© AP/Shutterstock.comDaniel Ellsberg speaking to an unofficial House of Representatives panel investigating the significance of the Pentagon Papers, July 28, 1971.
When Daniel Ellsberg died on Friday, the world lost a transcendent whistleblower with a powerful ethos of compassion and resolve.
Ellsberg's renown for openly challenging the mentalities of militarism began on June 23, 1971, when he appeared on CBS Evening News ten days after news broke about the Pentagon Papers that he'd provided to journalists. Ellsberg pointedly said that in the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents, "I don't think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There's neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever."
And he added: "The documents simply reflect the internal concerns of our officials. That says nothing more nor less that that our officials never did concern themselves with the effect of our policies on the Vietnamese."
Ellsberg
told anchor Walter Cronkite:
"I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions."The functions of overseeing the war on Vietnam had become repugnant to Ellsberg as an insider. Many other government officials and top-level consultants with security clearances also had access to documents that showed how mendacious four administrations had been as the U.S. role in Vietnam expanded and then escalated into wholesale slaughter.
Unlike the others, he finally broke free and provided the Pentagon Papers to news media. As he said in the CBS interview,
"The fact is that secrets can be held by men in the government whose careers have been spent learning how to keep their mouths shut. I was one of those."
Comment: Same as it is with the social justice movement, the LGBT community has been taken over by psychologically disturbed individuals who co-opted the group for their own perverted agendas. For more on the infestation of the LGBTMNOP+ community by Cluster B personality disordered people, see also: