https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/08/patrick-lawrence-what-dan-ellsberg-means/
What Dan Ellsberg Means
I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. A mutual friend, Rob Johnson, the executive director of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, in New York, proposed to introduce us several times but the occasion never presented itself. It does not matter. I know Dan Ellsberg as one knows someone by way of the work he or she has done, and what that work has meant in one’s life.
Another friend, a dear one, wrote a note from Gadsden, Alabama, last Thursday with the subject line, “Ellsberg dying.” This was thoughtful, as this friend unfailingly is, because Twitter has censored my account and I cannot read anything on it unless someone sends an item I am able to open. Ellsberg broke the news first to friends and supporters, among them ConsortiumNews, and then decided to share it on his Twitter account after someone had leaked it. “I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone’s case is individual; it might be more, or less.”
In the letter, Ellsberg recounts his experiences during and since the Pentagon Papers period — the antiwar work, the work against nuclear weapons:
“When I coped the Pentagon papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would have gladly accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action — in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses — did have an impact on shortening the war.”
And, addressing all of us forthrightly:
“It is long past time—but not too late—for the world’s publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will, as long as I am able, to help in these efforts….”
I detected in this letter the same modesty in combination with gumption, passion, great courage and… what?… down-to-earthness that Daniel Ellsberg has projected in his public life for the past 52 years, beginning in the spring of 1971, when The New York Times, and subsequently The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, began publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers?
We recall the extraordinary integrity Ellsberg displayed when, as a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, he secretly Xeroxed great volumes of classifed documents on the hidden conduct of the Vietnam war and passed them to carefully selected correspondents, Neil Sheehan of the Times and Ben Bagdikian of the Post. [Ellsberg also gave the Papers to the late Senator Mike Gravel, who read them into the Congressional record.]
Whistle-Blowing Greatness
This still stands as one of the great whistle-blows of our time. Ellsberg took the lid off 22 years of deceptions, corruption, mis- and disinformation, 1945 to 1967, so that Americans could at last see what was being done in their names and how their government had been lying to them about its conduct of a never-declared and so unconstitutional war of aggression. Only Edward Snowden’s equally courageous decision a decade ago to expose the national security state’s illegal surveillance programs, and Chelsea Manning’s leaks revealing the Pentagon’s methods in Iraq, Afghanistan and in its disgraceful prison at Guantánamo Bay, match what Ellsberg did — for its bravery and its consequence.
I was just finishing my university years in Nashville when the Times and the other big dailies started publishing the Pentagon Papers. It seems to me now the press’s decision to work with Ellsberg had a special significance for me and for others who, like me, aspired to make themselves journalists.
The big paper in Nashville then was The Tennesseean, a mid–South island of liberalism (a term that meant something better than it does now) run by a family named Seigenthaler. The Seigenthalers were close to the Kennedys and had employed, at one or another time, the young David Halberstam and the even younger Al Gore. For a long time there may as well have been a conveyor belt from the Vanderbilt campus to the Tennesseean’s newsroom just down West End Avenue. But the U.S. was in recession when I graduated, and the paper had nothing on offer. This turned out to be a disguised blessing.
When I made my way back to New York I found the journalism scene alive with a new kind of optimism. Reporters and editors were flush with confidence as to what they could get done. The term “Fourth Estate” had long earlier taken on the dust of a neglected antique, the notion of another age. But it seemed possible, with the release of the Pentagon Papers, to think again of the press as the independent pole of power a working democracy needed it to be.
Restoring Press Stature
That optimism, that confidence, all those uplifted eyes: These were among Dan Ellsberg’s gifts to those of us planning to devote our professional years to the Great Craft. No, in magnitude this was no match to Ellsberg’s monumental achievement in making public the true history of America’s conduct in Southeast Asia. But it mattered — to journalists, to readers and viewers, to the polity altogether.
