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Robert Ellsberg speaks on whistleblowing, truth-telling and the Pentagon Papers Oct 2, 2019 by Heidi Schlumpf JusticePolitics The autumn of 1969 has been on Robert Ellsberg's mind lately, as the 50th anniversary of a life-changing request from his father approaches. A half century ago, as a 13-year-old, Ellsberg agreed to help his dad photocopy documents from a government report he had worked on. Those documents, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, revealed the United States' role in the build-up to the Vietnam War and the lies told to the American public and to Congress about U.S. actions...

“We’re going to blow ourselves to kingdom come,” the ‘Star Trek’ franchise director warns, 40 years after his ABC TV movie terrified viewers when it depicted a fictional nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.Nicholas Meyer, director of ABC’s groundbreaking 1983 TV movie The Day After, is set to executive produce Paul Jay’s How to Stop a Nuclear War feature documentary, based on the book Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by the late Daniel Ellsberg. The Day After, which aired Nov. 20, 1983 on ABC, vividly depicted a fictional full-scale nuclear war between the U.S....

Deeply disturbed by the accounting of American deceit in Vietnam, he approached The New York Times. The disclosures that followed rocked the nation. Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who after experiencing a sobbing antiwar epiphany on a bathroom floor made the momentous decision in 1971 to disclose a secret history of American lies and deceit in Vietnam, what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, died on Friday at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife and children said in a statement.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is set to be sent to Congress on Thursday, but the fight to get the full, unredacted, or at least minimally redacted, report is already fiercely underway. Attorney General William Barr and his team have spent the last few weeks carving away at the nearly 400-page report and proclaiming varying degrees of exoneration for President Donald Trump. At the same time, Democrats and others have been making moves to ensure that Trump loyalists don't hide the potentially damaging parts for the president forever. But if all else fails,...

Author Jerome Corsi, who was questioned by the Mueller probe about his relationship with Wikileaks, reacts to the arrest of Julian Assange on FBN's "Trish Regan Primetime," saying the Wikileaks founder is being unjustly prosecuted. "This is another attack on journalism," Corsi said about Assange's arrest. "in 2013 the Obama Justice Department decided not to indict Julian Assange over these Chelsea Manning issues because they said it would be tantamount to indicting the New York Times of the Washington Post. As a journalist, Julian Assange has a right to publish even stolen materials." "The New York Times and Washington Post,...

Rocky Anderson, it turns out, is not stepping aside quietly. Joining a list of liberal luminaries, including Noam Chomsky and George McGovern, Salt Lake City's outgoing mayor submitted a letter Friday that calls on the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the Bush administration for abuses of power. The letter, signed by 18 political and cultural figures, asks House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., to hold hearings on alleged violations of the law under President Bush that include kidnapping and torture, warrantless wiretapping, a war of aggression against Iraq and disseminating false propaganda to deceive the American people. It came...

Of the making of Washington movies, there is no end. Kohelet said this in Ecclesiastes, I think. Or maybe it was Gene Shalit on the Today Show. It’s a truism in any case. Steven Spielberg’s latest entry in the genre, The Post, is for many Washingtonians the most powerful example in the long line. When the movie opened here in late December, there were reports of audiences cheering lustily and even dissolving in tears at the movie’s end, as if they were watching a speech by President Obama. The local paper ran news articles about it, along with numberless feature...

‘The Post,” the new movie starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, is three things: a film about the Pentagon Papers, classified documents about the Vietnam War that were leaked to the media in 1971, a film about the press and Donald Trump, and, finally, an indictment about Harvey Weinstein and sexism in Hollywood. According to Streep, who is interviewed on December 14 in the Washington Post, the film is mostly about sexism. Streep says that the new film came from a place of “grievance” about sexism.  “People were really scared and demoralized [after Trump was elected],” Streep told the Post. But...

