RIP, Daniel Ellsberg

Noted journalist Daniel Ellsberg, best known for exposing what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, has died. He was 92 years old. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier this year, and died early on Friday morning.

Of course, the Pentagon Papers were the series of over 7,000 documents that exposed how lies from the highest ranking American government officials - including five Presidents - led to the escalation of the Vietnam War. He went ahead with this task even at great personal risk, feeling that it would be best for the country to know the truth.

As it turns out, he was lucky. Nixon had been furious with the release of these papers, and initially wanted to come down hard on Ellsberg. However, Nixon was of course soon drowning in a huge controversy of his own making, namely the Watergate scandal, which largely compromised his credibility in almost every aspect of his presidency. 

Here were Ellsberg's own thoughts on how he largely got away with releasing such high profile papers:

“Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from [President] Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle,” he says in a Zoom interview from his home near Berkeley, Calif. on May 8. “There was no way to predict that.”

The Pentagon Papers clearly undermined the credibility and honesty of the American government, collectively. It was a series of almost earth-shaking events which did so, including the Kennedy assassination and the subsequent Warren Report, the official account of it, as well as the various news reports of successful execution of the conflict in Vietnam, even though the news reports which Americans watched each evening seemed to tell a different story. There were the Pentagon Papers, and of course, there was Watergate. Also, those things combined with the images of violent police reactions to peaceful protesters during both the Civil Rights movement and antiwar protests, as well as the Oil Crisis, seemed to collectively place the United States in much more compromised position than it had been prior to all of that, during what is commonly referred to as "America's Golden Age," prior to the Kennedy assassination in November of 1963. 

Ellsberg may have gotten off relatively lightly. Yet in an article about him published just weeks before he died, knowing that he was dying, he warned future whistleblowers:

“Don’t do it under any delusion that you’ll have a high chance of ending up like Daniel Ellsberg.” 

Still, he urges people to do it, although he warns not to expect too much, either from the government, or from the people themselves:

“I would caution people against thinking that any revelation by itself, no matter how spectacular — how amazing, how shocking, and extraordinary it is — would necessarily evoke a reaction, from the media or Congress, or that people will react to it,” Ellsberg tells me. “But it can work. My case shows that probably more than any other case.”

Despite the dangers, Ellsberg feels that there has never been a time when whistleblowers are needed more than right now:

“The need for whistleblowing in my area of so-called national security is that we have a secret foreign policy, which has been very successfully kept secret and essentially mythical,” he says. “I’m saying there’s never been more need for whistleblowers … There’s always been a need for many more than we have. At the same time, it’s become more and more dangerous to be a whistleblower. There’s little doubt about that.”

He feels that Americans have become too convinced that their country is basically almost always in the right, that the country is a heroic presence in the world:

During the course of our hour- and-20-minute interview, Ellsberg contended America still runs a “covert empire” around the world, embodied in the U.S. domination of NATO. He believes Washington deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by pushing its seat of power eastward toward Russia’s borders; that the mainstream media is “complicit” in allowing the government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold; and that any notion Americans are ever the “good guys” abroad “has always been false.”  

“I think very few Americans are aware of what our actual influence in the former colonial world has been, and that is to keep it colonial,” Ellsberg says. “King Charles III [of Britain] is no longer an emperor, as I understand it, but for all practical purposes Joe Biden is … Here’s a point I haven’t made to anyone but would like to in my last days here. Very simply, how many Americans would know any one of the following cases, let alone three or four of them?” Ellsberg then rattles off a series of U.S. orchestrated coups, most of them fairly well documented, starting with Iran in 1953, and then in Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Chile.

Indeed, whistleblowers willing to put themselves at risk in order to provide the American people with information on their own government and expose the lies and corruption which we all know is there are few and far between. We could use more journalists like Ellsberg, who showed us how it's done.

RIP, Daniel Ellsberg. 

Daniel Ellsberg Is Dying. And He Has Some Final Things to Say. By MICHAEL HIRSH  06/04/2023 

The iconic whistleblower reflects on the urgent need for others to follow in his footsteps.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/04/daniel-ellsberg-final-advice-00099639

Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower dies at 92 by Al Jazeera News, 16 Jun 2023:

Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower dies at 92 Ellsberg exposed US government deception on the US war in Vietnam and advocated for whistleblower rights.16 Jun 2023

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/16/daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-whistleblower-dies-at-92