have substantially changed the general discourse in the country. There is now overt concern and engagement in questions of inequality, the extraordinary power of financial institutions, government subordination to financial institutions, the role of finance and of money in general in the buying and shaping of elections. And they can go further—and already have, to some extent. So, for example, they can ask: Why should it be up to executives and managers to decide to settle investment decisions about where things will be produced and what will be produced, how profits will be distributed? Why should that be the domain of the directorate of a corporation? Usually a bank is a small sector of rich people. Do they have some natural right to make those decisions? Not by any economic principle. In fact, there’s every reason to advocate that those decisions be made by what are called stakeholders—communities, the workforce, others affected by what’s decided.
But going forward, how are they going to be able to sustain themselves in the face of this propaganda system and an increasingly repressive police force? One of the things that a number of people have commented on has been the degree of militarization of local police departments.27 They’re looking more and more like special operations forces.
Power doesn’t commit suicide. So yes, there will be attempts to carry out repression. But the repression that exists now is not remotely like it has been in the past. There’s nothing like Wilson’s Red Scare or COINTELPRO. As far as we are aware, there are no assassinations of movement leaders. But, yes, there is repression. And some of the tactics Occupy has used, which are good tactics, lend themselves easily to police repression. So occupying a space is a very good tactic. I think it’s good that Occupy has done it. But you have to recognize that it provides an opening to police attacks, which probably would be publicly supported to a large extent. So you need to find other tactics.
The way to deal with the repression and denigration that will take place is to build more popular support. What the Occupy movements have to do if they’re going to sustain themselves is recognize that tactics are not strategies. A tactic may be a very good one, but tactics tend to have diminishing returns after a while. People get tired of them and they lose their efficacy, so you have to move on. I think it’s generally accepted in the movements that they have to reach out and engage other sectors of the society. There have been moves in that direction, like joining with anti-foreclosure movements. But again, active labor participation will be essential.
Let’s talk more about the environment. You say that “risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative.”28 Explain.
It is an institutional imperative. By imperative, I don’t mean it’s a law of nature. You can change it. But given the way institutions now function, their core goal is to maximize short-term profit and power. That is a critical element for the core of decision makers in the economy and the society—and, therefore, in the political system. And that leads almost directly to destruction of the environment. In fact, we can see it right in front of us. The threat is quite serious. The major agencies that monitor global emissions have released very ominous predictions. The International Energy Association (IEA) released da
ta which their own chief economists concluded give us maybe five more years before we reach a turning point that will be irreversible.29
Fatih Birol, chief IEA economist, has said, “The door is closing…. I am very worried—if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.”30
The IEA is a pretty conservative agency. This is not a bunch of radicals. In fact, it was formed through the initiative of Henry Kissinger. I haven’t seen much reporting about it, but one of the few news articles quoted John Reilly, the codirector of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, who also said that the IPCC estimates were too low.31 “The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing,” he warned, and if we don’t do something very quickly about fossil fuels we’re going to be over the edge. “Increasing reliance on coal is imperiling the world,” he added. Again, this is not coming from far-out radicals but from major institutions, leading scientists.
It’s interesting to watch the way climate change is discussed in the media. It’s usually presented as a he-says-she-says issue. On the one hand, you have the IPCC. On the other hand, you have a handful of scientists and a couple of senators who say, “We don’t believe any of it.” That’s the choice. Actually, there is a third set of scientists, who almost never make it into print, and it’s much larger than the fringe of denialists: people who say that the consensus is much too conservative, that the risks are much higher. People like the ones who run the MIT program I mentioned or the chief economist of the International Energy Association. But they are ignored, and we almost never hear their views. And the public is left with a choice between two positions, which they’re in no position to make a judgment about.