Guilty Demeanor: The private 9/11 emails of Noam Chomsky

In the spring of 2008, I emailed Noam Chomsky to invite him to my radio show. He agreed, we scheduled a date, and I spread the news.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, he sent me an angry email backing out of the interview. He was furious about an article I had posted at Op-Ed News publicizing our upcoming show. In that article, I quoted William Blum asking “the million-dollar question”:

Why doesn’t Chomsky think it matters whether or not 9/11 was an inside job?

In the article, I said I hoped my upcoming interview with Chomsky might help clarify the issue. (Oddly, at the exact same moment that Chomsky angrily complained to me about the article, Op-Ed News, run by Zionist Rob Kall, took down the article, froze my account, and stopped answering my emails.)

Chomsky was angry about two things. First, he angrily denied Blum’s charged, backed up by various youtube videos, that “Chomsky doesn’t think it matters whether 9/11 was an inside job.” Second, he charged me with reneging on an alleged agreement not to discuss 9/11 with him during our radio interview.

I politely accepted Chomsky’s word, despite video evidence to the contrary, that he DID think it was important whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. And I politely pointed out that I had never agreed not to discuss 9/11 with him during our interview. Instead, I had suggested that we “focus on our points of agreement.” The obvious implication is that we would downplay but not completely ignore our points of disagreement, such as 9/11.

Rather than conceding the point, Chomsky kept repeating the lie that I had agreed not to discuss 9/11 with him.

When you show someone a quote proving that he is lying, and that person just gets angrier and angrier as he repeats the lie louder and louder, something is obviously wrong.

Something is obviously wrong with Noam Chomsky.

Why does he act this way?

My best guess: 9/11 was designed and carried out primarily by Zionists. Its primary purpose was to bring the US and the West into a long-term civilizational war against the Islamic world – a war whose major beneficiary is Greater Israel.
Chomsky – a Jew who says the best period of his life was spent on a kibbutz – knows this. And that knowledge is deeply unsettling. It produces the same sort of neurotic behavior one would expect from someone covering up for a beloved uncle who happens to be a serial rapist.

I have seen this same pattern of behavior among many left-liberal Jews who have not yet managed to sever their emotional ties with the Tribe and its crime base in Occupied Palestine.

-Kevin Barrett 11/5/2013

Noam Chomsky Does Not Want You to Read This 

By Dr. Kevin Barrett, first published 2008

I have decided to go ahead and post my recent email correspondence with Noam Chomsky, without his permission, and against his wishes, despite his claim that by doing so I am violating his privacy, and despite my earlier statement to him that I would respect his privacy.

In my most recent newsletter (sign up by emailing me at kbarrett[at]merr[dot]com) I explained that Chomsky had backed out of our scheduled interview on false pretenses, and that I was considering posting the correspondence, in which he falsely calls me a liar. I do not like being called a liar, and I would like to find out what others think about this when they read the email record.

There seems to be no legal objection to publication. One of my newsletter subscribers, Bill Scott, sent me his unsolicited opinion: “In the opinion of William Sumner Scott, Esquire of The Scott Law Firm, P. A. of Miami, FL, Prof Chomsky may be quoted without direct comment upon what he said or edits without his permission – his voluntary transmission of his email to me includes the right for me to republish was he said as long as my publication is accurate.”

Whatever the law says, I would normally respect my email correspondents’ right to privacy. But in Chomsky’s case I am making an exception.

Chomsky has accused me of lying, based on this email record. If he is right, I need to know that, so I can apologize to him and avoid making the same kind of mistake in the future. If he is wrong, as I believe he is, I think his persistence in a clinging to a demonstrably false belief, as shown by this correspondence, needs to be taken into consideration by those who take seriously his statements on gravely important subjects, especially the 9/11 controversies.

Our correspondence, in which we largely agreed in our critiques of empire,  “agreed to disagree” on 9/11, and scheduled a radio interview, hit two major snags, foundered, and finally sank.

The first snag was Chomsky’s claim that I had promised to completely avoid bringing up the subject of 9/11 in our interview. In fact, had I made no such promise. I had simply suggested that we “emphasize our areas of agreement.” When one emphasizes one aspect of a topic, that does not mean that one completely eliminates all mention of the other aspects. Chomksy’s misreading of the email record, and his persistence in clinging to that misreading after I had called his attention to it, is symptomatic of the deep irrationality, tinged with reflexive hostility, that colors his attitude toward those who question the official version of 9/11. A psychologist might suspect that Chomsky has such a strong desire to avoid any discussion of the empirical facts of 9/11 that he misreads by projecting his desire upon words that clearly say the opposite. As the French saying goes, “il prend ses désirs pour des réalités” – he mistakes his desires for realities.

The other snag was the question of whether Chomsky thinks it really matters who did 9/11. He has been widely quoted as saying “it doesn’t matter.” Those quotes, along with Chomsky’s unremitting hostility to the 9/11 truth movement, his blithe insistence that even if the World Trade Center was taken down by controlled demolition that would simply prove that Bin Laden did it, his complete refusal to examine and debate empirical evidence, and so on, seem to suggest that he thinks the truth about 9/11 is unimportant. When I posted those quotes, along with William Blum‘s million-dollar question – “Why doesn’t Chomsky think it would be important to prove 9/11 was an inside job?” – Chomsky responded with an angry tirade, claiming that the “it doesn’t matter” quotes were taken out of context, and that in fact he thinks it WOULD matter very much to prove that 9/11 was an inside job, because it would be important to convict Bush and Cheney. I responded by accepting his explanation about the quotes, and apologizing for taking them out of context. His response was another angry tirade. So I apologized again, and then a third time – eliciting more angry demands that I apologize, as if I had not already done so three times!
A charitable inference from Chomsky’s statements is that he thinks the only reason it would be important to prove 9/11 was a false-flag attack is to convict Bush and Cheney before they leave office. Informed that 9/11 lawsuits such as Ellen Mariani’s were quashed for “national security” reasons, Chomsky wrote: “Rather, you and your associates should file a lawsuit that does not request any evidence, and therefore won’t hit a national security barrier. That conclusion follows directly from your assertions and charges. The TM has already delayed so long that it may not be worthwhile, but at least there are a few months left.”  (My emphasis.)

Chomsky ignores the obvious: 9/11 doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution, launched two illegal Nazi-style wars of aggression, and justified the murder of more than one million Muslims because they are Muslims. None of this will magically end when Bush and Cheney step down. The military budget will not return to pre-9/11 levels. The Constitution will not be magically restored, and the many blatant unconstitutional acts, approved by Democrats as well as Republicans, will not magically vanish. The wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and perhaps Pakistan and Iran – all psychologically justified by the demonization of the “Muslim” 9/11 patsies and by extension Muslims in general – will not magically end. The one-million-Muslim holocaust launched by 9/11 will not magically cease; it will in all probability expand, as oil prices rise and Israel’s strategic situation becomes more precarious. And the use of murderous false-flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide will not magically follow Bush and Cheney into the proverbial dustbin of history.

Only the full exposure of 9/11 truth – the truth that 9/11 was a false-flag attack designed to demonize Muslims and justify their mass murder, while destroying liberty and militarizing society – will undo all this damage, and then some. Full exposure of 9/11 truth will enrage Americans, who will demand that the military-industrial complex and its national security state be destroyed once and for all. It will enrage them into slashing the military budget by more than 90% and returning to a “defend the borders” rather than “conquer the world” posture. It will enrage them into demanding a return to Constitutional rule. It will enrage them into cutting US ties to Israel, and thereby restoring good relations with the Muslim peoples of the oil-producing lands.

For some reason, Chomsky does not seem to want this to happen. Why not? Read our correspondence, and the rest of Chomsky’s writings on 9/11, along with “The Shame of Noam Chomsky and the Gatekeepers of the Left” in Barrie Zwicker’s Towers of Deception…and see if you can figure it out. Maybe it will seem obvious to you, “so simple a five-year-old child could understand it.” Well, to quote Groucho, please find me a five-year-old child, because I can’t make heads or tails of it.

-Kevin Barrett, 5/22/08

—– Original Message —–

From: Kevin Barrett
To: Noam Chomsky

Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2008 11:55 AM

Subject: radio interview request

Dear Noam Chomsky,

As one of three American scholars to have lost a tenured or tenure-track job due to questioning the official story of 9/11 (the other two are Steven Jones, who just co-published a paper in a peer-reviewed engineering journal on the case, and Judy Wood) I would appreciate the chance to discuss this and other issues with you on one of my three talk radio shows: http://www.mujca.com/airwaves.htm

I have recently interviewed Richard Falk and Daniel Ellsberg, among others. My shows feature lengthy, detailed, thoughtful discussions of the most important issues. Richard Falk  recently wrote:

“Thanks! It was one of the most satisfying interviews I have ever done. You were wonderfully well prepared, and raised the right issues.” The interview is archived at: http://www.alexjonesfan58.com/mp3/20080324_kevinbarrett_richardfalk.mp3

An appearance on my show could help heal some of the bad feelings that have developed among those who admire your work but not your interpretation of 9/11. This recent peer-reviewed engineering journal article may give you a chance to pause, reflect, and temper some of your earlier views:

http://www.bentham.org/open/tociej/openaccess2.htm

Please let me know if you would be willing to do an interview. Currently all May dates are available, including:

Mondays and Fridays, 5-7 pm Eastern

Tuesdays 9-11 pm Eastern

Saturdays 6-8 pm Eastern

Thank you for all the excellent work you have done, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Kevin

608-583-2132

Dr. Kevin Barrett

Co-founder, MUJCA-NET: http://mujca.com

Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth

Author,

Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie

Editor,

9/11 & American Empire: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out

Please look at

http://patriotsquestion911.com

On Apr 19, 2009, at 1:38 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

Appreciate the invitation, and would like to arrange it, but I’m afraid I cannot do so soon.  My time is very limited under difficult current circumstances, and every free moment, literally, is scheduled far ahead.  I can check at my office, but I think for over a month, at least.  That aside, I’m afraid if we can arrange it, it would have to be pre-recorded.  I cannot schedule anything at the hours you mention.  Not to be mysterious, my wife is severely ill, needs constant attention, and I can only schedule when proper home care is available, not after 5.

