President Barack Obama has unilaterally overturned the principles set forth nearly a millennium ago in the Magna Carta with his drone assassination campaign, said political scientist Noam Chomsky.

In a wide-ranging interview with the conservative website World Net Daily, the famed linguist and political scientist strongly condemned the president for undoing one of the foundational principles of western democracy by targeting suspected terrorists for death.

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“A principal element of the Magna Carta was the establishment of the presumption of innocence – that a person is innocent until proven guilty through due process in a trial before their peers,” Chomsky said.

He said Obama had “essentially rescinded” the principle of due process by designating suspected enemies as guilty of some future crime against the United States.

“If any other country were doing this, like Iran, we would consider it justification for a nuclear war,” Chomsky added.

Chomsky told WND’s Jerome Corsi, a birther author of books attacking Democratic presidential candidates, that the Obama administration had expanded Bush-era policies that allowed the National Security Administration to spy on Americans.

“The whistleblower revelations have demonstrated that the state has gone to pretty extreme levels of surveillance in the effort to control the population,” Chomsky said. “I think all of that is unconscionable.”

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He said there would be little change if Hillary Clinton were elected.

“[Clinton would be] maybe a little more militant,” he said.

Chomsky said he was not particularly disappointed in Obama’s record because he had low expectations.

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“I wrote about him before the primaries in 2008, simply using his webpage – the way he was presenting himself – and he seemed to me like an opportunist,” Chomsky said. “His portrayed idealism could not be taken seriously. The policies he was proudest of I thought were awful.”

He said Obama had could claim some minor accomplishments, such as the health care reform law.

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“What the administration regards as their major achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is a small step toward dealing with what’s, in fact, an international scandal,” Chomsky said. “The U.S. health-care system is outrageous. It has about twice the cost of comparable societies, at least per capita, and some of the worst outcomes.”

He said a single-payer, government-run health care system would be the fairest system – and one that already enjoys broad support.

“Almost two-thirds of the public was in favor of including a public option, essentially national health care,” Chomsky said. “That was thrown out without discussion, but it is a step forward — better than it was.”

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Watch the entire interview posted online by World Net Daily: