Institute for Public Accuracy
Forty years ago today, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, top-secret government documents that showed a pattern of governmental deceit about the Vietnam War. In the weeks that followed the Nixon White House worked to stop the Times and other newspapers from publishing the Papers, with the Supreme Court ultimately ruling against prior restraint. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers and later that month got them to Sen. Mike Gravel, who late in the evening of June 29 to June 30 entered them into the Congressional Record; he was conducting a filibuster against the draft.
MIKE GRAVEL, mg at mikegravel.us, http://www.mikegravel.us
Gravel is a former two-term senator from Alaska; his books include A Political Odyssey: The Rise of American Militarism and One Man’s Fight to Stop It. He said today: “It’s particularly ridiculous that the government is putting out a version of the Pentagon Papers now because the government approach to Ellsberg and myself is being echoed in their approach to Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the WikiLeaks revelations. Our oaths bind us to loyalty to the Constitution and not to government officials who lie us into wars.”
See:
Footage of Gravel from 1971 placing the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record
Gravel talking about publishing the Pentagon Papers with Ellsberg in 2007
Today’s Guardian has a piece by Ellsberg titled “Why the Pentagon Papers Matter Now,” which states: “The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers — the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 — comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)
“In other words, today’s declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That’s because we’re mired again in wars — especially in Afghanistan — remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don’t have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it’s likely to go.
“What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We’re not likely to get them; they probably don’t yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad substitute, definitely worth learning from.”
Ellsberg recently said: “ALL the crimes he [Nixon] committed against me — which forced his resignation facing impeachment — are now legal. That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the U.S., and authorizing a White House hit squad to ‘incapacitate me totally’ (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders, they have all become legal.
Whistleblowers: “Rescind Obama’s ‘Transparency Award’ Now!”
Over 20 noted whistleblowers have just released a petition calling for rescinding a “Transparency Award” President Obama recently received. The signatories including Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers; former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern; former Pentagon analyst Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski; and former National Security Agency analyst Russ Tice.
SIBEL EDMONDS, sibeledmonds at boilingfrogspost.com, boilingfrogspost.com
COLEEN ROWLEY, rowleyclan at earthlink.net
Edmonds and Rowley drafted the petition. Edmonds is a former FBI official and whistleblower. Rowley is a former FBI Special Agent and Division Counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures and was named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002.
The petition begins: “On March 28, 2011, President Obama was given a ‘transparency award’ from five ‘open government’ organizations: OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and OpenTheGovernment.org. Ironically — and quite likely in response to growing public criticism regarding the Obama administration’s lack of transparency — heads of the five organizations gave their award to Obama in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House. If the ceremony had been open to the press, it is likely that reporters would have questioned the organizations’ proffered justification for the award, in contrast to the current reality:
* “President Obama has not decreased but has dramatically increased governmental secrecy! According to a new report to the president by the Information Security Oversight Office — the federal agency that provides oversight of the government’s security classification system — the cost of classification for 2010 has reached over $10.17 billion. That’s a 15 percent jump from the previous year, and the first time ever that secrecy costs have surpassed $10 billion. Last month, ISOO reported that the number of original classification decisions generated by the Obama administration in 2010 was 224,734 — a 22.6 percent jump from the previous year. See ‘The Price of Secrecy, Obama Edition.’
* “There were 544,360 requests for information last year under the Freedom of Information Act to the 35 biggest federal agencies — 41,000 requests more than the year before. Yet the bureaucracy responded to 12,400 fewer requests than the prior year, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.
* “Obama has invoked baseless and unconstitutional executive secrecy to quash legal inquiries into secret illegalities more often than any predecessor. The list of this President’s invocations of the ‘state secrets privilege’ has already resulted in shutting down lawsuits involving the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping — Jewel vs. NSA and Shubert vs. Obama; extraordinary rendition and assassination — Anwar al-Aulaqi; and illegal torture — Binyam Mohamed.
* “Ignoring his campaign promise to protect government whistleblowers, Obama’s presidency has amassed the worst record in U.S. history for persecuting, prosecuting and jailing government whistleblowers and truth-tellers. President Obama’s behavior has been in stark contrast to his campaign promises which included live streaming meetings online and so forth, and rewarding whistleblowers. Obama’s Department of Justice is twisting the 1917 Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks — more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined.
* “The Obama DOJ’s prosecution of former NSA official Thomas Drake who, up till June 9, faced 35 years in prison for having blown the whistle on the NSA’s costly and unlawful warrantless monitoring of American citizens typifies the abusive practices made possible through expansive secrecy agreements and threats of prosecution.
* “President Obama has set a powerful and chilling example for potential whistleblowers through the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning, whose guilt he has also publicly stated prior to any trial by his, Obama’s, military subordinates.
* “Obama is the only president who has reenacted Fahrenheit 451 by actually having his agency collect and burn a book due to a never-justified classification excuse: Lt. Col Tony Shaffer’s -Operation Dark Heart. …”
For the full petition and list of signatories, see: http://takeawardback.org
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