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Daniel Ellsberg has died
- lgvln 3y agohttps://archive.is/fSVmc https://archive.is/fSVmc
- vintermann 3y agoI see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning, or Snowden, or Assange, or indeed draw any of the lines to the present day situation - lines that Ellsberg himself tried so desperately to draw in the last months of his life. In the book of Genesis, there is a part where Abraham haggles with God(!) trying to save the city of Sodom. If there's 50 honest people, will you spare it? How about 45? 40? He gets all the way to 10. Famously, that wasn't low enough. I feel like Sodom lost one of the honest men covering for it today.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rapnie 3y ago> I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning, or Snowden, or Assange, or indeed draw any of the lines to the present day situation - lines that Ellsberg himself tried so desperately to draw in the last months of his life. The Guardian does a better job in that regard. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/16/daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-whistleblower-dies https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/16/daniel-ellsb...
- kfrzcode 3y agoAs per usual.
- hindsightbias 3y ago“By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out." And yet Nixon handily won in 1968 (even with Wallace kneecapping him in 5 states) and 1972. While not well covered, Ellsberg would mention in person that his early issues weren't that it was a bad or immoral war but that the US wasn't committing the forces/effort required to win it. That's one of the reasons he waffled for so long.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CalChris 3y agoJohnson had escalated the war, created it really, from the Gulf of Tonkin 'crisis'. By 1968, the war had failed and at some level everyone knew that. Johnson was not running for re-election and Nixon had a 'secret plan' to end the war. Nixon ran on that and that's why he won handily. He even conspired with Anna Chennault to sabotage the peace talks and get the South Vietnamese to believe they'd get a better deal from Nixon. After winning, Nixon continued the war even after Congress reversed the Gulf of Tonkin war powers resolution. He even signed that reversal but then cynically claimed the power to defend the troops and remained.
- yamazakiwi 3y ago>Famously, that wasn't low enough. Why would god save Sodom if there were LESS honest people?
- ekam 3y agoIt wasn't low enough in the sense that Sodom had less than 10. Abraham was negotiating with God for a lower amount for that reason
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- explorigin 3y agoWe can only speculate but Abraham is pleading with God more for his nephew necessarily than Sodom itself.
- gwd 3y agoThe question was about the minimum number of "righteous" people required for the city to be saved. Abraham started at 50, then 45, then 40, 30, 20, and finally 10 -- at each point, God said "OK, if there are that many righteous people in the city, I'll spare it." https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+18%3A20-33&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+18%3A20...
- yamazakiwi 3y agoWhy didn't god just state that there were none after Abraham thought there were 50?
- gwd 3y agoYou could start by asking why God mentioned his intentions to Abraham at all. What the text says about that: > Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” That is, Abraham's idea of justice, and how authorities act, will have a big impact on a fairly big chunk of humanity. Abraham obviously knows that Sodom isn't a great place. But just how bad is it? Obviously part of Abraham thinks even 10 people should be enough to spare the city; but some other part of Abraham may be more "realpolitik". Abraham thinks this Elohim person is more than just some local tyrant god; but is he really? Abraham thinks that even God should be open to having his decisions measured by justice and morality -- but that's not exactly a common attitude for gods of that time. God affirms all of Abraham's intuitions. Yes Abraham, you're right: killing the innocent with the righteous is not OK. Yes Abraham, you're right: even my actions are guided by morality. Yes Abraham, you're right: The "judge of all the earth" won't be offended if you check him. This experience changed Abraham as a person, and affected not only how he ran his own show, but what he passes on to his kids and their kids.
- zozbot234 3y agoWhy mention Manning, or Snowden, or Assange and not the former POTUS? Doesn't he also stand accused of violating the Espionage Act, in a way that's regarded by many as politically-slanted persecution?
- LightBug1 3y agoOh my goddd....
- MarkMarine 3y agoIt’s a ridiculous law, originally used as a cudgel against anti WW1 protesters and socialists. A real horseshoe that it’s looped around to Trump, but let’s look at this critically. Was Trump exposing the classified information he took to the broader populace? No. Was there a public good to be had if he did? Probably not. Taking the nuclear secrets and making those public? Not good. There is no intent in the espionage law, so from a legal standpoint that doesn’t matter, but I don’t think Trump belongs with the whistleblowers. Sounds like he wanted to keep this information secret, for himself. He’s on tape, saying as much.
