Where are Iraq's Pentagon Papers? (Daniel Ellsberg)

[struggle4progress]

July 16, 2006

A joint resolution referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) calls for the withdrawal of all American military forces from Iraq by Dec. 31. Boxer's "redeployment" bill cites in its preamble a January poll finding that 64% of Iraqis believe that crime and violent attacks will decrease if the U.S. leaves Iraq within six months, 67% believe that their day-to-day security will increase if the U.S. withdraws and 73% believe that factions in parliament will cooperate more if the U.S. withdraws.

If that's true, then what are we doing there? If Iraqis don't believe that we're making things better or safer, what does that say about the legitimacy of prolonged occupation, much less permanent American bases in Iraq (foreseen by 80% of Iraqis polled)? What does it mean for continued American armored patrols such as the one last November in Haditha, which, we now learn, led to the deaths of a Marine and 24 unarmed civilians?

It was questions very much like these that were nagging at my conscience many years ago at the height of the Vietnam War, and that led, eventually, to the publication of the first of the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, 35 years ago this week. That process had begun nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 1969, when my friend and former colleague at the Rand Corp., Tony Russo, and I first started copying the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents from my office safe at Rand to give to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ...

Today, there must be, at the very least, hundreds of civilian and military officials in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, National Security Agency and White House who have in their safes and computers comparable documentation of intense internal debates -- so far carefully concealed from Congress and the public -- about prospective or actual war crimes, reckless policies and domestic crimes: the Pentagon Papers of Iraq, Iran or the ongoing war on U.S. liberties. Some of those officials, I hope, will choose to accept the personal risks of revealing the truth -- earlier than I did -- before more lives are lost or a new war is launched ...

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=10582

[LongwoodGeek]

1. I agree with you on that except for one problem

and that is even if papers were published to that effect it would have not nearly the same shocking effect that the "Pentagon Papers" had in the Vietnam Era. We live in an Information Age where almost any information is easily attainable and what isn't can be easily created. Anything that came out of a facility like that would be debated for validity for months if not years rather than taken for the face value and shock value that we need.

Bush and his supporters would still have all the time in the world to do what they wished in Iraq because they would be able to hold the public at bay with a plethora of excuses for why that document couldn't be true or to spin it in such a way as to seem unimportant and false. On top of that the information would have to be so overwhelmingly damaging that it would quite possibly reveal every last bit of American information on Iraq or American plans for over there which is something that is quite highly frowned upon by everyone. In this case it would be for the greater good and history would eventually show it to be the correct action but in the short term life would be hell for the person who did it. And I'm not sure it would be enough.

At the beginning of the Information Age the "Pentagon Papers" idea worked, in this adolescent stage of the Information Age we need something different, something more powerful and striking. More like a media blitz. What we need is a combination of several things:

1. Audio/Video footage (preferably live) of Bush and his staff admitting to wrongdoing in Iraq
2. "Iraqi Pentagon Papers"
3. Soldier's/Commanding Officer's Testimonies of what they were ordered to do and rationale behind it

All of this needs to be wrapped up in a nice media packaged and blitzed out to every broadcast station in the nation in one instant. There are ways to do this (I'll leave it to your imagination as to how) but that is what needs to be done. Just a set of papers won't cut it anymore.

Good luck.

[Demeter]

2. Try Cheney's Secret Energy Planning--Dec. 2000

It's all there, which is why they won't release it.