25 May 21
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FOCUS: Charles Pierce | Daniel Ellsberg Is 90 Years Old and Still Causing Trouble
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "OK, we already knew that, back in the 1950s and 1960s, there were some genuinely scary people in the United States government."
The man behind the Pentagon Papers is back with some horrifying revelations about the American Cold War government.
od bless Daniel Ellsberg. He’s 90 years old and still causing trouble. From the New York Times:
American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release.
The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Mr. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan.
OK, we already knew that, back in the 1950s and 1960s, there were some genuinely scary people in the United States government. (Operation Northwoods, anyone?) But it’s still startling to see how much of their insane scheming they immortalized on paper.
Among other details, the pages that the government censored in the official release of the study describe the attitude of Gen. Laurence S. Kuter, the top Air Force commander for the Pacific. He wanted authorization for a first-use nuclear attack on mainland China at the start of any armed conflict. To that end, he praised a plan that would start by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese airfields but not other targets, arguing that its relative restraint would make it harder for skeptics of nuclear warfare in the American government to block the plan.
“There would be merit in a proposal from the military to limit the war geographically” to the air bases, “if that proposal would forestall some misguided humanitarian’s intention to limit a war to obsolete iron bombs and hot lead,” General Kuter said at one meeting.
Yes, because nukes are famously restrained in their effects by cyclone fences and guard shacks.
But it’s not just the window into what we used to call “brinksmanship” that is so compelling about what Ellsberg is doing this time. Yes, he’s once again sharing classified material with us, but he’s doing it for a damn good reason.
Mr. Ellsberg said he also had another reason for highlighting his exposure of that material. Now 90, he said he wanted to take on the risk of becoming a defendant in a test case challenging the Justice Department’s growing practice of using the Espionage Act to prosecute officials who leak information.
Enacted during World War I, the Espionage Act makes it a crime to retain or disclose, without authorization, defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Its wording covers everyone — not only spies — and it does not allow defendants to urge juries to acquit on the basis that disclosures were in the public interest.
The Espionage Act has deserved a good disemboweling for decades now. It’s an authoritarian legacy of the awful President Woodrow Wilson and his completely awful Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. It’s a meat ax of a statute that’s still stained with the blood of Emma Goldman, for god’s sake. It needs to be torn out of the law, root and branch, and something less authoritarian put in its place. In that process, by the way, the presumption should be that a great deal of material that is classified probably shouldn’t be. General Kuter, the guy who wanted to nuke the Chinese air bases—but only the Chinese air bases, mind you—has been dead since 1979. I don’t think he’s liable to object.
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