For most people this name may mean nothing to them….but for me it is the loss of an antiwar icon.
Daniel Ellsberg, antiwar activist dead at 94….
Daniel Ellsberg, the history-making whistleblower who by leaking the Pentagon Papers revealed longtime government doubts and deceit about the Vietnam War and inspired acts of retaliation by President Richard Nixon that helped lead to his resignation, has died at age 92. Ellsberg, who announced in February that he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, died Friday morning, according to a letter from his family released by spokeswoman Julia Pacetti, per the AP.
Until the early 1970s, when he revealed that he was the source for the stunning media reports on the 47-volume, 7,000-page Defense Department study of the US role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite. He was a Harvard graduate and self-defined “cold warrior” who served as a private and government consultant on Vietnam throughout the 1960s, risked his life on the battlefield, received the highest security clearances and came to be trusted by officials in Democratic and Republican administrations. He was especially valued, he would later note, for his “talent for discretion.”
The Pentagon Papers had been commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the US and Vietnam and to help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would only admit to long after. The papers covered more than 20 years, from France’s failed efforts at colonization in the 1940s and 1950s to the growing involvement of the US, including the bombing raids and deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Ellsberg was among those asked to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.
First published in the New York Times in June 1971, with the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and more than a dozen others following, the classified papers documented that the US had defied a 1954 settlement barring a foreign military presence in Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war to neighboring countries, and had plotted to send American soldiers even as Johnson vowed he wouldn’t.
As important as the Pentagon Papers were in my day sadly we as Americans have learned NOTHING from the publishing the documents…..
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Why is it that many Americans still want to believe the unbelievable denials of the State Department and Pentagon when it comes to Nordstream? Why is it that the mainstream media today is no longer a watchdog but functions as an echo chamber for governmental propaganda, or worse, when the media becomes an attack dog that intimidates and censors those who dissent from the official narrative? What has happened to the New York Times, Washington Post and most of the “quality press” over the past 50 years? It seems that only the US government has learned from the Pentagon Papers, has adapted to better control the risk of disclosure, to better dissimulate crimes, and learned how to keep the mainstream media on the leash, so that when a prominent Professor at Colombia University and Advisor of four UN Secretary Generals, Jeffrey Sachs, disagrees with the official line, he gets yanked off the air for saying the obvious – that the US was behind the blowing up of Nordstream.[25] While the revelations in the Pentagon Papers are of enormous and urgent relevance to our perception of the war in Ukraine, the US government determines the music, and those who do not want to dance to their tune are ignored, defamed, ridiculed.
Daniel Ellsberg was and is on the right side of history and common sense when he reminds us that notwithstanding all the narrative management by our government “A failing war is just as profitable as a winning one… It’s the old Latin slogan, Cui Bono, who benefits?…We’re not after all a European nation and we have no particular role in the European Union. But in NATO—that’s as the Mafia says Cosa Nostra, our thing—we control NATO pretty much and NATO gives us an excuse and a reason to sell enormous amounts of arms now to the formerly Warsaw Pact nations…Russia is an indispensable enemy.”[26]
Today, more than ever, we need a free press, but we do not have it. We need investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh, but they are an almost extinct species. We need a vigorous alternative media that gives us the information that the “quality press” suppresses. We need academics with courage and intellectual honesty like Professors Nils Melzer[27], John Mearsheimer[28], Jeffrey Sachs, Richard Falk, who accept the factum that they must pay a price for their commitment to truth and the rule of law. We need whistleblowers who know exactly what happened with the bombing of the Nordstream Pipelines. Silence in such cases is not honourable. It means covering-up terrorist activities.
Dan Ellsberg has never rested on his laurels. Those who take seriously the danger of nuclear war are also deeply indebted to him for his The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017). That unique book is even more important today than when first published.
His voice will be sadly missed….at least for those that pay attention to the world around them.
With deepest sorrow we saw good-bye to an icon.
May he rest in peace.
“lego ergo scribo”