- ilc 3y ago[flagged]
- anigbrowl 3y agoYou're misremembering somewhat. God agrees not to destroy the city if Abraham can find 10 honest men. In the end it turns out there's only 1 (named Lot) and this isn't enough, so God has his angels escort Lot and his family out of the city before smiting it. Oddly, this determination of honesty is based on Lot extending hospitality to two angelic visitors sent to test him and defending his guests from the rapacious townspeople; Lot offers to let the crowd ravage his daughters instead but the townspeople decline his offer. No word on how the daughters felt about this.
- zirgs 3y agoBack when the Bible was written opinions of women didn't matter.
- 1-more 3y agoThis theme of reward/sparing for hospitality of disguised divinity is also present in the story of Baucis and Philemon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baucis_and_Philemon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baucis_and_Philemon
- nine_k 3y agoI used to think that Lot knew the townspeople well, knew what would happen, and successfully proved the point: "You see? They don't care, they need you." One of my Christian friends offered a different perspective: the city was so vile that even a man of slightly dubious moral character like Lot was a man of virtue, compared to the crowd outside his house. In any case, that was not enough to save the city.
- jxramos 3y agoThe thing that always struck me most about that passage is the determination to fulfill the lust even after being struck blind and being undeterred and persisting in groping for doorknobs and looking for a way in to Lot's home. If that's an accurate representation I can't imagine how anything other than getting my eyesight back or figuring out what happened to it would not be one's top priority in that moment. It may be a figurative use of the word blind though, like a mirage, or some other confusion ploy, or a mental fog to obscure the entrance somehow. The throwing the daughters under the bus could have been a declaration of his knowledge of the state of their souls and whatever corruption overtook it by that point. Or it could have been a risky gambit to buy time--when the mob comes I'm sure it's a terrifying experience.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mynameisash 3y ago> I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning, [...] I'm curious how common it is for that kind of connection to be made in an obituary. Not that I have a strong opinion one way or the other here, but in my understanding, obits typically cover the life of the individual and the direct impact of their work -- notably, not the impact of others inspired by their work?
- harry8 3y agoAssange, Manning and Snowden was a huge focus of Ellsberg's work for the past 15 years or so. Basically every time he appeared in the paper he was opining on that subject and for many of us it's how we first heard of him. You would expect it to be there if you thought him a hero who had somehow fallen in saying these things. You would expect it to be there if you thought it was his heroism continued. You would expect it to be there if you had no opinion about it just because of how much media coverage it gathered. Leaving such a significant part of his recent life out of the obituary seems utterly bizarre, deeply not normal and it's hard to imagine how it's not deliberate.
- iab 3y agoWhat is god factorial
- timeon 3y agoIf we feel that analogy was necessary here... So it seem that present time seems to reward citizens of Sodom. Maybe God is different than the one from Genesis.
- teddyh 3y ago“Have you ever heard the story of the 36 tzaddikim? They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints—36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world.” — Death, The Sandman, issue 31, Three Septembers and a January (1991)
- oilchange 3y ago[dead]
- jmclnx 3y ago>But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg's former psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Wow, never heard of this, I wonder if a Judge these days would do the same?
- boomboomsubban 3y agoEllsberg was very lucky the misconduct happened to come to light, as before that the judge had refused to let him offer a defense for his actions.
- garbagecoder 3y agoTalk about the butterfly effect. The Pentagon Papers should’ve just embarrassed the Johnson administration but Nixon lost his mind. Watergate. Everything. Truly a pivotal historical figure.
- BeetleB 3y agoWhen Chelsea Manning was arrested, Daniel Ellsberg would remind everyone that the stuff he leaked had a higher classification than whatever Manning leaked. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a great documentary about him. Fun fact: Mike Gravel was an Alaskan senator. When he heard Daniel had the papers, he convinced Daniel to send them to him. Then Gravel went on a filibuster to prevent funding of the Vietnam war, and he chose to read the Pentagon papers aloud in the filibuster. By doing so, he ensured that they would legally be accessible to the public, because they were now part of the congressional record.