Thanks for the reference to the journal.  I looked through the article, but it can’t temper my views about the collapse of the buildings just for reasons of logic: I have never expressed any views on the topic, and have none.  I do not have the expert knowledge of civil-mechanical engineering and the structure of the buildings to investigate the arguments presented, and do not intend to spend the enormous amount of time and effort required to attain it.  Therefore I treat the matter exactly as I (and scientists generally) treat other technical matters beyond their specialist knowledge: intelligent design, global warming, etc.  Namely, wait until the material is presented in some scientific journal (say Science, Nature, the professional journals of civil engineering, etc.), where it can be evaluated by other specialists, permitting outsiders to arrive at some evaluation.  I still do not understand why those who believe in one or another theory about the collapse of the buildings do not do that.  I’ve never heard of this journal but will be interested to see if specialists take the journal and the article seriously and will react, either by accepting the views or responding to them. As in other cases.  Until then, I’ll be compelled to continue to have no opinion, just as no one who lacks the specialist knowledge can have an opinion. Hence I’ll also express no opinion, as in the past, so, therefore, cannot temper my opinions.

Very sorry to hear about your dismissal for expressing your views.  That’s plainly intolerable, and I hope some action has been taken.  It’s not only intolerable but quite surprising.  I have my own experience in these matters and have only rarely come across cases of dismissal even for expressing views that is far more offensive to power interests.  Just to take a personal example, I was one of the organizers of resistance during the Vietnam war and was saved from a probable long prison sentence only because of the Tet offensive, which led the government to cancel the announced trial, in which I was to be the main defendant.  But even though MIT was almost entirely funded by the Pentagon, neither I nor others in the lab where I worked — the main academic center of the resistance movement — were threatened in any way within the university.  I was in fact teaching courses on international affairs and did not hesitate to express my opinions, which were well known.  But I did this (for over 25 years) on my own time, not within the framework of professional responsibilities.

I’m struck by your reference to “bad feelings.” That’s a curious feature of the Truth Movement, one of many that distinguish it from activist movements generally.  The source, perhaps, is reliance on rumors, perhaps the kind of rumors that led you to believe that I have opinions on the collapse of the buildings, though I have never expressed any, and cannot, for the reasons mentioned.  I suppose another source is the curious “with us or against us” mentality that pervades much of the movement: either you accept our claims, or you’re a “left gatekeeper.” I’ve never seen anything like that in 60 years of activist engagement.

Noam Chomsky

—– Original Message —–

From: Kevin Barrett
To: Noam Chomsky

Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2008 11:59 AM

Subject: Re: radio interview request

Dear Noam Chomsky,

Thank you for your quick and thoughtful reply.

I am very sorry about your wife’s illness. I wish you both well in your trying situation.

I just spent a few minutes on the porch of our log cabin overlooking a bow lake of the Wisconsin River. It is just past dawn on the second warm day of springtime here, and the birds are at the peak of their symphony. It occurred to me, as I listened to them, that each species’ song is opaque to the other species. Like humans according to Steiner’s After Babel, the birds guard their secrets. The beauty of their song is not unrelated to its tendency toward idiolect.

You would enjoy the scene here—the mist rising from the lake, the ebb and swell of warbling and twittering, the warm, rich smell of recently-melted earth.

If we could sit together on the porch, and converse over a pot of tea, we would find plenty of common ground. Curiosity about the miracle of language and its place in the larger miracle of existence (the subject of The Conference of the Birds by the Sufi poet Attar)…a commitment to the life of the mind under the moral imperative “speak truth to power”…a preference for rationalist traditions over brute empiricism…and of course a certain critique of the US empire and the inhuman technocratic capitalism of unenlightened self-interest it represents.

If the subject of 9/11 came up, we would bemusedly discover that our views are as incommensurate as the songs of different species of bird. Bemusedly, I say, not angrily. There is no reason for the cardinal to be angry at the robin! What’s more, we humans are capable of reflection and a high degree of self-awareness, though we rarely use those abilities. Critical thinking, and the kind of disinterestedness the Buddhists call non-attachment, can also help human dialogue, however incommensurate the positions it begins with, amount to something more than the chirping of birds.

Speaking of the destruction of the three New York skyscrapers on 9/11, you say “I do not have the expert knowledge of civil-mechanical engineering and the structure of the buildings to investigate the arguments presented…” I accept that you sincerely hold this position. (David Griffin’s new book, 9/11  Contradictions, was specifically written for you and others who feel this way.) Still, I  find it puzzling that you feel you need expert knowledge to understand the paper by Dr. Jones et. al., while I find it fairly easy to understand, despite my lack of training in relevant fields. While I would like to flatter myself by imagining myself more intelligent than you, I am afraid that any such imaginings would be delusional. Perhaps my years of study of the disputes about the WTC have prepared me to understand Dr. Jones’ paper. If so, I have no doubt that you could spend far less time on the material than I have, and understand it far better.

From my perspective, this is not a matter that requires expertise. Frankly, I cannot understand how anyone with eyes, who employs them to witness the many extant videotapes of the destruction of these buildings, can fail to understand that these buildings did not fall down—they exploded. Look at the multi-ton steel beams being hurled upward and outward more than 500 feet to impale themselves in neighboring buildings. One only needs a four-year-old’s grasp of the physical world to know that objects fall down, not up-and-out. (I could continue listing the many obvious visual proofs of explosive demolition, but I’m sure you have heard it before.)

Additionally, a few simple facts, easily grasped by anyone, offer a strong prima facie case for demolition. It is an undisputed matter of record that no tall building anywhere on earth, in more than 100 years of architectural history, has ever completely collapsed for any reason other than controlled demolition, with the alleged exception of the three New York skyscrapers on 9/11. It is also an undisputed matter of record that the destruction of all three of these buildings bore at least ten exclusive characteristics of controlled demolition. Not one of these phenomena has ever occurred anywhere on earth except during controlled demolitions. Even one such characteristic would be prima facie evidence for controlled demolition. Ten suggests ironclad proof. Whether one holds a degree in engineering, as my father did, or four advanced degrees in languages and literature, as I do, these facts are the same. Having argued this subject with dozens of engineers who have insisted on such howlers as “the buildings fell seconds after the planes knocked out their columns” and “steel melts at 1500 degrees f.” and so on, I would be amazed that the American engineering community produces cars that roll, planes that fly, and buildings that remain standing for a while, if I had not studied the psychological processes of coercion that operate below the level of conscious thought, and produce irrational beliefs in scientists and laypeople alike: http://www.mujca.com/apocalypse.htm

You express puzzlement that many 9/11 truth activists hold “bad feelings” toward you and others who don’t share their interpretations of 9/11. Such negative affect, you write, is a “curious feature of the Truth Movement, one of many that distinguishes it from activist movements generally.” I confess to having intermittently harbored such bad feelings since late 2003, when I discovered the overwhelming evidence that 9/11 was a false-flag operation. Perhaps I can help your sense of empathy expand enough to embrace this “curious feature” of our movement.

Consider: It is only human to get angry when one discovers one has been victimized by a lie. And the strength of the anger is likely to be proportional to the size, and the destructiveness or hurtfulness, of the lie.

As an exercise in empathy, imagine that you have carefully examined the evidence and concluded not only that 9/11 was a false-flag operation, but that it was a botched false-flag operation that left overwhelming, undeniable evidence pointing to its true nature and authors. Then imagine that for whatever reason, most of the consent-manufacturing industry refused to acknowledge the existence of this evidence, and instead pumped out transparently false propaganda supporting the cover story and the wars it was designed to unleash. Finally, imagine that many of those you had taken to be the leading critics of the empire and its consent manufacturers not only refused to acknowledge the existence of the relevant evidence but even asserted that it did not matter whether 9/11 was a false-flag operation or not! Surely you can understand why the discovery of such a gigantic and destructive lie would stimulate extreme anger, and why some of that anger would spill over in the direction of those critics of imperial propaganda who, for whatever reason, will not acknowledge the relevant evidence and its obvious importance.

My own intermittent anger is also bound up in my situation as a Muslim personally affected by 9/11, and an academic barred from my chosen profession due to having carefully and painstakingly researched 9/11, the most important historical event of the 21st century, and spoken publicly about the conclusions of my research.

As a Muslim living in the Islamophobic climate of post-9/11 America, I have had to pull my children out of school and home-school them due to the harassment they were experiencing. I have also suffered under the grotesquely bigoted portrayal of Islam and Muslims in general, and our attitudes toward 9/11 and the 9/11 wars in particular, in the consent-manufacturing industry. Virtually all Muslims understand that no intelligent Muslim, especially one strongly opposed to US/Zionist incursions in the Middle East, would want to perpetrate an attack like 9/11. Just as no intelligent Viet Cong would have wanted to have the destruction of the Twin Towers blamed on the Viet Cong, and no sane ANC fighter against US-supported South Africa would have contemplated blowing up the Empire State Building, no anti-empire Muslim would want to have the destruction of the Twin Towers blamed on anti-empire Muslims! This shatteringly obvious reality, not bigotry, paranoia, or naiveté, explains why the world Muslim community has almost unanimously viewed 9/11 as a probable false-flag operation from the moment it happened. (Even after years of media propaganda, Pew Surveys show that 80 percent of the world’s Muslims still view 9/11 as a probable false-flag operation, a figure that is essentially unchanged from late 2001.) The notion that radical Muslims, more so than other anti-empire folks, are crazed, irrational, suicide-loving fanatics, is a propaganda industry staple and a blood libel.

As a Muslim whose views are in harmony with those of most of the world Muslim community, my voice on these matters has been silenced. And as an honest academic, my voice has also been silenced. Howard Ross, then-Dean of Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has publicly stated that as part of a 2006 hiring process for a tenure-track job teaching Arabic and Humanities, I was originally the best of three finalists, and then the only remaining finalist after the other two went elsewhere—yet the hiring committee chose to leave the post unfilled in order to deny me the job, purely on the basis of my views on 9/11. Since then, I have been turned down for three lecturing jobs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—the same kinds of jobs I routinely held from 1995, when I began my Ph.D. program there, through 2006, when I became the focus of an astroturf hate campaign. I have been attacked by 61 state legislators, pilloried in the mainstream media, and held up as a horrible example of an academic who questions 9/11 “pour décourager les autres.” (Unlike you, though, I have not faced political prosecution, perhaps because the sacred, mythic event of 9/11 has allowed dissidents to be silenced as heretics rather than prosecuted.)

