Friday, January 20, 2012

Bradley #Manning : Daniel Ellsberg The Truth Digger

For our first Truthdigger installment of 2012, we salute Daniel Ellsberg, who has taken a page from his experience with the Pentagon Papers and is still busy serving up a bracing dose of truth to power, most recently with his support of accused WikiLeaker Bradley Manning.

It’s not like Ellsberg ever hung it up after passing the explosive 7,000-page work of revelations about the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam to the major American news media 40 years ago. In fact, he’s been quite busy, as you can see here and here. He has also composed a few pages of his own, as the author of three books—one of which, “Risk, Ambiguity and Decision,” is his doctoral dissertation. Ellsberg is one of those fortunate few whose major life decisions dovetailed with history in a way that proved beneficial for both the actor and the era in question.

Thus, it’s in keeping with his life’s ongoing legacy that Ellsberg would turn up again in the headlines in relation to Pvt. Bradley Manning, who also risked more than his own career to let the world in on some of America’s less lofty activities on the global stage. Ellsberg paid a visit late last month to the military courtroom at Fort Meade, Md., where Manning’s pretrial hearing was held, and on Friday, he told Truthdig’s Kasia Anderson about the parallels he sees between his story and Manning’s and about their brief, if interrupted, interaction....read more

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_daniel_ellsberg_20120106/