George W. Bush wasn’t the only person whose image benefitted from the September 11 atrocities. Famed linguist, philosopher, and left-wing political gadfly Noam Chomsky has had a surprise bestseller in his slim book 9-11, an analysis of the terrorist attack that sought its root causes in wrongheaded US policy.

Those looking for a sampler of Chomsky’s thoughts and style will be rewarded by this bare-bones documentary from John Junkerman, a compilation of snippets from Chomsky’s lectures in such liberal bastions as Berkeley intercut with more intimate interviews in his office at MIT. In sound bites, albeit paragraph-long ones, he iterates many of his key points, including his insistence that the terrorist acts inflicted by world powers on countries like Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan lead to the terrorist response of desperate bands like al-Qaeda, and his observation that September 11 will serve as an excuse for the suppression of freedom and the extension of government power under the guise of a "war against terror."

Now 73, Chomsky remains a persuasive speaker, polymathic, blunt, and articulate. Not that the audiences here need much convincing: he’s preaching to the converted, and a fair criticism of the film would be that it doesn’t offer any other point of view. Then again, you can get that by tuning in to any news station, radio or TV, at any time of the day. But Chomsky does seem to have mellowed since his more rigorous 1992 film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media: he suggests in Power and Terror that the media aren’t under the thumb of the administration and that dissent has a chance. (74 minutes)