COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, AND ECOLOGY
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/06/omni-daniel-ellsberg-week-2024.html
DANIEL ELLSBERG WEEK 2024 6-10/16-24
CONTENTS
Introduction and Interview
Roots Action. Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine.
Photo of Ellsberg
“Remember Ellsberg; Ditch Nukes.” Al Mytty. “Things to Learn.”
VIDEO: “A Celebration of Daniel Ellsberg” by his Family.
John Kiriakou. “ Dan Ellsberg: An American History Giant.”
Joe Lauria. “Memories of Dan Ellsberg.”
The Shalom Report. “Daniel Ellsberg, Presente.”
Michael Hirsh.
“Daniel Ellsberg Hates the Word ‘Legacy.’”
Matt Taibbi. “Daniel Ellsberg Talks About Whistleblowing, the Pervasiveness Of Official Lies, and the Dangers of the Espionage Act.”
Rep.Tulsi Gabbard on Ellsberg.
Ellsberg’s Last Book, The Doomsday Machine.
REVIEWS of The Doomsday Machine.
Ellsberg’s Son, Robert.
Ellsberg’s Cancer and Farewell Letter.
TEXTS
INTRODUCTION AND INTERVIEW OF ELLSBERG
“Daniel Ellsberg: All the crimes Richard Nixon committed against me are now legal.”
Posted by: Jay Kernis – Senior Producer
ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today’s OFF-SET questions is Daniel Ellsberg, author, defense analyst and prominent whistleblower.
He is the subject of a documentary about his life, “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” nominated for a 2010 Academy Award, which took its title from the words former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger used to describe Ellsberg in 1971.
In the 1960s, Ellsberg was a high-level Pentagon official, a former Marine commander who believed the American government was always on the right side. But while working for the administration of Lyndon Johnson, Ellsberg had access to a top-secret document that revealed senior American leaders, including several presidents, knew that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire.
Officially titled “United States-Viet Nam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense,”–the Pentagon Papers, as they became known–also showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In, 1971, Ellsberg leaked all 7,000 pages to The Washington Post, and 18 other newspapers, including The New York Times, which published them.
Not long after, he surrendered to authorities and confessed to being the leaker. Ellsberg was charged as a spy. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed on grounds of governmental misconduct against him. In April 1973, the court learned that Nixon had ordered his so-called “Plumbers Unit” to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to steal documents they hoped might make the whistle-blower appear crazy. In May, more evidence of government illegal wiretapping was revealed. The charges against Ellsberg were dropped. This led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. (*More bio below)
The federal government has now declassified the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon Presidential Library & Museum will release the documents on June 13, forty years to the day that leaked portions of the report were published on the front page of The New York Times.
Also, the PBS series POV is streaming “The Most Dangerous Man inAmerica: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” on June 13 and 14.
In this interview, Ellsberg says, “Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, would feel vindicated that all the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal. ” (Thanks to the Patriot Act and other laws passed in recent years.) And he says all presidents since Nixon have violated the constitution, most recently President Obama, with the bombing of Libya.
Until now, the public has been able to read only the small portions of the report that you leaked. What do you think the impact of releasing all 7,000 pages might be?
The “declassification” of the Pentagon Papers–exactly forty years late–is basically a non-event. The notion that “only small portions” of the report were released forty years ago is pure hype by the Nixon Library. Nearly all of the study–except for the negotiations volumes, which were mostly declassified over twenty years ago– became available in 1971, between the redacted (censored) Government Printing Office edition and the Senator Gravel edition put out by Beacon Press.
(I’ve heard that most if not all of this has long been online. Here’s a link I just looked up; there probably are others: CLICK HERE.)
It would be helpful if the publishers indicated, by brackets or different type, what was withheld earlier. But that would be very embarrassing to the Library and the government; I’ll be surprised if they do it. Most of the omissions in the GPO edition “for security”–a ridiculous claim, since their substance was nearly all available to the world in the simultaneous Gravel/Beacon Press edition–will appear arbitrary and unjustified.
I’d really like to see someone–a journalist or an anti-secrecy NGO– compare this version in detail with the redacted white space in the 1971 GPO edition, for a measure of what the government has regarded as necessarily classified for the last forty years. And then ask: just why was most of what was released by the GPO, covering 1945 to1968, kept secret as late as 1971? Hint: it wasn’t for “national security.”
What that comparison would newly reveal is the blatant violation of the spirit and letter of the FOIA declassification process by successive administrations (including the present one), in rejecting frequent requests by historians and journalists for complete declassification of the Papers over the years.
