tagged w/ Pentagon Papers
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What if the greatest scam ever perpetrated was blatantly exposed, and the US media didn’t cover it? Does that mean the scam could keep going? That’s what we are about to find out.
I understand the importance of the new WikiLeaks documents.What if the greatest scam ever perpetrated was blatantly exposed, and the US media... more
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Every now and then someone says something about America that succinctly characterizes what has happened to our country and where we are headed. Recently that someone was Daniel Ellsberg. He commented that "All Nixon's crimes against me are now legal".
As most of you will recall Daniel Ellsberg was the gentleman who gave the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post and New York Times for publication during the Vietnam War. "The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967." the Pentagon Papers "demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance"
To keep a very long story (relatively) short "Ellsberg surrendered to authorities in Boston and admitted that he had given the papers to the press. He was later indicted on charges of stealing and holding secret documents by a grand jury in Los Angeles. Federal District Judge Byrne declared a mistrial and dismissed all charges against Ellsberg [and Russo] on May 11, 1973, after several irregularities appeared in the government's case, including its claim that it had lost records of illegal wiretapping against Ellsberg conducted by the White House Plumbers in the contemporaneous Watergate scandal. Byrne ruled: "The totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case."
Now consider, if this case had been tried under current laws, what would the outcome have been? Simple, like Ellsberg said, "All Nixon's crimes against me are now legal". That simple comment is astounding if you think about it. Ellsberg would have been found guilty of treason and probably imprisoned for the rest of his life.
Now, for comparison purposes consider the status of Bradley Manning to what happened to Ellsberg. Manning is being held incommunicado in solitary confinement without trial for releasing information that DIDN'T compromised US strategy (because there is none) nor did it compromise the safety of US troops overseas. When you break it down the ONLY thing he did was embarrass the military.
The obvious difference between Ellsburg and Manning was that Ellesburg was a civilian and Manning is a soldier. But when you compare the political impact of the Pentagon Papers to the information Manning released there is no comparison. Yet Manning remains in prison. Why? The answer is simple, because they CAN; and the reason they can is because despite EVERYTHING that has happened from 2000 on, the American public remains largely uninterested in the real crimes of the US Government (and for all my conservative critics, I'm also including the Obama Administration of breaking the law).
I could forever analyze why most don't care but I think it boils down to the perception of not having any "skin in the game". During Vietnam one big reason so many people hated the war was because any young male between 18 and 25 could be drafted to fight it. Cases like Ellsberg's provided the damning evidence that was needed to stop the draft and get us out of there. Consequently the public watched what happened to him with critical interest. However, since there is no large scale perceived gain (like not getting drafted) to getting Manning out of prison, he ends up rotting there. Sure there is concern, but not the personal kind of concern that make people pick up protest signs and placards by the millions. The Bush/Cheney neocon reptiles were clever enough to recognize this peculiarity in our national character and made sure they never started a draft. Hence all the "stop loss" orders to keep our "volunteer" military in Iraq and Afghanistan for years.
So what has this got to do with democracy? Everything. We appear to have lost the belief that we have skin in the game when if fact we do. During the Vietnam era, no one would have tolerated keeping a man locked up for no good reason ESPECIALLY by the military. Nowadays, few seem to care. Is it so hard to envision then, in a couple of of decades all the laws and rights that currently protect us from our government being swept away because people choose to believe it won't affect them?
http://www.juancole.com/2011/06/ellsberg-all-nixons-crimes-against-me-now-legal.htmlEvery now and then someone says something about America that succinctly characterizes... more
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Their work revealed a pattern of deception by the Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy and prior administrations as they secretly escalated the conflict while assuring the public that, in Johnson's words, the U.S. did not seek a wider war.
The National Archives released the Pentagon Papers in full Monday and put them online, long after most of the secrets spilled. The release was timed 40 years to the day after The New York Times published the first in its series of stories about the findings, on June 13, 1971, prompting President Richard Nixon to try to suppress publication and crush anyone in government who dared to spill confidences.
