As a rule, the form of public lectures does not allow the fielding of questions, comments and criticisms from the audience. Furthermore, providing for a Question and Answer session in a large auditorium with an overflowing audience becomes a physical and logistical challenge. Nevertheless, Noam Chomsky indicated in advance to the organisers his clear preference for Q & A. Accordingly, a session lasting about forty-five minutes followed the lecture, attracting great audience interest within the auditorium and also outside, where hundreds of people watched the proceedings live on close circuit television, or clustered around loud speakers.

Q1: Sashi Kumar:

Now we’ll take some questions. We have one question from the organisers here, perhaps we could kick off with this: ``Please go into the question of what explains the September 11 crimes, the likely perpetrators and the reservoir of support. And, finally, what are the policy options?’’

A1: Noam Chomsky:

Well, who carried out the crimes? We know a number of them, the ones who killed themselves. So those are known. They were mostly middle class, urban, educated people, mostly from Saudi Arabia. They certainly were not people who’d been hiding in caves in Afghanistan.

The United States decided that you have to personalise these things, so you can carry out a `Crusade’. So they picked Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, who have interacted with him, which could be true. But they have apparently no evidence for it. If there were any evidence, it would be presented, you could be sure of that. Just simply to mobilise support.

The United States selected an increasingly comical client named Tony Blair [audience laughter and applause] to present the case to the world, while sort of hiding in the background. I suppose the public relations purpose there was to convey the image that we really have lots of secret information that this little boy doesn’t know about [audience laughter] but we`ll let him do it. But whatever the purpose was, they basically have no information, pretty clearly, and that’s not very surprising.

I think it’s not at all unlikely that these networks are indeed responsible. That was everybody’s first assumption, mine too, and I think it’s the plausible assumption. But there’s a big difference between plausible assumptions and evidence.

And networks like that are very hard to penetrate. They are decentralised, non-hierarchic, don’t have much communication. They follow a policy that’s actually called `Leaderless Resistance’. It’s also used by Christian Right terrorists in the United States. That’s why the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] can never penetrate those groups. Leaderless Resistance means there’s a kind of a shared point of view, maybe established by spokespersons, but then actions are initiated and carried out in small groups. Maybe consistent with those policies, but then actions are carried out in small groups. Anyone who’s been involved in, say, anti-war activities or resistance activities knows exactly how this works because that’s always the way it’s done. Just automatically, resistance activities are always, if they’re serious, going to be carried out with Leaderless Resistance, which is impenetrable. The FBI was never able to discover the people involved in the anti-war resistance in the United States, for example – not for lack of trying. These are just hard groups to penetrate.

So they probably won’t be able to find evidence, although it’s likely that’s roughly the range in which the perpetrators lie. And if anybody knows about this, it’s the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] because they helped set them up! They nurtured them for ten years. Not alone, together with British intelligence, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. They mobilised the best killers they could find from around the Muslim world who happened to be radical Islamists and they created a powerful mercenary army – not small, but a hundred thousand people maybe. Armed them, trained them, gave them manuals, showed them how to carry out terrorist acts, nurtured them for about ten years -- not in order to help the people of Afghanistan, on the contrary it helped destroy the country. And when they were done with them, they said goodbye.

But these guys had their own agenda and it was no secret. Remember that twenty years ago, in 1981, they assassinated the President of Egypt, who was one of the most enthusiastic of their creators. In 1983, one suicide bomber who may have been connected with these networks drove the U.S. military out of Lebanon. And right through the 1980s, it continued. After 1990, it spread around the world. They tell you exactly what they’re doing. It’s not a big secret. And within their framework, it’s as rational as the framework that’s leading to the destruction of the world within the Western framework. Both frameworks are rational internally, maybe lunatic looked at from some other point of view, but internally rational and we know what they are.

So I presume these are the perpetrators and they’re doing it for exactly the reasons they say. Speaking from their point of view, you’ve heard it all: to overthrow the oppressive and brutal and corrupt regimes of the Arab-Islamic world in general, to drive out the infidels, the foreigners who’ve invaded Muslim lands, and to protect Muslims everywhere from attack. Okay? That’s it. And they say it pretty straight, they’ve been saying it for twenty years. That’s the likely perpetrators.

They do draw on a reservoir of support. The support may come from people who despise them, like, in fact, their targets. You know, rich Muslims in the Arab world are their targets but they still resonate to their message. They too are opposed to the corrupt and brutal and oppressive regimes in the Arab world. Even those who are very strongly supportive of the United States and closely linked to it despise the United States because of its support for these corrupt regimes, its undermining of any steps towards democracy, its, in fact, blocking any independent economic development. And they say it. To its credit, The Wall Street Journal, our main business journal, after September 11^th began looking at this question. It had some good studies of the opinions of what it called ``moneyed Muslims,’’ rich Muslims – bankers, international lawyers and people like that, and this is what they say.