- anigbrowl 3y agoThis sort of political courage is sorely lacking nowadays. Instead we get ersatz versions of it, where lawmakers claim ignorance of or incompetence to assess facts already in the public sphere, while damning their political opponents on the basis of documents whose existence is merely rumored by unspecified individuals whose whereabouts have been unknown for years.
- mbg721 3y agoAnd journalists who cheer "Yeah, we hate Nixon too!" but don't truly hold anyone to account for the truth.
- D_Alex 3y agoRecently Chomsky talked about Ellsberg in response to a question "Who has been the single greatest public figure of your lifetime?" https://youtu.be/TQ-Crh3rdQA?t=1946 https://youtu.be/TQ-Crh3rdQA?t=1946 (BTW - the whole interview is well worth watching).
- 95014_refugee 3y agoIn what sense? Chomsky is generally not worth listening to for a variety of reasons (dishonesty, denialism, whataboutism, tankism, etc.)
- neonate 3y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20230616192004/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/us/daniel-ellsberg-dead.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230616192004/https://www.nytime...
- dang 3y agoIt's been years since I watched it but I remember thinking that https://www.mostdangerousman.org/ https://www.mostdangerousman.org/ was a good documentary about Ellsberg. It also included his personal and family life in unusually interesting ways.
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoLeaving in ",Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers," from the title would have been helpful for those that don't know
- dang 3y agoTrue, but there are advantages to leaving a little work for the reader. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22work%20a%20little%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- px43 3y agoIf you don't know who Daniel Ellsberg is, you probably don't know what the Pentagon Papers are either.
- Karellen 3y agoI'm not familiar with that many details of USA political history, I didn't really know who Daniel Ellsberg is (the name sounds somewhat familiar, but I might be getting them confused with someone else?), and I didn't know what the Pentagon Papers are. But "the Pentagon Papers" sound important (kind of like the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers, and may even be the trope namer?) and "who leaked the Pentagon Papers" sounds like an interesting story that I might want to learn more about. "Someone who is famous in some way but you've never heard of has died" is a much weaker pull. Yeah, there might be something interesting there, and if it's someone whose death has hit the top of the HN front page then the odds of me finding it worth reading are somewhat higher than if it was a headline almost anywhere else (hence why I'm here). But there are a bunch of other headlines on HN, and I could have easily skipped past it. "who leaked the pentagon papers" would have been a much stronger signal that this was someone I wanted to read more about.
- derivagral 3y agoNot true for me. Also https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- jdoliner 3y agoEllsberg is in many ways to mold from which modern day whistleblowers were cast. Edward Snowden said in an interview recently that when he was debating internally about whether or not he should become a whistleblower, knowing the ramifications it would have for his life, Ellsberg was what gave him the courage to do so. It was nice to learn that while in exile Snowden was able to get connected with Ellsberg and develop a friendship with him. Unfortunately Snowden and other modern day whistleblowers seem to have suffered more than Ellsberg who got off on something of a technicality.
- idlewords 3y ago[flagged]
- miguelazo 3y ago"at a time when his acquittal was anything but a foregone conclusion." This is a laughable statement given the treatment of several other recent whistleblowers. The power of the security state is orders of magnitude greater now.
- Alex3917 3y agoThis. They were literally torturing Chelsea Manning at the time.
- isx726552 3y agoIf anyone has not read Ellsberg’s 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine”, I highly recommend it. It covers his work and knowledge regarding potential nuclear war within US policy which was the main reason he wanted to become a whistleblower. Within the book he discuses numerous problems with US command and control procedures for launching nuclear attacks and even calls the movie “Dr. Strangelove” a “documentary” (tongue in cheek) because of its satirical yet accurate highlighting of these issues. It’s a captivating, informative, and frightening book.
- arethuza 3y ago"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts. I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to." https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html He also notes that Finland would have been completely destroyed by the US strike and 100 million would die in Western Europe from the effects of US weapons.
- zirgs 3y agoWere Soviet war plans any different?
- ethanbond 3y agoNope, and this fact amplifies the evil of the system, it doesn’t mitigate it.