Prepared near the end of Johnson's term by Defense Department and private analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg, in a brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes of whistleblowing in U.S. history.
"What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We're not likely to get them; they probably don't yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad substitute, definitely worth learning from."
Ellsberg recently said: "ALL the crimes he [Nixon] committed against me -- which forced his resignation facing impeachment -- are now legal. That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the U.S., and authorizing a White House hit squad to 'incapacitate me totally' (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders, they have all become legal."
http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/47832/Their work revealed a pattern of deception by the Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy and... more
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WASHINGTON — The US government on Thursday announced the release of the famed "Pentagon Papers," 40 years after the once top-secret Vietnam War documents were leaked to the media.
The National Archives, the massive US repository for historic books and documents, announced that the files, now declassified, will be accessible starting next month at the Richard Nixon presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California.
Officially titled "United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense," the top-secret report detailed US political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
It was commissioned in June 1967 by then defense secretary Robert McNamara, who wanted an exhaustive history of the Vietnam War. But it revealed a greater level of US military involvement in Vietnam than had been made publicly known.
The papers, first published on the front page of the New York Times in 1971, created a major scandal and were deemed instrumental in the decision by then-president Lyndon Johnson not to stand for re-election, as public opposition to the war grew.
The Times received the document from Daniel Ellsberg, at the time a military analyst employed by the Pentagon.WASHINGTON — The US government on Thursday announced the release of the famed... more
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Daniel Ellsberg: There was no law against leaking the Pentagon Papers nor is there now against WikiLeaks.
Bio
Daniel Ellsberg is a former US military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.Daniel Ellsberg: There was no law against leaking the Pentagon Papers nor is there now... more
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In the information age that we live in, I find it only fitting to know that there is a whistle-blower organization out there in cyberspace releasing classified documents. WikiLeaks released 391,832 reports last Friday documenting the war and occupation of Iraq, from January 1st, 2004 to December 31st, 2009. The reports come straight from a top source: soldiers in the United States Army.
WikiLeaks' brave founder Julian Assange
The founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange claims the publishing of the Iraq War logs was an attempt to show “intimate details” of the conflict in an effort to reveal the truth, much like Daniel Ellsberg did when he leaked the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971. It revealed that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war in Vietnam by bombing Cambodia. The most damaging revelation was that four Presidents
To keep reading visit: http://www.forgetthebox.net/mag/wikileaks-iraq-war-diaries-too-much-too-late.phpIn the information age that we live in, I find it only fitting to know that there is a... more
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Julian Assange,WikiLeaks Founder,WikiLeaks,Rape and Molestation Charges,Pentagon Papers
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*************THIS IS A GOOD ARTICLE ABOUT MEDIA SLANDER AND BIAS*************
In Early Struggles of Soldier Charged in Leak Case, the New York Times published a portrait of Private Bradley Manning reminiscent of the type of character assassination J.Edgar Hoover planted in newspapers in the hey day of the communist witch hunts. The government agencies routinely planted such misinformation to discredit civil rights activists and others they considered a threat to our national security. Whistleblowers like Private Manning and Daniel Ellsberg before him are considered extremely dangerous and in the words of the then sitting (during the Pentagon Papers incident) president Richard M. Nixon ''need to be taken out'. President Nixon famously said that he did not need to wait and see if the courts would convict Ellsberg because he would destroy him in the court of public opinion. He then ordered the break in to the offices of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Here we are again, four decades later convicting in the court of public opinion Private Bradley Manning.
The NYT article(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/us/09manning.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all) is subtle in its venom but no less deadly. In Manufacturing Consent, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky propose a mass media propaganda model for a modern western liberal democracy such as our own, in which mechanisms for the maintenance of the status quo are less obvious, but no less effective, than in systems such as totalitarian dictatorships. Private Manning and WikiLeaks threw a hand grenade at the status quo and now these mechanisms are working overtime to repair the damage. The fact that the NYT collaborated with WikiLeaks is in keeping with the model of the cultural mechanisms at play.
