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Wednesday, October 15, 2003 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I was a cold warrior. I never ceased to be anticommunist. I found the communist system abhorrent. But I became aware that so much of our policy was not any more prudent or productive in terms of fighting communism than an attack on Iraq is a justifiable aspect of our war on terror."
- - Daniel Ellsberg (Salon.com interview, 10/03/03)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/10/03/ellsberg/index.html
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - OCTOBER
1969 -- US: Millions of Americans demonstrate against the Vietnam War in the first Vietnam Moratorium/Peace Day held in the US (organized by Sam Brown & David Mixner). 100,000 Boston Common / 40,000 Bryant Park, Manhattan / 30,000 in candlelight march past White House, Wash D.C.: names of 45,000 Americans killed in Vietnam carried / 12,000 Chicago / Presidents of 79 colleges appeal to Nixon to step up withdrawal timetable / black armbands worn all over the US / 10 million involved throughout the US / John Lennon returns MBE to protest UK's involvement in the Nigerian war & its support of US in Vietnam.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/1553/c68chron.html
1984 -- US: The Associated Press reports the existence of a CIA-prepared terrorist manual advising right wing Nicaraguan rebels how to blackmail unwilling citizens into supporting their cause, how to arrange the deaths of fellow rebels to create martyrs & how to kidnap & kill (or as the manual puts it, "neutralize") government officials.
1990 -- Mikhail Gorbachev receives Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to end Cold War, free the East Bloc & slow the arms race.
RHINO HERE:
As same right wingers who would have been ranting & raging had the Clinton White House ever leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent now attempt to rationalize such a thing, a new set of leaky lies are about to surface. It seems Ambassador Joseph Wilson has stumbled on a briefing by analyst Sam Gardiner that suggests the White House and Pentagon made up or distorted over 50 war stories; tall tales, like the Pvt. Jessica Lynch story and more. Gardiner, who has taught at the National War College said
"Never before have so many stories been created to sell a war, and they probably didn't need it."
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031020/whispers/20whisplead.htm
Two pieces today related to Ambassador Wilson & the White House leaker. Some Democratic Senators putting pressure on the shrub gang to appoint a special prosecutor, and a recent interview with Daniel Ellsberg.
4 Senators Criticize Leak Probe
Letter to Bush Cites Screening of White House Documents
By Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt, Washington Post, October 10, 2003
Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and three other Senate Democrats asserted yesterday that procedures adopted by the Justice Department and White House could compromise an investigation into the leak of an undercover CIA operative's identity. Their objections include the decision of White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to screen documents White House employees submitted to his office in response to a Justice Department order. Gonzales set a deadline of last Tuesday for employees to turn in records that might be relevant; then his office is forwarding them to investigators. The White House has not ruled out the possibility that Gonzales will seek to withhold documents under a claim of executive privilege. The Justice Department and several outside Republican lawyers said they considered the procedures to be standard and prudent. The Democrats outlined their objections in a letter to President Bush, calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor who would have a degree of independence from Attorney General John D. Ashcroft.
MORE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6063-2003Oct9.html
From Senators: Tom Daschle, Joseph R. Biden, Carl Levin, Charles E. Schumer
To: The President / The White House
Thursday 09 October 2003
Dear Mr. President:
We write to express our continuing concerns regarding the manner in which your Administration is conducting the investigation into the apparently criminal leaking of a covert CIA operative's identity. You have personally pledged the White House's full cooperation in this investigation and you have stated your desire to see any culprits identified and prosecuted, but the Administration's actions are inconsistent with your words. Already, just fourteen days into this investigation, there have been at least five serious missteps.
READ THE LETTER: http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/printer_101103A.shtml
RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE presents Daniel Ellsberg's perspective on the current White House leak.
Daniel Ellsberg worked on the Top Secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times ,Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. Since the end of the Vietnam War he has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era and unlawful interventions.
ELLSBERG'S WEBSITE IS AT: http://www.ellsberg.net
8:01:19 AM 
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Edited transcript of Daniel Ellsberg's talk
with Dick Gordon on NPR's "The Connection" 10/1/03
---Gordon: What's going through your mind as you watch this story unfold?
---Ellsberg: I'm reliving my own experience 32 years ago and 30 years ago--it went on for a couple of years. Joe Wilson is standing exactly where I stood thirty years ago, in the cross-hairs of an Oval Office determined to punish him for having told the truth about White House lies, the most dangerous kind of unauthorized disclosure from the point of view of the White House.
It was a disclosure that had to be unauthorized, because the President wasn't going to authorize the release of information that would give the lie to his own statements. That's what I'd been doing, for a succession of presidents, with the Pentagon Papers, and its what Joseph Wilson admirably did--very courageously and boldly did--by putting his own name to an op-ed piece that asserted that information he had personally given the White House contradicted the statements they were then making, or were to make shortly thereafter, in order to get us into this war, and thus, that we were being lied into a war.
----Gordon: Do you make anything of the fact that, in the case of the Pentagon Papers, you were dealing with an unpopular war, and in this case, Ambassador Wilson is dealing with a case for war which is also controversial?
----Ellsberg: Yes, I think there is that connection. People have given this President an unwarranted benefit of the doubt this past year; people want to believe their president is not lying to them, and they particularly they want to believe that a war that he's lead us into, with great personal leadership, against opposition in this country and abroad, was just and necessary and successful and worthwhile. It wasn't, actually, and that means that the President has been following a policy that's depended on lies, and on secrets.
MORE: http://www.ellsberg.net/weblog/10_1_03.html
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6:38:56 AM
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