Also, Chomsky isn't a total hack, but he isn't completely trustworthy either. He definitely has an agenda that he sometimes pushes to the point of ignoring the truth. I distinctly recall him trying to argue that the Khmer Rouge were perfectly reasonable people who were being viciously slandered by media and that the killing fields weren't a thing.
That was back in 1977. But it's easy to point out one time someone got something wrong and ignore the fact that baseless propaganda against non-US aligned countries was a real thing, and pretty frequent.
The "yellow rain" of Vietnam. This stuff found on leaves in the jungle was claimed by the US State Department to be communist chemical weapons used against their own populations. I read about this in scientific american. several hundred samples were collected by various countries, and sent around the world, with many labs in different countries testing them and everyone that concluded it was harmless
bee feces. Even the samples directly collected and tested by the US Army were bee poop. The one sole exception was labs which received samples handled by the US State Department.
Those samples were a veritable cocktail of the most toxic synthetic substances known to man. Yeah, so hundreds of samples are taken, tested and verified to be a harmless natural substance across the world. What are the chances that the US State Department
just happens to be the only organization which ends up with all the toxic ones? It's not a credible coincidence. It's much more likely that they doctored the samples as a propaganda attempt.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yellow-rain/^ I'll give you an actual citation for this:
Scientific American, 1985, September 1st issue. This covers the scientific evidence and the fact that only US State Department-handled samples contained poisons. So, it's basically common knowledge that the state department was fabricating evidence against communists even if you were well-read of mainstream literature like Scientific American.
Given that examples like the above were pretty common during the cold war, I give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt, since in 1977 no-one had really verified the details. If you believed
every anti-communist story that came out in the 1970s - 1980s you'd also believe in the Yellow Rain and many other fake stories. Fake stuff was common, so it's not stupid to be at least a bit skeptical when the next one comes out.