American hero, Daniel Ellsberg, celebrated in the movie “The Post”, tells the world who his own inspirational hero is.
Daniel Ellsberg is America’s most famous whistleblower. He revealed decades long lying by the government about the Vietnam War. They knew we couldn’t win and still sent boys to die.
”I began to see all that killing as murder…and murder it seemed to me was something that had to be stopped.”
— Daniel Ellsberg
“They’re gonna come after you, you know?”, warned journalist Ben Bagdikian. He was right. The Whitehouse set out to destroy him.
President Richard Nixon: We’ve got to keep our eyes on the main ball.
The main ball is Ellsberg. We got to get that son of a bitch.
Despite Nixon’s attempt to smear the whistleblower, Ellsberg is now universally regarded as a hero and a truth teller. The American public needed to know how they’d been lied to and manipulated into that war. Daniel Ellsberg risked being sent to jail for life and played a key role in ending the Vietnam War.
Daniel Ellsberg: I hoped that my example would make many other
people realize, “Oh I can do that. And that’s the right thing to do.” It didn’t happen. Until Chelsea Manning.
Chelsea Manning
Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) leaked damning information on the government and what was happening in Iraq. Images like these:
American helicopter gunners laughing as they slaughter civilians and Reuters reporters. It seems like they are playing video games with people’s lives.
Daniel Ellsberg told Amy Goodman on Democracy now “That shooting was murder, it was a war crime,” referring to the moment when the American helicopter fired upon a civilian trying to save an injured and unarmed Reuters journalist crawling for safety, when ground troops only a moment away could have settled the situation without further bloodshed.
Then cam the Iraq War Logs. For every Iraqi combatant death, two innocent
men, women, and children were also killed. There were five 9/11’s worth of civilian deaths that hadn’t been reported.
Here’s something else Chelsea revealed. We had been turning over thousands of Iraqi prisoners to Iraqi custody knowing they would be tortured. Direct violation of the UN convention against torture. A thousand orders saying “do not investigate further”. An illegal order! Which goes right up to the commander in chief.
She couldn’t in good conscious let these crimes go unreported. Manning said, “I’m prepared to go to prison for life. Or even be executed…to get this out.” She’s a hero exposing the crimes of our government and trying to make our country better. Somebody had to do it.
She was sentenced to 35 years for this. Chelsea Manning was locked in a cage 24 hours a day with no clothes. The UN called it “cruel and inhuman”. She was held in solitary confinement for the better part of a year. Over the fact that she told us the truth about what our government was wrongfully doing.
“The courage we need is not the courage, the fortitude, to be obedient in the service of an unjust war…to help conceal lies. It is the courage at last to face honestly the truth and the reality of what we are doing in the world and act responsibly to change it.”
— Daniel Ellsberg
“…And that’s Chelsea Manning who did that. I’m here to celebrate an American hero. A hero of mine. I’m Daniel Ellsberg. I support Chelsea Manning. I hope you will too.”
— Daniel Ellsberg
“The public needs to know truths about government crimes or lies to act as a democracy. Is a different world possible? Yes. A worse world is very possible and that’s the way we’re headed. We need more Chelsea Mannings in order to keep this country from becoming like Russia or China.”
— Daniel Ellsberg