As I am sure you can imagine, this trajectory has left me with occasional flashes of anger and bitterness. And I confess that some of that anger and bitterness has been directed toward academics, especially critics of empire, who refuse to engage with the evidence that 9/11 was a false-flag operation. By “engage” I do not mean “accept our claims” but “acknowledge the supreme importance of the issue, study it, and discuss and debate the evidence.”

Ridiculous as it may seem, I cannot find a qualified person to debate me on 9/11—nor can the hundreds of other academics, engineers, architects, retired military and intelligence officers, pilots, and other 9/11 truth advocates who are seeking qualified debating partners. The National 9/11 Debates Project fell apart because no qualified person would agree to defend the official story. Last year, the History Club here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to set up a debate on 9/11, yet after canvassing the several university departments they could not find a single professor willing to defend the official story–so Jim Fetzer and I “debated” an empty chair. Likewise, at the University of Michigan last year, Kevin Ryan and I were slated to engage in a 9/11 debate with professors there, yet after more than 1,000 invitations were issued, the only response was from a couple of engineering professors who privately acknowledged that the destruction of the WTC was an obvious controlled demolition, but that they could not say so in public without risking their    jobs and their department’s funding. Meanwhile, I have been told that the University of Wisconsin-Madison lost more than $500,000 in private contributions to their Engineering Department because of my notoriety, and perhaps quite a bit of public funding as well. No wonder they won’t rehire me.

But why not study and debate this issue? Because it “doesn’t matter”? As a Muslim who has watched more than a million of my people butchered on the basis of what seems to me to be an obvious, easily-disproven blood libel—and as an American who has witnessed what appears to me to be the obvious, pre-planned controlled demolition of the Constitution—and as a citizen of the world who believes the American public needs a profound psychic shock, such as the public revelation of the truth about 9/11, to make us recoil from militarism and begin planetary disarmament— I am at a loss to understand those who say it doesn’t matter whether or not 9/11 was a false-flag operation.

But being at a loss does not equal small-mindedness or ineluctable anger. Bewilderment, according to some Sufis, is the highest stage of enlightenment. I embrace the painful joy of bewilderment at your position on 9/11, and would enjoy exploring that bewilderment with you, whether or not it can be even partially resolved. Whether in the form of a friendly conversation, or a debate, or a bit of both, I think our conversation could be rewarding in many ways, not least of all by helping calm relations between the left and the 9/11truth movement.

I understand your time constraints, and sympathize with the personal difficulties and pain you are experiencing. Perhaps we could schedule an interview at a time of your convenience in, say, June? Any time, any day, would be agreeable to me.

Thank you again for your quick reply, and for the inspiration you have provided so many of us who seek to bear the burden of speaking truth to power.

Sincerely,

Kevin Barrett

On Apr 20, 2009, at 12:19 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

Sounds like a marvellous scene, and I wish I could enjoy it with you.

On the substantive matters, I’d first like to make clear that this is a personal letter, not to be distributed. One of the many remarkable features of the Truth Movement is its reliance on gossip for its extensive and passionate vilification campaigns, based on circulating personal letters, phrases extracted from interviews, etc.  I’m assuming we agree on this, and so will continue.

I do lack the technical expertise to assess Jones’s claims. And having studied the sciences all my life, and spent half a century in the world’s leading scientific-engineering university, much of it at the Research Lab of Electronics, I know that it is no simple matter to gain such expertise. Therefore, I treat the matter exactly as I (and all scientists) do when complex technical claims are presented that they are not competent to assess: I mentioned a few examples in my last letter. It’s surprising that TM advocates think that this unique case should be treated differently.

On the “bad feelings,” your letter expands on what I said about the remarkable features of the Truth Movement (quite apart from its name), which distinguishes it from activist movements. You say, correctly, that “It is only human to get angry when one discovers one has been victimized by a lie. And the strength of the anger is likely to be proportional to the size, and the destructiveness or hurtfulness, of the lie.” That’s true. Suppose that the government demolished WTC and lied about it. That would rank so low among “the size, and the destructiveness or hurtfulness of the lie,” that it would take some work even to go down the list to find it. Consider the lies that led to the massacre of perhaps 4 million people in Indochina and the destruction of three countries (not to speak of creating the Khmer Rouge). Or the lies that led to acquiescence in Reaganite terror, leaving some 200,000 tortured and mutilated bodies in Central America and four countries ruined, perhaps forever; along with 1.5 million corpses in the countries subjected to Reagan-backed South African depredations; and on, and on. Or, since you appropriately see things from a Muslim perspective, consider one of the very minor pecadilloes and lies of leaders, Clinton’s destruction of most of the pharmaceutical industry in a poor African (mostly Muslim) country, with an estimated tens of thousands dead — small by our standards. People who care about atrocities and lies do get angry about the silencing of the facts, the incredible lies, and the vilification of those who try to break the silence. But they don’t react in the TM manner, unique in my experience of 60 years, or in anything I’ve read.

One of the remarkable features of the TM is its ranking of scale of atrocities. I have found that many (I suspect most) of TM adherents have little or no experience with political activism. I don’t recognize their names among active protestors of the Indochina wars, Reagan’s vicious crimes, Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq that were condemned as “genocidal” by the Westerners who know most about Iraq (the two highly respected international diplomats who ran the “oil for food” program and resigned in protest), killing perhaps 1 million people, and on through a long list.  Perhaps that explains their extraordinary reactions, so different from those of people who have spent their lives engaged in trying to end incomparably worse atrocities.

On 9/11 dissidents being silenced, that belief may also result from lack of engagement in activism regarding horrendous crimes. In fact, 9/11 dissidents have been granted kid gloves treatment that is quite unusual — the reason, I suspect, is that the establishment welcomes their main contribution, which has been to draw a great deal of energy and attention away from protest over ongoing crimes that vastly exceed what the TM charges concerning 9/11. They repeatedly appear on CSPAN, are all over talk radio, the books are best-sellers prominently displayed in bookstores, they receive nothing like the hysterical denunciations and slanders to which political activists are subjected regularly, and on, and on. What happened to you is deplorable, and should be vigorously protested. It is also most unusual. I’ve heard of nothing remotely comparable concerning Griffen, Falk, or other very prominent advocates of the TM, though it’s not uncommon, regrettably, in the case of political activists and dissidents.

I have also never seen anything like the incredible arrogance of the TM. To take just one example of the many familiar to activists and dissidents, the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor killed perhaps 1/4 of the population, probably the leading genocide of the late 20th century. Those who spent a great deal of effort for 25 years trying to do something about it were naturally angry about the incredible lies of the press and the intellectual community (Samantha Power, to take a recent example) and their unwillingness to allow the truth to emerge so that the horrors could be ended: continuing horrors, as in the other cases I mentioned. But I can’t recall that any of us produced a flood of denunciations of those who went along with the government/media line — that is, virtually everyone — condemning them as “gatekeepers,” sell-outs, or worse. These reactions are unique to the TM, in my experience.

Also unique is its unwillingness to think through simple questions. Let’s suppose it turns out that the WTC was destroyed by a controlled demolition. Then who would the finger point to?  Osama bin Laden, obviously. After all, related groups came close to blowing up the WTC in 1993, and with a little better planning, would have killed perhaps 10,000 people. Furthermore, no one else gains by attributing the crime to Saudis, bin Laden’s main enemy. In contrast, for the US government to implicate Saudis would be near lunacy. That undercuts their alleged goal of laying the basis for an invasion of Iraq — for that, they would have certainly implicated Iraqis, so that they wouldn’t have had to concoct fantasies, quickly demolished, about Saddam’s responsibility. The choice of Saudis also seriously harmed relations with one of their most valued allies, and caused them extreme embarrassment, including the need to fly Saudi businessmen quickly out of the country in violation of their closing of air space (and rather odd, if they’d planned to implicate Saudis). That’s just for starters.

You and others have every right to pursue your priorities, but not to have “bad feelings” about others who pursue what they regard as much more urgent priorities (rightly, even transparently in my opinion). Your concern over what you see as lies is appropriate, but as noted, far down the list of such regular behavior of states, media, and the general intellectual community. And the extraordinary arrogance and self-indulgence of the TM ought to concern people who adopt its priorities.

Noam Chomsky

—– Original Message —–

From: Kevin Barrett
To: Noam Chomsky [Chomsky’s responses included]

Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2008 6:04 PM

Subject: Re: radio interview request

Thank you for this eloquent letter. I will respect your wish for privacy.

I am in complete agreement with you about the relative scale of the atrocities you cite, including 9/11.  But I am in complete disagreement with several of your other points.

First, you claim that the lies about these much larger atrocities are bigger than the lie about 9/11. The size of a lie does not depend on the size of the atrocity it falsely describes. Instead, it depends primarily on how loudly and widely the lie is disseminated, the psychological and especially emotional impact of the        lie, and the audacity with which the lie contravenes the truth. In my opinion, these factors raise the 9/11 big lie far beyond any specific lie about any specific event ever told in history. I admit that there have been general lies of equivalent scale — blood libels against Jews, repeated claims that the Soviets were ahead in the arms race when in fact they were far behind and suing for disarmament, and so on. But no single lie about any single    event–not even “Oswald acted alone”– comes close to that of 9/11. The emotional impact of 9/11 on Americans was overwhelming. A great many,  probably the great majority, reacted by entering a long-term state of murderous hatred of Arabs and Muslims. That is why Americans perpetrated the cargo container massacres in Afghanistan. That is why they built a worldwide sex torture gulag. That is why they film themselves sodomizing Iraqi children in front of their parents. That is why the American people as a whole tacitly approves of those activities. And that is why, when they wake up and understand that the enemies of Muslims, rather than Muslims, perpetrated the crimes of 9/11, they feel a tremendous anger at the lie that turned them into subhuman, ravening beasts. Never before in history has a lie about a specific event had such a profoundly dehumanizing effect on a people.

