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A timely film about the vital role of the press in keeping government honest is coming together with a powerhouse cast. Steven Spielberg just said yes to direct Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in The Post, the spec script by Liz Hannah bought last fall by Amy Pascal’s Pascal Pictures. The deals are being negotiated. The film is a drama about the Washington Post’s role in exposing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and how the Post’s editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Kay Graham challenged the federal government over their right to publish them. The film will be co-financed by Fox...

A new TV ad featuring a disabled military veteran blasts President Donald Trump for seeking to repeal Obamacare and for imposing a travel ban that primarily affects Muslims. "You want to be a legitimate president, sir? Then act like one," says the veteran, who according to the ad's sponsor is a Marine who lost a leg while on patrol in Afghanistan. The ad aired for the first time Monday on MSNBC's show "Morning Joe" — which Trump is known to avidly watch — and was produced by the progressive veterans group VoteVets. It lasts just 30 seconds. But in that...

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.

The former editor of the Washington Post who led the paper's coverage of the Watergate scandal and made the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers is dead at 93. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2802484/ben-bradlee-washington-post-editor-led-coverage-watergate-dies-93.html#ixzz3Gpfgm5Gb Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

As most of you have read or seen by now, a journalist and NBC/MSNBC media consultant named William “Bill” Arkin has created quite a stir by viciously insulting American soldiers in Iraq. He wrote at his Washington Post blog, “Early Warning: William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security” column (1/30/07), that “… this NBC (Nightly News) report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer force that thinks it is doing the dirty work” re Iraq. The “report,” according to Arkin, featured “a number of soldiers (who) expressed frustration with...

Forty years after they were famously leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, the Pentagon Papers will be officially released next month at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. The National Archives announced this week that it “has identified, inventoried, and prepared for public access the Vietnam Task Force study, United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, informally known as ‘the Pentagon Papers’.” As a result, 3.7 cubic feet of previously restricted textual materials will be made officially available at the Nixon Library on June 13, the Archives said in a May 10 Federal Register notice. While any release of historical records is welcome, the...

In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg decided to make available to the New York Times (and then to other newspapers) 43 volumes of the Pentagon Papers, the top- secret study prepared for the Department of Defense examining how and why the United States had become embroiled in the Vietnam conflict. But he made another critical decision as well. That was to keep confidential the remaining four volumes of the study describing the diplomatic efforts of the United States to resolve the war. Not at all coincidentally, those were the volumes that the government most feared would be disclosed. In a secret brief...

Alleged WikiLeaks source suffers out of spotlightThe Irish Times - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 Concern is growing over the harsh conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention as he awaits his court martial, writes LARA MARLOWE, Washington Correspondent WHILE JULIAN Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, celebrated his release on bail last week with cocktails before being driven to “mansion arrest” at a 650-acre estate in Sussex, Private First Class Bradley Manning was mouldering away in solitary confinement in the brig at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, deprived of exercise, news or even a sheet or pillow. Assange (39) is preparing...

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...

ABC News has learned that Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has died. On Friday, Holbrooke was rushed to the hospital with a torn aorta. He went through more than 20 hours of surgery. Earlier this evening, speaking at the US State Department, President Obama sang Holbrooke's praises and called him "a tough son of a gun." Holbrooke, 69, was a former ambassador to the United Nations and served as chief negotiator at the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. The New Yorker's George Packer wrote a nice story about Holbrooke last year,...

"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...

Warming Scandal: Despite the incriminating e-mails, administration science adviser John Holdren still thinks man causes global warming. And Sen. Barbara Boxer thinks it's the whistle-blowers who should be arrested. Time was when Barbara Boxer thought it was just fine for the New York Times and Washington Post to spill national military secrets and war plans on their front pages. The people had a right to know where and how they were being led. But we are not dealing here with the Pentagon Papers, the location of terrorist prisons or the surveillance of al-Qaida and its operatives. Boxer, top Democrat on...

WASHINGTON - Bassem Youssef is the FBI's highest-ranking Arab-American agent. He's fluent in Arabic, ran the FBI's offices in Saudi Arabia and is a terrorism expert. In fact, Youssef's undercover work helping to infiltrate the terror organization of the so-called "blind sheik," Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, earned him the intelligence community's most-prestigious award, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. But now, for the first time, Youssef is speaking out against the agency he loves. "I don't believe that the FBI's doing everything it can to combat terrorism," the 18-year FBI veteran tells NBC News.

8:40am PT (11:40am ET): During a break, Edmonds and the attorneys stepped outside. DoJ still a no-show, so the questioning has proceeded, and Edmonds has been able to say "everything that she hasn't been able to say so far, implicating many members of Congress in a criminal conspiracy," according to interviews with Fein and others. Edmonds' attorney, Michael Kohn said: "The Justice Department decided not to show. Therefore, the deposition has gone much more smoothly than we had anticipated." There are apparently a handful of mostly independent and foreign media outlets present outside the NWC. No corporate MSM, from the...

Gobin Stair, artist and the publisher of the Pentagon Papers, and longtime member of the First Congregational Parish Church of Kingston, died Tuesday night in his sleep. He was 96. Stair was a well-known abstract artist, but made a name for himself as publisher of Beacon Press when he decided to publish the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret Defense Department history of the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The 1971 publishing created questions of credibility in the U.S. government and injured the Nixon administration’s war effort.

Anthony J. Russo, a Rand researcher in the late 1960s who encouraged Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers and stood trial with him in the Vietnam War-era case that triggered debates over freedom of the press and hastened the fall of a president, has died. He was 71.

A new Web site has popped up that has the potential to represent the best of the Internet — from the point of view of concerned citizens — and the worst of the Internet — from the point of view of almost all governments.

Daniel Ellsberg must surely support Ahmadinejad getting nukes. There are no two ways about it. In a forthcoming article in Harper’s Magazine, Ellsberg is going to call for moles in the Bush Administration to leak any plans to stop Ahmadinejad’s rush to nukes—presumably to the New York Times. Thousands of people will read Ellsberg’s article, and some will resolve to sabotage American plans to stop rogue regimes with nuclear bombs—not just the Khomeini Armageddon cult in Tehran, but Libya, North Korea, Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela, the Maoists in Nepal, you name it. There’s a logic to this madness: It is Lenin’s...

There are two misconceptions held by many Americans. The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded. The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well. “The Sixties are dead,” wrote columnist George Will (Slamming the Doors, Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991) Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace’ activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay’ rights groups....

Sweetness and Light has noticed that the press has quoted two former counterterrorism experts in defense of Mary McCarthy but omitted one interesting detail, which may or may not be relevant. Here's ABC News report quoting the first expert, Ray McGovern to the effect that McCarthy had a higher duty to "defend the constitution". To supporters, McCarthy is a woman of conviction who exposed actions she believed were against the law."This a matter of principle," said Ray McGovern, a former fellow CIA analyst, "where she said my oath, my promise not to reveal secrets is superceded by my oath to...