On the streets, it’s much harsher of course. But this is basically what they say and they also point to specific policies – the policy of devastating the civilian society of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein. And although the West prefers to forget it, it supported Saddam Hussein right through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds and all the rest. That they remember. And when bin Laden says that, they remember what it means. So Saddam’s being strengthened, civilian society is being destroyed. A little bit to the South, the U.S. alone has been maintaining the harsh and brutal Israeli occupation in the Occupied Territories, now going into its thirty-fifth year.

Well, you know these things arouse enormous antagonism. And out of that comes a kind of reservoir of support, even by those who despise the terrorism and its likely perpetrators.

What are the policy options? Well, what are the options when a crime is committed? So, for example, let’s take a much worse terrorist attack – the U. S. attack on Nicaragua. Far worse, practically they destroyed the country. It wasn’t an instant destruction (it’s different in that respect) but, over a couple of years, much worse.

Nicaragua pursued the right policy options. It went to the International Court of Justice; presented evidence, which wasn’t hard in that case; the Court considered its case; considered the U. S. case; accepted Nicaragua’s case; condemned the United States for international terrorism. The Court wasn’t going to punish anybody, but it called on the United States to terminate the crime, to pay reparations. When the U. S. refused, Nicaragua went to the [U. N.] Security Council, which did try to pass a resolution calling on states to observe international law. That was vetoed. Nicaragua then went to the [U. N.] General Assembly. They could get a unanimous vote practically but it didn’t mean anything. But at that point the options were finished – for a law-abiding state! If the United States were to pursue those measures, nobody would stop it. In fact, there’d be universal applause.

It’s kind of striking that the U. S. could easily have got a Security Council resolution to legitimate even its crimes – and they are major crimes -- in Afghanistan. The attack on Afghanistan is a major crime, in my opinion far worse than September 11^th [audience applause for the statement], but the U. S. could have got authorisation for that. It also happens to be illegal, but it could have been legal. You know, crimes can be carried out under authorisation of law, unfortunately.

The U. S. could easily have got Security Council support for ugly reasons. The five countries that have veto powers would have supported the U. S. because they’re terrorist states [audience applause] and they all support massive terrorism. They all want U. S. authorisation for their own terrorist acts. Actually, India is similar, wants authorisation for its own state terrorism. And that’s true quite generally, that’s true of Turkey and Algeria. Everybody in the Coalition of the Just joined it pretty much for this reason.

So they could have got authorisation, but they didn’t want it. Because to get Security Council authorisation would imply that you need Security Council authorisation, that is, that there is an authority to which you have to defer. And if you’re seeking hegemony, you don’t want that principle. You want to be able to act unilaterally, without any authority.

This is not Bush, this is traditional policy. Clinton said this in his first speech to the United Nations, in 1993. He said: We will act multilaterally when it works but if it doesn’t, we will act unilaterally in support of our interests. And that’s the way you should expect a great power to act if it can get away with it. So they preferred to do it illegally.

But there are options and the options are hard to pursue. I noticed in the newspaper this morning that India was very pleased that the United States was pressuring Pakistan to turn over an accused criminal responsible for crimes in India and they want Pakistan to extradite him.They [the United States] could probably have obtained the extradition of Osama bin Laden. We can’t be sure, but the Taliban were making gestures in that direction.

There was only one way to find out whether they were meaningful and that was to pursue them. But they didn’t want to do that because they might have been meaningful and that would have been a problem. Because then what do you do with him after you’ve got him? You don’t have the evidence, you don’t have the case and so on. Besides, it opens dangerous directions. Same with the extraordinary request for Pakistan. If you begin to open that door, there are a lot of questions waiting right behind it.

For example, the U. S. harbours major war criminals and refuses to extradite them. Much worse ones than the one in Pakistan. To mention just the obvious case, the Government of Haiti – poorest country in the hemisphere – for years has been asking the United States to extradite Emmanuel Constant, who’s a killer and a murderer, the leading figure in the paramilitary forces in Haiti that murdered four or five thousand people in the 1990s with the tacit support of the first Bush and Clinton administrations. That’s not what you read in the newspapers but, in fact, it’s true. He’s been convicted in absentia in Haiti (they didn’t have much trouble finding evidence) and now they want him returned. The U. S. refuses, presumably because it is afraid of what will happen if he stands up in open court and tells people about his connections with international terrorism, mainly the CIA. And they don’t want that out. So he’s not extradited. And there are other cases. When you begin pushing these questions, all sorts of unpleasant possibilities arise.