I have no doubt that Private Manning, a sensitive youth, was struggling to fit into a world that did not accept his sexual orientation, nor that he fell in love with a young man who in the words of the NYT is a "self described drag queen." And to that, I say so what.
The spin of the article is that because he was an outsider, his motivation for divulging the classified information and releasing the documents was to fit in with his new friends, a "politically motivated group of hackers to whom he increasingly turned to for moral support."
The article continues:
And now, some of those friends say they wonder whether his desperation for acceptance -- or delusions of grandeur -- may have led him to disclose the largest trove of government secrets since the Pentagon Papers.
There is no evidence that Private Manning was either desperate or had delusions of grandeur. The only named sources in the article was a former neighbor Mrs. Radford, a former classmate and a former employer, all who say nothing to lead us to that conclusion.
The only named source that paints the portrait of the desperate and delusional Private Manning is the cyber informant Adrian Lamo. I find it extremely disturbing that the NYT chose not to elucidate us in this article about the well known and well documented character and controversy surrounding Adrian Lamo. Adrian Lamo was prosecuted and convicted of hacking into the very NYT and so they more than anyone know about his history of heavy drug abuse(http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/hacker_pr.html) and psychological problems.
One glance at his Facebook page(http://www.facebook.com/felon?ref=ts) (which has no privacy settings so you do not need to friend him to navigate) will confirm that Lamo, if not exhibiting delusions of grandeur, at minimum is prone to self-aggrandizement and self promotion. When asked why hack, by a San Francisco Weekly reporter, he answers: "This is what I do, this is the role I was born to play." He goes on to quote a long passage about how greatness can destroy a man from the Frank Herbert science-fiction epic Dune later made into a David Lynch film, which tells the story of a young man who becomes a messiah.
He is also an avowed drug abuser. Do not take my word for it, but please watch this video from the BBC at about 3 minutes 25 seconds and you will witness the most bizarre behavior you have ever seen on prime time.
The NYT does not find it worthy of mention that the man who turned in Private Manning and the only named source in the article that eludes to Manning's motivation for the release of the documents is a total mess.
He tells a San Francisco weekly reporter that his convulsions are a result of an amphetamine overdose he suffered the year before. He goes on to say about his drug use(http://www.sfweekly.com/2003-04-16/news/a-duty-to-hack/):
I've resisted including this in news reports because I think it would make me intolerable to the government if I was advocating both intrusion and drug use, but substances that disassociate you from your senses have played a big part in my life.
Lamo goes on to explain to Wired Magazine's Khan that after his amphetamine overdoes he now takes only depressives and dissociatives.
The dissociatives are amazing... You can look at your face in the mirror and completely not recognize it.
The court issued a restraining order against Lamo, due to a complaint in which his then-girlfriend described an ongoing pattern of harassment and abuse. She explains: "He carried a stun gun, which he used on me. He was very controlling. He wanted to know where I was costansantly." There are many articles that reference the taser he carries with him, sometimes used to "hack" vending machines.
We are to believe that Adrian Lamo just happened to be chatting with the total stranger Private Manning and divulged not only what he would be doing and had done but also his motivation. Adrian Lamo is the oldest trick in the book and has the footprint of the government all over it. A homeless, drug addicted convicted felon with a suspended sentence who still owes the government over $65,000 in fines is not exactly my idea of a credible witness, but rather your typical informant who says and does as he is told.
