Daniel Ellsberg: Time to Drive Out the Bush Regime
Sep 16, 2006
By Daniel Ellsberg
I keep looking at that date on the calendar – Oct. 5. I think of 1969—I was copying the Pentagon Papers with Tony Russo in that month, starting Oct. 1. My intention, however, at that time was to bring them out in connection with something called the Moratorium on Oct. 15, 1969… because on that day … across the country 2 million people marched. Not in any one place; they were counted up and added up because they all walked out, it was a weekday, out of school, out of businesses on that weekday. They met in rallies, heard many speakers—in those days there was great tolerance (well, there still is to some extent) for a lot of speeches. But it was a weekday and they called it the Moratorium because people thought the word “general strike” was too provocative, but that’s what they had in mind.
It was a walkout; in other words it was not business as usual. The president was watching it in the White House, hour by hour, while pretending that he wasn’t. In fact he was in the situation room getting half-hour reports on how many people. They were being counted, in Washington and New York, from a U2
above.
I see in this crowd people who are not all a lot younger than I am. How many people were in the moratorium; look around (applause). Let’s see the hands. I want to ask—how old were you? Often if I ask that questions, some people will say 10 or 2. They were there with their mothers, in toddler strollers and backpacks on their parents’ backs, and they were doing the same job their parents were. Being counted from the air, from reconnaissance vehicles to add up to a number of 2 million.
What they didn’t know was that in fact they were stopping nuclear war. The president had made threats of nuclear war secretly several times starting in May and in August and September, saying that he was prepared to use nuclear weapons on Vietnam. They said that to the Russians and the North Vietnamese directly in Paris. And with 2 million people in the streets, he had to conclude that an ultimatum which was dated for Nov. 1—he was going to carry it out on Nov. 3rd but the date that he gave to his adversaries was Nov. 1st: “If by that time you haven’t met my terms” (which they did not meet and never did meet) “we will take measures of the gravest consequence,” including total bombing of North Vietnam, mining of Haiphong (which he didn’t do in the end until 1972), going into Laos and Cambodia.
(snip)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060916_daniel_ellsberg_drive_out_bush/
Then Ellsberg says he agrees with something Rumsfeld said!
..."the first sentence that I can remember that I agreed with by Donald Rumsfeld. He said that “before America entered WWII was a time when those who warned of a coming crisis—the rise of fascism and Nazism—were ridiculed and ignored... The attack on Iraq is legally indistinguishable from Hitler’s attack on Poland or France or Norway or Russia. Same aggression—pure crime against the peace—for which people were hanged back in Nuremberg."
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