- arethuza 3y agoIn the relevant timescale the Soviets were far less of a strategic threat to the US than they would later become. However, they did have lots of weapons pointed at Western Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap In many respect the Soviet leadership was terrified of the West and a first strike - later it was Reagan who was eventually persuaded of what a risk that fear was and de-escalated.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- arethuza 3y agoI know this an odd thing to thank someone for, but his book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" is the only book I've ever read that actually gave me nightmares.
- derrasterpunkt 3y agoMy favorite story from Daniel Ellsberg is „The Limits of Knowledge“ in this Mother Jones article: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
- breck 3y agoWow, that is super interesting. It amazes me that it's not a universal American principle that we should, as a country, at least aim for a world where these information asymmetries don't exist. We should strive for zero classified documents; zero special access programs. Of course, I need to think more deeply about this, because who's to say information asymmetries aren't essential (for some reason). But the perspective shared here is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
- derrasterpunkt 3y agoThe anecdote is definitely „food for thought“. It became kind of a ritual for me to revisit the article every time a new US president gets into office.
- fires10 3y agoI wish there was more thinking along these lines. Almost all governments must publish there secrets. Total transparency can help in many situations. I wonder what political maneuvering would be like.
- bricemo 3y agoI don’t really understand how this would work. Classified information seems like a law of human nature as long as there is competition: trade, geopolitical, military. As a metaphor imagine if a game like chess required zero classified information: every move you make you need to disclose all your thinking and future moves to your opponent. You would be at a disadvantage.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoIs seems like a bunch of old famous/infamous political figures all died recently: Ellsberg Silvio Berlusconi Theodore Kaczynski Pat Robertson Robert Hanssen I know it is probably just a mind trick, but it feels weird
- phone8675309 3y agoYet Kissinger is still free and walking about.
- mchannon 3y agoPerhaps the aforementioned phenomenon is his send-off.
- msla 3y agoConnect the dots: > Ellsberg 92 > Silvio Berlusconi 86 > Theodore Kaczynski 81 > Pat Robertson 93 > Robert Hanssen 79 Add them all together, divide by five, and you get Died Of Old Age. We're through the looking glass, people!
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Is seems like a bunch of old famous/infamous political figures all died recently: They key word is “old”.
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoThat's what happens when people get old. The last 4 years has been an absolute bloodbath for the US comic industry with regards to comic books, comic strips, and comic magazines. A ton of all time greats have died, most recently John Romita Sr. These are all folks who would have mostly gotten their start around the 50s and 60s in the Silver Age of American comics.
- Metacelsus 3y agoFunny, I was just looking him up (since The Doomsday Machine) was mentioned on another site. Meanwhile, Kissinger is still alive (and recently turned 100).
- DaniFong 3y agoblack line
- ejb999 3y agoas a society we have moved on from whistleblowers - now we lock them up or call them conspiracy theorists - all enabled by the corporate media who does nothing but the bidding of the three letter agencies who tells them what to say, when to say it, and how to say it.
- 317070 3y agoOK, the media overwhelmingly mentions his activist achievements. But, can I point out it is the same Daniel Ellsberg as in "The Ellsberg paradox" [0]? I have an urn with 30 red balls and 30 green balls. You can pick a color, and you get 10$ if you guessed the next ball I pull out of the urn correctly. Alternatively, I have another urn with an unknown amount of red and green balls in them. You could also choose to use this urn with a color of your choice, if you want? Which of these 4 options do you pick? It turns out that people overwhelmingly prefer the first urn. They have an aversion to epistemic uncertainty, even though from utility theory, all 4 options are equivalent. Even weirder, if we would have played this game repeatedly, the second urn is clearly preferable. Then why do we have this intuition? The experiment from his paper is slightly different and (in my opinion) harder to understand, but the sketch above illustrates the same paradox between what utility theory tells us is the best decision, and what we intuitively decide. Do note that he was working at the RAND corporation at the time, where they were running probabilistic simulations of the cold war, the so called Cold War games. (People were literally throwing dice all day to run the simulations of the various nuclear war scenarios). His paradox was a critique to that method, as we don't actually know the probabilities involved in these nuclear scenarios, in the same way as we don't know the amount of red and green balls in one of the urns. Therefore, we might want to discredit decisions based on scenarios where we don't have good estimates of the probabilities of the outcomes, in favour of scenarios where we do know them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox
- cubefox 3y ago> Even weirder, if we would have played this game repeatedly, the second urn is clearly preferable. I don't think that's the case? Edit: I get it now, under repetition the probability distribution of the second urn could be inferred, and the gambler could use this information to bet on the more frequent color. However, the Ellsberg paradox only says we prefer known distributions to unknown ones, and under repetition the distributions of both urns would be known. So it doesn't say people would prefer betting on the first urn in the repetition case.
