|
watch/read/listen: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/30/our_president_is_deceiving_the_american“Our President Is Deceiving the American Public”: Pentagon Papers Whistleblower on President Obama and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq We are joined by a man who played a major role in efforts to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In 1971, the then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. After avoiding a life sentence on espionage charges, Daniel Ellsberg has continued to speak out against US militarism until the present day.
Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower
Rush Transcript <snip>
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dan Ellsberg. In the wake of the surprise visit by President Obama to Afghanistan, your thoughts?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war, just as the Vietnam War became Nixon’s war in November of 1969, just about the time I was copying the Pentagon Papers in hopes of forestalling that, and Johnson made Vietnam his war, Johnson’s war, and McNamara’s war in June of 1965, when I was working for him, when he decided to escalate, an open-ended escalation there, following the previous commitment of Eisenhower and of Kennedy that made it an open-ended war, just as Obama is doing there now, and, I think, with very much the same results in the end, tragic results, especially for the country involved and for the Americans, and with probably the same kinds of pressures on him, actually, as Johnson faced.
AMY GOODMAN: I saw you speak, Dan Ellsberg, here in New York after a production of Top Secret, a very interesting play about not the New York Times and the Pentagon Papers—they were the first to begin to print them but were then enjoined by the Nixon government, and then the Washington Post started to print the Pentagon Papers, and that’s what this was about. But afterwards, you talked about the US ambassador to Afghanistan and how important what Ambassador Eikenberry had to say in these memos and cables that were made public. Can you talk about those?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah. Well, for years now, really since we set out to go into Iraq on much the same kinds of lies in 2002 that sent us into Vietnam when I was in the Pentagon, since then, I’ve been saying to officials in the government, “Don’t do what I did. Do what I wish I had done in ’63 or ’64, before we had entered the war, before the bombs had fallen. Don’t wait, as I did, ’til we were in the war and the war was essentially unstoppable, before telling the truth about the hopelessness, understood within the government, and the impossibility—the unlikelihood of any kind of victory there. But do it now.”
Actually, almost as I—in recent times, that call has been answered. I don’t know whether it was direct or not, but some government official who is now the most dangerous man in America in the eyes of President Obama, I’m sure—I’m sure there’s a Plumbers operation going on right now to find out who leaked the cables, the secret cables, of our ambassador in Kabul, Lieutenant General, retired, Karl Eikenberry, who had been in charge in Afghanistan, and first in charge of training Afghan troops and then in charge of all of our operations in Afghanistan, before McChrystal, and is now our accredited ambassador to Karzai, the head of the so-called government that we’re supporting there now.
..more..
|