Chomsky: You’re so wrong about this I barely know how to begin. The crimes you mention are real, but aren’t even a minute fraction of the crimes in Vietnam. Or Iraq. In the 1990s, for example, Clinton’s sanctions killed probably 1 million Iraqis, but the lying was so phenomenal that the most knowledgeable Westerners were completely silenced: the highly respected international diplomats who ran the “oil for food” program, both of whom resigned because they regarded it as “genocidal.” Von Sponeck’s crucially important book about this did not receive a word of mention in the US, and he himself was completely silenced, as was Halliday. These crimes against Muslims preceded 9/11, and are far worse than those you describe — which are, in fact, bitterly condemned by Americans, including the mainstream media, contrary to your remarkable claim. And that’s the merest fragment.

While I agree with you that the US empire has been perpetrating much larger atrocities during much of its existence, I disagree with your claim that the 9/11 truth movement is impeding effective action to stop those crimes and end that empire.

Chomsky: There is one particle of truth in what you say. The TM appears to consist almost entirely of people who are remote from activism, so the huge amount of attention and energy they devote to this does not in itself reduce activism.  But they draw in many others, who find it a lot easier to blog and discuss on the internet and to post on Youtube than to carry out the difficult and demanding work of organizing and activism.  Another respect in which the TM differs from activist movements, apart from those I’ve mentioned, is how little it does about any ongoing crime. According to polls, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the population either believe the TM view or consider it plausible.  With a fraction of that kind of support serious activists would have made an enormous difference in policy, but the TM organizes no demonstrations against ongoing crimes , no tax resistance or other forms of resistance, no law suits, in fact none of the actions that are second-nature to activists. Just filling cyberspace. That’s a large part of the reason why there isn’t much more protest against the Iraq war.

On the contrary, I am convinced that the vast majority of the American people will never feel the degree of revulsion that would bring them to end that empire without 9/11 truth. If we take people as they are, rather than as they should be, we must recognize that most will never be profoundly affected by American-sponsored atrocities in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, Central Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Chomsky: I don’t know of any basis for your utter contempt for the American people. I don’t think that you and I live on some higher moral plane. And the evidence is strongly opposed to you. By 1969, about 70% of Americans (though not elites) considered the Vietnam war “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” and many millions were directly engaged in actions to stop it. And succeeded: read the last section of the Pentagon Papers on why the Joint Chiefs were unwilling to send more forces to Vietnam after the Tet offensive. In dramatic contrast, the TM is of no concern to the powerful — it doesn’t seem to bother them at all, and it wouldn’t be a great surprise if that is confirmed by internal documents, as we have learned about the JFK assassination.

In fact, this correspondence (and the huge number of others like it) itself illustrates how the TM is taken energy and attention away from genuine activism confronting horrifying ongoing crimes. The time we’re taking for this discussion is taken away from such activism, on my part at least. And that’s multiplied massively. By now, I mostly respond only with form letters for this reason. Maybe TMers have infinite time to pursue their specific interest, instead of acting to put an end to terrible ongoing crimes. But I don’t.

But they will be and are being profoundly shaken by the knowledge that forces in their own government blew up the World Trade Center with thousands of Americans inside. That knowledge allows them to emotionally identify with the victims of empire. Millions of conservative, nationalistic Americans–the same people who wanted to kill the Muslims after 9/11–are now supporting Ron Paul’s proposal to close every foreign military base, abolish the CIA and the Federal Reserve, scale down the military to a defend-the-borders posture, and effectively end the empire and its long history of atrocities. Their thousands of small contributions has made Dr. Paul’s campaign the biggest grassroots fundraising success in US political history.

Chomsky: Ron Paul’s campaign has had essentially no effect on policy, and there is not the slightest indication that it will. Fortunately. His ultranationalism, and policies to place the country under the rule of unaccountable corporate tyranny, would be an utter disaster.

Your claim that 9/11 activists get “kid gloves treatment” and that the media and big book chains are promoting the movement strikes me as bizarre. Until the publication of Alten’s novel The Shell Game two months ago, the big chains and even many left-leaning independents had refused to stock most 9/11 books while hiding away the few they do stock.

Chomsky: That is completely false. Years ago I saw Griffen’s book and others prominently displayed in chains. That’s entirely unlike dissident literature, which really is suppressed.
In six years that have seen the publication of at least twenty extremely important critical studies of 9/11, not one of them has ever gotten display space in any major bookstore, to my knowledge. My book, for example, got great reviews, even from Publisher’s Weekly, but no bookstores will stock it–not even in liberal Madison, my home town, where I have personally sold several hundred! Even most of the left and alternative media has boycotted these books, usually refusing to even review them. Your book 9/11, by contrast, was massively promoted by the foundation-funded “alternative” media and became a bestseller, convincing a great many people who should know better that radical Muslims were responsible for the single biggest strike against their interests ever perpetrated.

Chomsky: The fact that your book got great reviews reveals how little the TM threatens power and how the TM gets kid-gloves treatment, as compared with activist and dissident literature, which scarcely gets reviews at all, including the left press, and if there is a review, it is almost invariably vilification. That’s all well-known to activists. As for the foundation-funded “alternative media,” that’s as much of a fantasy as the “massive promotion” of my interviews on 9/11. It was a hand-to-mouth operation by a tiny press, with virtually no funding. And to believe that it is that pamphlet that convinced people that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 is to live in a dream world so remote from reality that comment is impossible.

Griffin’s books became semi-bestsellers because people like me went into debt (in my case I now owe almost $200,000 counting student loans), sacrificing everything we had to buy dozens or even hundreds of copies and give them away. (I have now given away hundreds of books and more than ten thousand DVDs while raising children below the poverty line and drowning in debt.) When talk radio wouldn’t touch the topic, we called in repeatedly and mentioned these books. Finally, today, 6 years after the truth movement arose, we have exactly two second-tier national talk radio hosts, Richard Greene of Air America and Alex Jones of GCN, who are taking on the issue.

Chomsky: I’m glad to learn that you do what activists and organizers do routinely, except that they don’t posture about it, but take it for granted. Some day you might want to learn something about people who really have devoted their lives to activism, and who have given up promising careers and livelihoods to live in poverty and vilification (if they are noticed at all). Your two national talk shows are two national talk shows more than available to those who have devoted themselves to state crimes that (you concede) are far more extreme than what you claim about 9/11. Can’t you see that you are simply contradicting yourself?

The truth movement has invented or pioneered all sorts of new activism techniques, from parodying the currency, to freeway blogging, to asking the hard questions of public figures and posting the videos on youtube. We have turned the internet into the subversive tool it was meant to be. In short, we are the purest grassroots movement around, and we haven’t gotten a dime’s worth of help from any foundation or political party or government grant. All of that gets cancelled the moment we speak out. Bob Bowman, who ran for Congress against a forever-incumbent and got 45% on Diebold machines, would have easily won if the Democratic party had given him funding–but his pro-9/11 truth stance got him blackballed by his own party. Many of us, myself included, have had to put up with sporadic death threats, vandalism attacks, and physical assaults. Yet nobody will debate us! If your thesis was correct, and the powers that be wanted to heighten the visibility of the truth movement, why in the world have I been unable to find a single qualified debate opponent after four years of trying and many thousands of invitations issued?

Chomsky: As I said, the TM does essentially nothing about ongoing crimes, contenting itself with internet debates on its sole concern, alleged government involvement in 9/11: again, no demonstrations, no tax or other resistance, no law suits, in fact nothing like what is done by groups with far less outreach, and about ongoing crimes. I’m sorry that you face the routine treatment of activists — death threats, for example. I suppose you also have to have police protection if you are giving a talk. I’m sure you can think of many reasons why no one wants to take time to debate you.

Your question “who would the finger point to?” puzzles me, because the answer seems so obvious: The many interlaced groups that had something to gain. Those who wanted to invade Afghanistan to restore the CIA-controlled heroin business and snatch the gas pipeline rights from Bridas; those who wanted to invade Iraq to establish permanent US bases and smash the country into ethnic mini-states; those who wanted a new enemy image to replace Communism and justify the military-industrial complex; those who wanted massive military budget increases; those like Silverstein’s buddy Netanyahu who felt Israel’s survival depended on bringing the US into the Middle East to smash its enemies and balkanize the large states in the region; those who wanted to turn the US into a presidential dictatorship via the unitary executive theory; those who felt that a much higher level of imperial mobilization would be necessary to preserve American hegemony in the next century; those who felt that a pre-emptive mass mobilization against terrorism might help stave off a genuinely debilitating attack (see Bobbit’s The Shield of Achilles); those who anticipate a “Peak Oil” civilizational crisis and believe that whoever controls Middle Eastern oilfields will determine who lives and who dies during the upcoming mass die-off (see Mike Ruppert and Jim Kunstler)…this list could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea. Which of these motivations were primary and which were secondary is an open question, of course.

Chomsky: The question was who stood to gain by implicating Saudis. The answer, trivially, is Osama bin Laden, since they are his main enemy. For Bush it was obviously an extremely harmful choice. It undermined efforts to build up support for a war against Iraq (they surely would have implicated Iraqis for that purpose), it seriously harmed relations with a most valued ally, and it embarrassed the hell out of them when they had to fly Saudi businessmen out of the country, violating the closure of air space. All of this is strong evidence that they didn’t know even know about it.

Evading that question, the only one that was raised, you are responding to a different question: who gained from 9/11? I think your answers are mostly wrong, and I’ve explained why in print frequently, but there is no point explaining because you are evading the crucial question, not surprisingly: it is one of the most obvious arguments against TM speculations.

This evasion should make it clear to both of us that there’s no point going on. And I won’t. I think we can agree that it is a pointless waste of time for both of us.