But there are options. Those are options if you want to find the perpetrators of the crime and punish them. If you just want to show you can slaughter a couple of hundred thousand people and get away with it and have everybody applaud in the West, well, you do it a different way.

Incidentally, let me mention that this case of Emmanuel Constant has scarcely been reported in the United States. And it’s been going on for years.

Professor Chomsky, this question is specifically about what’s happening in Afghanistan. The United States has an economic interest in a political cleavage to ensure its oil resources in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other countries. But militarily speaking, they are bombarding places that have no relevance whatsoever. That is because, if you look at the successive U. S. governments, it started with Korean War in 1950, it went on to Vietnam and Iraq, then to Kosovo and now to Afghanistan. Is it that the U. S. government is trying its new armaments in these enlarged areas just to test them?

There is an oil interest. Oil is behind anything that happens in that part of the world. If this were something with the Antarctic, nobody would care what was going on. But these are the major sources of oil in the world, energy. Not Central Asia, but the Gulf. That’s where most of the oil is. Central Asia is important but secondary. So yes, that’s in the background. And there have been efforts by U. S. oil companies to push in a pipeline through Afghanistan from the Central Asian countries for some years. But that can’t be the reason for what’s going on because those issues were always there and they didn’t decide to bomb Afghanistan. But they are in the background, you’re right.

Is the United States trying to test its armaments? Really doubt it. We don’t have internal documents now to tell you what they are planning in Washington, but you can make out a pretty good guess. It’s probably the standard procedure, not just for the United States, but for anyone with substantial power. Criminal organisations work this way too… say, the mafia. Suppose you’re a mafia don and a storekeeper doesn’t pay you protection money, well what do you do? You don’t go to the court and get a court order and send the police to make them pay the money.

That’s the parallel to going to the U. N. Security Council for getting authorisation. You can’t do that. What you do is you send your goons and then you beat him to a pulp. And the purpose is to establish what’s called `credibility’. Actually, that’s the term that’s used in the international affairs literature and it’s the term governments use. For example, the bombing of Serbia. You know intellectuals have to make up stories to make it look good, that’s their job, but the governments were pretty straight about it, Britain and the United States, particularly. They said: ``We have to maintain the credibility of NATO.’’

"NATO" doesn’t mean NATO. Nobody cared about the `credibility’ of Belgium, for example. What it means is the `credibility’ of the United States and its attack dog -- those are the two states whose credibility has to be maintained --and credibility means just what it means for a mafia don. Everyone has to be frightened. That’s the meaning of those statements I was reading from the major planning document called the ``The Essentials of Post-War Deterrence.’’ `Our national persona must be irrational and vindictive…otherwise people might not be afraid enough to do what we tell them to do …and you regularly have to demonstrate this’. I presume that’s the background thinking in this case too and it’s perfectly reasonable.

No, I’m not suggesting there’s anything unreasonable about it. It’s reasonable for the mafia don. It’s reasonable for world leaders. It’s reasonable for respectable intellectuals to make up stories about how marvellous their leaders are and committed to benevolence and so on and so forth. All that goes right back through history. There’s practically no exception, I don’t even know of any exceptions to this. Now again this is speculation, we don’t have internal documents in this case but I’m willing to wager that’s what it is.

Professor Chomsky, you have presented a very good overview of the state, looking outside from the United States. How do you see the current laws being passed in the

U. S., including the USA Act, Patriot Act and the revocation of the confidentiality of communication even between lawyer and client? How do you see the curtailment of civil liberties in the U. S. against the backdrop of the U. S. looking outside at the world for enemies and somebody to pin it in?

Personally, my feeling is that measures of that kind are much more dangerous in India than they are in the United States. The Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance [audience applause], which is the Indian counterpart. The reason is that in India, this is handing over power to a violent, repressive apparatus, which uses it directly. It has given them more power, that’s the last thing India needs. In the United States, it’s just different for lots of reasons, including a couple of hundreds of years of having smashed everybody in the face.

One result of that is that internally, it’s a pretty free society. And there is a lot of protection of civil liberties that doesn’t come from the government, it comes from the population. There’s a deeply rooted tradition by now and they’re not going to give it up. Furthermore, civil liberties are protected by the rich and the powerful, because they benefit from them. They do not want the state to be powerful enough to carry out actions against citizens that could harm them. They want a compliant state, not a powerful state.

