Antiwar.com Blog

Here is Larisa Alexandrovna, of Raw Story, criticizing my most recent column on the Litvinenko affair — at some length. It starts out: “Seriously, if one more person defends Putin based on the single reason that Putin stands up to Bush, I shall pull my hair out.” My dear Larisa, please don’t do anything so drastic: it isn’t worth it. Aside from which, ascribing motives to me before even bothering to examine my argument is an interesting way to approach the issue: so, you’re a writer and a mind-reader!

But seriously: the lovely Larisa misperceives my motive. I’m not interested in defending Putin “because he stands up to Bush” — just in defending reason from the sort of “logic” that pins a murder on someone when there is no convincing evidence.

Larisa avers that my piece is based on “the faulty premise that the victim of a crime should be tarred and feathered postmortem” — and then goes on to write:

“While I do not doubt that Litvinenko was desperate for money, there is no evidence that he hatched a blackmail plot as some have suggested. He was working for Erinys International at the time of his murder and in fact, one of the contaminated locations was an Erinys office. What did he do for Erinys? Well, a bit of spying and dirt digging that Erinys could use for blackmail in negotiating an energy contract. How do I know this? I broke the damn story.”

Er, um — so, he was involved in blackmail. Right?  

Larisa makes a big deal out of my questioning of Litvinenko’s “poisoning,” and claims that this is an established fact. But is it? If the polonium-210 that killed him was part of a smuggling operation in which Litvinenko was somehow involved — well, then, yes, he was poisoned, but by whom? Perhaps his fellow smugglers, perhaps by accident: we don’t know. What we do know, however, is this: if Putin or his followers wanted to get rid of Litvinenko, a bullet to the back of the head would have been far more effective, and much less messy. Why leave a trail of radioactive polonium-210 stretching from Moscow to Germany to Britain? It seems … unnecessary, to say the least.

Until and unless Larisa, or the other Putin-did-it conspiracy theorists — including Scotland Yard — can answer that question, I shall continue to be skeptical of the “official” story.

 

Antiwar.com’s editorial director Justin Raimondo appeared last Wednesday on “The Sloan Ranger Show,” on WGNU-AM in St. Louis.

Listen to the audio archive.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/charles/aw071807ellsberg.mp3]

Daniel Ellsberg, heroic antiwar activist and the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, compares and contrasts the Iraq and Vietnam wars and discusses the abdication by the cowardly Congress of their authority over the American government’s war powers, torture, his wish that more whistleblowers would come forward and David Petraeus’ dishonor.

MP3 here. (19:05)

Daniel Ellsberg was born in Detroit in 1931. After graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in Economics, he studied for a year at King’s College, Cambridge University, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Between 1954 and 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander.

From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, a landmark in decision theory which was recently published. In 1959, he became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. He joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs), John McNaughton, working on Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification on the front lines.

On return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, he worked on the Top Secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, Daniel has continued to be a leading voice of moral conscience, serving as a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, government wrongdoing and the urgent need for patriotic whisteblowing.

To encourage national security whistleblowing, Daniel launched the Truth-Telling Project in 2004 with “A Call to Patriotic Whistleblowing.” The Project aims to reach current government insiders, journalists, lawyers, lawmakers, and the American public with an urgent appeal for revealing the truth about government cover-up and lies before the next war. Collaborating with the ACLU, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), the Project on Government Oversight, and other organizations, the Truth-Telling Project provides a personal and legal support network for government insiders considering becoming truth-tellers.

Daniel’s book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers reached bestseller lists across the nation. It won the PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfiction, the American Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Prize for Non-Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

In 2005 the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation awarded Daniel their first Fellowship for his lifetime commitment and continued efforts toward the advancement of peace, nuclear disarmament, and truth-telling.

In August 2005 the Ellsberg Fund for Truth Telling was established to enable Daniel to continue the work he is uniquely qualified to do as a prominent whisteblower—speaking, writing and activism to encourage more national security whistleblowing and to alert the nation to the dangers of government abuses of power.

In December 2006 Daniel was awarded the 2006 Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden. He was acknowledged “for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to a movement to free the world from the risk of nuclear war.” (Read his acceptance speech here.)

Daniel continues to serve as a public speaker, giving lectures at conferences and universities, and countless press, radio and Internet interviews. His recent essay, “The Next War”, featured in the October 2006 issue of Harpers magazine, urges government officials to reveal truths about government secrecy and nuclear planning—with documents—to avert a possible attack on Iran.

Daniel Ellsberg lives in Northern California with his wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg. Their son, Michael Ellsberg, is a freelance developmental editor and lives in Buenas Aires. His oldest son, Robert Ellsberg, is publisher and editor-in-chief of Orbis Books. His daugher, Mary Carroll Ellsberg, is senior program officer of the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). He has 5 grandchildren.

Daniel is currently working on a nuclear memoir on the dangers of the nuclear policies of the U.S. and other nuclear states and a call for worldwide nuclear glasnost.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/charles/aw071307helenthomas.mp3]

Helen Thomas, dean of the White House press corps talks about her frustrations with the war in Iraq and trying to get a straight answer out of the boy emperor.

MP3 here.

Commonly referred to as “The First Lady of the Press,” former White House Bureau Chief Helen Thomas is a trailblazer, breaking through barriers for women reporters while covering every President since John F. Kennedy. For 57 years, Helen also served as White House correspondent for United Press International. She recently left this post and joined Hearst Newspapers as a syndicated columnist.

Born in Winchester, Kentucky, Helen Thomas was raised in Detroit, Michigan where she attended public schools and later graduated from Wayne State University. Upon leaving college, Helen served as a copy girl on the old, now defunct Washington Daily News. In 1943, Ms. Thomas joined United Press International and the Washington Press Corps.

For 12 years, Helen wrote radio news for UPI, her work day beginning at 5:30am. Eventually she covered the news of the Federal government, including the FBI and Capitol Hill.

In November, 1960, Helen Thomas began covering then President elect John F. Kennedy, following him to the White House in January, 1961 as a member of the UPI team. It was during this first White House assignment that Thomas began closing presidential press conferences with “Thank you, Mr. President.”

In September, 1971, Pat Nixon scooped Helen by announcing her engagement to Associated Press’ retiring White House correspondent, Douglas B. Cornell at a White house party hosted by then President Nixon in honor of Cornell.

Thomaswas the only woman print journalist traveling with then President Nixon to China during his breakthrough trip in January, 1972. She has the distinction of having traveled around the world several times with Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, during the course of which she covered every Economic Summit. The World Almanac has cited her as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in America.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/charles/aw071307glenngreenwald.mp3]

Glenn Greenwald, author of A Tragic Legacy: How a Good Versus Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency discusses the president’s psychopathic religiosity, black and white world view and the consequenses .

MP3 here. (38:15)

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book How Would a Patriot Act?, a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His brand new book is A Tragic Legacy.

Sometimes you don’t get the real picture without seeing the big picture. But you don’t always get such a good example.

An Associated Press news photo from today in Pakistan: Droves of people carrying banners, the front one reading “MODERATE EXTREMISTS!“ (What could that mean?)

But I happened across another photo in the same collection. This gave some clarity, and allowed me to find the real story behind the banner.