Meryl Streep Admits She Reads Drudge, Watches Fox News By Paula Bolyard December 15, 2017 n an interview to promote her new movie, "The Post," Hollywood legend Meryl Streep discussed her media habits and admitted she reads Drudge and Fox News, along with The New York Times. Streep, along with director Steven Spielberg and several of the film's collaborators, discussed the new movie that tells the story of the Pentagon Papers through the eyes of Washington Post reporter Katharine Graham. Never shy about her left-leaning politics, Streep discussed a wide variety of topics with The Hollywood Reporter, including the recent...

The throngs of "anti-war" marchers heading to DC to attend the September 24th rally don't know that they are being used. CodePINK and United For Peace and Justice are both prodigy of Global Exchage, the 501(3)c non-profit formed by Global's Medea Benjamin. It's the "Benjamins For Benjamin Weekend"!. Using the attraction of a Hate America event to lure attendees, Code Pink's Medea Benjamin's cash cow, Global Exchange, has scheduled one of it's "Green Festivals" for the same weekend and is running it in competition with the anti-war events scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. How convenient? How many people will...

Unfortunately, it appears that when Elizabeth Edwards speaks some people actually listen. This sad fact might be innocuous enough if the aspiring Second Lady were trading parenting or dieting tips. But instead semi-reformed former Deaniacs and Kucinich Kids seem to have latched onto Edwards' recent promise to a worried supporter that post-election riots will not wrack the nation -- so long as the Kerry-Edwards ticket walks away with it. The suggestion, of course, is that there indeed will be riots if John F. Kerry's boyhood dreams of ascending to his rightful position as ruler of the universe are squashed by...

If Rush Limbaugh can see this far in the future, shouldn't Rush, not Dorothy Day, be considered for sainthood? Good religion is good politics. Can America integrate Heaven and Earth? Here's the Bible-thumping sermonette that defines the battle tactics.

Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, says the United States is on the verge of becoming a police state as evidenced by the National Security Agency’s data collection programs and the treatment of secret document leakers Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. “We have not only the capability of a police state, but certain beginnings of it right now,” Ellsberg told The Huffington Post Wednesday. “And I absolutely agree with Edward Snowden. It’s worth a person’s life, prospect of assassination, or life in prison or life in exile—it’s worth that to try to restore our liberties...

Cenk Uygur can't figure out why accused Army leaker Bradley Manning isn't being treated like a "hero". Seriously. [snip] On his MSNBC show this evening, Cenk whined as to why Manning isn't being accorded the "hero" treatment that Daniel Ellsberg received from some for his leak of the Pentagon Papers back in the Vietnam day. View video here.

WASHINGTON — Even as prosecutors build a case against the Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" has been selected as one of 18 films that will tour the world this year as part of its "American Documentary Showcase" program. -snip- Among the other documentaries chosen for this year's showcase are...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even as prosecutors build a case against the Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" has been selected as one of 18 films that will tour the world this year as part of its "American Documentary Showcase" program. Ellsberg, whom the film portrays as a whistleblower of conscience,...

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

WikiLeaks' Selective MoralityDespite its claims of uncovering bad behavior by governments around the world, WikiLeaks chiefly targets the U.S. military. There has never been anything quite like WikiLeaks in American military history. We are engaged in a great experiment to see whether the U.S. military can still persist in a conflict when it knows that any and all of its private communications can become public — and will be selectively aired and hyped by people with a preconceived bias against it. Had the public known in real time from periodic media leaks about operational disasters surrounding the planning for the...

"Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg _____________________________________________________________ "As a response to the leaks, the Nixon administration began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally. Aides Egil Krogh and David Young under John Ehrlichman's supervision created the 'White House Plumbers,' which would later lead to the Watergate burglaries."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#Fallout _____________________________________________________________ So what is Daniel Ellsberg...

The famous hotel could be open for bids next week The Watergate Hotel made famous by a presidential scandal is expected to be on the auction block next week. Alex Cooper Auctioneers is announcing that it will take bids Tuesday on the Washington landmark. [snip] The Watergate complex was made famous by the 1972 burglary that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.