The one group that clearly would never want a 9/11 would be Muslims who want to roll back the US-Zionist presence in the Middle East. Bin Laden, if we take his statements at face value, approved of anti-US attacks in Arabia and Africa, but repeatedly deplored the 9/11 attacks, which he called un-Islamic and blamed on American Zionists in interviews with Pakistani journalists in September and October of 2001. The media portrayal of Bin Laden as a 9/11 criminal ignores the obvious inauthenticity of the so-called “confession video” of December 2001, which leading Bin Laden expert Bruce Lawrence, chair of Religious Studies at Duke University, says is “bogus,” adding that his many acquaintances in the CIA’s Bin Laden detail all know it is bogus. Lawrence and other Islamologists, including myself, strongly doubt the authenticity of recent Bin Laden videos. To this day, the FBI insists Bin Laden is “not wanted” for 9/11 because there is “no hard evidence” against him. Yet despite all this and much more, the tacit assumption that Bin Laden and “radical Muslims” did it is still being promoted by people who claim to be leftist critics of empire.

Bin Laden, by the way, almost certainly had nothing to do with the 1993 WTC attack, which was arranged by an FBI informant (and manipulated patsies) who taped himself discussing the fact that the FBI built the bomb with his FBI handler. (The FBI now says Bin Laden is wanted for the African embassy bombings and the USS Cole attack, but not for either World Trade Center attack.) The false-flag nature of the 1993 event is not particularly surprising, given the history of National Security State terrorism against friendly civilians in Gladio, Northwoods, Oklahoma City, and so on; the proven false-flag nature of the attacks in London and Bali; and the suspected false-flag nature of Madrid.

As for the Saudi royals, they may have cut a deal with the US/Zionist 9/11 perps in order to get US forces out of their country and into Iraq and then Iran, thereby solving of their two biggest geopolitical problems, just as it solves Israel’s. But they obviously were not the major players nor the major beneficiaries.

I apologize if my expression of my views seems arrogant. I have studied these matters carefully for four years and feel strongly about them. If anything I am saying is incorrect or arrogant, please let me know. Also, I would be interested in learning which 9/11 truth advocates have so alienated you, and how they have done so. To my knowledge, most of the leaders in the field–Griffin, Jones, Ahmed, Gage, PD Scott, Chossudovsky, Thompson,and even your tough critic Barrie Zwicker–are far from arrogant. (Ruppert, Tarpley, and Fetzer can be a bit arrogant, I admit.)

Take care, and thank you again for writing.

Kevin Barrett

—– Original Message —–

From: Kevin Barrett
To: Noam Chomsky

Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2008 10:55 PM

Subject: Re: radio interview request

On Apr 20, 2008, at 9:13 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

I understand your point, but completely disagree. Take say the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Transparently, the crimes are far worse than 9/11, but the lies are far worse too. The major lie is the denial that the US is guilty of aggression. That’s unspeakable. In the case of Vietnam, the most extreme critics at the left end of the mainstream spectrum could say, at the end of the war in 1975, that the US “intervention” began with “bungling efforts to do good” but by 1969 it was clear that the efforts were a “disaster” and that we could not bring democracy to Vietnam at an acceptable cost. Every word in that account is a flat out lie, comparable to Hitler’s claim to have fought a war of self-defense. And the lie was uniform, across the spectrum.

Barrett: You’re right.

Today the debate rages between those who say if the US military hadn’t been hampered we would have won, and the Lewis position at the opposite end. This lie is vastly more extreme than what you take to be the lies about 9/11, and it led to the slaughter of many millions of people and the destruction of three countries (and the Khmer Rouge, and worse)  Exactly the same is true in the case of Iraq. It is impossible to find a principled critique of the US invasion in the mainstream. At most it’s a “strategic blunder” (Obama) or we’re involved in a “civil war” we can’t win (Clinton). Try to find a single voice in the mainstream with a principled critique — a notion we understand very well, the way we reflexively react with the Russians invade Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan or Chechnya, or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. I haven’t found a word. In fact, the plain truth is unthinkable, and any attempt to state it leads to hysteria, vilification, etc. — not the kid gloves treatment of the TM.

Barrett: I agree with you completely except for the kid gloves and TM part. I consistently call the Iraq and Afghanistan wars what they are–examples of the supreme war crime, aggression. I consistently laud the Iraq, Afghan, and Palestinian resistance for upholding international law. You should listen to my show some time! The TM is far more receptive to this than the non-TM left-liberals.

These are only a few of the lies of state-media-intellectual culture that are far more extreme than the worst that’s claimed about 9/11, and have had utterly horrendous effects.

Barrett: I see 9/11 as the emotional wallop that made these wars, and the lies about them, politically possible. Let the 9/11 lie stand, and the others will stand also, given the unfortunate psycho-cultural realities that make the treasonous murder of even one person of ones own nation FEEL worse than the murder of a million strangers. (Emotions rule the world, not logic.) Take down the 9/11 lie, and the wars, the lies excusing them, and hopefully the whole empire and its military-industrial context will be politically vulnerable in a way they never have been before. I would think you would want to be a part of that!

There are indeed outrageous lies about 9/11. The worst is the near-univeral claim that it is a monstrous act that is unparalled, and therefore changed history to the post-9/11 world. In reality, by any rational measure, it was nowhere near as horrible as what Latin Americans call “the first 9/11,” in 1973. But since we were crucially involved in carrying out that atrocity, the thought is inexpressible — except, of course, in Latin America and elsewhere in the third world.

Barrett: I agree completely. My most-repeated statement about 9/11 is “we’re going to shred the Constitution, and commit criminal wars of aggression, for two days’ worth of cigarette fatalities; four days worth of deaths caused by medical treatment; or twenty-nine days worth of automobile deaths?” I endlessly repeat this to show that the “war on terror” is a farce, regardless of what you think happened on 9/11.

More below, but I’m afraid I’ll have to stop after this, because the chances of our making any progress are too slight for us to be spending our time this way.

Barrett: Well, you’ve achieved my near-complete agreement with you.

Kevin

On Apr 21, 2008, at 12:18 AM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

Glad to see that we’ve achieved at least a partial meeting of minds. That’s a good sign.

Noam Chomsky

— Original Message —–

From: Kevin Barrett
To: Noam Chomsky

Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 8:19 AM

Subject: Re: radio interview request

I think we are in essentially complete agreement on all substantive matters except (1) the strength of the evidence that 9/11 was a false-flag operation, (2) the importance of false-flag operations as a tool of authoritarian and imperial rulers, and (3) the best political strategy for curtailing imperial abuses and hopefully empire itself, in light of (1) and (2).

I’d love to have a radio conversation emphasizing our points of agreement, which are many, and helping educate my TM audience about the history of imperial atrocities much greater than 9/11, and lies arguably greater than 9/11. I have had that kind of conversation with William Blum, John Perkins, and others who emphasize the historical context of empire and its abuses. You are supremely qualified for that kind of conversation, and I would be honored if you would join me at a date and time of your choosing.

Thank you again for your many decades of excellent work, which have been a great inspiration to me.

Kevin

On Apr 21, 2008, at 11:42 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

Letter went off before I finished.

I’d be glad to arrange a radio conversation, if it’s possible. But the timing you suggested doesn’t work for me, as I wrote. And even if we could work something out, there’d be a long wait, necessarily. Demands are far beyond what I can deal with.

And thanks for the generous remarks, appreciated.

NC

Original Message —–

From: Kevin Barrett
To: Noam Chomsky

Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2008 10:39 AM

Subject: Re: radio interview request

Could we go ahead and set a radio date for however far ahead?

Mondays and Fridays, 5-7 pm Eastern

Tuesdays 9-11 pm Eastern

Saturdays 6-8 pm Eastern

The interviews, which are punctuated by commercial breaks, can last from a half hour to the full two hours. I prefer the longer ones, which allow time to really cover the territory, as in my Richard Falk interview.

But however much time you can spare would be greatly appreciated.

I’ll be running for Congress on an End the Empire platform throughout the summer. (Libertarian, Wisconsin’s 3rd District.) It would be great to have a conversation with the leading critic of empire during the campaign!

Kevin

On Apr 26, 2008, at 10:59 AM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

I wish I could, but for as far ahead in the future as I care to think, those hours are impossible for me. (…)

Good luck in the campaign

Noam

—- Original Message —–

From: Kevin Barrett
To: Noam Chomsky

Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2008 6:35 PM

Subject: Re: radio interview request

I’m sorry about your situation, and for my misunderstanding.

If you want to schedule a phone interview (prerecorded for broadcast) of any length, at any time during the day, at any date of your convenience, let me know.

Kevin

—– Original Message —–

From:Noam Chomsky
To:Kevin Barrett
Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2008 6:56 PM
Subject: Re: radio interview request

That would be a possibility. I’ll have to check Monday when my office opens, to see what times (if any) are free. It’s tight. Demands and obligations are very heavy, and time is short — only when home care is available. I’ll be back to you when I find out.

Noam

Date: Thu, 01 May 2008 15:44:34 -0400

To: khidria@merr.com

From: Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>

Subject: Fw: radio interview request

Dear Mr. Barrett,

I am writing for Prof. Chomsky, as I manage his schedule.

We can try to do this in late May or early June, when he has help at home and can spare a few minutes on the phone.

I would like to suggest Thursday, May 22, at 11:30 am, or Wednesday, June 4, at noon. Would either date work for you?

Best,

Bev Stohl

Asst. to Noam Chomsky

[Barrett submits article to op-ed news announcing interviews with Chomsky and William Blum, two leading critics of empire. The article quotes William Blum asking “the million dollar question,” why Chomsky thinks it doesn’t matter why 9/11 was an inside job, and lists three commonly-cited Chomsky quotes appearing to say it doesn’t matter whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. The article expresses hope that Chomsky will clarify his position. Op-Ed news 1) does not publish the article; 2) fails respond in any way to the article submission; 3) freezes Barrett’s Op-Ed News account, so Barrett permanently loses access to the article. Barrett then receives an email from Chomsky saying “I was forwarded your article” (obviously by someone in the editorial department at Op-Ed News – note that the article was never published). Chomsky’s email attacks Barrett for crediting and publishing Chomsky’s “it doesn’t matter” quotes, and claims that Barrett had agreed not to discuss 9/11 during their upcoming interview. Unfortunately this email, and the article it refers to has been lost.]

