Daniel Ellsburg, the patriot who stole the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, then photocopied them and passed them to the New York Times for publication, is back and stirring up an October surprise for the regime.
Actually, he never went away. But whenever the times call for heavy doses of truth and decisive action, he steps into his natural leadership role and provides both.
Ellsburg is one of the organizers of the demonstrations sponsored by "The World Can't Wait (to drive out the Bush Regime)" scheduled nationwide for October 5.
Speaking at the umbrella group's organizational meeting in San Francisco on September 7, Ellsburg recalled the critical days of 1969 and his role in them, and linked that historic crisis to the Iraq War, the potential for war with Iran, and the need to get people activated to demand change, truth, and accountability once more.
"I keep looking at that date on the calendar – October 5. I think of 1969-- I was copying the Pentagon Papers with Tony Russo in that month," Ellsburg recalls, "starting October 1. My intention, however, at that time was to bring them out in connection with something called the Moratorium on October 15, 1969...because on that day, across the country 2 million people marched. Not in any one place, they were counted up and added up because they all walked out -- it was a weekday -- out of school, out of businesses...They met in rallies, heard many speakers... But it was a weekday and they called it the Moratorium because people thought the word general strike was too provocative, but that’s what they had in mind.
"It was a walkout, in other words it was no business as usual. The president was watching it in the White House, hour by hour, while pretending that he wasn’t. In fact he was in the situation room getting half-hour reports on how many people. They were being counted, in Washington and New York, from a U2 [plane] above."
So, we might ask if we were talking to Ellsburg, "What good did it do? It didn't stop the war, which went on until 1975." Likewise, skeptics might be excused for adopting a "so what" attitude toward the demonstrations coming up on October 5, and for believing that Bush pays no attention to them (or so he says).
But Ellsburg has an answer for that.
"What (the 1969 demonstrators) didn’t know was that in fact they were stopping nuclear war. The president had made threats of nuclear war secretly several times starting in May and in August and September, saying that he was prepared to use nuclear weapons on Vietnam. They said that to the Russians and the North Vietnamese directly in Paris."
But, Ellsburg claims, with two million people in the streets, Nixon decided he couldn't nuke Vietnam, that the public backlash would simply be too great.
Consider the situation we're in now, with a madman in the White House and another in charge at the Pentagon, threatening to bomb Iran, and when asked if those bombs would be nuclear, responding that "all options are on the table; nothing is ruled out."
I would urge people in the strongest possible terms to turn out on October 5 and register your disapproval of the direction this country has taken, is taking, will take if it's not stopped. So far we haven't seen significant mass disruption of the administration's war and propaganda effort, but they're only one day away from being run off the rails if a couple million people suddenly decide that all is not hopeless, that protest is not futile, and that there's no machine, however huge, multi-tentacled, and ominous, that can't be monkeywrenched and disabled.
Read the entire text of Ellsburg's speech to the World Can't Wait organizational meeting here. You'll find links to the organization's home page there also.
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