How Daniel Ellsberg uncovered the U.S. conflict machine and have become a high enemy of empire – Liberation Information

Daniel Ellsberg speaking at a press conference in 1972. Photo by Gernard Gotfryd, public domain

Daniel Ellsberg, a senior military analyst who courageously exposed four governments’ criminal war against Vietnam and later became a leading activist for peace and civil rights, died June 16 at the age of 92.

Ellsberg is best known for releasing 7,000-page copies of classified documents in 1971 that became known as the “Pentagon Papers.”

The incriminating documents, reprinted in leading newspapers in the US and around the world, showed that US political and military leaders were willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of US soldiers rather than admit defeat, many of which were defeated of them knew it was inevitable. Ellsberg, who worked for the Rand Corporation and the State Department, had spent time in Vietnam and seen firsthand the discrepancy between government reports and the reality on the ground.

As early as July 23, 1965, when the massive buildup of US troops had just begun, Clark Clifford, a close adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote:

“I don’t think we can win in South Vietnam. . . If we lose 50,000 men there, it would be catastrophic for that country. Five years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of men. . . All I can think of in this area is catastrophe for our country.”

But when Pentagon generals assured him that given sufficient troops and bombs, a US victory was certain, Johnson launched a massive deployment that would see more than 550,000 troops deployed into Vietnam by 1968. Though he inflicted unimaginable death and destruction on the country, victory was no nearer the height of the boom than it had been when it began, and Johnson was forced out of office.

His successor, Richard Nixon, was elected and promised to end the war but had no intention of doing so. While US troop levels in Vietnam were being reduced by the time the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, Nixon was escalating genocidal air warfare against the country and contemplating the use of nuclear weapons.

The release of the Pentagon Papers, entitled “History of US Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945-68,” hit the country like a bomb, documenting a quarter-century of lies and deception. Its publication enraged Nixon. One of his advisors, Egil Krough Jr., later said, “We had a strong feeling that we were dealing with a national security crisis.” Henry Kissinger [then National Security Adviser] said that dr. Daniel Ellsberg is “the most dangerous man in America” ​​and he must be stopped.”

A film entitled The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, voiced by Ellsberg himself, was released in 2009.

“Let’s get this son of a bitch in jail,” Nixon told his attorney, John Ehrlichman. “We want to destroy him in the press. Is that clear?”

After The New York Times began printing the papers on June 13, 1971, Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell obtained an injunction blocking further publication. But then the Washington Post began publishing the documents. Later that year, the injunction was overturned by the Supreme Court, a major victory for press freedom.

Meanwhile, a two-week nationwide search for Ellsberg and an associate, Anthony Russo, which one media report described as “the biggest manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping” in the 1930s, ended in self-reporting. Both were charged with espionage and other crimes, Ellsberg faces 105 years in prison and Russo faces 35 years.

Ellsberg was the first target of the White House “Plumbers Unit,” secretly formed in August 1971 under the leadership of G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt to pursue Ellsberg. The Plumbers became notorious for the 1972 break-ins at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, DC – the Watergate scandal that played a key role in Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

But as early as September 3, 1971, the “Plumbers” had broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychologist in Santa Monica, California, looking for information that Nixon hoped would discredit Ellsberg. When this break-in was exposed during the May 1973 trial of Ellsberg and Russo, it prompted the judge to dismiss the charges against both defendants.

Daniel Ellsberg and the anti-war movement

As he pointed out, Ellsberg’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers did not come in a vacuum, but was significantly influenced by the growing anti-Vietnam movement. He attended his first anti-war rally in 1965, while still working as a fringe analyst, at the invitation of his future wife, Patricia Marx.

An anti-war conference at Haverford College was a turning point for Ellsberg. At the conference, Randy Kehler, a draft evader, proudly declared that he was about to go to prison. “I didn’t know he was going to be convicted of conscientious objection,” Ellsberg said in an interview many years later. “It wasn’t exactly what he said that changed my worldview. It was the example he set with his life. . . I had no doubt that my government was engaged in an unjust war that would continue and only get worse. . . If I hadn’t met Randy Kehler, I wouldn’t have thought of copying [the Pentagon Papers]. His actions spoke to me in ways that mere words could not. He put the right question in my mind at the right time.” (Greenfield Recorder, 12/31/2021)

On May 1, 1971, just weeks before the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was part of an affinity group with Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and others at a mass anti-war demonstration in Washington DC. He remained an anti-war activist for the rest of his life, opposing US wars from Latin America to the Middle East. He has been arrested more than 90 times in civil disobedience activities.

In a 2018 interview, Ellsberg said, “I think America in Iraq has never looked at the number of people who have died over the last 30 years from our invasion, our aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan.”

When the ANSWER coalition initiated a mass march and demonstration in Washington DC in 2019 against Trump’s attempt to impose regime change in Venezuela, Ellsberg was the keynote speaker.

Among his many books was The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. According to Ellsberg, planning for nuclear war was his main work as a military analyst. In May 2021, Ellsberg posted online a classified 1958 document in which he sought another legal battle over press freedom and detailed a Pentagon plan to launch nuclear war if the People’s Republic of China attempted to gain control over Taiwan province had seceded from the mainland after the 1949 revolution. The planners assumed that such a course of action by the USA would result in a reaction from the Soviet Union and thus in World War III.

Ellsberg was a staunch supporter of other “whistleblowers” ​​who exposed the criminality of Pentagon/CIA wars and interventions, including Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. He wore a pink feather boa to represent Chelsea Manning at the LGBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco in 2013 and carried a sign that read “I Was Manning: The Pentagon Papers, 1971.” In 2020, Ellsberg testified against the extradition of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange to the US.

In a 2018 interview, he appealed to other members of the national security apparatus who are aware of criminal acts being planned or carried out:

“My message to them is: don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until the bombs actually fall or thousands more die before you do what I would have done years earlier, in 1964 or even 1961, on the nuclear issue. And that means exposing the truth you know, the dangerous truths that the government is keeping from you, at whatever cost, whatever the risk. Consider doing this because in a war, lives could be at stake. Or in the case of the two existential crises I am talking about, the future of humanity is at stake.”