But if the hype around this belated release got a new generation to read the Pentagon Papers or at least the summaries to the various volumes (my highest hope, pretty unlikely), they’d get from them as good an understanding as they could find anywhere today of our war in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon Papers didn’t explicitly present that last alternative, but their release contributed to that result, eventually. Is it too much to hope that their re-release could do the same?
Yes, it is. But fortunately there are a few Congresspersons, like Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee, Walter Jones and Ron Paul who got that message the first time, even if the Republican and Democratic leadership hasn’t, yet. (CLICK HERE to see a salon.com essay pointing to the only way out of Afghanistan, as it was the only way out of Vietnam).
On June 23, 1971, in an interview with CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, you said, “I think the lesson is that the people of this country can’t afford to let the President run the country by himself, even foreign affairs, without the help of Congress, without the help of the public. I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions.” How concerned are you that elected officials haven’t learned those lessons?
I still stand by my cited conclusions, both for 1971 and for every single year since, including this one. But I never expected elected officials in the Executive branch (of which there are exactly two in each administration) or their myriad subordinates to “learn those lessons” or to accept them as warnings.
Leaders in the Executive branch–in every country– know what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it, and they always want to stay in office and keep on running things with as little interference from Congress, the public and the courts as possible: which means, with as much secrecy as they can manage. So I’m not exactly concerned that they’re still at it (which is why I’m still at what I do), since that is so predictable, in every government, tyrannical or “democratic.”
Our Founders sought to prevent this. Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, for the first time in constitutional history, put the decision to go to war (beyond repelling sudden attacks) exclusively in the hands of Congress, not the president. But every president since Harry Truman in Korea–as the Pentagon Papers demonstrated up through LBJ, but beyond them to George W. Bush and Barack Obama–has violated the spirit and even the letter of that section of the Constitution (along with some others) they each swore to preserve, protect and defend.
However, as has been pointed out repeatedly by Glenn Greenwald, ( CLICK HERE) and Bruce Ackerman , David Swanson and others, no president has so blatantly violated the constitutional division of war powers as President Obama in his ongoing attack on Libya, without a nod even to the statutory War Powers Act, that post-Pentagon Papers effort by Congress to recapture something of the role assigned exclusively to it by the Constitution.
This open disregard of a ruling statute (regardless of his supposed feelings about its constitutionality, which Obama has not even bothered to express) is clearly an impeachable offense, though it will certainly not lead to impeachment–given the current complicity of the leaders of both parties–any more than President George W. Bush’s misleading Congress into his crime against the peace, aggression, in Iraq, or President Johnson’s lies to obtain the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
Yet the most important point, as I see it, is not the secrecy and the lying, or even the blatant disregard of the Constitution, the Presidential oath and the rule of law.
As the Pentagon Papers documented for the much of the Vietnam era (we still lack, and we still need, the corresponding Papers for the Nixon policy-making, that added over twenty thousand names unnecessarily to the Vietnam Memorial and over a million deaths in Vietnam) and the last decade confirms: the point is that the Founders had it right the first time.
As Abraham Lincoln explained their intention (in defending to his former law partner William Herndon his opposition to President Polk’s deliberately provoked Mexican War): “The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.” ( CLICK HERE to read the whole letter, which I keep pinned to the wall of my office).
As Lincoln put it, the alternative approach (which we have actually followed in the last sixty years) “places our President where kings have always stood.” And the upshot of that undue, unquestioning trust in the president and his Executive branch is: smart people get us into stupid (and wrongful) wars, and their equally smart successors won’t get us out of them.
Either we the people will press elected officials in Congress–on pain of losing their jobs–to take up their Constitutional responsibilities once again and to end by defunding our illegal, unjustifiable (and now, financially insupportable) military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and air attacks on Pakistan, Libya and Yemen: or those bloody stalemates will continue indefinitely. . . .[Bradley Manning, Nixon, et al.] Click on title for full interview.
*MORE BIO: After graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in Economics, he studied for a year at King’s College, Cambridge University, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Between 1954 and 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander.
From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision. His research leading up to this dissertation—in particular his work on what has become known as the “Ellsberg Paradox,” first published in an article entitled “Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms”—is widely considered a landmark in decision theory and behavioral economics.
In 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. In 1961 he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Ellsberg joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) John McNaughton, working on the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification in the field.
On his return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, Ellsberg worked on the top secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.
Ellsberg is the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006 he was awarded the 2006 Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden, “. . for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”
Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing.
He is a Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
The RootsAction Team |
| Read more at Progressive Hub. |
“Remember Ellsberg; Ditch Nukes.”
Things to Learn. Al Mytty. The News Gazette, June 10, 2024.
