There are by now declassified documents from the 1950s that tells you a lot about what's going on in Egypt and we should have known it then. It's about exactly what's happening, how we can disregard public opinion as long as the dictators we support are capable of suppressing their populations. So to hell with public opinion. That's all right there in the 1950's. That's not security. That's not security of the government. That's, if anything, security from its own population. And there's a lot of that.

In November 2004, U.S. occupation forces launched their second major attack on the city of Falluja. The press reported major war crimes instantly, with approval.

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.

Haiti, which has been the main target of US intervention throughout the 20th century, is the poorest. And Guatemala, which is maybe the third major target of US intervention, probably ranks third poorest.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

The book [Manufacturing Consent] itself is then devoted to a series of case studies, selected, we hope [with Edward Herman], to offer a fair and in fact rather severe test of those conclusions.

The Russian ambassador at the United Nations did make some proposals for a political settlement in which Bashar Assad would be slowly eased out. The West dismissed it immediately, and we don't know if it was real, because it didn't come from the Kremlin, and it was informal. But the point is every such proposal is immediately scotched. And you just don't know if they're real.