So a more developed form of state capitalism will tend to have civil libertarian protections. And they have these gains like freedom of speech, which is very well protected in the Unites States by comparative standards. That’s not a gift, it’s not in the Constitution, it’s not in the Bill of Rights, contrary to what they may teach you in school. Didn’t say anything about freedom of speech. Those were rights that were won by giving meaning to the First Amendment through struggle. In fact, it was pretty recent.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the United States crossed the main barrier, which has not been passed by any other country to my knowledge, and eliminated, the Supreme Court eliminated, the rule of the law of seditious libel, the law that says that you can’t assault the state in words. Even if what you say is true, you can’t defame state authority, [that’s] seditious libel. As far as I know, every other country still has those restrictions, including England. But they were overcome finally in the United States in 1964, and that was in the course of the civil rights movement. It grew out of the civil rights protest. That’s the way these rights were established and pretty firmly rooted.

There is an attempt to undermine them, you’re right, but, frankly, I don’t think it’s going to get very far.

Why does religion play a major role in twenty-first century terrorism? How do you counter and combat globalisation of Islam, a potential security threat to Asian countries, non-Islamic, like India? What is your suggestion for India in the present war?

My impression is that India, the non-Islamic part of India, has its own forms of extreme religious fanaticism. The United States is a major fundamentalist country [audience laughter and applause]. That’s no joke. If you really look at it, the fundamentalist Christian movements in the United States surpass anything I know, certainly in the developed world. For example, 40 per cent of the population in the United States believe that the world was created 6,000 years ago. Around 85 per cent believe in miracles or have even seen them! And a lot of other beliefs. About half the population thinks there are extra-terrestrials among us [audience laughter], you know, aliens.

Islamic fundamentalism is not unique in the world. There are a lot of things developing. Where did Islamic fundamentalism come from? It’s a little odd to talk about Islamic fundamentalism being a problem to India as if it’s in isolation, as if, say, Hindu fundamentalism is not a problem to India. It surely is [audience applause]. But I agree with you, it’s a problem.

But we ask where these things came from. Well, you know, it’s not too obscure. They come from the denial of opportunity. They come from denial of opportunity for meaningful political participation [audience applause]. Take a close look in case after case. You know, Algeria, Egypt, Kashmir close by. You look at other places where people are denied the opportunity to act in a meaningful way in the political arena. They find other ways to do it.

I suspect that’s part of the reason for the rise of extreme fundamentalism in the United States. Political options have indeed been restricted, not by force, but by other measures

like neo-liberal programmes that diminish opportunities -- and people want to identify themselves in some way. They want to press their interests in some way. If political participation is blocked, they’ll find other ways. These ways often turn into religious fundamentalism, or other forms of fanaticism. That’s only one of the forms and it can be very dangerous. I agree with you on that.

How do you deal with it? By dealing with the causes. Nothing is that simple but the primary causes in this case are reasonably clear. It is the diminishing, the reduction or elimination of means of participation in determining your own fate through some sort of democratic system. If that’s blocked, other things will develop. The history of Kashmir shows it very dramatically.

We often read in the papers of this Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. So proudly, the Indian media display it, that the United States is sending its forces into whatever place to bomb Afghanistan. What they don’t write is things like the fact that the American forces in the Diego Garcia base are situated less than five hundred miles away. (I’m not sure about the number because the media never talk about it.) They are situated less than five hundred miles from Indian territory, the Lakshwadeep Islands. Nobody seems to know about it. Nobody knows where Diego Garcia is.

My question is simple: why this media and political complacency towards the presence of American troops? And why do we see no threat from them? Will America tolerate Indian troops situated some five hundred miles from its coast? Nobody seems to be asking that question [audience applause]. The second question is this. The United States, despite all the CIA intelligence and its technology, has not been able to prevent a single person planting a bomb or ramming a jet into its buildings. The question is: whatever technology they develop, can they really dominate the world?

So the first part is about Diego Garcia. That’s just a straight power play. The United States wanted the island as a military base. It wanted it as part of the great system of intervention aimed at the Gulf energy resources. The main U. S. intervention forces, called the Central Command, have been aimed right at the oil-producing areas for many years. It has nothing to do with the Russians or anybody else. That’s, incidentally, conceded now. With the collapse of the Russians, it was officially conceded that they had nothing to do with it. It had to with the fear of independent nationalism, which might lead to movements that would take over the resources of the region for the benefit of its own population. And that’s intolerable, of course.

The prime beneficiaries of those resources have to be rich westerners. The United States, Britain, energy corporations, and so on. As long as governments are in place that accept that rule, like the Saudi Arabian government, they’ll be accepted. But if they aren’t, they’re going to be overthrown.

So Diego Garcia is part of it. It extends from Guam in the Pacific all the way over to the Azores in the Atlantic and it goes through the Indian Ocean and Diego Garcia is a base. Well, okay. It was a ``British island,’’ so the British kicked out the population, and the United States took it over and turned it into a military base. As you know, I’m sure, the population has been pursuing the case through the British courts and won. You know the High Court in England accepted their case and said that the British Government, which technically still owns it, has to bring them back. The United States just said, `get lost’, and Britain got lost. It’s kind of like the World Court case [relating to the United States’ terrorist war against Nicaragua]. So they stay there. But that’s just plain exercise of force.

Nobody knows about it in the United States. If you do a database search in the press, I doubt if it’s been mentioned twice in the last twenty years! So no one knows. Nobody knows about the dispossessed population or anything that’s happened and therefore there’s no protest. You can’t protest something you do not know about.

That’s part of the duty of the free press and the intellectual community: make sure people do not know about things that might lead them to protest. If people knew, they would do something about it and the forces would have to get out of the island, the people would be back home.

Does the United States have the technical means to protect the country from attack? No, it doesn’t. I was quoting a high-level technical study, by an agency close to the government, which said if you tried to bring a small plutonium bomb into the United States, it had a 90 per cent probability of success. And the borders are permeable, you can’t control the U.S. – Canadian border. People can find a way to climb across through the forests. If they can do it over the Himalayas, you know, they can do it across the Canadian border! There’s no way to stop that and never will be a way.

As I mentioned, protecting the security or even the survival of the country has never been a high priority. If it were a high priority, they would have blocked Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles fifty years ago. They would have accepted Khrushchev’s offers and all sorts of other things. And that’s not unique to the United States. Take a look at world history. Countries do start wars and they often end up destroyed. They’re doing it for other reasons, even if they face destruction. There are institutional reasons for that. They’re not nice ones, but they’re there.

Yes, they can’t protect themselves and it’s not a significant issue. The forty thousand or so loose nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union are a much greater threat and we’re doing very little about that. Because it ranks too low in the scale of values as compared with establishing `credibility’ and hegemony and so on.

Q6: Prof. Mahmood

I was on a teaching assignment twenty-five years ago in Afghanistan. I have some observations. Afghanistan is a very poor country, [it’s a struggle] even for a slice of bread. Is it worthwhile to attack Afghanistan? The second question is this: Is it worthwhile to attack a ten-dollar tent with a million dollar missile? Where is the world heading?

I think your observation is correct but you’re drawing the wrong conclusion from it. Afghanistan is worth attacking precisely because it’s a poor, defenceless country. I mean, you don’t want to attack somebody who can shoot back [audience applause]. That would be ridiculous.

Think of the mafia don again. I mean, is he going to attack another mafia don who can send goons in to kill him? If you have a choice, you fight against defenceless enemies. Then you can stand up on television and, you know, make heroic gestures and so on and so forth without any concern. So yes, it’s a poor country, it’s totally defenceless, therefore it’s a fine punching bag.

Take, say, the U.S. attacks on Libya right through the 1980s. Why did they attack Libya all the time? Beginning right away, as soon as the Reagan administration came in, it started attacking Libya, bombed it, all sorts of things. Well, you know, several reasons. First of all, Libya is defenceless, can’t do a thing about it. Secondly, it’s unpopular. Qaddafi is not going to get any support from anyone, therefore it’s a perfect punching bag. Yes, makes good sense. You want to establish `credibility’, that’s the way to do it.

Does it make sense to use expensive missiles to attack a tent? Yes, not a bad idea! I didn’t mention this, barely mentioned this, but the fact of the matter is that the military system has been a kind of a cover for economic development. It’s not just weapons producers. It’s not the ``military-industrial complex,’’ that’s a misleading term. The military provides a framework within which economic development takes place. That goes far back in history. Britain, the United States, Germany and others developed their economies to a significant extent within the military system. So you go back a century. One of the hardest problems of mechanical and electrical engineering, really an advanced frontier, was trying to figure out how to put a huge gun implacement on a moving platform and make it possible for it to hit a moving target. That’s naval guns. That was one of the hardest problems of the period. Notice those problems you can solve at public expense. Private corporations don’t have to take a chance on it. You do it at public expense under the framework of security. The public pays the costs, takes the risks. If anything works out, as it did, you hand it over to private corporations for a profit. That’s called `free enterprise’.

The whole American system of mass production developed that way. It was mostly worked out in the Army ordnance system for decades before it was handed over to private hands. Since the Second World War, this has been the core of the dynamism of the economy. Virtually the whole high-tech economy comes straight out of the state sector. That’s true of computers, the Internet, lasers, automation, in fact virtually all of electronics. Over the last years, government spending has shifted from the Pentagon system, that’s the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration], a number of agencies. It has shifted from them over to the National Institute of Health, the Center of Disease Control, and others. The reason is the cutting edge of the economy is shifting to the biology-based sciences. So therefore the public has to pay the costs of development there and take the risks if nothing works. And if it turns out okay, you hand over to some pharmaceutical company which charges exorbitant profits because they claim they need it for Research and Development, which is mostly done by the public anyway.

So using a missile to hit a tent, you know, there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s just like building a joint strike fighter. Who’re they going to fight? The United States already outspends, in military expenditure, the next fifteen countries in the world put together. They don’t need a joint strike fighter for that purpose. But it’s a spur to economic development. We wouldn’t have any commercial aviation industry if it weren’t for the Air Force. The commercial aviation industry is largely a spin-off from Air Forces. Same with aerospace, same with a quite large part of the economy. It’s kind of irrational from another point of view, but in terms of the way a state capitalist economy can proceed with socialising cost and privatising profit, this makes perfect sense. And an occasional display against a defenceless enemy is fine.

It’s the fashion among the professional dissenters in India to equate Hindu fundamentalism with Islamic and Christian fundamentalism. I think semantically it’s not right. You cannot have a Hindu fundamentalist. You may have a Hindu extremist. A Hindu fundamentalist is not in the same category. Now, I wonder if somebody has ever tried to ask himself what is the reason for Hindu extremism in India today and how old is Islamic fundamentalism in India. Secondly, when people campaign for the voice of the people of Kashmir, why is that they don’t want to talk about the voice of the people of Jammu and Ladakh, who have been victims of Kashmiri oppression [audience applause].

These are questions that you have to answer, they’re not for me to answer [audience laughter and applause].

Please comment on it, sir.

Look, if you say Hindu extremism is not Hindu fundamentalism, I agree. But Islamic fundamentalism is extremism and it is not fundamentalism [audience applause]. And the same is true of Christian fundamentalism. The term `fundamentalism’ is misused, I agree with you. Across the board, it’s misused. It’s a form of religious extremism. Doesn’t have much to do with technical fundamentalism, going back to the literal principles of the holy texts. That’s another thing. So, yes, it’s misnamed fundamentalism and that’s true of Islamic fundamentalism too, it’s misnamed.

In fact, when I write about it, I call it `radical Islam,’ not `Islamic fundamentalism,’ because that is an inappropriate term. And I assume it’s also an inappropriate term -- `Hindu fundamentalism’ and also `Christian fundamentalism.’ This term is used loosely, you’re right about that.

As to the specific reasons for the origins of it, it would be ridiculous for me to comment in this audience. You know much more about it than I do. And the same with the problems in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Those are your problems, not mine [audience applause].

Dear Professor, the day the intelligentsia starts marketing its products faster than the arms dealers, perhaps the world will have less of these problems. Will you please do it for the world?

Well, you know I’m much more sceptical about the intelligentsia than you are [audience laughter]. My view is that if you look over history, intellectuals have been a very dangerous force [audience laughter]. We have to be very careful here. If we mean the intellectuals who’re called `respectable intellectuals,’ or `responsible intellectuals,’ the ones who’re accepted within a society and honoured within that society, they’re typically the flatterers at the court [audience applause]. That goes on right through history back to the ancient texts. I don’t know if it’s true of the Sanskrit texts, but it’s certainly true of the Old Testament.

Take, say, the Old Testament. There was a category of intellectuals, they don’t call them intellectuals, but that’s what they were. There’s an obscure Hebrew word that’s translated in the West as `prophet’. It doesn’t have anything to do with prophet. The people who were `prophets’ were intellectuals. They were doing geo-political analysis and giving moral lessons and so on. And there were two categories of them. There were the true prophets and the false prophets. But those designations were given many centuries after the event. At the time, the false prophets -- the flatterers at the court -- were honoured. The people who a few centuries later were called true prophets were jailed, driven into the desert, you know, all sorts of things. That’s the way history works.

So, yes, intellectuals market their product, which is service to power, and they do it very effectively. There’s always a periphery of dissidence and they don’t have anything to market, really. If they are serious, they want to provide services to activists, public popular organisations that try to do something. It’s nothing to market, you know. You just try to participate.

