Pentagon Papers

[John Kowalski]

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Has anyone seen this documentary? It received an Oscar nomination last night.



Some researchers believe that JFK's assassination is linked to the Vietnam war, does anyone know if the Pentagon Papers discusses JFK's intentions regarding Vietnam?



John Kowalski

[Paul Rigby]

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Has anyone seen this documentary? It received an Oscar nomination last night.

Some researchers believe that JFK's assassination is linked to the Vietnam war, does anyone know if the Pentagon Papers discusses JFK's intentions regarding Vietnam?

John Kowalski

John,

The finest thing I've seen on the PP is Peter Dale Scott's dissenting essay in the Chomsky edited (?) collection of same which came with, I hope I'm right in saying, the Gravel edition (vol 5, again from memory). It makes an overwhelming case for the entire project being a CIA whitewash of its role in facilitating the US invasion of Vietnam. If you read nothing else on the subject, read this, it's a tour de force.

Paul

[Phil Dragoo]

http://www.peterdalescott.net/B-IV.html

Amplified excerpts from the 1976 recension (B.5a) of my 1971 essay "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers" (C.14).

http://www.history-matters.com/essays/vi...am1971.htm

[Paul Rigby]

http://www.peterdalescott.net/B-IV.html

Amplified excerpts from the 1976 recension (B.5a) of my 1971 essay "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers" (C.14).

http://www.history-matters.com/essays/vi...am1971.htm

Happy is the website where you can rely on one or more of its readers to provide such links on cue. Thanks, Phil.

[Paul Rigby]

It seemed very curious to me, too...and funny. Still does:

http://www.maebrussell.com/Articles%20an...apers.html

An excerpt from the book Heartland by Mort Sahl

Harcourt, Brace, Jovonich, 1976 - hard cover, 1st edition

from pages 106 - 108

It seemed very curious to me. It seemed to me that they were doing what most people were doing. It never is free speech. Abbie Hoffman doesn't open schools to speak in: he writes four-letter words on the wall, he lights up joints of marijuana, and his speaking engagements cancel the entire program for the semester. It was almost as if that were his job.

Let's look at some others. Angela Davis. Angela Davis is a brilliant Ph.D., a very attractive woman, and she chooses to express her anger with the system by joining the Communist Party, which is made up of 850 eighty-six-year-old Jewish people in the Lower East Side of New York and about a thousand FBI agents. Why would she choose such an outmoded form? There's always a trial, a lot of noise, and always there's an acquittal, you'll notice. None of them is ever punished. Then she goes on a speaking tour where the action is--Bulgaria.

Stokely Carmichael couldn't wait to tear the system down; then he was suddenly silent. The man who arrested Dr. Spock and the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, Ramsey Clark, went to Hanoi and suddenly became an outspoken dissident. Daniel Ellsberg, who worked at the Rand Corporation, a CIA-funded group, was in and out of the Marine Corps for thirteen years and suddenly arrived and said he's been redeemed and accused the Army of ruling the country. The Army. Not the CIA. The Army. Who does the CIA speak for? The American financial establishment. And where did Ellsberg speak? He spoke in the New York Times, which is more of a financial tribunal than the Wall Street Journal, if the truth were known, or if the papers were read from cover to cover. Ellsberg was immediately accepted by the liberals, who don't ever ask for credentials. The left is lovely: You say to them, "I'm turning you in," and they say, "Will you ride to the station with me?"

Ellsberg was immediately accepted because the liberals were starved for heroes, obviously. He went on to discredit the Army, and the concert goes on in the Times, an orchestrated scenario. Officers' enlistments are down; the soldiers smoke dope; officers are being fragged by their subordinates. A discreditation of the Army. At the same time, coincidentally, General Abrams caught the Green Berets working for the CIA, killing a double agent and dropping his body in a mail sack in a river in Vietnam, and he said, I don't want any SS in my Army; at which time the CIA said, we're going to drop a real octopus on you, which was My Lai.

When the Warren Report was printed in the New York Times, it was printed in one day and buried. The "Pentagon Papers" were printed piecemeal, day by day, as the group that printed it waited to be stopped by the government. Wasn't it the lawyer for the New York Times who said in the Supreme Court hearing, "Why don't you define espionage for us so we don't violate the tenets and make it more restrictive?" And Justice Douglas replied by saying, "I find this a very odd argument for a defense counsel." Defense counsel being Alexander Bikel, who wrote in Commentary, an influential Jewish monthly, that anybody who didn't accept the Warren Commission must have corrupt reasons.