- michaelt 3y ago
- kepler1 3y agoHere's a philosophical (?) topic I would love to hear opinions on the occasion of remembering Ellsberg's contributions. Some would say that the transparency of revealing the Pentagon papers caused us as a people for the first time (debatable of course) to not fundamentally trust that the government usually does the right thing. (In the general public perception sense. There were and always would be groups discontent or not trusting the state was acting in their interests on specific issues. But this was a large scale violation of people's beliefs, some might say.) But for the first time (again, debatable), the government was shown to be covering up the national disgrace of the very important and big topic of Vietnam for face saving, and sacrificing lives in the process. And that this was just people at the top muddling through really important topics. And this was important for a people to know, and understand that they could check government like this. So... however -- I wonder, is there something such as too much transparency for a country's people, in the face of the reality of who your international competitors are, in a modern information age? When governments can control information, they are much more able to sweep certain things under the rug, unify a people with partial information, and embark on war, other issues that dismiss or hide the many layers of truth or actions. And every issue is always complicated by who it helps and hurts. In a huge democracy, there will always be someone hurt by some decision. When you have competitor countries who are not committed to such whistleblowing, sharing of information, freedom of press, and their people are able to be unified towards some goals while smaller issues are swept under the rug. Is our country by comparison paralyzed from doing great things, because any great thing will have endless "complainers" once all the details are known because of our freedom of information and above mistrust of government? Basically, is there conceivably a bad or unintended consequence of so much freedom of the press to check government? Has too much democracy been a hinderance (or will it be when some important issue presents itself) to the progress of a democracy?
- avgcorrection 3y agoNo.
- pphysch 3y agoIn a democratic system, the point of whistleblowing and journalism is not to expose secrets that could put lives at risk, but to hold powerful people accountable for their actions. The latter people spend a lot of resources conflating the two. They manufacture the illusion that they are necessarily operating for the public interest, and therefore the only reason why their secret operations are secret is to keep people safe. By extension, guys like Assange are clearly criminals for violating that secrecy. In reality, in the cases of Ellsberg, Manning, Snowden (et al.), we learned that our governments were not operating in the public interest. The Vietnam and Iraq invasions were insane and wasteful, enriching the pockets and hegemonic fantasies of a tiny elite at the cost of real American lives (and countless other lives).
- walterbell 3y agoDaniel Ellsberg giving advice to Henry Kissinger about security clearances, in 1968, from his book "Secrets", https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe... > You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.
- er4hn 3y agoThe full quote is much more impactful and is something I come back to when I think about more mundane things like moving up in roles in a company: > “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret. > “I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even _existed_. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you. > “First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well. > “You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those _other_ people are fools. > “Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the _New York Times_ can. But that takes a while to learn. > “In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to _learn_ from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And _that_ mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself. > “You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.” > ….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.
- xhkkffbf 3y ago[flagged]
- lawrenci 3y agoThere’s definitely a difference between leaking secret information to the public, and keeping it yourself to use for your own purposes. Without getting into which one is worse, surely you can see they’re not really comparable. If Donald Trump had declassified the docs and shared them publicly, we would be having a totally different conversation, and he wouldn’t be under federal indictment.
- xhkkffbf 3y agoHello? The purpose of the classification is to keep the information secret. Do you seriously believe that printing the info on the front page is somehow not as indictment-worthy as keeping the documents stashed away? The reality is that what Trump did by hiding the papers was much more consistent with the spirit of classification than what the NYT did with the Pentagon papers.