In the context of the French repression in Algeria, Jean Paul-Sartre remarked: "So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it. My dear countrymen, France was once the name of a country. Take care that in our times it does not become the name of a nervous disease." Now, we are worried about America. So much violence and skulduggery from its dirty tricks department. Can America ever be rescued from itself or is it destined to self-destruct as a rogue state?

Well, let’s take France. Sartre was one of the exceptions but, in fact, there was very little protest against what the French were doing in Algeria. Very little and there was virtually no protest over they’d been doing in Indo-China right before that. There was no anti-war movement against the French effort to re-conquer Indo-China. When Algeria came along, most of the French intellectuals supported it. When they finally began protest, they were very mild. Like signing a petition against torture!

There was very little active resistance against the French massacres in Algeria, which is part of the reason that they’ve been kept secret. Now, they’re beginning to leak out, but mostly they’re not known, because nobody was pursuing them. The French Communist Party, for example, was trying to keep people quiet; people who wanted to support the FLN in Algeria had to leave it and act individually. And, furthermore, that continues until the present.

There are lots of atrocities going on in Algeria. They’re, for the most part, publicly attributed to ``Islamic fundamentalists,’’ -- radical Islamists -- and to some extent that’s probably true. But there is very strong evidence that the core of those atrocities is carried out by the state. Often under the pretence that they are carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. I can tell you, if you’re interested, that there is a major book about this written by Algerian dissidents – scientists, physicists and others. I have written the introduction to this, one of them is a person I know from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and they did a very close analysis of the major atrocities in Algeria through the 1990s. A careful, detailed analysis of the kind that good scientists would do and their conclusions are pretty striking. The typical atrocity is a kind of all day massacre, carried out by people dressed up to look like Islamic fundamentalists, but taking place, you know, two hundred metres from a big army base where nobody pays any attention. Then, after everyone’s murdered, a couple of months later, a general buys the property cheaply and builds a hotel. That’s been the typical massacre. For example, the oil installations have never been subject to these actions.

Now, the chances are pretty strong that French intelligence is involved in this. Like other imperial countries, including England and Portugal and Belgium and the rest of them, they were forced to de-colonise. But they tried to maintain control and one of the ways of maintaining control is through elite connections, including intelligence connections. So the lack of protest in France -- and it was very low over things like the Algerian atrocities -- that has a cost to France and to Algeria and to all of North and West Africa, namely continuation of similar actions. Well, the Unites States is much more powerful, but not fundamentally different. So, yes, there’s that cost.

Professor Chomsky, your criticism of the West has been lapped up by the audience. But what is your viewpoint on Kashmir? Do you think it is a movement for national self-determination?

I don’t like to talk about things I don’t know very much about. You know more about it than I do. But if you want my opinion, it’s this. There is a problem of self-determination in Kashmir. A very serious problem. What does the population want? That’s a problem. Maybe that’s not the only issue, I’m sure it’s not. But that is an issue. One issue is: what does the population want? That’s why there were U.N. resolutions calling for a referendum way back. All right, India rejected them. That’s a guarantee that there’s going to be trouble, a virtual guarantee that there’s going to be trouble. If you look over the years (you know this much better than I do), there were efforts to develop some kind of autonomy, some kind of independent…various moves were made. Finally, it led to the establishment of a political party calling for…not very clear what, maybe autonomy, maybe independence, wasn’t too clear.

There was an election, I think it was in 1987, which was simply stolen. India would not allow the election to go through and rammed through a fake outcome in which the autonomy-independence parties were blocked. And after that came terrorism. What’s the solution to this? Part of the solution should be allowing a political expression to the population itself. That’s part of a solution. Where it goes from there, how that interacts with others demands is not obvious. Some kind of autonomy within, maybe, a co-determined framework would be a possibility. The world allows things like that.

You have stoked the fires of our frustration and anger about what is happening in the world. I’m sure today Mr. Sashi Kumar and Mr. Ram would have seen in The Hindu a boxed item: "U. S. paying for past mistakes: Clinton." He says we are getting back what we have done to the Native Americans and what the original Christian Crusaders did to Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem. [The former U. S. President is reported to have said, in a speech at Georgetown University, that terror had existed in America for hundreds of years and that the nation was ``paying a price today’’ for its past mistakes -- how the country ``once looked the other way’’ when ``a significant number of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights’’; and how ``international terrorism’’ dated back thousands of years because, for example, in the first Crusades, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every Muslim woman and child on the Temple Mount. ``I can tell you that the story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.’’] Now, isn’t it ironical? He waged war on Iraq and, as you mentioned, in Sudan. As you rightly put it, the facts never came out. What is your reaction to these Clinton remarks?