The named source in the Wired Magazine article quoted in the NYT, Private Manning's boyfriend, Mr. Watkins, states that after WikiLeaks released the video allegedly provided by Manning of the shootings of the AP journalists that "one of his {Private Manning's} major concerns once he'd done this was, was it really going to make a difference?" This concern would lead one to conclude that Private Manning's motivation, as much as one can impute motivation, was to have an impact on public opinion and perhaps on the course of the war, in the tradition of Ellsberg. If Manning wanted to influence the course of the war and deliberately broke the law and knowingly risked prosecution, he follows in the footsteps of the greats: Rosa Parks, Dolores Huerta (arrested 22 times and counting), Dr King and Daniel Ellsberg. There is no credible evidence, only government spin repackaged by the NYT, that this is not the case.*************THIS IS A GOOD ARTICLE ABOUT MEDIA SLANDER AND BIAS*************
In... more
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Originally Posted at Focal Points
By Hannah Gurman, July 28, 2010
Almost as soon as the WikiLeaks story broke on Sunday, officials and commentators were making comparisons between these 91,000 documents and the Pentagon Papers, the 4,000 page classified study on Vietnam leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. The White House and other critics were quick to reject the analogy. Even supporters of WikiLeaks' decision to release the documents are hesitant to put this event in the same league as the Pentagon Papers, which have come to hold such an important place in progressive history.
There are important differences between WikiLeaks’ potential influence on the war in Afghanistan and the Pentagon Papers’ actual influence on the war in Vietnam. But, contrary to the heroic story of the Pentagon Papers, these differences reveal the actual shortcomings of what happened in 1971. For all of their accomplishments, the Pentagon Papers were in key respects, a failure. Understanding the limits as well as the achievements of the Pentagon Papers is an important step in maximizing the potential influence of the WikiLeaks documents. This is one of those cases where the negative lessons of history are as valuable as the positive ones.
FOR THE ENTIRE POST VISIT:
http://www.fpif.org/blog/conceding_failure_of_pentagon_papers_critical_to_wikileaks_success_ending_warOriginally Posted at Focal Points
By Hannah Gurman, July 28, 2010
Almost as soon... more
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Orignially Posted on Focal Points by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Sunday’s WikiLeak deluge and the official response to it have reaffirmed my axiom for the digital age: too much information, not enough knowledge.
After the flood of more than 90,000 low-level classified documents splashed onto the front-pages of the Western world’s three leading newspapers, the U.S. government delivered a tongue-lashing to WikiLeaks, mainstream media wrote ominously of repercussions for Obama’s ability to secure Congressional war funding, and bloggers plunged into the data headfirst in the search for scintillating information.
And while a few morsels have surfaced here and there, what, on balance, have we learned? What has really changed? As it turns out, very little....
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But there is also another reason: we live in America 2.0. We are far removed from the era of social and cultural tumult that accompanied the Vietnam War. We have decided to shift the burden of our war-fighting from conscripted young men to a smaller, leaner, and better-trained all-volunteer force, which we have equipped with deadlier and more automated technology. Most Americans are more connected to their iPads than American soldiers or foreign civilians, the news of whose deaths briefly flash on the gadgets’ screens now and then...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.fpif.org/blog/the_wikileaks_documents_are_not_the_pentagon_papers_20Orignially Posted on Focal Points by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Sunday’s... more
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Israel will not cooperate, UN to investigate in Gaza War
Israel will not cooperate, UN to investigate in Gaza War
Israel said that it will not cooperate with the UN inquiry panel to investigate violations of international humanitarian law during the Israeli military invasion on Gaza that ended on Jan. 18.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak made the remarks to reporters after meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at UN Headquarters.
Barak said that the panel, led by South African prosecutor Richard Goldstone, "I don't think Israel has to or will cooperate with this investigation," he added.
Yigal Palmor, Israel's foreign ministry spokesman, told The Associated Press news agency:
Israel had no plans to co-operate with the investigation.
UN investigatorsIsrael will not cooperate, UN to investigate in Gaza War
Israel will not... more
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War Is Sin
By Chris Hedges
War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation.War Is Sin
By Chris Hedges
War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about... more
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Daniel Ellsberg, the State Department official and Vietnam War Veteran who leaked 7,000 hand Xeroxed top secret "The Pentagon Papers" to The New York Times 30 years ago, is urging those within the Administration who have knowledge of secret war plans to do as he did and leak. leak. leak..Daniel Ellsberg, the State Department official and Vietnam War Veteran who leaked... more
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