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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...

In the current debate over judicial nominations, some commentators claim Republicans such as myself are misrepresenting history by suggesting the current filibuster tactics of the Democrats are unprecedented. These commentators cite the 1968 nomination of Abe Fortas to be chief justice of the United States as an example of how Republicans once attempted to block a judicial nomination on the Senate floor. I welcome the opportunity to respond to this claim, because the more Americans learn about the history of judicial nominations, the more they will realize how terribly off-track our confirmation process has become. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson...

BALTIMORE (AP) _ Carrying puppets, signs and roses, hundreds accompanied a pickup truck carrying the coffin of peace activist Philip Berrigan as it wound its way Monday through the rough neighborhood where he once served as a priest. Family members stood in the back of the truck along with the plain wooden coffin, hand-painted with red roses, as bagpipers played ``Amazing Grace'' while the procession marched to the funeral at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in west Baltimore. ``He was bigger than life _ extremely human and heroic and committed,'' said actor Martin Sheen, who marched in the funeral...

Long after the war was over, after the fighting had ended, after Bunker was dead, and Abrams too, after the boat people and all the other sad detritus of a lost cause, the eldest of General Abram's three sons, all Army officers, was on the faculty of the Command & General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. There someone reminded him of what Robert Shaplen had once said, that his father deserved a better war. 'He didn't see it that way,' young Creighton responded at once. 'He thought the Vietnamese were worth it.' -A Better War is no greater analytical tool...

The Republican National Committee’s director of security said that the explanation of the purported January 6 pipe bomb plot, and the response by authorities, “make no sense whatsoever.” Kenneth Capolino, a former Capitol Police officer who went on to work as the RNC’s director of security, was the man who personally alerted Capitol Police to the bomb near the RNC and managed the emergency response. Capolino told The Daily Wire, in his first public remarks on the incident, that it looked like a stereotypical IED, or improvised explosive device, that is used by law enforcement in training sessions. “Any of...

Pete Mongilardi’s wife, Patricia Perrine, comforts their daughter, Julie Sims, as they talk about the man they lost more than 40 years ago. Bill Tiernan/The Virginian-Pilot The bones were broken and weathered, their edges softened by three decades of tropical rain: four pieces, the largest about 3 inches, tip to tip. They were mixed in the silty loam of a Vietnamese hillside with the wreckage of a Navy jet. Most of the debris had been dragged off by scavengers, but what remained included pieces of belt, parachute and boot sole. The pilot had not ejected.A team sifting through the...

There Was More Truth In The Vietnam War Than The Ukraine War As I See It "At least Walter Cronkite was able to tell us how many died by government estimate each week during the Vietnam War..." Liberal Democrats Want To Fuel The War In Ukraine-New CNN Poll... Russia is so bad what a country prosecuting and persecuting political opponents heck they don't that here in the USA... The Bankruptcy Of Our Nation The Bankruptcy Of Our Leaders... The credit rating of the United States is downgraded and our leaders live in denial... And they distract us with a crank...

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.

Henry Kissinger turns 100 on May 27. How should he be remembered? For me, he is the American who, more than any other individual, lost the Vietnam War. But today Kissinger is a demigod among our foreign policy elite. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger ranks in the top echelon of notable Americans. On issues like the war in Ukraine and even artificial intelligence, our elite wants to know: "What does Henry recommend?" Kissinger's rise to eminence began with his secret negotiation of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement ostensibly ending the...

Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America's South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists? Here's the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that "immoral" war against a communist takeover: There's no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It's crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder...

A newly restored documentary spotlights her despicable Team Communism cheerleading. Back around the time Jane Fonda was giving aid and comfort to America’s Communist enemies in North Vietnam, yukking it up with anti-aircraft gunners who shot down our troops — I wonder if there are any laws against that sort of thing — she also headlined an anti-U.S.O. tour. Despising the actual U.S.O. for its policy of giving aid and comfort to American troops, Fonda went on the road with a hippie rebuttal to bolster the chances of the North Vietnamese Stalinists who, after the war turned out the way...

In his last few days as President, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a televised speech in which he warned the nation about the dangers of .. the “military-industrial complex” (MIC). ... Eisenhower wisely delivered his speech warning the nation about the MIC when he was leaving office .. not wanting to anger the CIA. ... written for Facui. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Rambo (First Blood) one of the greatest action adventure movies of all time, but more than that, the quintessential film about PTSD and its traumatic effects on combat veterans. The film stars Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo, Brian Dennehy as Sheriff Will Teasle and Richard Crenna as Colonel Sam Trautman. It was directed by Ted Kotcheff and the screenplay was written by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone. With the Ghosts of Vietnam haunting America in 1982, the film opens with John Rambo walking down a lonely road in the Pacific...

The Raskins have been in politics and controversy for a long time. Now the Democrat family is caught hiding stock transactions which is against the law. Their excuse is sickening. Rep. Jamie Raskin is a nasty Democrat Representative in the US House. He and his family have been involved in shady actions and now have been caught in some more. Raskin’s father was college professor Marcus Raskin who was indicted for conspiracy to resist the Vietnam war effort. …he was indicted for conspiracy to obstruct the Vietnam War effort by encouraging young men to resist the draft. He coauthored a...

Ukraine and Taiwan are proxy fights over the soul of American foreign policy: does it exist to protect America's security interests, or everyone else's?If you thought for one moment that the embarrassing multi-decade debacle in Afghanistan would lead to some soul-searching from the failed interventionists responsible for America’s 21st-century Vietnam, think again. Instead of taking a step back to understand exactly why and how their grandiose plans to use the mightiest military in history to impose a top-down, secular, Western-style democracy didn’t quite pan out, they’re doubling down on failure.When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail, and when you’re...

In the past few decades, there have been several undeniable trends. First, the power of government at all levels, from all three branches, has increased dramatically. Simultaneously, the quality of life for ordinary Americans, especially those living in cities, has decreased significantly. Thus, as ordinary citizens have ceded more power and control to government “experts” the living conditions in our country have deteriorated considerably. The American “dream” of upward mobility and a better standard of living than the previous generation is now impossible for many young couples. Our country’s working-class citizens are finding it more difficult to survive economically. These...

Last Days in Vietnam: A Moral Obligation With just 24 hours in which to complete an evacuation of Americans still in the embassy in Saigon, Ambassador Martin decides to airlift as many South Vietnamese as possible to safety from the advancing North Vietnamese Army, in this video adapted from American Experience: Last Days in Vietnam.

Are there parallels between the anti-war, hippies of the 1960s and today’s social justice warriors? Are there valuable lessons we can learn from the past, both cultural and spiritual, that will give us insight for today? Growing up in the 60s (I was born in 1955), I lived through the anti-war movement. But for me, being a few years younger than the activists, that era was all about rock music and drugs. Giving the “peace” sign was just something we hippies did. “Peace, man,” we would say while holding up two fingers. Our mantra was, “Make love not war.” As...

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...

Welcome to the weekend the new lockdowns announced in places like France and Germany in recent days keep Big Business open with big factories and Big Government open with schools while many suffer from it... In this Corporatist world Stalinist purging of the "undesirable" elements and the challenge to remember Pastor Niemoller's words: "first they came for" And they're going after all kinds of people like Piers Corbyn brother of Jeremy Corbyn arrested for organizing a rally opposing the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK and now of course the former Labor Party leader getting suspended from his party for saying...