Daniel Ellsberg Talks About Whistleblowing, the Pervasiveness Of Official Lies, and the Dangers of the Espionage Act
In an interview with "Useful Idiots," Daniel Ellsberg talks about official deceptions, and how he was upheld as the "good" whistleblower to disparage the likes of Ed Snowden and Julian Assange
“On Tuesday morning, August 4th, 1964,” writes Daniel Ellsberg in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, “a courier came in my out office with an urgent cable for my boss. He had been running.”
A former Marine with a PhD from Harvard in Decision Theory, Ellsberg had joined the Pentagon as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, who himself was perhaps the closest advisor to Secretary Robert McNamara. Ellsberg, in other words, was the right hand of the right hand, of the man who would become known as the chief architect of the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg’s first day on August 4th, 1964 proved to be a historic one. His boss McNaughton was down the hall with McNamara, so the panting courier handed Ellsberg the note and left. He opened it and found it was from Captain John J. Herrick, the commodore of a two-destroyer flotilla in the Gulf of Tonkin, o…
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