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THE RETURN OF THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA
By Kevin Stoda, Wiesbaden , Germany IN EXILE
Well, I'm sitting at my computer in Germany with my wife about 15,000 kilometers away in the Philippines .
On Democracy Now, I'm listening to the wife of Daniel Ellsburg, Patricia Ellsburg, speak of how U.S. government officials had spoke in terms of torture in terms of bombing whole populations in Laos and South East Asia in the late 1960s. She learned this all just a few days before her husband, Daniel Ellsburg sent the Pentagon Papers to many American newspapers.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/16/the_most_dangerous_man_in_america
Today, Amy Goodman was interviewing Patricia Ellsburg on her memories. Mrs. Ellsburg responded"it really struck--the pivotal moment, perhaps, in my adult life was the time when Daniel said, I think that I want you to read the papers.' He had protected me, because it was top secret. He didn't want my fingerprints on the copies. And I'm considering putting out the papers,because he knew that Nixon was going to expand the war and that the peace--the peace plan was not going to work. So this is our first year of marriage, first few months of marriage. And I was thirty-two, and I had spent a lot of years looking for Mr. Right. I had not been married before. And I'm reading documents that are horrifying to me.
THE LANGUAGE OF TORTURERS
Mrs. Ellsburg stated, as she read through these documents, "Amy, I saw something that Dan hadn't seen, that in the language that was being used by the leaders of our country, they were using words like one more turn of the screw, ratchet up the water-drip technique, and much phrasing, much, much language of torturers. And I was horrified at the indifference to human suffering of both Americans and Vietnamese, their indifference to Congress, to the American public, the manipulations. And so, Dan said, Should I put these out? And I said, with tears in my eyes, These have to get out to the American public, knowing that my beloved husband, who I still love after forty years--he's still my hero--might go to prison for the rest of his life. And I look back at that, and I am really proud. I'm really proud of--I was not groomed to be chopping top secrets off documents as we were about to publish--to copy them so that they could be given out to more newspapers."
Daniel and Patricia Ellsburg are out doing interviews at this time, 40 years after the release of the famous Pentagon Papers, because they see a big ferocious repeat of what they witnessed in misguided war-making in Afghanistan today. Moreover, a new film about their lives in the times of the Nixon-Johnson-Kennedy-Eisenhower cover-ups is coming out soon. The film is called, "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA".
On Democracy Now, Daniel Ellsburg said, "I look at this film, and I watch the bombs falling, and all I can see in my mind are the bombs, the same bombs, falling over Afghanistan , or Vietnamistan, and Iraq right now. And we're really facing, at this moment, a crisis of decision that's just like the one that's in the film, which I failed at the time, where the President is doing something that I feel will be a disaster, and I kept my mouth shut about it, the change from 70,000 men in the spring of '65 to an open-ended commitment, starting with another 50,000, which I knew was on the way to hundreds of thousands. I didn't tell about that, and nor did anyone else. There was a lot of dissent in the administration about that, but we were overruled. We saluted Clark Clifford, Vice President Humphrey. Again, we have a vice president who apparently is against the application, another parallel. James Jones, the military man, can see what I can see and anybody can see, who has memories of Vietnam : there is no success at the end of this tunnel. There is only a stalemate, which could persist indefinitely."
In short, after 40 years of mediocrity, the city of Washington DC needs to see that whistleblowers are needed more than ever, right now, Americans!
Daniel Ellsburg said he wished the film was out in the theaters of Washington , D.C. already. "We need people to put out, to tell the truth, and to do it, not the way I did, not after the escalation, not after the bombs have fallen, but right now. Right now. And for the Congress to hold the hearings that will entertain those people."
Good luck America , you need more and better whistle blowers who can turn the country around.