—– Original Message —–

From:Kevin Barrett (by way of Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>)(with Chomsky’s responses)
To:Noam Chomsky
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 3:13 PM
Subject: million dollar question

Dear Noam,

>since we’d already agreed that we would not discuss

>this, I was a little surprised to learn that you intend to bring it up. But

>that’s the least of the surprises.

I’m sorry for the apparent misunderstandings. I do not remember any agreement not to discuss this. I expect our interview to focus on your work exposing the crimes of empire, and educating my audience about those crimes. But I was not planning to completely avoid my own area of interest and scholarly focus, namely the empirical questions surrounding 9/11 and their implications. I see that as a minor but indispensable part of the interview, given who I am and who my audience is.

Chomsky responds: Your memory is flawed. Here is your last letter about the interview, and my note of agreement.

“I think we are in essentially complete agreement on all substantive matters except (1) the strength of the evidence that 9/11 was a false-flag operation, (2) the importance of false-flag operations as a tool of authoritarian and imperial rulers, and (3) the best political strategy for curtailing imperial abuses and hopefully empire itself, in light of (1) and (2).”

“I’d love to have a radio conversation emphasizing our points of agreement, which are many, and helping educate my TM audience about the history of imperial atrocities much greater than 9/11, and lies arguably greater than 9/11. I have had that kind of conversation with William Blum, John Perkins, and others who emphasize the historical context of empire and its abuses. You are supremely qualified for that kind of conversation, and I would be honored if you would join me at a date and time of your choosing.”
In brief, we agreed to have a discussion emphasizing our points of agreement, and avoiding our points of disagreement: specifically, avoiding “the empirical questions surrounding 9/11 and their implications.” I explained in earlier correspondence why I believe these issues are a diversion from the task of “curtailing imperial abuses.” We agreed to disagree about this, and to avoid the topic, as your letter makes clear. If you intended to change the plans on which we had agreed, I would have liked to be informed, and I’ll naturally have to rethink my participation. It’s a matter of priorities, as we both know, and as I explained at length.

>The first quote is a transparent misquotation. Unambiguously, I said it

>doesn’t matter much which group of Islamic terrorists was involved, the

>al-Qaeda group in Afghanistan or some other part of these loose networks.

I apologize (though I must stay I take offense at the expression “Islamic terrorists,” which I consider a slur; and the presumption that Muslims were responsible for 9/11, when there is no reliable evidence whatsoever of any involvement by any Muslim). I had seen this quote in Barrie Zwicker’s Towers of Deception, along with his claim that he sent you the chapter and didn’t get a response, so I assumed it was accurate. My bad.

Chomsky responds: The misquotation is from a talk of October 2001. At that time there was no discussion — at least none that I had ever heard of — of 9/11 being an inside job. Zwicker may or may not have sent me the chapter, but it’s not my responsibility to correct, for that matter even to read, the masses of material that reach me. What you put into your blog is a gross misquotation, period. And a serious one. To make it worse, as I wrote you I’ve said the exact opposite of what you impute to me, loud and clear, a great many times, so the misquotation is not a small point.
You skipped the next part of my latter about the “admission” you attributed to me, also not a small point. It’s not an “admission” but an “assertion,” which I’ve again spelled out in detail in print, repeatedly.
Hence the first part of your “million dollar question” completely collapses. Completely, nothing left, again not a small point.
Your letter simply ignores the refutation of your second bit of “evidence.” Hence the entire basis for your charges, and your posing of the “million dollar question,” completely collapses.
Your letter also gives no indication that you have any intention of withdrawing what you now know to be completely false, slanderous, and irresponsible charges. I presume, then, that you feel it is your right to make such charges, and leave them standing.
That’s normal in what passes for intellectual discourse. I expect that kind of behavior in the intellectual mainstream, and don’t even bother to respond to the flood of misquotations, misrepresentations, and pure slander that flows as a matter of course. If that’s the company you want to keep, fine. But then be clear about it.
As for the interview, as I wrote you, I have limited time and very heavy obligations, and am compelled to set priorities. If this is to be the level of argument and evidence and sense of responsibility, I don’t have time for it.
That ends the discussion concerning your blog, my response, and your response.
Let’s turn next to your evasions of these issues.
Your first evasion is to bring up your feeling about attributing 9/11 to Islamic terrorists. I hope it is obvious that this is completely irrelevant to your charges, and the faked evidence you used to support them. If you want to withdraw the charges and explain why, then you could go on to these new points that you are raising. That is, you could object to the fact that in October 2001 I assumed that some group of Islamic terrorists was responsible, while asserting very clearly that little or no evidence was available. (“Well, with regard to the perpetrators, in a certain sense we are not really clear. The United States either is unable or unwilling to provide any evidence, any meaningful evidence….”). And that I repeated that again and again long after that Washington had not provided any evidence, and the head of the FBI admitted they didn’t have any. If you want to object to that, fine, go ahead and do so. But that’s quite different from fabrication of a “million dollar question” by misquotation and ignoring the fact that my unambiguous position was the opposite of what you charged, and converting a loud and clear assertion into an “admission” so as to support this serious false charge.

> As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, that’s one reason for

> skepticism that they would have dared to carry out such an attempt.

As Zwicker points out, false-flag operations are the easiest of military operations, because there is no opposition. History is awash in false-flag operations, yet I cannot think offhand of anyone ever having been caught and prosecuted for any of them. Thus the neocons, who had the means, motive, and opportunity for the crime, would have no reason to think they would get caught. Anti-imperialist Muslims (and I know what I’m talking about, because I am one) would on the contrary have neither the means and opportunity, nor the motive, to carry out such a spectacular attack, which would obviously increase the murderous US presence in the Middle East, not decrease it. No Muslim smart enough to pull off a major attack in the US would be dumb enough to want to. The same cannot be said of radical imperialists and Zionists, the real authors of 9/11, who had every reason to want a spectacular “Islamic terrorist attack” on the US.

Chomsky responds: This is the next evasion. This comment is completely irrelevant. I explained that your “million dollar question” was not only based on gross misquotation and misrepresentation, but that I had in fact said and emphasized precisely the opposite of what you charge when you pose the “million dollar question.” That’s the end of the matter. Your views, or Zwicker’s, on false flag operations haven’t the slightest bearing on this. I won’t comment on the rest.

Your response also happens to evade the contents of what I said, but I won’t go into that, because it is irrelevant to your charges and my response to them.

Again, I ask you to try to empathize with the outrage the 9/11 false-flag attack sparks in me, a Muslim whose family has been badly damaged, and whose livelihood has been taken away, by this murderous blood libel. Imagine, if you will, that a group of Nazis disguised themselves as rabbis and filmed themselves slaughtering 3,000 children and drinking their blood, broadcasting their exploits on live television as a “Jewish terrorist” event and producing a history-turning shock to mass consciousness triggering worldwide rage against Jews, legalized torture of Jews, and the murder of more than a million Jews and counting. This scenario, unthinkable as it seems, is exactly what has happened on 9/11 – with Muslims in the place of Jews.

Chomsky responds: If you want to discuss your feelings, fine. Some other time. But they provide no warrant for your charging me with lunatic positions I flatly and unequivocally rejected, on the basis of misquotation and misrepresentation of a talk, while you ignore what I did say in the talk, and much more importantly, have repeatedly written. And going on from there to impute to me an absurd position, raising your “million dollar question.” I’m still ignoring the silly clip from Youtube so dear to TMers, to which you referred.

Again, I apologize for the misunderstandings, and reiterate that I would like our interview to focus on the crimes of empire. But I will not be able to entirely avoid the question of why you think exposing 9/11 as a false-flag operation will not contribute to our shared goal of rolling back and perhaps ending this criminal empire. Since you have a month to prepare, and are one of the smartest people on the planet, I expect a very good answer ; )

Chomsky responds: Let me make it clear again, as I wrote you before, that I regard this as a diversion from the task of terminating ongoing and probable future crimes. If you think otherwise, that’s just fine. It’s surely your right, as it’s my right to keep to what appear to me to be far higher priorities. That seems fair enough.

Kevin

PS Please note that I am using a new email: kbarrett@merr.com  The old one will soon be out of commission.

Dear Noam,

Bill Blum and I discussed the history of crimes of empire for about 45 minutes, and 9/11 truth and your approach to it, for about the last 15 minutes, yesterday on my Dynamic Duo show: http://67.212.67.19/PubPodcast//d_duo/DD1.mp3

That is the kind of conversation I would like to have with you, emphasizing our points of agreement, and (as the word “emphasizing” suggests) at least briefly touching on our main area of disagreement, which happens to be my own main scholarly and political focus at the moment. If my interpretation of what “emphasizing” means is wrong, please correct me. If it is not, please concede the point. (In your message, you say you are including part of your “note of agreement” but I don’t see any such thing, just my suggestion that we emphasize our points of agreement.)

Again, as I said in yesterday’s note, I apologize for unintentionally taking your quotes out of context and mangling their meaning. Unfortunately I am unable to find or correct the article I submitted, because I am now locked out of my account at oped news, presumably due to your complaint. If you could contact the same person you complained to, and asked them to unlike my account so I could correct the article, I would certainly do so.

I do think that you have left yourself open to this unfortunate misunderstanding through your seemingly irrational approach to the questions raised by the 9/11 truth movement. Bill Blum expressed this point very well on yesterday’s show: It seems self-evident that convincing evidence that 9/11 was a false-flag operation would be by far the strongest imaginable weapon against empire and its crimes; and most of those (virtually all, in fact) who carefully study the evidence presented by the leading figures in the 9/11 truth movement conclude that this evidence is not just convincing, but overwhelming. For a list of names and positions of many of us who have put our reputations and careers on the line for affirming this, see htttp://www.patriotsquestion911.com  Your own actions, as a self-professed opponent of empire who is not only not supporting the 9/11 truth movement in its work, but seemingly propagandizing against it, seem exceedingly irrational to a very large and growing number of people. When you ask “How could I believe anything as nutty as that?” (about “it wouldn’t matter”) the answer is, your position already strikes many of us as just about that nutty.