Ditch nukes in honor of Ellsberg
June 16 will mark the one-year anniversary of the death of Daniel Ellsberg, the renowned whistleblower whose Pentagon Papers revelations about the Vietnam War sparked a national crisis of conscience. Ellsberg, who as a young man helped create some of the nuclear-war plans the U.S. still uses today, left the world a warning about the dangers of nuclear weapons.
With the announcement that the program to modernize U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles and make them more usable is nearly 40 percent over budget, it’s past time to heed Ellsberg’s warning:
“For over half a century, the existence on both sides of vulnerable land-based ICBMs has been the hair-trigger to the Doomsday Machine. They pose a use-it-or-lose-it mentality which encourages each side to launch its missiles on ambiguous warning, lest they be destroyed — in order to attack the ICBMs of the other side.”
To make the world safer, these weapons should be dismantled. Every person lives with the constant threat of suffering and death as long as these weapons exist. In fact, nuclear weapons are pitched to cities and states as a job-creating boon to local communities, while research shows that investing in essential areas such as health care, education and green energy would create many more, better jobs.
We can’t afford to pour tens of billions of dollars more into weapons that threaten all of humankind. To honor Daniel Ellsberg and save the world, let’s ditch the ICBMs.
Remember Ellsberg; Ditch Nukes
VIDEO: A Celebration of Daniel Ellsberg
https://rootsaction.org/news-a-views/3224–video-a-celebration-of-daniel-ellsberg
by Daniel Ellsberg’s Family on October 25, 2023
The Ellsberg family held this online memorial and celebration of the life of Daniel Ellsberg, livestreamed on 10/22/23.
The program starts at 15:40.
“North Star,” a musical tribute to Daniel, by Adey Bell & Venus Exalted, www.oracle88.com
Chopin and Debussy music via www.musopen.org
Opening photo by Christopher Michel, @ChrisMichel
You can visit the Danel Ellsberg webpage at Ellsberg.net
Dan Ellsberg: An American History Giant
John Kiriakou. CovertAction Magazine (7-1-23).
Like so many Americans, I was heartbroken to learn of the death of my friend, mentor, and personal hero Daniel Ellsberg. Dan was a giant of modern American history. He was the godfather of national security whistleblowers. And he was a patriot who wanted nothing more than to ensure transparency, truth, and the rule of law within government…
READ MORE →
Memories of Dan Ellsberg. Consortium News (6-20-23).
CN Editor Joe Lauria recalls several significant interactions with one of America’s most courageous men. Read here…
The Shalom Report. “Daniel Ellsberg, Presente.”
Daniel Ellsberg died the day before yesterday at the age of 92. He made public the “Pentagon Papers,” detailing the true negative assessments of US military and political leaders about the US War against Vietnam, even while they insisted on continuing the war.
For the sake of truth, justice, and life, Ellsberg took the chance of being sentenced to years in prison. His actions may have helped save the lives of up to a million Vietnamese and tens of thousands of US soldiers.
His courage so infuriated President Nixon and his close advisers that they violated laws so basic that Nixon was forced to resign just short of impeachment, and some of his aides ended in prison themselves.
I am saddened by his death for his sake, for his family’s sake, and for the nation’s. I met him only once, on May 4, 1972, when I was one of the organizers of a demonstration against the war on one side of the Capitol and he was one of the speakers.
There was what seemed at the time a weird scuffle when some men attacked him. We later discovered they were among “the plumbers,” Nixon’s under-cover posse of bully-boys whose secret assignment was to harass and violate Ellsberg. In that moment, Ellsberg was as brave personally and bodily as he was politically.
I hunger for the emergence of many who can respond to their own lives as his did: whistle-blowers in the government and in the carbon-corporations, depositors in banks that invest in the carbon-corporations that are burning Earth, police officers disgusted by the racist violence of other officers, legislators revolted by their colleagues’ votes to deny women or young trans people life-saving medical procedures.
I append excerpts from an article embodying the last interview of Ellsberg before his death,
With blessings of shalom,
Arthur
MICHAEL HIRSH. “Daniel Ellsberg Hates the Word ‘Legacy.’” POLITICO MAGAZINE. 06/04/2023. [On leakers and whistleblowers.]
Michael Hirsh is the former foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, and the former national editor for Politico Magazine.
Daniel Ellsberg hates the word “legacy.”
“I’m very put off by the word. It always throws me for a loop,” Ellsberg tells me when I ask him recently what he believes his legacy will be as one of America’s most iconic whistleblowers. “I didn’t plan on a legacy. I don’t know what a legacy is.” Ellsberg, who is dying of pancreatic cancer at age 92, says one reason he doesn’t think he’s really leaving any legacy is that the act he is famous for — leaking the Pentagon Papers more than 50 years ago — was highly unusual, if not unique. Despite the government-shaking magnitude of his revelation, he was one of the few whistleblowers who got away with exposing deception and wrongdoing in high places without turning the rest of his life into one long misery.
