Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who made history by leakingthe damning Pentagon Papersduring the Vietnam War, died Friday at the age of 92.
In a statement obtained by Fox News, Ellsberg's family said the nonagenarian died peacefully and surrounded by loved ones.
"Daniel was a seeker of truth and a patriotic truth-teller, an antiwar activist, a beloved husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, a dear friend to many, and an inspiration to countless more," the statement read. "He will be dearly missed by all of us."
The Pentagon Papers was a 7,000-page, 47-volume history of theU.S. military’s involvementin Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The report was commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a staunch advocate of the war, and was completed days before President Richard Nixon was sworn into office.
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The papers provided extensive detail on France’s failure to successfully colonize Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as documenting the military actions of the U.S., including hundreds of thousands of deployments and bombing raids.
Ellsberg’s leak contradicted President Lyndon Johnson's claim that the U.S. did not plan to send more soldiers. The leak also questioned whether South Vietnam's government was viable.
Damningly, the documents exposed that Johnson's administration covertly expanded the war to nearby countries, despite guidance from intelligence officials stating that such actions would not weaken North Vietnam's forces.
A little of bit of history. Lyndon Johnson was Democrat president that took over after the president JFK was shot dead.
The final revelation of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died on Friday at the age of 92, was to reveal details of top secret US plans to launch a nuclear invasion of China.
Millions would have died in the bombing, planned for 1958, which was set to start with Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on the Chinese mainland near Taiwan and then move to larger nuclear weapons on a path going north to Shanghai. The resulting nuclear war would lead to countless deaths across mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan.
The Chinese at the time had only conventional weapons.
While it had long been rumoured that the US had considered “nuking” China in the 1950s, Ellsberg revealed full details of the secret plans in 2021, sharing the original papers documenting the plans. There was a little coverage of the revelation in some mainstream media outlets, but then the story quickly disappeared.
Here’s what happened—and how details were hidden for more than half a century.
Tension across the Straits
When there was tension across the waters between parties on mainland China and a military group, the Nationalists, which had fled to the island of Taiwan in 1958, US military officials met to discuss what role they should play. Mainland fighters were making headway against the group on the island, a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting was told.
The US decided it was in their interest to maintain control of the region by holding key islands in the South China Seas. If mainlanders fought with the Nationalists on Taiwan, the US would launch an invasion “to destroy the war-making capability of Communist China”.
The decision was made that the US would act in “a situation in which there would be a Communist military offensive against Taiwan that would be countered by an American attack with atomic weapons against the Chinese mainland”.
(It’s interesting to note that planners repeatedly used the word “communist” to reinforce negativity about China, a technique still used by the mainstream media today, despite the country having run a state capitalist system for more than 40 years.)
Islands useful to America
Classified notes of the meetings reveal that there was no discussion of the need to defend people living on the island of Taiwan, but were wholly focused on the military value of offshore islands to US maintenance of control of the region.
Page 50, MEMORANDUM RM-4900-ISA (Abridged) DECEMBER 1988 Image: supplied
US military leaders believed at the time that numerous islands in addition to Taiwan were worth defending with the use of atomic weapons. As well as Taiwan, there were seven others: the ones known to the west at that time as Big Quemoy, Little Quemoy and the five-strong Matsu group. (An earlier document had 13 islands listed as worth protecting.)
On August 7 of 1958, a revised US plan was issued indicating that Phase 1 was based on patrolling the area, while Phase 2 “would involve atomic weapons strikes by both sides”. The strategy was for “The 13thAirforce commander to direct atomic operations and the initial operations were to emphasise pre-planned strikes against enemy airbases”.
A later contingency plan, co-drafted by CIA personnel, clearly specified a US nuclear invasion of China, described as: “an American expansion of the crisis to include atomic attack against the Chinese mainland”.
Page 57, MEMORANDUM RM-4900-ISA (Abridged) DECEMBER 1988 Image: supplied
Nuclear war ‘Inevitable’
At one meeting of US military leaders, Air Force General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the use of atomic weapons was “inevitable” and planning “must proceed on that assumption”.
The nuclear invasion of China would begin with US fighter bombers dropping atomic bombs of 10 to 15 kilotons (the bomb dropped in Hiroshima was 15 kilotons) on the mainland near Taiwan, namely Xiamen, then known as Amoy. They would initially aim at airbases so as to deflect any criticism from humanitarians.
A summary said: “He [Air Force leader Twining] noted that the U. S. military would begin by attacking a few of the fields in the Amoy area, using low- yield ten to fifteen kiloton nuclear weapons. At this point the Chinese Communists hopefully would break off. But if they did not , the United States, Twining indicated, would have no alternative but to conduct nuclear strikes deep into China as far north as Shanghai.”
The Chinese would fight back and a nuclear war would take place, the summary said. “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs suggested that this would almost certainly involve nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and possibly against Okinawa.”
This seems odd, since China had no atomic weapons, but US military leaders mentally blurred China and Russia together (exactly as they do today) into a single, monolithic “commies” block. Retaliation by the Chinese was guaranteed because the Russians had atomic bombs. The resulting nuclear war would leave millions of people in Asia dead (but relatively few Americans—that was the beauty of nukes, as shown in Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Yet the US military never got to launch the atomic bombers.
