I first spent time with Dan Ellsberg at a writer’s retreat in 2016. I was writing The Ghost about counterintelligence chief James Angleton. I asked Ellsberg about him and quickly learned everything I heard about Ellsberg was true. He is a profound student of U.S. policy and U.S. empire. He combines an encyclopedic yet personal knowledge of war and warfare with perceptive takes on politics and personalities. And all the while, he exudes a moral commitment to peace and a general love of life. Not just an impressive man but a thoroughly likable one too. This is a week to honor him.
Daniel Ellsberg became a whistleblower by giving the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. Ellsberg’s subsequent trial on twelve felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, leading to the convictions of several White House aides and figuring in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for principled whistleblowing.
Source: Daniel Ellsberg Week – DefuseNuclearWar.org
