1971 -
The day after Tricia Nixon's wedding the Washington Post and the New York Times began printing THE PENTAGON PAPERS. They were leaked by dissenting intelligence specialist Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was on the staff of defence secretary Robert MacNamara when McNamara ordered a fact paper drawn up explaining step by step just how the U.S. managed to get in as big a mess as Vietnam. The papers revealed publically such damaging secrets as the U.S. had been fighting alongside the SouthVietnamese much earlier than the "Tonkin Gulf Incident" of 1965 while saying we were neutral. That the ship that was fired on in the incident (the U.S.S. Maddox) was ordered to violate Vietnamese waters and hopefully provoke a communist attack, and that the opinion of the Pentagon Joint Chiefs was that we knew we couldn't win as early as 1968, yet we stayed in anyway until 1973. McNamara said recently he himself never got around to reading the Pentagon Papers but had a copy in his garage.
Aloha,
I'm really confused here. THIS speech below, this is the Daniel Ellsberg, intelligence specialist, that leaked the Pentagon Papers? Didn't he ever get charged for that? And why is he speaking in foreign countries about our operation plans and how he influenced them?
Am I confused or is this inappropriate?
Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times during the Vietnam War, speaking in Tel Aviv, Israel on 13 October 1996 at a conference chaired by Joseph Rotblat in support of Mordechai Vanunu, the world's longest imprisoned anti-nuclear activist, described what he calls
"the most evil plans that have ever been made in the history of humanity."
Broadcast by Co-op Radio, CFRO Vancouver, on 30 November 1996, from a tape made by Mordechai Briemberg of the Vancouver Committee to free Vanunu.
(Transcribed by David Morgan)
''In 1961 I drafted a question for the president, John F.Kennedy, to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff(JCS). I was in the process of drafting for the Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara, the Kennedy Administration Annual Operating Plans for General Nuclear War. I wrote a twenty-page top-secret draft, which was adopted totally by MacNamara, who sent it to the JCS, thus changing completely the general war plans from those of the Eisenhower Administration. I was very proud of doing that for reasons that you will see in a moment; I thought the Eisenhower plans were disastrous and that those I had drafted were much better. I can still say that they were better, but I fooled myself that they were that much better. They were still disastrous, and I bear that on my conscience. But in the course of drafting these new plans, I was in a very good position as a consultant to pose the following question for the President to give to the JCS:
"If your plans, i.e., the Eisenhower plans, which were still in effect in early 1961, were executed as planned (and weren't disrupted by some typhoon, total incompetence or some pre-emptive attack by the Soviets) how many people would die in the Soviet Union and China?"
Now I actually asked that question believing that they did not have an answer. I had been working with the planners for some time had asked the same question, but they had never seen any such estimate done by the Air Force staff, and I didn't think that it existed. I assumed that they didn't WANT to know how many people they could kill. So I thought that they would either have to waffle and admit that they didn't have an answer, which would be very embarrassing for a bureaucrat and would put them off balance, and less resistive to my revisions, or they would come up with some fast estimate that would be absurdly low, and thus have the same effect.
Actually they did have an answer. It was addressed, "for the President's eyes only," but since I had written the question, they showed it to my eyes. So I held in my hands a very unusual piece of paper, a one-page sheet with a graph on it. It showed the number of people they expected to be killed in the Soviet Union and China alone--which is what I had asked, since I didn't want them to have an excuse for delaying by saying "we don't have the figures for Albania, give us another month."
So I had the graph for the Soviet Union and China. It was an ascending line, a simple graph, starting with the immediate deaths the first day and the deaths from fall-out over the next six months, and the total figure was three hundred and twenty million (320,000,000) dead. So they knew what their plans entailed!
It was obviously a computer model. They had done the calculations, so I figured let's ask the rest then--how about the rest of the Sino-Soviet block?
Well I won't go through the whole thing, but there were 100 million in West Europe if the winds blew the wrong way over our NATO allies; 100 million in East Europe; neutral countries adjacent to the Soviet Union, like Finland, Afghanistan, Austria, Japan were wiped out by fallout from our attacks, without getting into any calculation of what Russian retaliation to our first strike, might have done. So the total body count over the next couple of weeks was about 600 million (six hundred million)--that means one hundred holocausts!
I asked myself how colonels and majors that I drank beer with, saw in the evening, worked with every day, how they could have written such plans. These were not just hypothetical plans--they were the estimates used for the targeting of planes that were on alert all over the world, misssiles, submarines, all the machinery was out there. This was not ten years in the future, this was next week if we went to war. This is what would have happened if we had gone to war over Cuba, which was really possible in 1962, or Berlin in 1961. Six hundred million people!
I thought they were the most evil plans that had ever been made in the history of humanity and I've spent the thirty five years since trying to understand how humans, how Americans, had created such plans and such machinery.''
Daniel Ellsberg, 13 October 1996, Tel Aviv, Israel