Two summers after the big dailies published the Pentagon Papers, the Times having taken the Nixon administration all the way to the Supreme Court to defend the press’s right to do so, the Watergate scandal began to break. “Yes! We’re getting it done! We’re confronting power with that power that is ours alone!” Every journalist I knew said this, silently or out loud. The publication [MORE], a motley monthly written and edited by journalists who took themselves and their profession seriously, reflected this spirit on every one of its tabloid pages.
This spirit, upon which all Americans could draw, was another of Ellsberg’s gifts to his time.
In the autumn of 1971, the Pentagon Papers having split open the American consciousness like a machete taken to a coconut, Hannah Arendt published “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” in The New York Review of Books. Arendt concluded from her reading of the documents that the national security state had led Americans into “an Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere,” a sort of collective psychosis that arose from what she called “defactualization”—a term as eminently useful in our time as it was in Ellsberg’s and hers.
Facts are fragile, Arendt wrote, in that they tell no story in themselves, a little in the way a stone in the road simply sits there and has no story to tell. This leaves them vulnerable to the manipulations of storytellers. “The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts,” Arendt explained in this remarkable piece of work, “that is, with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.”
The facts don’t, after all, speak for themselves, the folk wisdom notwithstanding.
Dan Ellsberg gave us the wisdom to know ourselves and our institutions and our time in this way. Arendt was his best interpreter, in the way art critics explain to us what the great painters are doing and saying.
I confess I have long had misgivings about the optimism in the air during the time I describe. How bravely and independently did the press actually act?
The Watergate story that propelled Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward to fame may not have come to light had certain factions of Washington’s permanent bureaucracy not wished to depose a president they found incompetent. Those honored correspondents filing reports critical of the Vietnam war, Halberstam and Sheehan among them: Would the major dailies and wire services have published their work had the tide of opinion in high places not begun to turn?
Ditto the Pentagon Papers: Would the Times have gone into print with what Ellsberg gave Neil Sheehan were there not, by then, considerable antiwar sentiment even in the mainstream of American thinking?
In hindsight, I think the Pentagon Papers and Watergate did journalism harm as well as good. In re-legitimating the mainstream, they calmed a gathering wave of criticism within the profession and a longstanding distrust among readers and viewers — both heartily deserved.
You may think at this point I cast aspersions on Ellsberg’s legacy. Not a bit of it. The spirit he engendered — a spirit of engagement, we might call it — is at least as alive now as it was in the early 1970s, and maybe more so now than then. It simply abides in a different place among us — among journalists and among those who look to journalists for reliable accounts of the world in which we live.
When I first got into journalism it was with true and deep pride that I was entering one of the most honorable of professions. When I bailed out of the mainstream press 30–odd years later, the craft I had held so high was an embarrassment. I could not get far enough away fast enough.
I was reminded of this when I read Ellsberg’s letter and began thinking about what this distinguished, humane man has meant to me. To fool around with time’s arrow for a sec, what if a young man named Daniel Ellsberg had just pilfered some lid-lifting documents exposing the criminal malfeasance of the national security state and gone to the Times or The Post to get them published? Would they do now what they did 52 years ago?
You either have to laugh or do the other thing.
You don’t read about all the antiwar and antinuclear work Ellsberg has done since the Pentagon Papers — not in the Times or the Post. The mainstream refuses to report blows of the whistle now — Washington’s craven corruption of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, for instance.
When Seymour Hersh recently published his investigative exposé documenting the Biden regime’s covert operation to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, mainstream media flinched and did their best to discredit Hersh’s work, as they are wont to do whenever Sy publishes.
The corporate-owned press and broadcasters worked with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and worked well, until the Obama administration turned against the man and the publisher. Now they dishonestly mark both down as creatures of the Kremlin.
Who defends Assange now? Where did the OPCW story break? Where did Sy Hersh publish “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline?” Where, to answer these questions all at once, are you reading this commentary?
No, the optimism and confidence Ellsberg did so much to give America and its journalists back in the 1970s has nothing like evaporated. It only looks that way. It resides among independent publications and those who read them. Whether he thinks of it this way or otherwise, Daniel Ellsberg, now 91, has long waged war against the very press that once gave sanctuary to the course of action he took.
Let us reflect for a moment on how times have changed.
And then let us honor the man and “keep going!” as he asks. Yes, let us wish him all the salt his palate desires and keep going.
....
https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/09/matt-taibbi-my-statement-to-congress/
Matt Taibbi: My Statement to Congress
In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee about the Twitter Files, a few words about why state-funded "anti-disinformation" and free speech can't coexist.
I’m here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.
It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?”
A week later, the first of what became known as the “Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.
But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the “Files,” that we started to grasp the significance of this story.
The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.
What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.
We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:
Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS:
Or:
Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.
This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.
Following the trail of communications between Twitter and the federal government across tens of thousands of emails led to a series of revelations. Mr. Chairman, we’ve summarized these and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter Files thread, which is also being released to the public now, on Twitter at @ShellenbergerMD, and @mtaibbi.
We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.
A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”
Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.
Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.
As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying.
Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense.
But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.
Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.
Some will say, “So what? Why shouldn’t we eliminate disinformation?”
To begin with, you can’t have a state-sponsored system targeting “disinformation” without striking at the essence of the right to free speech. The two ideas are in direct conflict.
Many of the fears driving what my colleague Michael Shellenberger calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” also inspired the infamous “Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798.” The latter outlawed “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against Congress or the president.”
Here is something that will sound familiar: supporters of that law hundreds of years ago were quick to denounce their critics as sympathizers with a hostile foreign power, at the time France. Alexander Hamilton said Thomas Jefferson and his supporters were “more Frenchmen than Americans.”
Jefferson, in vehemently opposing these laws, said democracy cannot survive in a country where power is given to people “whose suspicions may be the evidence.” He added:
It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism.
Jefferson’s ideas still ring true today. In a free society we don’t mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy.
This is why “anti-disinformation” just doesn’t work. Any experienced journalist knows experts are often initially wrong, and sometimes they even lie. In fact, when elite opinion is too much in sync, this itself can be a red flag.
We just saw this with the Covid lab-leak theory. Many of the institutions we’re now investigating initially labeled the idea that Covid came from a lab “disinformation” and conspiracy theory. Now apparently even the FBI takes it seriously.
It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.
This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions.
For hundreds of years, the thing that’s distinguished Americans from all other people around the world is the way we don’t let anyone tell us what to think, certainly not the government.
The First Amendment, and an American population accustomed to the right to speak, is the best defense left against the Censorship-Industrial Complex. If the latter can knock over our first and most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have no serious opponent left anywhere.
If there’s anything the Twitter Files show, it’s that we’re in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all other democratic rights are impossible.
....
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-colonel-mcgregor-russia-crushing-kiev-regime/5811449
Colonel McGregor: “Russia is crushing the Kiev Regime”
Colonel Douglas McGregor doesn’t need a lot of introduction to people aware of the current geopolitical situation, as his actions, integrity and wisdom speak for themselves. Unfortunately, such cadres are now almost entirely absent from Washington DC, particularly the Pentagon. They have been replaced by a plethora of post-Cold War neoconservatives and neoliberals intended on not just maintaining the so-called Pax Americana, but also extending it to essentially every corner of the planet. In his latest interview with “Real America’s” Dan Ball, Colonel McGregor gave an assessment of the current state of the Kiev regime forces, as well as their prospects in the coming weeks and months.
Scroll down for Video
After the anchor gave a brief breakdown of the disastrous state of the United States under the troubled Biden administration, he touched on the subject of ever-escalating military “aid” the Washington DC has been sending to the embattled Neo-Nazi junta in hopes of stopping Russia from finally inflicting a crushing defeat on them. He pointed out that the US Congress just approved its latest “aid” package worth $400 million, pushing the publicly revealed amount to $32 billion of US taxpayer dollars for Washington DC’s favorite puppet regime, out of the $113 billion approved thus far, “with no end in sight”, as he correctly noted.
Dan Ball then assessed the meeting between Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, signaling the symbolic end of the very last remnants of Berlin’s sovereignty as Germany pledged to send more weapons and funds for the Neo-Nazi junta, despite the tremendous problems this is causing on the home front. Ball also pointed out the glaring hypocrisy of the political West, as NATO is publicly bragging about its involvement with the Kiev regime, including the massive weapons shipments and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets, while openly threatening China in case it sends armaments to Russia.
Aside from the fact that Beijing never made such statements, nor is there any indicator that Moscow is desperate to get help from China, it’s quite obvious the US has completely lost touch with what actual diplomacy is. The anchor also questioned the impact of the “aid” the Neo-Nazi junta is getting, but warned that it’s certainly “drawing down our existing weapons stock, which puts America in a bad spot, kind of like Biden draining our emergency oil reserves”. The last line refers to Joe Biden’s unrelenting squandering of America’s SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve), which has been actively (ab)used for nearly a year now, despite the fact it was founded for emergencies such as nationwide natural disasters or major wars.
After touching on the topic of sending F-16 fighter jets, the question even the Pentagon is “stingy and unsure” about, Dan Ball introduced Colonel Douglas McGregor, who immediately pointed out the staggering losses of the Kiev regime forces, “now approaching 200,000”. According to McGregor, this was largely due to the Neo-Nazi junta’s disastrous decision to defend Bakhmut (Artyomovsk), with the Russian military using the opportunity to “apply all of their rockets, missiles, artillery fire against concentrations of Ukrainian infantry, inflicting enormous casualties”. He also stated the city is going to fall anyway, making the deaths of thousands of forcibly conscripted Ukrainians all the more pointless.
McGregor also touched upon the increasingly strained relationship between the Kiev regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky and his General Staff which is rightfully furious at him for not listening to their assessment it would’ve been better to leave the city and set up a new defense line further to the west. The colonel warned that the junta has expended most of its reserves, both in terms of equipment and manpower, while its “best soldiers are dead, so it’s now shoving boys, old men, women into the breach”. He further added that Zelensky is essentially admitting defeat and taunting the political West, specifically the US, to “come here and win the war for us,” otherwise, “it’s over”.
Once again, the anchor Dan Ball mentioned the fighter jets and how the US has essentially lied it wouldn’t provide specific weapons systems, such as advanced missiles or tanks, all of which have been delivered in the meantime (or are about to). Ball warned that the same is true for F-16s, adding that “there’s now a bipartisan push in the Congress to send the jets”, but also stated that it would take at least a year to train pilots, “prolonging the killing in Ukraine”.
Colonel McGregor responded that the US doesn’t have a military strategy, but only a media one to convince everyone that the Neo-Nazi junta is supposedly winning. As the number of those who believe this narrative has dwindled to almost nothing and as the losses are piling up, the Kiev regime is forced to use contractors, the vast majority of whom are NATO personnel, meaning that if F-16s were to be sent, they would require American/NATO pilots to fly them. McGregor warned that “this is now a slow slide into [global] war that many people have really worried about for a long time” and that the US is faced with either admitting failure or pushing for a direct confrontation with Russia.
Ball and McGregor then discussed the issue of an escalating disinformation campaign in the US media, with the colonel pointing out that Washington DC has been doing this for decades, particularly in cases when any given administration was trying to not only justify, but also praise the US aggression against the world, specifically mentioning Bosnia, Iraq and the NATO-occupied Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohia. However, McGregor stated that the media are now forced to admit that “the weight of Russian manpower, as well as their military power in general, is crushing Ukrainians”.
He added that the message to the viewers is that “no amount of Ukrainian valor is going to stand up to [Russian] firepower” and people need to read between the lines and that “the message is – Ukraine can’t win”. The colonel further pointed out the Biden administration is certainly aware of this, with the recent Blinken-Lavrov meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in India perfectly illustrating it. McGregor thinks that “our threats don’t ring with much credibility” and that this behavior “puts everything at risk, including the United States“. However, the Biden administration is worried about its political future, so it’s refusing to admit the reality and finally come to an agreement that would take Russia’s security concerns into account.
Watch below the interview of Col. McGregor.
( video at article address )
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