At the time, Ellsberg says, he expected to spend the rest of his life in prison for handing over copies of the 7,000-page top-secret history of the lies and self-deceit that drew America into the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from [President] Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle,” he says in a Zoom interview from his home near Berkeley, Calif. on May 8. “There was no way to predict that.”
Nor did leaking the Pentagon Papers, by itself, do anything to shorten the war, which was his intention, Ellsberg admits. What did happen is that Nixon erupted in outrage over the leak and created the “Plumbers” unit to discredit Ellsberg. The Plumbers’ first break-in was to the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, but that led later to the Watergate burglary, Nixon’s resignation and the dismissal of all charges against Ellsberg on grounds of “improper government conduct.” Thus, indirectly, Watergate may well have prevented further escalation and shortened the war because it “undermined Nixon’s authority,” as Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years. Congress cut off aid to South Vietnam in 1975, and the war ended in April of that year with total victory by North Vietnam.
So Ellsberg has some parting advice to future whistleblowers: “Don’t do it under any delusion that you’ll have a high chance of ending up like Daniel Ellsberg.” This is especially true, he says, now the government is zealously prosecuting under the Espionage Act, which was first used in Ellsberg’s case. (Barack Obama later deployed it eight times, more than any other president, despite pledging to run “the most transparent administration in history.”)
Even if they escape prosecution, whistleblowers in high places face long odds against success in changing government policy — and yet at the same time Ellsberg says they are more necessary than ever. “I would caution people against thinking that any revelation by itself, no matter how spectacular — how amazing, how shocking, and extraordinary it is — would necessarily evoke a reaction, from the media or Congress, or that people will react to it,” Ellsberg tells me. “But it can work. My case shows that probably more than any other case.”
Ellsberg’s farewell announcement of his terminal cancer.
Living on a Deadline in the Nuclear Age. Some Personal News.” My wish for you, my friends, is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.
DANIEL ELLSBERG. Common Dreams. Mar 02, 2023.
Dear friends and supporters,
I have difficult news to impart. On February 17, without much warning, I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT scan and an MRI. (As is usual with pancreatic cancer–which has no early symptoms–it was found while looking for something else, relatively minor). I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone’s case is individual; it might be more, or less.
I have chosen not to do chemotherapy (which offers no promise) and I have assurance of great hospice care when needed. Please know: right now, I am not in any physical pain, and in fact, after my hip replacement surgery in late 2021, I feel better physically than I have in years! Moreover, my cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my quality of life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my former favorite foods! And my energy level is high. Since my diagnosis, I’ve done several interviews and webinars on Ukraine, nuclear weapons, and first amendment issues, and I have two more scheduled this week.
As I just told my son Robert: he’s long known (as my editor) that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!
I feel lucky and grateful that I’ve had a wonderful life far beyond the proverbial three-score years and ten. (I’ll be ninety-two on April 7th.) I feel the very same way about having a few months more to enjoy life with my wife and family, and in which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else). When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action—in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses—did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition, thanks to Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.
What’s more, I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and non-violent resistance.
I wish I could report greater success for our efforts. As I write, “modernization” of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine states that possess them (the US most of all). Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the Donbas–like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the US government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity of every member state then in NATO ) West Berlin. The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen.
China and India are alone in declaring no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war–let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out–are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere.
It is long past time–but not too late!–for the world’s publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will continue, as long as I’m able, to help these efforts. There’s tons more to say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course, and you’ll be hearing from me as long as I’m here.
As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts. For the last forty years we have known that nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean nuclear winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth.
So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the Pentagon’s nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats. (In a like case of disastrous willful denial by many officials, corporations and other Americans, scientists have known for over three decades that the catastrophic climate change now underway–mainly but not only from burning fossil fuels–is fully comparable to US-Russian nuclear war as another existential risk.) I’m happy to know that millions of people–including all those friends and comrades to whom I address this message!–have the wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.
I’m enormously grateful to have had the privilege of knowing and working with such people, past and present. That’s among the most treasured aspects of my very privileged and very lucky life. I want to thank you all for the love and support you have given me in so many ways. Your dedication, courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts. My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.
