The Nixonian Henchmen of Today: at the NYT

[unhappycamper]

The Nixonian Henchmen of Today: at the NYT
by Glenn Greenwald
Published on Sunday, October 24, 2010 by Salon

After Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing the lies, brutality and inhumanity that drove America's role in the Vietnam War, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger infamously plotted to smear his reputation and destroy his credibility. As History Commons puts it in its richly documented summary of those events:

President Nixon authorizes the creation of a "special investigations unit," later nicknamed the "Plumbers," to root out and seal media leaks. The first target is Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press (see June 13, 1971); the team will burglarize the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, in hopes of securing information that the White House can use to smear Ellsberg's character and undermine his credibility . . . .

Nixon aide John Ehrlichman passes on the president's recommendations to the heads of the "Plumbers," Egil Krogh and David Young (see July 20, 1971), regarding "Pentagon Papers" leaker Daniel Ellsberg (see Late June-July 1971). . . . Within days, Keogh and Young will give Ehrlichman a memo detailing the results of investigations into Ellsberg and a dozen of Ellsberg's friends, family members, and colleagues. . . .

This weekend, WikiLeaks released over 400,000 classified documents of the Iraq War detailing genuinely horrific facts about massive civilian death, U.S. complicity in widespread Iraqi torture, systematic government deceit over body counts, and the slaughter of civilians by American forces about which Daniel Ellsberg himself said, as the New York Times put it: "many of the civilian deaths there could be counted as murder."

Predictably, just as happened with Ellsberg, there is now a major, coordinated effort underway to smear WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, and to malign his mental health -- all as a means of distracting attention away from these highly disturbing revelations and to impede the ability of WikiLeaks to further expose government secrets and wrongdoing with its leaks. But now, the smear campaign is led not by Executive Branch officials, but by members of the establishment media. As the intelligence community reporter Tim Shorrock wrote today on Twitter: "When Dan Ellsberg leaked Pentagon Papers, Nixon's henchmen tried to destroy his reputation. Today w/Wikileaks & Assange, media does the job."