Daniel Ellsberg speaks with Matthew Hoh about Afghanistan on BraveNewConversations.Net
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Daniel Ellsberg interviewed by Barry Shainbaum
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Daniel Ellsberg spoke to Tom Ashbrook about Afghanistan on NPR here.
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[Interviews and videos of Daniel Ellsberg on Vietnam/Afghanistan parallels posted on The Real News Network]
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The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers premieres in the US today, 9/16/09 at Film Forum in NYC (it will remain at Film Forum for a 2-week run)
It premieres in LA on 9/23/09 here.
Here are press reviews: [More. . .]
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by Ann Beeson
Originally published in the Huffington Post
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000 page top secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam, to the press. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War.
John Dean was counsel to President Nixon for 1,000 days and the government’s key witness in the Watergate trials. Both men played crucial, personal roles in the abuse of executive power during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, and both later blew the whistle with brutal honesty to expose the sordid actions of our national leaders during these crises. [More. . .]
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[This is the first installment of my personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.” This online book, being published on Truthdig and other sites, will recount highlights of my six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy, which followed the intervening 11 years of my preoccupation with the Vietnam War. Subsequent installments will appear on Truthdig and here.]
One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.
What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes Only.” [More. . .]
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[Daniel Ellsberg's chapter in Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World, eds. Susan Griffin, Carin Carrington and Howard Teich, UC Press, forthcoming; written May 2007]
Long after the ending of the Cold War, the chance that some nuclear weapons will kill masses of innocent humans somewhere, before very long, may well be higher than it was before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
One phase of the Nuclear Age, the period of superpower arms race and confrontation, has indeed come to a close (though the possibility of all-out, omnicidal exchange of alert forces triggered by a false alarm remains, inexcusably, well above zero). But another dangerous phase now looms, the era of nuclear proliferation and with it, an increased likelihood of regional nuclear wars, accidents, and nuclear terrorism. And the latter prospect is posed not just by “rogue” states or sub-state terrorists but by the United States, which has both led by example for sixty years of making nuclear first-use threats that amount to terrorism and may well be the first or among the first to carry out such threats.
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[This paper was originally presented at The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, a conference organized by the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, in partnership with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in September, 2007 in San Franciso. It appears as Chapter Four in The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, ed. David Krieger]
The chance that some nuclear weapon will kill masses of innocent humans somewhere, before very long, may well be higher than it was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. One phase of the Nuclear Age, the period of superpower arms race and confrontation, has indeed come to a close, for now. But another dangerous phase now looms, the era of nuclear proliferation and with it an increased likelihood of regional nuclear wars and nuclear terrorism. This prospect is enhanced not just by “rogue” states or sub-state terrorists but above all by the United States. [More. . .]
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