Daniel Ellsberg, the person responsible for perhaps the biggest leak in U.S. history — the Pentagon Papers — said the latest disclosures of classified information show that the world faces some of the same dangers that spurred him to act over 50 years ago
Ellsberg, who is 92 and dying of pancreatic cancer, said he is struck by the similarities between the Vietnam War and the current war in Ukraine — two conflicts in which a superpower, he argued, could be tempted to use nuclear weapons.
The war in Ukraine, he said, “feels very similar to Vietnam. The war is stalemated, that seems so obvious now except for the fact that both sides totally deny it. What these new leaks show is what the Pentagon Papers showed, that the insiders all know that. They know that they are fighting a stalemate.”Ellsberg argued that Ukraine “is not just another war” because of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. “It’s not Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan. None of those had any real possibility of blowing up the world.
To Ellsberg, that sounds like a young man who was trying to show off to his friends, a way of saying, “Look who I am, look what I have access to.”But Ellsberg scoffed at the notion that Teixeira has done any serious harm to the country. Nixon’s fury over Ellsberg’s disclosures led to the creation of the “plumbers,” a covert group directed by White House officials in the hope of stopping leaks. That group was responsible for breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, hoping to find information to discredit him. They also broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, setting the stage for the Watergate scandal that ultimately drove Nixon from the White House.
“He actually read and understood all of the material he released. He knew what he was doing. And he acted with thoughtful discrimination by withholding four volumes of material on diplomatic negotiations that he considered particularly sensitive,” Aftergood said.
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