Free Republic

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s papers and to the...

ransomnote: 10 minute video interview with former CIA agent Frank Snepp circa 1983. TRANSCRIPT BELOW.On X Jan 2, 2024 TRANSCRIPT BEGINS~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Frank Snepp: Once again I want to make it perfectly clear that we were not hiring these reporters, they were not operating as our spies or as our dupes. But, in a war situation, when there are so few sources of information, a reporter may rely on a CIA contact, and he becomes vulnerable.In Saigon, if I planted a piece information with a reporter, I would ordinarily then try to create an environment in which he could not check the...

The Post & Email has received tonight a decclassified FBI report admitted in evidence in the case brought against W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller by President Jimmy Carter’s U.S. Attorney General, Mr. Griffin B. Bell. This document was obtained by an American citizen, who wished to remain anonymous, via a FOIA request. Mr. W. Mark  Felt is none other than the informant who spoke with reporters from the Washington Post, exposing the Watergate Scandal:  who went by the name “Deep Throat” a fact that points to his political neutrality in American politics.What is not know about Mr. Felt...

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.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former government analyst who leaked a trove of classified documents that became known as the “Pentagon Papers” and has lived near Berkeley for more than four decades, announced that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a Facebook post Thursday, Ellsberg wrote that doctors told him that he has inoperable pancreatic cancer, and estimated he has three to six months to live. Ellsberg, 91, has decided to forgo chemotherapy.

New Pentagon Documents Point To COVID-19’s Laboratory Origin as a Chinese Bioweapon and U.S. Government Complicity As described in a Gateway Pundit article last year, for over 15 years China has conducted biowarfare research on genetically-engineered viruses coupled to a vaccine-production program to protect its own military from those China-made bioweapons. Hold on to that thought for a moment. The just-released memorandum written on August 21, 2021, by U.S. Marine Major Joseph Murphy to the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is highly revealing, both for what it says and for what it doesn’t say. Major Murphy’s...

Iran, Turkey, and Venezuela's Super Facilitator: Who Is Slex Saab? On June 12, Alex Nain Saab Morán, a Colombian businessman of Lebanese  descent, was arrested at Amílcar Cabral International airport in Cape Verde. This was a huge blow to the Maduro regime’s illicit networks, as Saab is a key facilitator, involved in alleged corrupt dealings and money laundering in Venezuela since 2004.  His arrest was made after years of investigations on behalf of the U.S. and Colombia to uncover a myriad of shell companies that Saab; his business partner, Alvaro Pulido Vargas; and family members set up. Considered a fugitive in Colombia,...

Neil Sheehan, the Vietnam War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who obtained the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times, leading the government for the first time in American history to get a judge to block publication of an article on grounds of national security, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 84. Susan Sheehan, his wife, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease. Mr. Sheehan, who covered the war from 1962 to 1966 for United Press International and The Times, was also the author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in...

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...

EUGENE — The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War called for government insiders to provide similar classified documents about the war in Iraq. Daniel Ellsberg, 73, said federal insiders owe a "higher allegiance'' to the Constitution, the public and U.S. soldiers in Iraq than to their government bosses. He acknowledges that whistle-blowers risk personal setbacks, such as losing their jobs, but urged them to act nonetheless. "I'm asking them to ask themselves whether their highest duty to this country really consists in keeping secrets of an administration that has acted like this ... in protecting lies,...

The jungles of Viet Nam were the reality for over 54,000 deaths of America’s soldiers, but the Nam war also may be the epitome of stupidity for politicians who turned a US victory into an agonizing defeat! An important book appearing on bookshelves of an American legion post details just what went wrong and it was written by the son of John H. Richardson, Sr., the senior CIA station chief in Saigon. Much maligned after news stories popped up in homeland newspapers, written by real fly-by reporters, the Saigon headquarters of the CIA chief became the boiling point for palace...

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...

When Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst, leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, it created one of the most significant newspaper stories -- and battles -- of the century. One thing it did not do was prevent the Vietnam War, although it may have shortened it. Now he is calling on officials within the government to leak "the Pentagon Paper of the Middle East" to modern reporters, to short-circuit another possible war. Ellsberg's challenge is found in the October issue of Harper's magazine, to appear next week. E&P has obtained an advance copy. The article is titled, "The...

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,...

The former Democratic senator who entered the classified “Pentagon Papers” into the Congressional Record, making them public, says House Intelligence Committee Republicans are cowards if they let the executive branch block release of a memo on alleged surveillance abuse. Former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska said Republicans on the committee would demonstrate “the height of cowardice” if they abandon efforts to release the memo after voting to do so Monday evening.

I have some personal knowledge regarding the movie The Post and its subject matter, the Pentagon Papers. At the time the Pentagon Papers began to be published in the summer of 1971, my father was highly placed in the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department and participated in the decision-making process regarding prosecution of the Pentagon Papers cases. I have a specific recollection around that time of my father at the breakfast table with the family, on several mornings, suddenly breaking out in a cursing rage. I was perplexed by this behavior, but after a while, a pattern emerged....

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 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...

Based on a true story, The Post follows the unlikely partnership between The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of a major American newspaper, and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), as they race to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents.

For years Americans' right to privacy, as granted by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, has come under threat as the country's surveillance systems have grown. After intelligence leaks by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, however, the NSA's domestic dragnet is finally getting the attention that many people feel it deserves.