Damn this is a dumb cheap shot. I don't like Chomsky particularly, but he's smart, and surely he doesn't believe what he said here. "The CIA was too stupid to spy on me." Good lord, man. Much more likely is that his files were destroyed in some sort of clean-house effort in the '80s."These agencies are good at killing people, targeted assassinations and overthrowing governments," he told me. "But if anyone were to honestly look at intelligence records, they'd find it all to be a very dubious affair as far as competence is concerned." That is to say, the agency may have had no ethical qualms about spying on Chomsky, but whether it did, and successfully organized that information into its databases, is another story. "We shouldn't be overwhelmed at their pretense of superhuman knowledge," he added. "That's mainly for spy novels."