Noam Chomsky gives his perspective on the US government shutdown, the Syrian civil war, capitalist reform in South America and more in a Truthout interview.

Noam Chomsky is one of the world's greatest living intellectuals. His work and achievements are well known - he is a foundational American linguist, professor emeritus at MIT for more than 60 years, undeviating political activist and commentator, and an ally of progressive movements around the world.

In this interview, Truthout spoke with the 84-year-old by telephone to discuss the current US government shutdown, tumultuous state of American politics, the Syrian Civil War and a wave of capitalist reform in South America.

Chomsky's latest works are Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe, with writer and multimedia artist Laray Polk, and On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, with novelist and filmmaker André Vltchek.

The DEA is a failed institution.

The GOP House's temper-tantrum-induced shutdown of the U.S. government can be called many things - an extortion, a frustration, an outrage... name your unflattering descriptor. But if it does anything of use for the American people, it serves up an inarguable indication of the government's true priorities. It shows us, verbatim, which programs are deemed "essential" and which aren't.

For instance, the national parks and almost a million federal employees have been cutoff, while the military continues to operate full-force.

And while the injustices of the shutdown are many, among the most hypocritical government priorities is the continued funding of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) - an organization focused on ending the war on drugs - sent an email to supporters on Friday asking why the DEA was considered essential during the government shutdown.

"You and I both know the DEA isn't effective," he wrote. "So why is it considered essential?"

A very good question considering the fact that, even if fighting the war on drugs was reasonable priority to maintain during a shutdown (it isn't) the DEA has long since lost the war. Since its inception in 1973, it has failed to reduce the number of drug-related crimes in the U.S., and continues to place more than 1.2 million people behind bars each year for the mere possession of illegal substances.

Tarek El-Sawah is in terrible shape after 11 years as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, a fact even the U.S. military does not dispute.

During his time in captivity, the weight of the 55-year-old Egyptian has nearly doubled, reaching more than 420 pounds at one point, and his health has deteriorated as a result, both his lawyers and government officials concede.

Lawyers for El-Sawah, and the doctors they have brought down to the U.S. base in Cuba to examine him, paint a dire picture - a morbidly obese man with diabetes and a range of other serious ailments. He is short of breath, barely able to walk 10 feet, unable to stay awake in meetings and faces the possibility of not making it out of prison alive.

"We are very afraid that he is at a high risk of death, that he could die at any moment," said Marine Lt. Col. Sean Gleason, a military lawyer appointed to represent him.

Details about the condition of El-Sawah, who has admitted being an al-Qaida explosives trainer but is no longer facing charges, are emerging in a series of recently filed court motions that provide a rare glimpse into the health of an unusual prisoner, and a preview of arguments that may become more common as the Guantanamo Bay prison ages into a second decade with no prospects for closure in sight.

He's not the only one of the 164 prisoners at Guantanamo who is seriously ill. Last week, a judge ordered the release of a schizophrenic Sudanese man who spent much of the past decade medicated in the prison psych ward. His lawyers argued he was so sick, with ailments that also included diabetes, that he couldn't possibly pose a threat and therefore the U.S. no longer had the authority to hold him. The judge's ruling came after the government withdrew its opposition to his release.

As far as Germany is concerned, the drama of the euro crisis is over. The subject was barely discussed in the country's recent election campaign. Chancellor Angela Merkel did what was necessary to ensure the euro's survival, and she did so at the least possible cost to Germany - a feat that earned her the support of pro-European Germans as well as those who trust her to protect German interests. Not surprisingly, she won re-election resoundingly.

But it was a Pyrrhic victory. The eurozone status quo is neither tolerable nor stable. Mainstream economists would call it an inferior equilibrium; I call it a nightmare - one that is inflicting tremendous pain and suffering that could be easily avoided if the misconceptions and taboos that sustain it were dispelled. The problem is that the debtor countries feel all the pain, while the creditors impose the misconceptions and taboos.

One example is Eurobonds, which Merkel has declared taboo. Yet they are the obvious solution to the root cause of the euro crisis, which is that joining the euro exposed member countries' government bonds to the risk of default.

Normally, developed countries never default, because they can always print money. But, by ceding that authority to an independent central bank, the eurozone's members put themselves in the position of a developing country that has borrowed in foreign currency. Neither the authorities nor the markets recognized this prior to the crisis, attesting to the fallibility of both.

An array of issues surrounding the recently launched websites for President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act have rendered them largely unavailable during the last week, and a lack of funding might not be to blame.