Now that you have explained that your actual position is “it WOULD matter,” but you don’t think the empirical evidence is in fact overwhelming or even convincing, you need to engage in reasoned debate about that empirical evidence, or your position will be just as nutty as “it wouldn’t matter.” Oddly, you never seem to address the empirical issues, such as the fact that the destruction of all three WTC skyscrapers had at least ten exclusive characteristics of controlled demolitions; Norman Mineta’s testimony under oath about Cheney’s stand-down order issued at about 9:25 a.m. in the White House bunker, which conflicts with the Commission’s ludicrous claim that Cheney didn’t arrive at the bunker until almost 10 a.m.; and so on. Instead, you offer wild, vapid speculation such as “they’d have to be crazy to do it” which is at least as irrelevant as “anti-imperialist Muslims would have to be crazy to do it.” Your consistent refusal to engage with the specific empirical evidence, while instead repeatedly resorting to wild, vapid, ultra-general speculation, strike those of us who have studied this issue as extremely irrational.

“The misquotation is from a talk of October 2001. At that time there was no discussion — at least none that I had ever heard of — of 9/11 being an inside job.”

Maybe it’s because I watch al-Jazeera and read the foreign press, but I do remember Bin Laden’s three statements of September-October 2001 in which he deplored the attacks, called them un-Islamic, emphatically denied responsibility, and blamed the attack on “American Jews.” Those sentiments were echoed by a top Pakistani general (Gul, if memory serves) and (in milder form) by Egypt’s most erudite man, Mohammed Heikal, as well as by roughly 80% of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, according to Pew surveys. All of the many dozens of my Muslim friends and acquaintances at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and at the mosques I go to, were unanimous in saying it looked like an inside job. I seemed to be the only one who doubted them and took a wait-and-see attitude. At the time there were a number of reports like Stan Goff’s article (from September or early October 2001) pointing out how ludicrous the government’s story of Hani Hanjour’s stunt flying was. The full MIHOP interpretations of Gore Vidal and Thierry Meyssan came out in 2002, if memory serves – but by then your book had inoculated the key segment of the public against such information. While your ignorance about what much the world (including almost all the members of the group being blamed, as well as military experts like Goff) thought is perhaps understandable, in retrospect it is hardly excusable. In any case, the idea that any critical intellectual would not from the very beginning at least entertain the possibility that it was some kind of false flag attack, and immediately grasp the importance of determining whether there was evidence for that possibility, is incomprehensible to me.

Again, I am sorry to have misquoted you, and look forward to an interview emphasizing our points of agreement. If you want an interview without any discussion of 9/11 whatsoever, please let me know and I’ll consider that possibility. Also feel free to call me any time. Sometimes these matters are easier to smooth over by conversation than by email.

Kevin

From: chomsky@MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: million dollar question
Date: May 10, 2008 11:43:07 AM CDT

I’m shocked by your new charges, even more than by the old ones. It would never have occurred to me in a million years to register a complaint against you. Nor would I know how to do it. You’ve already demonstrated that you believe it is your right to slander without even a pretense of grounds. That’s your problem, not mine.

Furthermore, I haven’t NOW explained my position that it would matter. I’ve announced it loud and clear, unambiguously, from the very start. In fact, the irrationality of the TM is so extreme that quite often I’m charged with saying that it doesn’t matter along with denunciations of my reasons for explaining why it would matter greatly to send Bush-Cheney et al to the firing squad. An illustration is the silly Youtube fragment that you cited, the source of the desperate TM efforts to extricate some support for their charges from the garbled phrase in a Youtube videotape in which I explained why it would matter greatly, in the same passage in fact. If you insist on fabricating, I can’t do anything about it, but do not see why I should contribute to it by spending time on your show.

Saying that you took my quotes out of context and mangled their meaning is a bit deceptive, to put it mildly. To repeat once again, you offered three pieces of evidence for your charge that I am a lunatic who believes it wouldn’t matter to show that the government was responsible for 9/11 — putting aside, again, that you know perfectly well that I’ve always stressed the exact opposite. The first was a fabricated quotation — fabricated, not taken out of context of with meaning mangled. The second was a childish TM favorite, the purposely misinterpreted Youtube phrase — a ridiculous source even if there were any merit to the claim. The third was you charge that I “admitted” what I’d also clearly and unambiguously asserted — like my saying that you now “admit” that the government might have been involved in 9/11.

In short, every particle of evidence in your charges was utterly false. If you can’t concede that, it’s your problem.

Your example of the conversation with Blum is entirely beside the point. You and he seem to agree, so therefore you can express your agreement in a few sentences. That’s totally irrelevant to the self-evident fact that if we were to go into this matter, it would consume the entire show, and beyond. I’d then have to waste time on a deluge of hysteria from TMers, which happens even though I never discuss the matter at all, except in response to queries. Aside from which all of this is a low priority for me, for reasons you know: I prefer to devote my time to combatting the crimes of empire, not to learning enough civil engineering to evaluate a claim about building 7 which, if correct, would clearly point the finger at Osama bin Laden, or to other diversions from my own priorities.

I hope that is now clear.

Since you regard the evidence as utterly overwhelming, then why not do something about it? For example, initiate a law suit to try Bush-Cheney (or whoever you have in mind) with high treason. TMers have delayed far too long. There are only a few months left. That would certainly be a sign that the movement takes itself seriously. If the courts refused to accept the suit, even with evidence that is overwhelming, that would be a very strong argument for TM claims.

I think by now it is clear that we cannot communicate, and I do not see any point in planning a radio event.

From:Kevin Barrett
To:Noam Chomsky
Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2008 2:13 PM
Subject: Re: million dollar question

On May 10, 2008, at 11:43 AM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

I’m shocked by your new charges, even more than by the old ones. It would never have occurred to me in a million years to register a complaint against you. Nor would I know how to do it. You’ve already demonstrated that you believe it is your right to slander without even a pretense of grounds. That’s your problem, not mine.

What “charges” ? You contacted someone at Op-Ed news, and the next day my account is locked. Nothing other than your contacting them could possibly have led to this result. I’m not changing you with asking them to do it. I am asking you to request that they undo it.

Furthermore, I haven’t NOW explained my position that it would matter. I’ve announced it loud and clear, unambiguously, from the very start. In fact, the irrationality of the TM is so extreme that quite often I’m charged with saying that it doesn’t matter along with denunciations of my reasons for explaining why it would matter greatly to send Bush-Cheney et al to the firing squad. An illustration is the silly Youtube fragment that you cited, the source of the desperate TM efforts to extricate some support for their charges from the garbled phrase in a Youtube videotape in which I explained why it would matter greatly, in the same passage in fact. If you insist on fabricating, I can’t do anything about it, but do not see why I should contribute to it by spending time on your show.

Saying that you took my quotes out of context and mangled their meaning is a bit deceptive, to put it mildly. To repeat once again, you offered three pieces of evidence for your charge that I am a lunatic who believes it wouldn’t matter to show that the government was responsible for 9/11 — putting aside, again, that you know perfectly well that I’ve always stressed the exact opposite. The first was a fabricated quotation — fabricated, not taken out of context of with meaning mangled. The second was a childish TM favorite, the purposely misinterpreted Youtube phrase — a ridiculous source even if there were any merit to the claim. The third was you charge that I “admitted” what I’d also clearly and unambiguously asserted — like my saying that you now “admit” that the government might have been involved in 9/11.

In short, every particle of evidence in your charges was utterly false. If you can’t concede that, it’s your problem.

I have conceded it completely, twice! I hereby concede it a third time!

Your example of the conversation with Blum is entirely beside the point. You and he seem to agree, so therefore you can express your agreement in a few sentences. That’s totally irrelevant to the self-evident fact that if we were to go into this matter, it would consume the entire show, and beyond. I’d then have to waste time on a deluge of hysteria from TMers, which happens even though I never discuss the matter at all, except in response to queries. Aside from which all of this is a low priority for me, for reasons you know: I prefer to devote my time to combatting the crimes of empire, not to learning enough civil engineering to evaluate a claim about building 7 which, if correct, would clearly point the finger at Osama bin Laden, or to other diversions from my own priorities.

How would Larry Silverstein’s admitted demolition of Building 7 implicate Bin Laden?

I hope that is now clear.

You are getting less clear all the time.

Since you regard the evidence as utterly overwhelming, then why not do something about it? For example, initiate a law suit to try Bush-Cheney (or whoever you have in mind) with high treason. TMers have delayed far too long. There are only a few months left. That would certainly be a sign that the movement takes itself seriously. If the courts refused to accept the suit, even with evidence that is overwhelming, that would be a very strong argument for TM claims.

Several lawsuits and a great many FOIA requests and other legal actions have been filed, as you surely know. The recent memorandum from Elias Davidsson to the UN may be our best hope, since every US lawsuit has hit a “National Security” wall before it gets to discovery. The NYC Ballot Initiative is also promising.

I think by now it is clear that we cannot communicate, and I do not see any point in planning a radio event.

Do I then have your permission to publish our correspondence in toto, without any alteration, in order to explain why you have backed down from an event I have already scheduled and announced? If not, do you have any objection to my publishing my side of it, with my paraphrases of what I was responding to (qualified by the admission that I am far from sure that I understand you correctly?) I need to offer an explanation to my listeners, and the complete record would probably be the fairest one.

Kevin

From: chomsky@MIT.EDU

Subject: Re: million dollar question

Date: May 10, 2008 1:32:34 PM CDT
To: kbarrett@merr.com

Another lie. I never heard of Op-Ed news, and wouldn’t have contacted anyone there if I had known about them. Again, more evidence that you feel that it is your right to lie and slander at will, with a particle of evidence.

As for the rest, I haven’t seen anything in which you withdrew every statement in your posted material and agreed that all of it was false. Rather, as I have repeatedly pointed out, you have ignored most of the false charges and evaded the one you referred to.

You’re quite right about something, though. Silverstein’s comments, whatever one think about them, certainly do not point the finger at bin Laden. With equal rationality you could say that the fact that the sun rose this morning doesn’t do so.

