Chomsky: Obama is 'dedicated to increasing terrorism'

In a wide-ranging interview with GRITtv host Laura Flanders, MIT professor and author Noam Chomsky plainly stated that President Barack Obama's administration is "dedicated to increasing terrorism" all around the world.

In his view, the NSA spying scandal clearly illustrates how subservient to corporate and state power the American media has become. "There would be headlines saying this is a bad joke" if the press wanted to be truly independent, Chomsky told Flanders.

"The Obama administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism," he went on. "In fact, it's doing it all over the world. Obama, first of all, is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns, which are just part of it... All of these operations, they are terror operations."

Chomsky continued: "People have a reaction, they don't say, 'Fine, I don't care if my cousin was murdered.' And they become what we call terrorists. This is completely understood from the highest level, that as you carry out these operations you're generating terrorism."

"Sometimes it's almost surreal," he lamented, recalling the congressional testimony of a man from Yemen who claimed a single drone strike turned his whole village against the U.S. -- something the extremist Muslims in his region had failed to do.

"People hate the country that's just terrorizing them, that's not a surprise," Chomsky added. "Just consider the way we react to acts of terror. That's the way other people react to acts of terror." He went on to say the Obama administration risked a nuclear war to kill al-Qaeda financier Osama bin Laden by sending special forces troops into a sovereign nation.

He concluded that the ongoing polio vaccination campaign in Pakistan was ultimately discredited by the Central Intelligence Agency, which used fake vaccinations to get access to the bin Laden compound. Chomsky said that operation gave weight to the fear many Pakistanis have of letting strangers inject their children with an unknown substance -- even though that substance could be used to finally eradicate polio from one of its last havens on the planet.

"By now the charges are credible, that these rich white guys are just trying to gather intelligence and undermine you, and maybe send more drones to attack you," he said. "It was so severe that the U.N. had to pull out its vaccination team... [One] epidemiologist... estimated that it may lead to 100,000 polio cases in Pakistan."

Watch the video below from GRITtv, published Tuesday, June 18, 2013.