Love, Dan
Daniel Ellsberg is an American economist, political activist, and former United States military analyst. He was put on trial in 1971 for leaking the Pentagon Papers, but the case was dismissed in 1973 because of government misconduct. He is the author of “Papers on the War,” “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” and “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”
WhistleblowersNuclear WeaponsPentagon PapersVietnam WarDaniel Ellsberg
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
· On Nuclear Annihilation And Other Topics: A Talk With Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg ›The Truth-Teller: From The Pentagon Papers To The Doomsday Machine ›
Daniel Ellsberg: The 90-Year-Old Whistleblower Tempting … ›
· The Deceit And Conflict Behind The Leak Of The Pentagon Papers … ›
· ‘I’ve Never Regretted Doing It’: Daniel Ellsberg On 50 Years Since … ›
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers
Matt Taibbi. “Daniel Ellsberg Talks About Whistleblowing, the Pervasiveness Of Official Lies, and the Dangers of the Espionage Act.” Substack.com Mar 17, 2021.
In an interview with “Useful Idiots,” Daniel Ellsberg talks about official deceptions, and how he was upheld as the “good” whistleblower to disparage the likes of Ed Snowden and Julian Assange
Daniel Ellsberg: “We could be East Germany in weeks, in a month. Huge concentration camps and so forth…”
“On Tuesday morning, August 4th, 1964,” writes Daniel Ellsberg in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, “a courier came in my out office with an urgent cable for my boss. He had been running.”
A former Marine with a PhD from Harvard in Decision Theory, Ellsberg had joined the Pentagon as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, who himself was perhaps the closest advisor to Secretary Robert McNamara. Ellsberg, in other words, was the right hand of the right hand, of the man who would become known as the chief architect of the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg’s first day on August 4th, 1964 proved to be a historic one. His boss McNaughton was down the hall with McNamara, so the panting courier handed Ellsberg the note and left. He opened it and found it was from Captain John J. Herrick, the commodore of a two-destroyer flotilla in the Gulf of Tonkin, off North Vietnam in the South China sea. Officially, the United States was not yet engaged in full-fledged military operations in Indochina.
Herrick said he was under attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats, and had opened fire in return. He was 60 miles from the coast, in international waters. The sonar operators on the Destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy, Maddox said, each heard torpedoes in the water. Ten minutes later, the courier returned with a new note. “Am under continuous torpedo attack,” he wrote, about an encounter that was taking place in total darkness.
For some time after, cables came in quick succession, as Ellsberg guessed Herrick was dictating from the bridge in between trying to maneuver his ships. “Torpedoes missed. Another fired at us,” read one. “Four torpedoes in water,” read a second. “Five torpedoes in water… Have successfully avoided at least six torpedoes…” According to Herrick, at least one attacking boat had been sunk. The action went on for two long hours, before suddenly the stream of messages cut short.
“Then, suddenly, an hour later,” Ellberg wrote, “a message arrived that took back, not quite all of it, but enough to put the rest of it in question.” The courier came in running again, handing him a cable with the highest clearance and urgency [emphasis mine]:
Review of action makes any reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken…
It was a little after 2 p.m., Washington time. Ellsberg was dumbfounded by the latest communications. “In my mind, these messages erased the impact of the two-hour-long live drama that we had been following. This new information was a cold bath.”
Herrick later sent another cable: “Details of action present a confusing picture, although certain original ambush bona fide.” Ellsberg was now unsure of how Herrick was so sure, given that he hadn’t seen anything and was acknowledging, among other things, that one sonar man was hearing his own ship’s propeller. “It seemed almost certain there had been no attack,” Ellsberg wrote, certain the proper course was to wait to see what actually happened before acting.
Things didn’t go that way. Senior military officials scrambled to put together an immediate retaliatory airstrike. President Lyndon Johnson was so anxious not only to strike back, but to brief the public about doing it, that he asked the Pentagon’s permission to go on TV with details before the planes even reached Vietnam.
LBJ was on the air by 11:37 p.m. that night, telling the American people that “hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes” constituted “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” McNamara gave subsequent pressers in which he described “unprovoked” attacks of U.S. vessels on “routine patrols” in “international waters.” They described the evidence for Vietnamese aggression as “unequivocal.”
By the end of Ellsberg’s first day, he knew every single one of these claims was a lie. The two destroyers were on a special mission, penetrating deep into North Vietnamese waters and engaging in sabotage raids. In top-secret testimony to congress in the two days after the August 4th incident, McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk told congressional leaders the U.S. had nothing to do with the raids, which were entirely South Vietnamese operations.
Ellsberg soon learned this was a lie, too, that the personnel on the ships had been chosen by the CIA and that the operations were run jointly by the agency and the Navy. “Each of these assertions,” Ellsberg would later write, “was false.” You can still go back and look to see how these lies were reported with complete credulity and never corrected:
Ellsberg became famous years later for shepherding to the public a wealth of secret documents about the ugly history of failure, brutality, and ignorance in the Vietnam War, collectively known as the Pentagon Papers. He is America’s most famous whistleblower, a figure who single-handedly triggered a major constitutional crisis when the government of Richard Nixon tried to block publication of his material.
