Chomsky: Well, first we should be clear about the framing. The term contact is elastic. Academics interact with a wide range of people across institutional and social contexts, often without endorsing or meaningfully engaging with the entirety of those individuals’ activities. Universities themselves are historically embedded in networks of funding and influence that include defense industries, extractive corporations, authoritarian regimes. If association alone becomes the analytic category, then intellectual life would be almost impossible.

But if we want to talk about ethical questions surrounding association, it is curious how selectively that concern is deployed.

Interviewer: Selectively how?

Chomsky: Take Nicaragua in the 1980s. The United States supported Contra forces responsible for widespread atrocities against civilians. That was not peripheral contact. That was material support, logistical coordination, diplomatic shielding. The International Court of Justice ruled against the United States for unlawful use of force. Yet within domestic discourse, the moral interrogation of that relationship was remarkably muted.

So when we talk about association, the asymmetry immediately appears.

Interviewer: But people are asking about your associations, not U.S. foreign policy.

Chomsky: But the question of association cannot be disentangled from the structures that normalize certain associations while problematizing others. Consider Guatemala in 1954, Operation PBSuccess. A democratically elected government overthrown with CIA orchestration, partly to protect United Fruit Company interests. Psychological warfare operations including fabricated radio broadcasts were deployed to create the perception of inevitability. That episode shaped decades of violence.

Or Iran in 1953, Operation Ajax, where covert action restored monarchical rule after nationalization of oil resources. The long arc of consequences includes the 1979 revolution and subsequent geopolitical tensions. Yet the moral vocabulary surrounding those associations remains peripheral.

Interviewer: You seem to be suggesting that scrutiny itself is structured.

Chomsky: Precisely. Scrutiny is not randomly distributed. Corporate media systems operate under institutional constraints. Advertising dependence, sourcing relationships with government and corporate actors, ownership concentration. Herman and I described this as a set of filters shaping what becomes salient.

Take Operation Mockingbird, the documented cultivation of relationships between intelligence agencies and journalists during the Cold War. Or the pattern of coverage during the Chilean coup in 1973, where economic instability narratives dominated while covert destabilization received far less attention.

The result is a public sphere where certain forms of elite interaction appear aberrant while others appear routine.

Interviewer: Still, critics would say that this does not address whether intellectuals should avoid association with figures like Epstein.

Chomsky: Ethical responsibility exists, of course. But its evaluation requires institutional symmetry. Universities themselves have accepted funding streams from actors involved in environmental destruction, weapons manufacturing, authoritarian governance. Intellectual communities operate within these ecosystems.

The interesting question is why episodic scandal becomes the principal mode through which elite networks are perceived.

Consider the Indonesian massacres of 1965. Intelligence cooperation included the provision of information used to target individuals. Hundreds of thousands were killed. That episode was treated in mainstream discourse largely as a geopolitical footnote for decades.

Or East Timor following Indonesia’s invasion in 1975. Substantial arms transfers and diplomatic support continued while mass civilian casualties occurred. Coverage levels remained strikingly low compared to other conflicts.

Interviewer: Let me press again. Emails suggest ongoing contact. Do you regret that?

Chomsky: Regret presupposes retrospective informational completeness. But more importantly, your question assumes that moral accountability operates primarily through individual reflection rather than institutional transparency.

Look at the Church Committee revelations. Assassination plots, domestic surveillance programs, MKUltra experiments involving unwitting subjects. Extraordinary disclosures. Yet institutional continuity followed with limited structural transformation. Public attention dissipated.

So we repeatedly observe cycles of revelation without systemic reckoning.

Interviewer: Some would say you are broadening the frame to avoid giving a simple answer.

Chomsky: It may appear that way, but conversation is not a courtroom. Questions contain implicit premises. When premises isolate phenomena from their structural context, expanding the analytic field is not evasion but clarification.

Take the Laos Secret War. Extensive bombing campaigns conducted with minimal public awareness for years. Or Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, involving targeted neutralization programs whose ethical implications remain debated. These were not hidden because information was nonexistent but because attention allocation mechanisms deprioritized them.

Understanding those mechanisms is essential to understanding why some associations become moral spectacles.

Interviewer: So you believe you can legitimately redirect the conversation.

Chomsky: Dialogue permits reframing when explanatory adequacy requires it. If the topic is elite networks and moral responsibility, then examining intelligence operations, corporate influence, and media filtering is directly relevant. Otherwise, the analysis remains anecdotal.

For example, the relationship between corporate media and national security narratives during the lead-up to the Iraq War demonstrated heavy reliance on official sources with limited adversarial scrutiny. That is not conspiracy. It is institutional sociology.

Or consider lesser known episodes such as the support for RENAMO in Mozambique through allied intelligence channels, or the role of covert funding streams in cultural organizations during the Cold War to shape intellectual climates. These illustrate the permeability of elite spheres.

Interviewer: Let me try one more time. Did you see anything troubling at the time?

Chomsky: Individuals rarely possess comprehensive situational awareness within complex networks. What is troubling, historically, is the recurrent discovery of opaque elite interactions across domains. Financial, political, intelligence, academic. Each revelation is treated as discrete rather than symptomatic.

That pattern itself deserves examination.

Interviewer: So your answer is that the broader system is the real story.

Chomsky: The broader system is what renders individual episodes intelligible. Without it, we are left with biographical fragments interpreted through fluctuating moral attention cycles.

The persistent question is not why particular intersections occur. It is why the institutional architectures that generate them remain comparatively insulated from sustained scrutiny.

Understanding that dynamic is, in my view, the more substantive inquiry.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5836167&forum_id=2\u0026show=posted#49679449)