- lawrenci 3y agoResponsible actors will try to balance security with transparency. It is not surprising that a newspaper would have a different view on where the right balance lies than the government. You might disagree with the NYT editors’ judgment, but they decided it was worth harming national security to expose government lies about the Vietnam War. Trump’s hoarding of classified documents and refusal to give them back did nothing to increase transparency, because Trump did not make any information public. So it’s not surprising that the NYT views Trump’s actions differently than Ellsberg’s.
- psadauskas 3y agoTrump isn't being charged for having classified documents in an insecured manner. He's being charged for refusing to give them back after being asked, lying about having them, and obstructing officials trying to get them back from him.
- corbet 3y agoI got to meet him once at a protest at the nuclear test site — back in those days when we were still setting off bombs in holes in the ground. Took a couple of pictures... https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWl7MdCuvetRLGReEq https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWl7MdCuvetRLGReEq
- sschueller 3y agoLet us not forget that right now Assange is still roting in a UK prison and is about to be extradited to the United States. A discusting witch hunt against an individual which the US managed to turn into the bad guy in the publics view. Shame on the United States and it's allies enabling this grotesque injustice!
- Buttons840 3y agoHe is not a US citizen and will be tried under US law for things he did outside of the United States. Let everyone judge for themselves if that is just.
- csomar 3y agoYou may want to watch this if you think this is a special case because of him leaking classified information: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NeFUdJfShzc&pp=ygURYXJuYXVkIG1vbnRlYnVvcmc%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NeFUdJfShzc&pp=ygURYXJuYXVkIG1...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoAssange can leave Belmarsh whenever he wants.
- fit2rule 3y ago[dead]
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoIs that supposed to be a distasteful allusion to Epstein, or something else?
- masfuerte 3y agoThe extradition treaty between the USA and the UK prohibits political extraditions. Assange's extradition is plainly political. His lawyers argued this point in court. The judges explained that a treaty is not a law so it is irrelevant to an English court. In Britain you literally have no right to challenge an extradition for being contrary to the treaty that enables it.
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoI think he was a truly good person.
- all_usernames 3y agoNot to state the obvious, but this would be a wonderful time to share Ellsberg's story with someone in the younger generations.
- sillywalk 3y agoHis book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is an excellent book about the events of his life leading to his decision to leak. He drove around Vietnam (armed) in a jeep for almost 2 years as an observer on pacification for the State Department..
- blast 3y agoChomsky does a good job in the video linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367082
- slantedview 3y agoWhile Ellsberg is widely regarded as a hero, it's important to remember that the only reason he escape prison is because the government mishandled his case, which led the judge to throw it out. That other whistleblowers have been demonized while he is (rightly) venerated shows there's still a lot of bias and propaganda surrounding how we view whistleblowers.
- celtoid 3y agoEllsberg was one of the greatest Americans of my lifetime. He was a true believer working in the belly of the national security state and had the courage to both admit that he was wrong and to make his proof public. "We weren't on the wrong side. We are the wrong side." -Daniel Ellsberg
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoAnd yet, nothing changed, as the dead bodies all over the middle east caused by direct US warfare or indirectly instigated color revolutions illustrate. The public forgets, and the machine still functions by the same rules and mechanisms as it always did. I think the machine will come to a halt only by its own increasing disfunction, similar to the UDSSR.
