Gravel on the "military industrial complex"

[Herman Munster]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi6857hRrFw

[Hieronymus]

1. Gravel was so good last night at the debate.

[ljm2002]

2. Excellent commentary...

...wish more of our politicians would start thinking along those lines...

[Octafish]

3. Gravel's busted the MIC. Here's what he said re. The Pentagon Papers...

Fletcher Prouty quoted him in "JFK The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy":

...Few people have been more articulate on the subject than the then senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel:

The Pentagon Papers reveal the inner workings of a government bureaucracy set up to defend this country, but now out of control, managing an international empire by garrisoning American troops around the world. It created an artificial client state in South Vietnam, lamented its unpopularity among its own people, eventually encouraged the overthrow of that government, and then supported a series of military dictators who served their own ends, and at times our government's ends, but never the cause of their own people.

In his brilliant introduction the senator included an extract from the works of the English novelist and historian, H. G. Wells, who once wrote:

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than "the gang in possession" and its days are numbered.

SNIP...

The Pentagon Papers reveal the inner workings of a government bureaucracy set up to defend this country, but now out of control, managing an international empire by garrisoning American troops around the world. It created an artificial client state in South Vietnam, lamented its unpopularity among its own people, eventually encouraged the overthrow of that government, and then supported a series of military dictators who served their own ends, and at times our government's ends, but never the cause of their own people.

SNIP...

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than "the gang in possession" and its days are numbered.

SOURCE:

http://www.maebrussell.com/Articles%20and%20Notes/Pentagon%20Papers.html

It takes a real man to speak truth to power.