However, Ellsberg has remained an important figure in American culture and politics precisely because so little has changed since the events of the fifties, sixties, and seventies he described in such vivid detail.
In the Useful Idiots interview below, Ellsberg points out the similarities between Vietnam and our current policies in various countries around the world. He says our leaders are worried about “regime change in Washington,” which they believe would occur if they left other countries’ oil in the ground, or “stopped killing Afghans.”
More than anything, however, Ellsberg is an expert on the role of secrecy in American life. Both in his books and in his interview with Useful Idiots, he describes military and executive branch officials who don’t even figure “truth” as a variable in their calculations, since it’s irrelevant to what they tell the world.
He arrived in Washington believing the commonly held notion that nothing in the capital stays secret for long. Soon he learned that it’s actually quite easy to keep secrets. Ellsberg described a vicious cycle, in which leaders lie pervasively, then learn to have so much contempt for the public that swallows those lies, that they feel justified in lying more.
“My awareness of how easily Congress, the public, and journalists were fooled and misled contributed to a lack of respect for them,” he wrote. “That, in turn, made it easier to accept practices of deception,” and “their resulting ignorance made it all the more obvious that they must leave these problems to us.”
Ellsberg is adamant that our military and intelligence services don’t learn from even the bloodiest failures. However, when asked in the Useful Idiots if they’d at least learned something in a negative sense — like how to deal with whistleblowers and shut off pictures of war deaths — he concurred, explaining that he himself had been used as propaganda.
“It is now accepted that somebody can be a good whistleblower, and that’s Daniel Ellsberg,” he says, “in contrast with Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden. The appreciation that I’ve been getting since 2010, I can date very simply to the need to denigrate Chelsea Manning.”
He went on to describe a New Yorker piece written by Malcolm Gladwell that ripped Ed Snowden in comparison to him, Ellsberg, among other things quoting an analyst who wondered if Snowden “may have been the dupe of a foreign-intelligence service.” Ellsberg wrote a letter to the New Yorker calling the contrast ridiculous, and, he tells us, “They never published it.”
Overall, Ellsberg’s takes on nuclear safety, the implications of the use of the Espionage Act in the Julian Assange case, and continued misuse of secrecy and hyper-aggressive foreign policy in places like Afghanistan and Syria, still resonate. The most powerful part of his interview regarded the power of the secret state in modern America.
“They know where we are, they know our names, they know from our iPhones if we’re on our way to the grocery store or not,” he said. “We could be East Germany in weeks. In a month.”
The last portion of the Useful Idiots episode:
This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To hear the entire episode and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.
Assange, Snowden and Exposing Abuses of Power
| Tulsi Gabbard <aloha@tulsigabbard.com> 10-29-20 | 12:11 PM (6 hours ago) | ||
| to me | |||
| Aloha Friend— Tulsi is in U.S. Army Reserves Civil Affairs training this month with Congress being in recess. While she’s out, we want to continue to bring awareness to the vital issues she’s been working on. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing lies and war crimes committed by the U.S. Government intended to escalate the war in Vietnam. He became the first person charged as a source for violating the Espionage Act. In 2010, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks released cables and documents showing war crimes against civilians in the Middle East. And in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked thousands of documents, opening the nation’s eyes to the illegal and unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans by security agencies. All three of these brave whistleblowers took great personal risk to hold those in power accountable for their actions. Yet, all three have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act — a law written in 1917 that prevents those accused under it from having a fair day in court. WATCH NOW But as we have clearly seen time and time again, the First Amendment and a free press are fundamental to forming a more perfect union. This freedom must be fiercely protected, not undermined. This is why Tulsi introduced H.R. 8452, the Protect Brave Whistleblowers Act, which would allow whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden to have a fair day in court by allowing them to defend their actions and state their motivations in a legal defense. She also called for the charges against Edward Snowden and Julian Assange to be dropped immediately with bipartisan House Resolutions 1162 and 1175. Let’s stand with Tulsi and urge Congress to stand up for the American people, stand up for our freedoms, give these brave Whistleblowers a fair day in court, and pass this critical legislation now. Stand with Tulsi | |||
ELLSBERG’S NEW BOOK ON NUCLEAR WAR
Dick Bennett j.dick.bennett@gmail.com Mar 10
I want to recommend this excellent review from a favorite magazine, but I cannot find the link.
Bill Griffin. Rev. of The Doomsday Machine in The Catholic Worker (Jan. Feb. 1018), 8. “In this book [Ellsberg] brings us essential information about…today’s thermonuclear weapons and the benefits of his critical reflections on our government’s blind reliance on the military strategy of deterrence.”