I didn’t see Clinton’s full remarks. I saw what was reported in the Indian press, which was very tepid and it totally avoided his own crimes and, in fact, any recent crimes. I mean it’s true that Clinton could say two hundred years ago we didn’t act very nicely! That’s something, but it’s not much.

If we go back to, say, 1840, a long time ago, former President John Quincy Adams, out of office like Clinton, spoke in much harsher terms. He condemned the fact (I remember the words) ``this hapless race of North Americans that we are exterminating with such felicity.’’ That’s way stronger than Clinton and in 1840 -- right in the middle of the action. They knew what they were doing. They knew they were exterminating the native population. And it was not totally suppressed, it was kind of justified.

Actually, if you read [Alexis] de Tocqueville, his famous Democracy in America, he actually describes -- he was an eyewitness to -- the famous, infamous I should say, expulsion of the Cherokees [in 1838]. It was the third time they were expelled in what came to be called the `Trail of Tears’. And he describes how he is amazed at how Americans can carry out these murderous expulsion of weeping women and dying children and so on and do it with complete nobility of purpose and self-justification and admiration of their own righteousness.

So, if Clinton now happens to notice what was talked about a hundred-and-fifty years ago, that’s nice but I’m not overwhelmed. I’d be more interested if he had talked about the kind of things you mentioned -- his crimes, which are substantial. The bombing of Sudan, which I mentioned, that’s like a footnote and that one footnote probably meant tens of thousands killed.

He’s regarded as a great peacemaker in the Middle East. That’s just not true. He was responsible for what’s called the ``peace process,’’ the Israel-Palestine ``peace process.’’ That’s an effort to prevent a peaceful settlement and Clinton continued with it. You look at his Camp David proposals last year, 2000. I don’t think a map was ever published in the United States, at least not that I saw, showing the form of the arrangements. And there’s a good reason as to why the map was not published. If you publish the map, you’d see it’s a call for a Bantustan. Clinton’s proposals fragmented the West Bank into at least three, maybe four separated cantons maintained under U.S.–Israeli control

Just to go on, you read about the atrocities carried out there. For example, just to pick one, helicopters are regularly used for political assassination and also for attacking civilian complexes. Why? Where did the helicopters come from? Israel doesn’t manufacture helicopters. It’s a big military force but it can’t produce helicopters. So the United States provides them. Take a look more closely. The current intifada, the fighting broke out on September 30^th, 2000. In the next few days, U. S. helicopters flown by Israeli pilots attacked apartment complexes and other civilian targets, killing dozens of people. Now, that was part of a massive set of atrocities. There was no fire then. You know, people were throwing stones under military occupation, but they weren’t shooting.

What did Clinton do about it? Well, on October 3^rd, 2000, two days after this, he made a deal -- the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel advanced military helicopters. That was his contribution.

What was the contribution of the free press? Well, it was to keep it secret. It still hasn’t been published in the United States, not because they don’t know. They know, but they don’t want the population to know, that you, the taxpayer, are sending advanced helicopters to a country that is using them to attack civilian targets. A couple of weeks later they started using them for political assassinations. Well, the U. S. makes kind of mild reprimands about these assassinations. On the other hand, it continues to send the helicopters.

One of Bush’s early acts, when he came into office, was to arrange to send a new shipment of the most advanced attack helicopters in the U. S. arsenal. That’s because, as he says on television, that there is a universal law that murder is evil -- except when we provide attack helicopters for you to commit murder with them. That was barely reported. If you look in the business pages, you’d find some item about how Boeing has a new contract sending attack helicopters to Israel – which, as they know but consider too insignificant to report -- is using them for political assassination and for attacks on civilians.

A couple of weeks later, Israel started using F-16s, jet planes, to attack civilians. Within a week, the Bush administration had made a new deal to send them more F-16s. And it’s not just with Israel, the same with Turkey. Turkey was carrying out some of the worst atrocities of the 1990s, against the Kurds, its own Kurdish population -- massive ethnic cleansing, two or three million refugees, killed tens of thousands of people, destroyed about 3500 villages, it’s seven times Kosovo under NATO bombing. Where were they getting the arms from? From Bill Clinton. In fact, the arms continued to increase as the atrocities increased, major atrocities, these are some of the worst atrocities of the late-1990s. You can go on. If Clinton wanted to talk about atrocities, he doesn’t have to talk about something that happened two hundred years ago, which was talked about more strongly then. He can talk about decisions that he made and give the reasons for them. The way John Quincy Adams did. He was talking about his own crimes.

Thank you and that’s about all the questions we can take.

[Prolonged audience applause for Noam Chomsky.]