Noam Chomsky and the Manufacturing of American Dissent: 2 videos

[Paul Rigby]

No point in commenting on previous exchanges within this thread, as readers can form their own judgments.

First up, and with due thanks to the excellent Greg Parker at the EF, the funding issue:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listser...95382.html

You're one step removed from the actual source, Paul, if the following is to be believed:

But this project was actually funded NOT by the military, but by the CIA and NSA. From a prior post, ³Manovich on Chomsky's CIA Ties,² which observes that Chomsky, who worked on the program, took some of the ideas he helped develop for the CIA and NSA to his work on ³mechanical translation,² a full-fledged intelligence program directed against the Soviet Union

The link Greg posted didn't work for me, but the one below appears to cover the same ground:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/John...p2002.html

Subject: Proof of Chomsky's CIA Past

10 Sep 2002

More on the great hero Chomsky an expert in "artificial intelligence" if I ever saw one. He was ushered into MIT by the JASON group, another DoD top secret advisory group. No wonder he supported Deutch to head the CIA and never talks about assassination conspiracies. Lately he has said that the idea that the government had any foreknowledge of 9/11 is preposterous. Couldn't it have been a-priori like language is? Somewhere deep inside there must have been a suspicion someone might get angry and respond.

Subject: Fwd: Proof of Chomsky's CIA Past
Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2002 14:35:06 +0000
From: beatrice w

I was unaware of the details in Chomsky's background as specified below. It helps to explain alot. I never understood why Chomsky's ideas were so readily accepted in academic, linguistic circles. They always seemed highly dubious, circumspect and controversial to me. Altho I haven't read his material in linguistics, I have heard him speak on the subject a few times, and, I've heard his ideas discussed by others in the context of language acquisition, etc. It always appeared to me that he was a-historical, anti-materialist, and completely inapplicable to the historical, contextual realities of language development, history, acquisition, promulgation, etc. Yet, nobody every seemed to question his almost Kantian approach, a seemingly "idealist," universalist, a-priori, innate category, or, categories which appeared to have no applicability in reality. I could say more, but, will leave it at that.

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From: Alex Constantine
To: Mike Ruppert
Subject: Proof of Chomsky's CIA Past
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 16:47:38 -0700

From the WBAI People message board: "The text you posted does not say Chomsky worked for the CIA" - Anonymous

It is well known that during the 1950s, the CIA funnelled finances for its classified research projects through the military. It is also well known, as reported in Barsky¹s biography of Noam Chomsky, that the budding MIT linguist worked on a "machine translation" project at MIT funded ostensibly by the Pentagon, but as will be shown, in fact by the CIA and NSA.

"Ironically," the project was the very sort of intelligence activity Chomsky has criticized publicly:


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From the Barsky bio: http://www.alexconstantine.50megs.com [Noam Chomsky, A Life of Dissent, by Robert Barsky, MIT Press, 1998]

"Chomsky was made an assistant professor [at MIT] and assigned, ironically, to a MACHINE TRANSLATION PROJECT of the type he had often criticized. The project was directed by Victor Yngve and was being conducted at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, which was subsidized by the U.S. military."


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But this project was actually funded NOT by the military, but by the CIA and NSA. From a prior post, "Manovich on Chomsky's CIA Ties," which observes that Chomsky, who worked on the program, took some of the ideas he helped develop for the CIA and NSA to his work on "mechanical translation," a full-fledged intelligence program directed against the Soviet Union:

"... The idea of computer vision became possible and the economic means to realize this idea became available only with the shift from industrial to post-industrial society after World War II. The attention turned from the automation of the body to the automation of the mind, from physical to mental labor. This new concern with the automation of mental functions such as vision, hearing, reasoning, problem solving is exemplified by the very names of the two new fields that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s -- artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. The latter gradually replacing behaviorism, the dominant psychology of the "Fordism" era. The emergence of the field of computer vision is a part of this cognitive revolution, a revolution which was financed by the military escalation of the Cold War. This connection is solidified in the very term "artificial intelligence" which may refer simultaneously to two meanings of "intelligence": reason, the ability to learn or understand, and information concerning an enemy or a possible enemy or an area. Artificial intelligence: artificial reason to analyze collected information, collected intelligence. In the 1950s, faced with the enormous task of gathering and analyzing written, photographic, and radar information about the enemy, the CIA and the NSA (National Security Agency) began to fund the first artificial intelligence projects. One of the earliest projects was a Program for Mechanical Translation, initiated in the early 1950s in the attempt to automate the monitoring of Soviet communications and media. The work on mechanical translation was probably the major cause of many subsequent developments in modern linguistics, its move towards formalization; it can be discerned in Noam Chomsky's early theory which, by postulating the existence of language universals in the domain of grammar, implied that translation between arbitrary human languages could be automated."

 Alex Constantine

A sample of Chomsky’s hypocritical, contradictory, absurdly shifting positions on the funding issue:

Richard Todd, “The ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’ at MIT,” NYT Magazine, (Sunday), 18 May 1969, pp.32-33, 63-64, 66, 68, 70, 73, 76, 83-84, 91, 93-94:

“The quintessential outside man at MIT is Noam Chomsky…(Chomsky was at one point, but is no longer, supported by Air Force money)…Chomsky…takes a hard line on the question of defence money. ‘My own view,’ he says, ‘is that science’s association with the Department of Defense is a tragic development. It has harmed the scientist’s own work, but, worse than that, it has harmed national policy. The real tragedy is that people, out of their own free will, have involved themselves with the Defense Department. The Defense Department constitutes a menace to human life. I think people simply have to ask what they can do that is useful. If they can’t do anything, then they should become plumbers.’”

Now turn to Milan Rai’s equally hagiographic profile, Chomsky’s Politics (London: Verso, 1995):

p.13: According to Chomsky – how very convenient this is – “…in a sense, MIT was outside the American university system.”

p.130: “On the related issue of university connections with the CIA, Chomsky remarked that he had never become particularly interested in the topic: ‘The institution pretty much serves the interests of the state where it can. Whether it’s being directly funded by the CIA or in some other fashion seems to me a marginal question.’ In fact, Chomsky advocated direct, open funding by the CIA: ‘At least everything would be open and above-board.’”

p.134: Chomsky was “asked during the Vietnam war how he had managed to carry on teaching at MIT, one of the centres of US military research.”

p.135: “Despite being a largely Pentagon-funded university, MIT has a very good record on academic freedom and freedom of dissidence…”

The Loyal Tool Quiz, part 1:

Quotes:

(1) "The CIA, as the President's loyal tool - tainted to some extent by involvement in Watergate-related activities - also became vulnerable."

(2) "CIA: The President's Loyal Tool."

(3) "One thing I would mention is that when it's a CIA operation, that means it's a White House operation. It's not CIA. They don't do things on their own…If it's a CIA operation it's because they were ordered to do it…"

(4) "[T]he CIA is not a mysterious body with its own brand of politics: it is a tool in the hands of the President of the United States…"

(5): "While the CIA deserves no kudos for its part in the scheme [Bay of Pigs], it is a misjudgement to credit it with more than an agent's share of the blame…"

(6) "The Central Intelligence Agency has never assumed the 'right to meddle in other nations' internal affairs.' The charter legislation for the CIA makes it the instrument for such special activities, but only when they are proposed by the policy agencies, directed by the President and financed by Congress after proper notification."

(7) "Let me say again flatly that CIA does not make policy, and does not operate outside or contrary to established policy."

(8) “He was disillusioned, he said, because the CIA had become ‘not an intelligence gathering organisation but a covert operations arm of the Presidency.’”

(9) "The White House knows, or is made aware of, every important step of the CIA...The CIA operates both independently and secretly, but the much circulated view that there are two governments is groundless. There is only one government in the United States and it is directed from Washington."

Sources:

(1) Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks. The CIA And The Cult Of Intelligence (New York: Dell, February 1975), p. 328.
(2) Victor Marchetti, "CIA: The President's Loyal Tool," The Nation, 3 April 1972, p. 430.
(3) Noam Chomsky. Class Warfare (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 92.
(4) Philip Agee, as quoted by Claude Bourdet, in "The CIA Against Portugal," as found in Jean Pierre Faye (Ed.). Portugal: The Revolution In The Labyrinth (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976), p. 194.
(5) Carl Marzani & Robert E. Light. Cuba v. CIA (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1961), p. 52.
(6) Gary E. Foster, (Director of Public and Agency Information, CIA), "C.I.A. Isn't Lone Wolf of Foreign Policy," New York Times, (Wednesday), 17 February 1993, p.A18.
(7) Admiral William F. Raborn, outgoing Director of Central Intelligence, U.S. New & World Report, 18 July 1966, pp.75-76.
(8) Ralph W. McGehee. Deadly Deceits (1989), as quoted, without objection, by John Pilger. Heroes (London: Pan Books, 1989), p.184.
(9) George Morris. CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO's Foreign Policy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp.23 & 145.

PS: “Does the CIA make policy? Allen Dulles, in his new book, The Craft of Intelligence, calls this the most harmful myth about the CIA.”

Ben H. Bagdikian, “Unsecretive Report on the CIA,” New York Times Magazine, (Sunday), 27 October 1963, p.108.