#pentagon papers

[todaysdocument]

Affidavit of James L. Greenfield

Record Group 21: Records of District Courts of the United StatesSeries: Civil Case FilesFile Unit: United States of America v. The New York Times Company, et al.  

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff,

-against-

THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY,

et al.,

Defendants.

AFFIDAVIT

71 Civ. 2662

STATE OF NEW YORK

COUNTY OF NEW YORK

SS.:

JAMES L. GREENFIELD, being duly sworn, deposes and says:

1. I am the Foreign Editor of The New York Times ("The Times") and am familiar with the facts of the instant situation.

2. On June 13, 1971, The Times began publishing excerpts from a 47-volume history of the Vietnam War completed in 1968 entitled "History of U. S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy" and a summary of a document relating to the Tonkin Gulf Incident prepared by the Defense Department in 1965 (the "documents"). This was an exclusive feature of The Times.

3. On June 15, 1971, this Court entered a temporary restraining order effective until 1:00 P. M. on June 19, 1971, restraining The Times from further disclosing any portion of the documents. The Times has complied with this order and has stopped further publication of the documents.

4. I am making this affidavit in support of a motion to vacate this temporary restraining order.

5. Annexed to this affidavit is the Washington Post issue of June 18, 1971, story entitled, "Documents Reveal U. S. Effort in '54 to Delay Viet Election." This story indicated that the Washington Post has possession of some or all of the documents that are the subject of this order. Particularly, I am able to say it contains material that The Times has prepared for publication and would already have been published but for the restraining order. In addition, the Washington Post states clearly that today's article is the first in a series, thus clearly indicating the Washington Post possesses additional material.

6. The Washington Post has a News Service with some 275 subscribers. It is understood that the article referred to in paragraph 5 above was sent over the Washington Post - Los Angeles Times News Service wire to its subscribers. Further, attached hereto are releases with respect to the story of the Associated Press which is distributed to some 8,500 newspaper, television, and other media subscribers about the world.

7. Attached hereto are releases with respect to the story of the United Press International which is distributed to some 6,000 newspaper, television, and other media subscribers about the world.

8. Attached hereto is a copy of The New York Post of June 18, 1971, containing an article obviously taken from the Washington Post News Service.

9. Although we have no further evidence of how many clients of the Washington Post - Los Angeles Times News Service will use the material, its use throughout the world is highly likely by many of the Service's clients.

10. Certain portions similar to The Times' prepared but still unpublished material has from sources unknown also appeared in The New York Daily News, issue of Friday, June 18, 1971.

11. The Washington Post story is also being carried by the British News Agency Reuters for world wide publication.

12. From the aforegoing, it is evident that the very material which is the subject of the restraining order is receiving nation-wide and world wide dissemination from sources other than The Times.

13. If the restraining order continued in effect, The Times will suffer irreparable pecuniary and professional damage in that once the documents are published as aforesaid, they will lose their newsworthy value to The Times as an exclusive story, and will cause The Times to lose all benefit from the large sum of money, time and energy expended by The Times in compiling this story. In fact, if the order continues in effect, The Times alone will be restrained from publishing its own carefully compiled story.

14. Furthermore, any arguable value to be derived from the restraining order is lost by virtue of the aforesaid publication by other sources, and it serves only as a restraint on The Times alone.

[[signed]]

Sworn to before me this 18th day of June, 1971.

[[signed]]Mary Ann C. Simpson

MARY ANN C. SIMPSON

Notary Public, State of New York

No. 41-3682775

Qualified in Queens County

Commssion Expires March 30, 1973 

[meepmonstare]

rip newsies, you would have loved the Pentagon Papers

[souper-dooper]

when i was in eighth grade history class we had a six month long unit on late 20th century corruption in the US government (the watergate scandal, the pentagon papers, etc.), and the whole time my history teacher exclusively referred to Richard Nixon as “Tricky Dick” and I think that experience molded me as a person.

[justforbooks]

Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.

In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.

“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”

On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppy-seed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.

“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’

“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”

Tributes were swift and many.

Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”

The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”

The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”

The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”

The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.

By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.

In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.

Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.

In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.

“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”

In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.

After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.

Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.

On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.

Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”

In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.

“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.

“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”

Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.

His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.

“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[thecapitolradar]

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, dies at 92

This one hurts.

We will miss Dan sorely. He was a guiding light to us, a reminder that you could and should do what you had to do -- no matter what your inner circle might think.

Dan did what was right -- not what was easy. May his memory be a blessing.

Daniel Ellsberg, RIP.

[lascitasdelashoras]

steven spielberg - pentagon papers

[reynard61]

August 8, 2024

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M.

In his resignation speech, Nixon refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. Instead, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

And, thus, the first step toward "Stop the Steal" was taken... 😒

[odinsblog]

Sen. Mike Gravel worked to end the draft that fed the Vietnam War and used Senate immunity to read aloud the Pentagon Papers, showing that our Government had lied.

In 2008, Gravel called President BarackObama, HillaryClinton and Joe Biden "warmongers." They laughed, but he wasn't joking.