The Obama administration is “dedicated to increasing terrorism throughout the world,” Chomsky said, agreeing with an article last week by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky.

I have spent a lot of time looking through the classified documents in the US, which is maybe the freest society, most of the documents are classified to protect the government against its own population and not for security reasons. I think anyone who tries to lift the veil on this is doing the right thing. In fact, the programs that the government was carrying out are really illegitimate and it was correct to expose them. I think he is going to suffer for it. You know. But it was the right thing to do.

NC : First of all, I think he has carried out a heroic act. That is the proper act of a citizen to let people know what their government is doing. For the most part, the public should know what their representatives are doing. Of course, governments never want that. They want to operate in secret.

In a talk at the American University of Beirut graduation, Noam Chomsky singled out protesters, including those in Taksim Square, as “at the forefront of a worldwide struggle to defend the global commons from the ravages of the wrecking ball of commercialization, environmental degradation and autocratic rule that is destroying Earth.” (full text of talk is here.)

The first part of Chomsky’s talk focused on the artificial political boundaries that define countries, most of them the result of military violence and coercion. “The legitimacy of borders – for that matter of states – is at best conditional and temporary,” he said. “Almost all borders have been imposed and maintained by violence, and are quite arbitrary….

Surveying the terrible conflicts in the world, almost all are the residue of imperial crimes and the borders they drew in their own interests.” He proceeded to explore the meaning of this fact in the Middle East, where imperial powers have drawn so many of the national borders with little regard for the ethnic or ecological consequences.

Near the end of his talk, Chomsky pointed out how these powers are destroying the commons of the world: