Tag: Pentagon Papers

End Of An Era

The news has come out that effects me and anyone who participated in the antiwar movement from the 70s.

The person that released the secret info to the public through the Pentagon Papers has very little time left in this world.

The “Pentagon Papers”?

This is for those too young to give a shit about this historic incident.

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States’ political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study, they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971.  A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.”  (Some things never change…think Ukraine you dullards)

The Pentagon Papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War with coastal raids on North Vietnam and Marine Corps attacks—none of which were reported in the mainstream media. For his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property; charges were later dismissed, after prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that the staff members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg.

(wikipedia)

Daniel Ellsberg is dying.

Daniel Ellsberg, who copied and leaked documents that revealed secret details of US strategy in the Vietnam War and became known as the Pentagon Papers, said he has terminal cancer and months to live. Ellsberg posted on his Facebook page Thursday that doctors diagnosed the 91-year-old with inoperable pancreatic cancer on Feb. 17 following medical scans. Doctors say he has three to six months to live, he said. Ellsberg said he has opted not to undergo chemotherapy and plans to accept hospice care when needed, the AP reports.

The documents in the Pentagon Papers looked in excruciating detail at the decisions and strategies of the Vietnam War. They told how US involvement was built up steadily by political leaders and top military brass who were overconfident about US prospects and deceptive about the accomplishments against the North Vietnamese. Ellsberg, a former consultant to the Defense Department, provided the Pentagon Papers to Neil Sheehan, a reporter who broke the story for the New York Times in June 1971. Sheehan died in 2021. Sheehan smuggled the documents out of the Massachusetts apartment where Ellsberg had stashed them, illicitly copied thousands of pages, and took them to the Times.

President Richard Nixon’s administration got a court injunction arguing national security was at stake and publication was stopped. In June 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing publication, and the Times and the Washington Post resumed printing stories. The Nixon administration tried to discredit Ellsberg, an effort that included Nixon aides orchestrating a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Ellsberg was charged with theft, conspiracy, and violations of the Espionage Act, but his case ended in a mistrial when evidence surfaced about government-ordered wiretappings and break-ins. “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,” Ellsberg wrote.

This is a letter from Daniel Ellsberg to his supporters….

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!

Living on a Deadline in the Nuclear Age. Some Personal News From Daniel Ellsberg

This man meant a lot to us in the movement….his guts and his drive has been an inspiration for all us that are concerned about the state of our war machine.

His voice will be missed….there are so few voices left in the antiwar movement…..and these days we need all we can get.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Pentagon Papers Turns 50

This may have been the best eye-opener for people on the subject of the Vietnam War…..I still have my copy and remains in my “old Books” section of my library…..

2021 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the “Papers” and the feed it gave tom the anti-war movement….

This article is from the NYT…..

Brandishing a captured Chinese machine gun, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara appeared at a televised news conference in the spring of 1965. The United States had just sent its first combat troops to South Vietnam, and the new push, he boasted, was further wearing down the beleaguered Vietcong.
“In the past four and one-half years, the Vietcong, the Communists, have lost 89,000 men,” he said. “You can see the heavy drain.”
That was a lie. From confidential reports, McNamara knew the situation was “bad and deteriorating” in the South. “The VC have the initiative,” the information said. “Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers.”
Lies like McNamara’s were the rule, not the exception, throughout America’s involvement in Vietnam. The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press. The real story might have remained unknown if, in 1967, McNamara had not commissioned a secret history based on classified documents — which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.
 
It is a shame that the American people cannot muster the passion to end destructive and deadly wars we fight all over the globe….
 
The book failed to have a lasting effect on our proclivity to war……

The Pentagon Papers should have spawned permanent, radical skepticism concerning the candor and competence of U.S. foreign interventions. Philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the Pentagon Papers revealed how “sheer ignorance of all pertinent facts and deliberate neglect of postwar developments became the hallmark of established doctrine within the Establishment.” That internal study also revealed how deceit became institutionalized. Daniel Ellsberg, who wrote a portion of the papers, noted that the documents reveal “a general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing ‘progress’ rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning.” Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert observed that the U.S. military floundered in Vietnam in part because “it had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea.” The accolade of “The Best and the Brightest” received far less derision than it deserved.

Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official, risked life in prison to smuggle the report to the media after members of Congress were too cowardly to expose it. The Nixon Justice Department speedily secured a court injunction blocking the New York Times from continuing to publish excerpts. The Washington Post and other newspapers quickly began publishing additional classified excerpts, setting up a Supreme Court showdown on the First Amendment.

Pentagon Papers Failed to Cure Servile Pro-War Media

Sadly they are few that push back against the control of the M-IC on our foreign policy……until we get a grip and demand that these endless countless wars cease….we will have the body counts grow and grow….

Pay F*cking Attention People!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Closing Thought–13Jun21

The Pentagon Papers turn 50.

This publication may have been lost on most Americans…..so let me fill in some blanks.

The Pentagon Papers was the name given to a top-secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. As the Vietnam War dragged on, with more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by 1968, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg—who had worked on the study—came to oppose the war, and decided that the information contained in the Pentagon Papers should be available to the American public. He photocopied the report and in March 1971 gave the copy to The New York Times, which then published a series of scathing articles based on the report’s most damning secrets.

https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/pentagon-papers

Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of this secret study…..

June 13 will be the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the secret Pentagon Papers, a vast collection of internal U.S. decision-making documents on the Vietnam War.

The Papers provoked questions about how the war could have been waged through six presidencies in a row: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. How could such dissimilar presidents have gone wrong — over and over again? Why couldn’t they stop? Did they get bad intelligence? Did they pick unworthy advisers? Did other bureaucratic dynamics guarantee bad decisions every time? Were they afraid of losing re-election?

This speculation avoided a more straightforward conclusion: Six presidents in a row did not change the long-term goals and strategy, and could not have if they wanted to, because presidents don’t decide those things.

This is what is missing from the Papers. It is the empire in the room nobody wants to talk about.

The Pentagon Papers at 50: What’s Left Out is Crucial

This is the article about how the publishing of the book changed the life of Ellsberg and his family…..

https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2021/04/21/pentagon-papers-anniversary-new-york-times-nixon-impeachment-240479

One of the first books in my now extensive library….as a participant in the conflict in Vietnam I had to read the book….it was an eye opener for me.

If my reader is interested in history then I recommend this book for a look at a war that many Americans want to forget.

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Pentagon Papers Turns 46

Where we you on 13 June 1971?

There was a publication that blew the top off the story of the year…….

46 years ago today the first part of the Pentagon papers was published…..

Pentagon Papers, papers that contain a history of the U.S. role in Indochina from World War II until May 1968 and that were commissioned in 1967 by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. They were turned over (without authorization) to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, a senior research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies.

The 47-volume history, consisting of approximately 3,000 pages of narrative and 4,000 pages of appended documents, took 18 months to complete. Ellsberg, who worked on the project, had been an ardent early supporter of the U.S. role in Indochina but, by the project’s end, had become seriously opposed to U.S. involvement. He felt compelled to reveal the nature of U.S. participation and leaked major portions of the papers to the press.

On June 13, 1971, The New York Times began publishing a series of articles based on the study, which was classified as “top secret” by the federal government. After the third daily installment appeared in the Times, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained in U.S. District Court a temporary restraining order against further publication of the classified material, contending that further public dissemination of the material would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to U.S. national defense interests.

Source: Pentagon Papers | United States history | Britannica.com

On 13 June 2011 the papers were declassified and the question was asked…..do the Pentagon Papers still matter?

The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers – the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 – comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)

In other words, today’s declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That’s because we’re mired again in wars – especially in Afghanistan – remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don’t have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it’s likely to go.

Source: Why the Pentagon Papers matter now | Daniel Ellsberg | Opinion | The Guardian

The Papers still matter because it shows at what lengths the government will go and the death of Americans matter not.

The “Paper” matter to me because I learned why I was fighting in Vietnam and the disastrous decisions that got me there.

History lesson is over…you may return to your normal day…..