Surely few if any readers have come across the sentence they are now reading, and someone who had by chance heard or seen it could not possibly remember such a fact.

If you look at the Associated Press wires, there's a constant flow of information coming in. At that time I happened to have direct access to AP wires. The day the marines landed in Haiti and restored [ Jan Bètran] Aristide there was a lot of excitement about the dedication to democracy and so on. But the day before the marines landed, when every journalist was looking at Haiti because it was assumed that something big was happening, the AP wires reported that then [Bill] Clinton administration had authorized Texaco to ship oil illegally to the military junta.

I still think, despite everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a huge catastrophe; nobody knows what the consequences would be. I imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would resort to that.

As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege

One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think - even the activists - that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: 'Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn't stop the war so what's the use of doing it again?'

Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business… the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.

The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.