- dingdongg 3y ago[flagged]
- nunesvn 3y ago[flagged]
- photochemsyn 3y agoThe absolutely psychotic nature of what the American government was up to in the 1950s and 1960s was only touched on in the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg certainly deserves a historical memorial for what he exposed to the public about the idiocies of the Vietnam War, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. For example, experimental biological warfare was a feature of the US attack on North Korea, and that program was originated in 1942 (*Merck Report) and expanded via information from Shiro Ishii (captured war criminal who turned over records of Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare unit active in China, to US spies and hence to Fort Detrick.) The US biological warfare program was actively connected to the CIA's MK-ULTRA brainwashing/torture program which operated domestically during the 1960s, involving use of LSD and similar drugs to manipulate people (likely involved in the Charles Manson debacle). Biological warfare and chemical warfare testing exploded during the 1960s under JFK and Johnson, and was only (publicly) shut down by Nixon after the disastrous 5,000 sheep kill outside Dugway Utah via a VX gas oopsie. They were all insane back then, and they still are trying to hide a lot of what they got up to back then from public scrutiny. Of course it didn't end there, the 9/18 and 10/8 anthrax attacks walked out of US government programs aimed at replicating the Soviet biowarfare programs of the 1970s/1980s, and out of those attacks came Project Bioshield... I think that gave Anthony Fauci's career a boost, and led to financing of gain of function research in North Carolina and Wuhan, China, and of course chimeric virus recombination was a long-standing dream of the biological warfare establishment, though the methods they were trying to use to accomplish that in the 1980s were pretty sloppy compared to today's CRISPR approaches. Everything is connected, at some level. Keep leaking their dirty secrets, I'm going to go toast Ellsberg now.
- dingdongg 3y ago[flagged]
- hilbert42 3y agoThis is such sad news. Daniel Ellsberg showd extraordinary courage to do what he did. Few in his position would have exposed themselves for what they believed right. What we need to take from his legacy is that if our democracies were in good health and functioning as they should then the Daniel Ellsbergs of this world would not have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the common good.
- isaacg 3y agoI met Ellsberg when I attended a live recording of the podcast Philosophy Talk in 2019. It was called "The Doomsday Doctrine", it was about the policy of mutually assured distruction. I remember he talked about the difference between "their bomb is in the air, so we're launching" and "their bomb has exploded, we're launching". Politicians vacillate between the two, when history shows us that they are very, very different. Airplanes and bombers encourage the latter, while missile silos encourage the former. This makes missile silos a severe liability, as they encourage first-steike launches. I remember talking to him briefly after the talk. It impressed me how decisive, opinionated, and well-thought-out he was, at his age. He liked my T-shirt, which said "Statistics means never having to say you're certain." I'm glad I got a chance to meet such an important and positive figure in US history.
- hm-nah 3y agoRest In Peace hero.
- jmount 3y agoI saw Daniel Ellsberg speak at a Rotary event and got to talk to him later. Very humble and intelligent person. He said all he had done paled to what needed to be done about climate change.
- enachtry 3y agoI wonder. Following the latest advancements afforded to total surveillance as well as never before possible profiling-depth of people based on everything they've ever done since their teens, how will this change gov-level secretive organisations? Would someone like Ellsberg be weeded out even before his first interview or would he be detected and neutralized at the very first step outside the lines? Gov can now scrutinize candidates for secretive organisations en masse for even the lowest positions and effectively weed out anyone who's ever shown even a hint of dissent, morality or adherence to principles who've proven to be any kind of risk against total obedience. Gov can now also monitor employees' every heartbeat, every step, sleep patterns, stress levels and every spoken word (literally true for all of these), let alone their actions. The risk of getting someone like Ellsberg past the door, let alone at any meaningful level, can now be crushed at previously unthinkable values. How would these improved, airtight, secretive organisations operate and what would be the consequences? It feels like all these advancements in tech placed us on a one way superhighway towards returning to empires, aristocracies, eternal ruling classes & eternal commoners.
- pavlov 3y agoThe previous US president took classified war plans with him, kept them in cardboard boxes in a bathroom at his residence which is also a public club, showed some of the papers to members of the public, and then lied about them when the Feds came calling. Having an airtight recruiting funnel at the bottom is useless if the top is wide open.
- FeepingCreature 3y agoNot sure this is what you intended to say, but it sounds like the logic here is- "Reelect Trump, he's now our only chance of more juicy leaks."
- pavlov 3y agoMore like: “You can imagine your clearance system is impenetrable and the elite’s secrets will be forever safe, but you’re not actually prepared for black swan events like a president who simply enjoys dispensing state secrets to random people at his own golf club.”
- drumhead 3y agoReading how the judge at his trial threw out the case because he was offered the role of fbi director by the Nixon administration to sway his mind makes me think how impossible it would be for a whistle blower to receive the same treatment today. Snowden would have been locked away for life if not found dead in his cell from "suicide". The protection for whistle blowers is a sham unless they're embarrassing the governments opposition now.