Daniel Ellsberg. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury, 2017.
Publisher’s description.
Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America’s Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day.
Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization–and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration–threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era.
Framed as a memoir–a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating–this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing “doomsday machine” and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful–and powerfully important–book about not just our country, but the future of the world.
Reviews
“The Doomsday Machine is being published at an alarmingly relevant moment, as North Korea is seeking the capability to target the United States with nuclear missiles, and an unpredictable president, Donald Trump, has countered with threats of ‘fire and fury.’” – New York Magazine
“A groundbreaking and nightmare-inducing account of how the whole mad system works.” – Esquire
“One of the best books ever written on the subject–certainly the most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole’s mad logic and came out the other side.” – Fred Kaplan, Slate
“Ellsberg, the dauntless whistle-blower, has written a timely plea for a reassessment of a weapons program that he describes as ‘institutionalized madness.’” – Best Books of the Year 2017, The San Francisco Chronicle
“A passionate call for reducing the risk of total destruction . . . Ellsberg’s effort to make vivid the genuine madness of the ‘doomsday machine,’ and the foolishness of betting our survival on mutually assured destruction, is both commendable and important.” – Editor’s Choice, New York Times Book Review
“Brilliantly and readably tackles an issue even more crucial than decision-making in the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which is policy on the handling of nuclear weapons.” – 10 Excellent December Books, Huffington Post
“Gripping and unnerving . . . A must-read of the highest order, Ellsberg’s profoundly awakening chronicle is essential to our future.” – starred review, Booklist (“High Demand Backstory”)
“Ellsberg’s brilliant and unnerving account makes a convincing case for disarmament and shows that the mere existence of nuclear weapons is a serious threat to humanity.” – starred review, Publishers Weekly
“Noted gadfly Ellsberg returns with a sobering look at our nuclear capabilities . . . When the author hurriedly copied the contents of his RAND Corporation safe to reveal, in time, what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, that was just the start of it. He had other documents, even more jarring . . . Especially timely given the recent saber-rattling not from Russia but North Korea and given the apparent proliferation of nuclear abilities among other small powers.” – Kirkus Reviews
“His point is simple: We and our political leaders must stop thinking of nuclear war as a manageable risk. We must stop thinking of the possibility of nuclear war as normal.” – St Louis Post-Dispatch, “Our Favorite Books of 2017”
“The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner blends personal recollections and historical analysis with a set of considered proposals for reducing the threat of apocalyptic war. Many years in the making, it’s a book that arrives at an opportune moment.” – San Francisco Chronicle
“Ellsberg’s book, perhaps the most personal memoir yet from a Cold Warrior, fills an important void by providing firsthand testimony about the nuclear insanity that gripped a generation of policymakers . . . The Doomsday Machine is strongest as a portrait of the slow corruption of America’s national security state by layer upon layer of secrecy. He relates how the Cold War, the nuclear build-up and trillions of dollars of defense spending were compromised by information purposely withheld from the policymakers and politicians who debated and shaped our path” –Washington Post
“History may remember Ellsberg as the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers and helped end the Vietnam War, but his alarmingly relevant new book should also assure his legacy as a prescient and authoritative anti-nuclear activist. The Doomsday Machine, which takes its title from Dr. Strangelove, reads like a thriller as Ellsberg figures out that America’s pledge never to attack first was fiction and that the so called ‘fail-safe’ systems are prone to disaster.” – Los Angeles Times
“Ellsberg writes briskly in the service of opinions formed by long and sober study. What he means is never in doubt and it is always interesting . . . He is a vigorous writer with a gift for dramatic tension and the unfolding of events as they cascade toward disaster.” – Thomas Powers, New York Review of Books
“Ellsberg presents his thoughts on how best to dismantle a program that could lead to global annihilation, while once again proving how deeply disturbing and radically ignorant our country’s leaders are when it comes to thermonuclear warfare.” – SF Weekly
“The Doomsday Machine is chilling, compelling and certain to be controversial.” – Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Is it really necessary to declare that a knowledgeable, detailed and passionate book about the odds-on danger of cataclysmically destroying all human life on earth is important? Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine demands to be widely read. Its claims should be examined by experts, corroborated, rebutted, taken up by Congressional committees (alas, unlikely) and generally forced into public consciousness . . . The Doomsday Machine is engrossing and frightening.” – Peter Steinfels, America Magazine