With the official launch of so-called Obamacare last Tuesday, millions of Americans flocked instantly to brand new Web portals where people could sign up for inexpensive health insurance plans. Bugs, glitches, an overload of traffic and other snafus resulted in many of those sites voluntarily shutting down while programmers picked through code and attempted to revamp the websites in recent days, but a new investigation by Digital Trends' Andrew Couts suggests that a stupendous amount of money was involved in getting some of those sites off the ground - only for them to crash and burn almost instantly.

Couts has since revised his original estimate since going live with his report on Tuesday this week, but his latest round of research led him to assume that American taxpayers spent over $500 million on the Obamacare websites that have been plagued by problems since their launch one week earlier.

Azerbaijan's big presidential election, held on Wednesday, was anticipated to be neither free nor fair. President Ilham Aliyev, who took over from his father 10 years ago, has stepped up intimidation of activists and journalists. Rights groups are complaining about free speech restrictions and one-sided state media coverage. The BBC's headline for its story on the election reads "The Pre-Determined President." So expectations were pretty low.

Even still, one expects a certain ritual in these sorts of authoritarian elections, a fealty to at least the appearance of democracy, if not democracy itself. So it was a bit awkward when Azerbaijan's election authorities released vote results - a full day before voting had even started.

As the government shutdown and the threat of a federal debt default begin to merge into a singular Washington crisis, the only way out for House Speaker John A. Boehner may be something he disparaged earlier this week as "unconditional surrender."

More than a week into the shutdown and just days before the government is set to exhaust its borrowing authority, Boehner (R-Ohio) and the White House remain at a standoff with no solution in sight.

President Obama has consistently said he will not negotiate until the government reopens and the debt limit is raised.

Most of the political pressure has been on Boehner and his fellow House Republicans to fix the problem, and none of their options are attractive.

"Obama will feel pain," Michael Needham predicted.

Needham looked as though he were angry enough to administer the pain himself. The 31-year-old chief executive of the conservative group Heritage Action gripped his coffee cup tightly with both hands as he spoke to reporters over breakfast Wednesday. When he reached for his water glass, there was a slight tremor in his hand.

But the ones feeling the pain from Needham right now are Republicans. His group, funded by the Koch brothers and anonymous donors, is the one that joined Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to rally opposition to Obamacare this summer. Together, Cruz and Heritage Action deserve much of the credit for forcing the government shutdown - and Heritage is threatening to use its considerable war chest against Republicans who waver in the effort to abolish the nation's health-care law.

When 20-year-old New York photographer Shay Horse dropped by his first Occupy Wall Street march on May 23rd, 2012, a friendly fellow protester approached him and started making small talk. "He just asked me what my name was, what my involvement was, pretty general stuff," Horse says. From then on, Horse ran into the protestor, whom he knew only knew as "Al," at practically every Occupy Wall Street event. He even invited him to his birthday party. But it turns out "Al" was actually an undercover cop, 32 year-old NYPD detective Wojciech Braszczok.

Braszczok's cover was blown in the aftermath of the bizarre SUV vs. motorcycle viral video. He was arrested today after he was seen on a new video punching the SUV among the gang of motoryclists in Manhattan, according to NBC New York. He was off duty at the time, but was charged with riot and criminal mischief. NBC reported that in five years of working undercover he'd infiltrated the Occupy Wall Street movement. This set the OWS community hunting for recollections of the dark-haired guy with the mohawk: "Al," or "Albert."

Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan spent several hours in captivity after a 'former rebel' militia kidnapped him from a Tripoli hotel in retaliation for his apparent cooperation with a US anti-terror raid.

After Zeidan was freed by his captors unharmed, he urged another militia group who helped in his release to join the regular armed forces.

"Libyans need wisdom ... not escalation ... to deal with this situation," Zeidan said during a televised cabinet meeting.

The AP believes that government forces may have intervened, as it appeared that Zeidan's abductors were not willing to let him go.

A militia commander with ties to the Interior Ministry told a private news channel that another Tripoli-based militia intervened by storming the house where Zeidan was kept, securing his release.

The commander of the intervening militia - calling itself the 'Reinforcement Force' - spoke to Al-Hurrah television, recounting a gun fight in which his men attacked the building and freed Zeidan without any harm coming to him.

Security sources first told local media on Thursday morning that armed units grabbed Zeidan from the Corinthia Hotel in the Libyan capital and took him to an unknown location, Reuters says. The reports were later confirmed by a government statement, but government officials could not be reached for comment at the time.