History Repeating

Posted by Mary Mancini on September 17, 2006 under Uncategorized |

In this month’s Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Ellsberg admits to a harsh reality - in 1964 he had the power to “avert the deaths so far of 50,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese” yet he failed to act.

In 1971, Mr. Ellsberg did release the Pentagon Papers to the press which revealed the Johnson Administration’s deliberate deception that mired us so deeply into the Vietnam war. But in 1964, seven years before, Ellsberg had already recognized the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution for what it was - a deception by “the president and his top Cabinet officers” to “consciously” deceive “Congress and the public” about “a supposed short-run threat in order to justify and win support for carrying out preexisting offensive plans against a country that was not near-term danger to the United States” - but he failed to act. Revealing the Resolution as disinformation at that time would have given Congress all the counsel it needed to vote against it thereby averting the disastrous war. Yet, in that fateful year, Ellsberg failed to “close the information gap” as a “conscientious insider” and instead, did nothing.

Sound familiar?

The power in Ellsberg’s Harper’s Magazine piece, entitled “The Next War,” is in his admission of complicity in the deaths of so many. The thrust of the piece, however, is to both identify the similarities between the current Iraq War and the future Iran War and, perhaps more importantly, to call for a “conscientious insider” to “court being fired for telling the truth.” In other words, welcome the conseqences that come with exposing, with documentation, the disastrous Iran war plans of an out-of-control executive branch.

Mr. Ellsberg questions are extraordinary valid, “Where was the ‘conscientious insider’ in 2002?” and “where is the ‘conscientious insider’ now?”

What we face today is the possiblity of repeating both 1964 and 2002. Writer Syemour Hersh and others have revealed the plans of the office of the President and Vice President to bring about regime change in Iran. But these revelations are based on anonymous sources - high-level officers and government officials who are appalled by this “juggernaut that had to be stopped” - but who lack the fortitude? gumption? cojones? to suffer the consequences of releasing classified material. And not just any classified material, but classified material that will prove that we are once again planning to attack a country that “unless attacked itself, poses no threat to the united States.”

Ellsberg writes that reports by Hersh and others state that “many high-level officers and government officials are convinced that our president will attempt to bring about regime change in Iran by air attack; that he and his vice president have long been no less committed, secretly, to doing so than they were to attacking Iraq; and that his secretary of defense is as madly optimistic about the prospects for fast, cheap military success there as he was in Iraq.” Furthermore, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported last year in American Conservative, “that Vice President Cheney’s office had directed contingency planning for ‘a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons’ and that ’several senior Air Force officers’ involved in the planning were ‘appalled at the implications of what they are doing - that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack - but no one is prepared to damage his career by protesting any objection.”

Please, someone, heed Mr. Ellsberg’s call for the Pentagon Papers 2 because this time it is personal.