“In the era of barbed insults regarded as precursors to nuclear threat, the warnings yielded by The Doomsday Machine have become required reading. . . . Daniel Ellsberg’s title evokes Kubrick’s film on purpose, a metaphor that culminates in his definition of the ‘Strangelove Paradox.’ The United States has thousands of ‘Doomdsay Machine’ weapons and hundreds of ‘fingers on the button.’ The question the reader must ask, now mortified by the necessary horrors of Ellsberg’s masterpiece, is how to save the world” – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
“The Doomsday Machine is, in fact, a Bildungsroman, a tale of one intellectual’s disillusionment with the country in which Ellsberg had placed so much trust. It reveals how the horrors of US nuclear war planning transformed a man of the establishment into a left-wing firebrand.” – Los Angeles Times
“[The Doomsday Machine is] an important tome that’s as optimistic as it sounds. It’s vital reading that reminds people that both poor planning and the potential for simple mistakes still run rampant in US nuclear policy.” – antiwar.com
“gripping . . . The Doomsday Machine is essential reading–both a terrifying ‘Doctor Strangelove’ saga and a hopeful consideration of future scenarios.” – Mercury News
“Ellsberg’s book is essential for facilitating a national discussion about a vital topic.” – starred review, Library Journal
“Alarming, galvanizing, and brilliantly written.” – Barnes & Noble Review
“Given the current crises, both domestic and international, the timeliness of Ellsberg’s exposures-and warnings-is unnerving… The Doomsday Machine is not for the faint of heart, but its sense of urgency should make it required reading, and-more importantly-a call to action.” – BookPage
“Shocking . . . The Doomsday Machine is full of deeply disturbing revelations. The book sometimes reads like a thriller, as Ellsberg describes his mounting horror and revulsion over the discoveries he made over the years.” – Five out of Five, Berkleyside
“An absolutely imperative read in this day and age of Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un, and global instability.” – Helen Caldicott, Founding President, Physicians for Social Responsibility,
“This long-awaited chronicle from the father of American whistle-blowing is both an urgent warning and a call to arms to a public that has grown dangerously habituated to the idea that the means of our extinction will forever be on hair-trigger alert.” – Edward Snowden,
“Nobody could have told this horrifying story better than Daniel Ellsberg. He introduces us to the men who have coldly and with a God-like sense of righteous entitlement, put in place a plan that can, on a whim–not virtually, but literally–annihilate life on Earth. What a book.” – Arundhati Roy, anti-nuclear activist and author of THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS and the Pulitzer Prize-winner THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS,
“A fascinating and terrifying account of nuclear war planning by a consultant from the RAND Corporation at the highest levels of government in the Kennedy administration. Ellsberg tells us of the close calls with nuclear war and of the policies developed then that still threaten the planet with annihilation. I couldn’t put the book down.” – Frances FitzGerald, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of FIRE IN THE LAKE,
References
Bill Griffin. Rev. of The Doomsday Machine in The Catholic Worker (Jan. Feb. 1018), 8. “In this book [Ellsberg] brings us essential information about…today’s thermonuclear weapons and the benefits of his critical reflections on our government’s blind reliance on the military strategy of deterrence.”
Dan Lybarger. “Ellsberg Once ‘Most Dangerous Man in America.’” NADG (January 19, 2018). Pentagon Papers: “Over 40 years, I’ve been asked dozens of times, ‘What gave you the right or what made you think you had the right to put this information [about the Vietnam War] out?’ I’ve virtually never gotten question, ‘Why did you have the right to keep it secret earlier?’”
Dick’s take on the final 2 pp. of The Doomsday Machine
WE DIDN’T KNOW (Germans who lived nearby Auschwitz, US citizens who lived near Rocky Flats, CO)
Almost the final words of The Doomsday Machine were written by Robert Ellsberg, Daniel’s eldest son. He and his father sat on railroad tracks at Rocky Flats, trying “to stop the production of plutonium triggers there,” trying to show that we the people have “the power to change ourselves and history” by “accepting the risks of peacemaking.”
“Rocky Flats is the Auschwitz of our time. Behind that barbed wire…intelligent, decent family men in their white suits and their security badges” are preparing “for the Final solution to the Human Problem. In each bomb prepared at Rocky Flats is another Holocaust—perhaps for the children of Moscow, Peking, Hanoi—those who build them don’t know.
At one of the German concentration camps. . .the American troops who liberated it forced the townspeople to tour the camp. . .the piles of corpses, the ovens that had disposed of the dead. And of course they were numbed and shocked and they said, ‘We didn’t know—we didn’t know what was in those boxcars—we didn’t know what came out of those chimneys.”
So son and father and friends stood on the railroad tracks at Rocky Flats on May 12, 1978, outside Arvada, CO, not far from Denver, where plutonium detonators, used in nuclear bombs from 1952 until 1989, were produced by the plant’s operator, Rockwell International Corporation, the protesters “trying to warn the people” what kind of cargo travelled over those tracks in those boxcars, even if it meant arrest.