On April 18, 2023, upon hearing Daniel Ellsberg’s announcement he has terminal cancer, Newsmax’ Greg Kelley took this opportunity to kick the man when he is down calling Ellsberg a “traitor to his country.” Kelley is one of those myopic, political arm chair quarterbacks who mimics the Party line with no thought for discovering the truth. In doing so, Kelley exhibits the same solipsistic behavior pandemic among the radical Left.
Solipsism is the philosophy that the self is all that can be known to exist. Kelley exhibits a remarkable ignorance of both the man and the cause he is most famous for -not uncommon in the counterfeit conservative, myopic media.
In a situation similar to comedian Bill Cosby’s, Greg Kelley’s self-righteousness seems hypocritical considering how he capitalized on his father’s good name to enlist an abiding New York City District Attorney and a sympathetic press in besmirching a rape victim’s good name and avoiding prosecution for that rape (see: “She Accused a TV Anchor of Rape and Got Dragged Through the Tabloids” by Jessica Testa, Buzzfeed News, June 9, 2014). It’s also curious Greg Kelley’s Wikipedia bio doesn’t include his mother’s name. What’s up with that?
If Kelley wasn’t such a myopic Party hack, he might have exerted a little effort in delving into the real facts of the Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers. Here are some:
- Daniel Ellsberg was a First Lieutenant in the 2nd Marine Division from 1954-57.
- Daniel Ellsberg was a Cambridge Phd military analyst employed at the Defense Department’s RAND Corporation.
- Daniel Ellsberg was proud of his country and argued in support of it frequently before discovering the truth – much the same as ultra-conservative AZ Senator Goldwater, who returned from Vietnam telling the American people we were being “brainwashed.”
- In late 1969, with the assistance of his former RAND Corporation colleague Anthony Russo, Ellsberg made copies of classified documents to which he had access and became known as the Pentagon Papers.
- They revealed that, early on, the government knew the Vietnam War could not be won, the Johnson Administration had systematically lied to the public and Congress about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.” Johnson and Nixon were prolonging the war to avoid having the legacy of being the “first president to lose a war.”
- After spending two years conducting personal interviews with Vietnamese of every social strata, Ellsberg and the other members of the RAND’s research group submitted their report to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. When told the Vietnamese were actually Nationalists and would never give up their war for independence, Kissinger replied “What does it matter? It’s history now.” Kissinger had reached an “under the table” agreement with the North Vietnamese in 1968 that the NV would eventually obtain their goal of reunifying Vietnam. American troops were not withdrawn from South Vietnam until April 1975.
- [I wouldn’t be surprised if similar evidence exists regarding Afghanistan and Iraq.]
- Ellsberg tried repeatedly to get the Pentagon, Congress and two Presidents to stop the senseless slaughter of his fellow Marines and soldiers. These included Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee and Senator George S. McGovern – a leading opponent [allegedly] of the War. He asked them to release the documents on the Senate floor because a Senator could not be prosecuted for anything he said for the record before the Senate. They all turned a deaf ear.
- In frustration, he voluntarily subjected himself to a possible 115 year prison term to release the documents to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.”
- After being personally involved in the most in-depth analysis of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg wrote: “There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger [sound familiar? Thank you Bush, Jr.]. Thousands of young men were dying each year. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing.”
- “The release of these papers was politically embarrassing to the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations. Nixon’s Oval Office tape dated June 14, 1971 shows H.R. Haldeman describing the situation to Nixon:
- “To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing…. You can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment; and the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though its wrong, and the president can be wrong.”
- Haldeman and Mitchell (Republicans) would later be convicted and sent to prison for their part in the Watergate break in. Prior to that, they ordered a break-in of Ellsberg’s lawyers office in a search for incriminating documents [exactly like Biden’s search of Mar a Lago, and other Trump associates].
- On June 28, 1971, Ellsberg surrendered to the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts in Boston. In admitting to giving the documents to the press, Ellsberg said:
- “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”
- The egregious conduct of the Republican Nixon administration in trying to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers contributed greatly to the Court deciding in Ellsberg’s favor.
- The right of the press to publish the Pentagon Papers was upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. United States. The Supreme Court ruling has been called one of the “modern pillars of First Amendment rights with respect to freedom of the press. (Wikipedia)
* It is interesting to note that in Army Regulation 380-5 Army Information Security Program, one of the few prohibitions to classifying information is to prevent embarrassment to the government or its’ officials.
So, Greg Kelley, myopic Party hack, who’s the traitor? A Marine who risked prison to save lives or a Marine who preaches gossip and innuendo to cover up the murder of his fellow Marines? A traitor puts lives at risk. Ellsberg did not do that. He tried to save lives. The only damage he did was expose the incompetence and egotistical lust for power of several presidents – and strengthened the freedom of the press to publish dissent (BCM – Before Co-opted Media).
Treason is the New York Times publishing the government’s monitoring of Osama bin Ladin’s personal cell phone against the request of the government not to. As a result, the war was extended for years killing and maiming thousands of U.S. servicemen and women when bin Ladin’s cell phone went silent the day after the NYT published it.
See Also: The Consequences of Ethnocentrism: A Multi-Racial Malady dated March 30, 2023 at www.LigonClanLaw.com regarding the equally wrong-headed public opinion regarding the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
Also: Roger Hilsman’s Congressional Testimony regarding the War in Vietnam and briefing to President Kennedy in the book American Guerrilla by Roger Hilsman.
