A new version of the Pentagon Papers needed...

[marmar]

Times call for new Pentagon Papers
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2006-08-08 18:25. Media
By Daniel Ellsberg

Ellsberg is an antiwar activist, and a former U.S. military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers to American newspapers

According to recent opinion polls, most Iraqis don't believe that we're making things better or safer in their country. What does that say about the legitimacy of prolonged occupation, much less permanent American bases in Iraq? What does it mean for continued American patrols such as the one last November in Haditha, which, we now learn, led to the deaths of a Marine and 24 unarmed civilians?

Questions very much like these nagged at my conscience at the height of the Vietnam War, and led, eventually, to the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the summer of 1971, 35 years ago.

As a former Marine commander and defense analyst in 1970, I had exclusive access to highly classified defense documents for research purposes. They constituted a 47-volume, top-secret Defense Department history of American involvement in Vietnam titled U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68. The Pentagon Papers made it very clear that I, like the rest of the American public, had been misled about the origins and purposes of the war I had participated in. Today's troops in Iraq have also been misled, as 85 percent of them believed, according to a Zogby poll from March, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that he was allied with al-Qaeda.

That period had several other similarities to this one.

Americans saw the color photographs of the My Lai massacre; now we are seeing photographs eerily similar to those from Haditha: women, children, old men and babies, all shot at short range.

Congress was debating the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Indochina while President Richard Nixon was making secret plans to expand, rather than exit from, the ongoing war in Southeast Asia - including a major air offensive against North Vietnam, possibly using nuclear weapons. Today, the Bush administration's threats to wage war against Iran are explicit, with reports indicating that officials regularly reiterate that the nuclear "option" is "on the table."

The rest is at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/13625