I’m glad to learn from you about the lawsuits. This is the first time in the deluge of TM material that reaches me that refers to one, so I’ll be glad to learn about their status. But what you write is just another evasion. A national security wall has to do with an entirely different matter: requesting documentation. But given that the publicly available evidence is already so overwhelming that anyone who isn’t convinced is “nutty,” then clearly you don’t need new documentation. Rather, you and your associates should file a lawsuit that does not request any evidence, and therefore won’t hit a national security barrier. That conclusion follows directly from your assertions and charges. The TM has already delayed so long that it may not be worthwhile, but at least there are a few months left.

As for Davidsson, I assume you know why this initiative is worthless. If not, I am sure that Bill Blum can explain it to you. But if you, Davidsson, and others want to spend your time on pointless pursuits instead of confronting ongoing crimes, that’s your privilege.

You certainly do NOT — repeat NOT — have my authorization to publish this correspondence. From ample experience, you and I both know that that will lead to another deluge of irrationality, hysteria, and fabrication in the TM gossip system. The examples you chose illustrate that perfectly. Every single one of them, without exception. And I have no interest in contributing to that, nor in responding to more falsification and misrepresentation of the kind you are unwilling to concede. I have explained to you repeatedly that, and why, I regard all of these efforts as a diversion from the task of confronting serious crimes. If you want to indulge in these efforts, fine, that’s your choice. But I have the same right to choose my priorities, a fact that seems to be lost on the TM, one of the great many respects in which it differs sharply from dissident and activist movements.

You can very easily offer an explanation to your viewers. Simply tell them the truth: that every single charge in the posting we have been discussing was a flat, outright falsehood, and you therefore withdraw it, in toto. That’s ample explanation, and it would be the honest way to proceed.

On May 15, 2008, at 1:43 PM, Sean wrote:

> He also endlessly repeats the mantra that proving World Trade Center Building 7 was taken down in controlled demolition would be unimportant, because that would just prove that it was Bin Laden who demolished it.

Kevin (cc: Eric),

How does Chomsky retain any credibility at all amongst his (willfully and unwillfully) blind adherents when suggesting the above? And what is the impetus for his wanting to avoid the topic of 9/11 in a debate? Has he stated why?

Sean

From: Kevin Barrett (by way of Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>)
To: Noam Chomsky, Sean

Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 12:02 PM

Hi Sean,

His stated reasons for avoiding the topic, like his opinions on the topic, don’t make any sense to me.

I think that since he reneged on our agreement to an interview, I will have have to renege on my agreement to keep my communication with him private. Stay tuned for my publication of the entire correspondence, so you can judge for yourself.

Kevin

On May 19, 2008, at 11:06 AM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

I’m sorry to learn that you cannot keep to minimal conditions of decency, but I suppose I should not be surprised.

If you insist on falsifying the facts about the interview, that’s of course your right as well.

From:Kevin Barrett (by way of Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>)
To:Noam Chomsky
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 2:19 PM
Subject: Re: Re:

I want to simply publish the unedited record of our entire correspondence, so everyone can judge just who is “falsifying facts.” If you honestly believe that I am the one falsifying facts, why would you object to publishing our entire correspondence?

On May 19, 2008, at 1:56 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

The reason, as I explained to you, is that out of politeness I respond to letters that are sent to me: to the recipient, not to the public. If I want to write to the public, I would do so. It would never occur to me, or to any decent person, to circulate personal letters they receive. I assumed that you understood normal conditions of decency. Otherwise I never would have responded in the first place.

From:Kevin Barrett (by way of Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>)
To:Noam Chomsky
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 4:44 PM
Subject: Re: Re: Re:

I have respected your wishes for confidentiality thus far, and am taking a lot of flak for it.

If you had not broken your agreement to do an interview “emphasizing our points of agreement” (i.e. also touching upon our points of disagreement) under false pretenses, I would not even consider publishing our private correspondence. But since you are making a false claim about what was in that correspondence, in order to break your agreement to do an interview, I do not see any alternative to publishing the correspondence in toto in order to allow people to judge who is telling the truth.

If you would have the decency to apologize and admit that our agreement was to emphasize our points of agreement, rather than completely avoid our points of disagreement, and then go ahead with the interview, I would certainly continue to honor your request for confidentiality.

Kevin

From: chomsky@MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: Re: Re:
Date: May 19, 2008 4:10:56 PM CDT
To: kbarrett@merr.com

This is pretty pitiful.

If you have indeed kept confidentiality of correspondence, then no one but you or me knows anything whatsoever about what you allege (wrongly) to be a false claim. So there is no one who can even know that there is anything to judge. We therefore are left with the following: either you violated confidence and circulated private correspondence, contrary to what you now claim; or this letter is simply a pretext for breaking confidentiality.

I won’t repeat to you what I already explained about the course of the plans for an interview. In fact, I clearly cannot write a word to you on the normal assumption of confidentiality, taken for granted among civilized people.

—– Original Message —–

From:Kevin Barrett
To:Noam Chomsky
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 7:35 PM
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re:

I was supposed to not breathe a word that I’ve had an email exchange with you, even though I scheduled you for an interview?! Does that mean the interview was supposed to be top-secret, unannounced, and sprung without warning on an unsuspecting public? That’s not how radio works.

I scheduled and announced the upcoming interview with you, but did not discuss the contents of our email exchange. Then you backed out on false pretenses. I am left holding the bag, forced to explain “why Chomsky backed out” to dozens of irate fans who were looking forward to the interview and even hoping you might finally say something sensible about 9/11, if only in a couple of sentences.

Your cancellation under false pretenses has left me only two choices: Explain the situation in my own words, or just publish the entire email exchange so everyone can see both sides of the story and come to their own conclusions.

Why is publication of the exchange a problem for you? If you think you’re right, the full, unedited exchange will prove it, so you should encourage publication. If you know you’re wrong, as I think you do, stop acting in bad faith and apologize.

Which will it be?

Kevin

PS If I were a paranoid conspiracy theorist, I would suspect that I’m in the middle of a Turing test, communicating with a CIA computer-generated linguistic simulacrum designed to drive me crazy, rather than the great, honorable dissident Noam Chomsky.

From: chomsky@MIT.EDU

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re:

Date: May 19, 2008 8:20:15 PM CDT
To: kbarrett@merr.com
Reply-To: chomsky@MIT.EDU

Stop the pretense. You can say that I was unable to make it, as commonly happens. The rest I’ll skip, out of politeness.

From: kbarrett@merr.com
Subject: politeness
Date: May 21, 2008 6:47:49 PM CDT
To: chomsky@mit.edu

“Politeness” ?

Throughout this correspondence I have been polite and congenial, trying to reach common ground and forge a human connection with you. You have responded with scorn, condescension, bitterness, insults, false accusations, and such a complete lack of empathy and sense of fair play that I regret to inform you that you have failed the Turing Test. I am forced to conclude that I have been corresponding with a machine programmed to behave in an inhuman as well as illogical fashion.

Here is your request for confidentiality:

“On the substantive matters, I’d first like to make clear that this is a personal letter, not to be distributed. One of the many remarkable features of the Truth Movement is its reliance on gossip for its extensive and passionate vilification campaigns, based on circulating personal letters, phrases extracted from interviews, etc. I’m assuming we agree on this, and so will continue.”

Like so much of your correspondence, this passage shows a complete lack of regard for the other. You assume I agree on this?! Your awareness of the reality of other people is sadly lacking. My opinion of the 9/11 truth movement is, of course, at least as high as yours is low, and I could hardly be expected to agree with your attack on a movement I honor and belong to.

While I am not about to launch an “extensive and passionate vilification campaign,” I am going to set the record straight. You have repeatedly accused me of lying, and still refuse to admit that the record demonstrates that those accusations are false.. Since you have been and continue to be the most influential propagandist against the 9/11 truth movement, I think that what this correspondence reveals about you needs to be more widely known.

Kevin

From: chomsky@MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: politeness
Date: May 21, 2008 9:20:24 PM CDT
To: kbarrett@merr.com
Reply-To: chomsky@MIT.EDU

As I wrote, I assumed that you would agree that “this is a personal letter, not to be distributed.” I then gave the my reasons. I was not asking you to agree with my reasons. Surely you can understand that.

You say that (1) you are going to set the record straight, and you also said that (2) you had not distributed any of the correspondence, keeping to the decent assumption that correspondence is personal. If you are telling the truth about (2), then there is no record to set straight, because no one knows anything about the correspondence except you and me. So either you withdraw (1), or you concede that (2) is false and you have been violating confidences all along, contrary to what you claimed.

Your statement that I am a propagandist against the TM is over the edge. I never say a word about it except in response to queries. It takes considerable imagination to regard that as a campaign against the TM. If you want to end this awe-inspiring campaign, then all that’s necessary is for TMers to stop deluging me with demands that I abandon my priorities and adopt theirs.

From: kbarrett@merr.com
Subject: Re: politeness
Date: May 22, 2008 6:46:36 AM CDT
To: chomsky@MIT.EDU
On May 21, 2008, at 9:20 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote:

As I wrote, I assumed that you would agree that “this is a personal letter, not to be distributed.” I then gave the my reasons. I was not asking you to agree with my reasons. Surely you can understand that.

You say that (1)you are going to set the record straight, and you also said that (2) you had not distributed any of the correspondence, keeping to the decent assumption that correspondence is personal. If you are telling the truth about (2), then there is no record to set straight, because no one knows anything about the correspondence except you and me.

They know you accepted an interview invitation, then backed out.

The record to be set straight, of course, is between you and me – namely, your having called me a liar. I intend to find out whether other people, when they read the email record, agree with that charge.

So either you withdraw (1), or you concede that (2) is false and you have been violating confidences all along, contrary to what you claimed.

Your statement that I am a propagandist against the TM is over the edge.  I never say a word about it except in response to queries.

Your book on 9/11, and your responses to questions about the subject, together have done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims, than any other single person’s efforts, with the possible exception of whoever is in charge of today’s equivalent of Operation Mockingbird. Before our correspondence, I thought that despite this major contribution to genocide, your intentions were good. This email exchange has reluctantly convinced me otherwise. You are plainly acting in bad faith. I think it is important for others to see the record and judge for themselves.

Kevin

Kevin Barrett

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.

He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.

He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.

Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.

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