The Chinese switched to a focus on mainland issues and adopted what would today be called an attitude of “strategic patience” with the hostile group which had moved to Taiwan; a policy that continues today.
Ellsberg’s revelations
How was all this revealed? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated marine with top level access to military intelligence, became shocked at the sheer immorality of US foreign policy, which he realised was built on lying to everyone about what the military and the intelligence services were doing.
In 1971, he leaked a top secret history of the Vietnam War, which the press dubbed “the Pentagon Papers”. He was threatened with years in jail—but when people saw the depth of the deception that was being carried out, he was gradually recast as a hero, and a judge set him free. He became known as the first whistleblower.
A second secret Document
But unknown to anyone, Ellsberg had also copied another top secret study, written in 1966, which summarised military plans to nuke China in 1958. While others had talked about the existence of such a plan, details had never been released.
Decades passed. Ellsberg did not disclose the documents.
Official papers covering US military activity in Asia were eventually declassified over the years, but sections about the US planning first-strike nuclear invasion of China were removed, remaining as top secret information.
Ellsberg realised that he alone had the full, uncensored document.
History repeats itself
In 2021, Ellsberg realised that history was repeating itself, with the US again flirting with the idea of military adventuring which was carelessly leading to a possible nuclear war based around Taiwan.
Still staunchly opposed to the way his government goads conflicts into being and then blames the victims, he found the 1966 document and released it to the public.
But times had changed. In the early 1970s, the media was shocked by revelations of US military provocations in East Asia, and was happy to give him the headlines and hold the government to account.
But half a century later, Ellsberg released a bombshell—and the mainstream media had relatively little interest. After brief coverage, the story disappeared.
The media, he realised, had become part of the war machine. US manipulates politics in Ukraine, invents a genocide in Xinjiang, stirs up protests in Iran, sponsors trouble in Hong Kong, and what happens? Journalists edit out all indications of US provocation, and blame the victims. O those awful Chinese. O those dreadful Iranians. O those monstrous Russians.
In a final interview published by Politico on June 4, 2023, Ellsberg said the United States was still running a covert global empire, and the situation was dangerous. We are “on the edge of blowing up the world over Crimea or Taiwan or Bakhmut”, he warned.
He said the U.S. had a long history of creating needless conflicts for its own advantage, and it is continuing to do that, taking us to the edge of nuclear catastrophe.
It’s still worth speaking out
Although he is a hero to many, Ellsberg was always hard on himself for delaying the release of information. He sat on the secretly copied Vietnam document for a year—and the China invasion story for five decades.
The media, he believed, was now complicit in US government wrongdoing, and whistleblowers have less chance of making a real difference. Those who speak out may simply ruin their own lives.
But he continued to believe that it was worth trying. In 2011, he wrote: “The personal risks are great. But a war’s worth of lives might be saved.”
white people have very short memories. they don't know if they want to nuke China or believe in the fantasy of coexistence with the Chinese.
🤬#Fight Chinese Oppression #Viet Lives Matter 🤠 #Stop Chinese absorption of Vietnam. #Free Uyghurs #Free Austronesians in Taiwan. #free the Tibetans.
White people do not want us on their land but they hate the Chinese more and so do we. White people abandoned us and helped create a monster in China. To this day they have no real policy towards China.
🤬#Fight Chinese Oppression #Viet Lives Matter 🤠 #Stop Chinese absorption of Vietnam. #Free Uyghurs #Free Austronesians in Taiwan. #free the Tibetans.
@athena an average white person has zero clue about the Chinese mindset. Chinese are also invincible and separated from white society. By the time white people have already woken up, it is already too late.
🤬#Fight Chinese Oppression #Viet Lives Matter 🤠 #Stop Chinese absorption of Vietnam. #Free Uyghurs #Free Austronesians in Taiwan. #free the Tibetans.
When he served asnational security adviser under Nixon, Kissinger’s policies in Southeast Asia had a profound effect on U.S. Latinos. In 1970, Latinoswere about5% of the U.S. population, numbering 9.6 million. But asthe war in Vietnamescalated, Latinos were increasingly making up adisproportionate numberof casualties. Some Latinos proudly served their country in Vietnam, only to become disillusioned with the war itself.
“It was a super-patriotic time at first,” recalled Carlos Muñoz Jr., professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. “I served in Army intelligence, and it was a radical experience for me. I saw what the administration was doing, and I came to feel that it [the war] never should have occurred. So many of my friends and colleagues died needless deaths.”
After he served, Muñoz and some of his fellow“veteranos” became anti-war activists. “Once I was discharged, I started protesting in the street. In a very real sense, the anti-war movement was the beginning of the Chicano movement. Hundreds of people would take to the streets as the movement grew, but not everyone realizes that Chicano veterans were there at the beginning.”
“To be fair, no matter who was serving in his [Kissinger’s] position, it was a losing proposition,” Muñoz reflected. “The war was simply killing too many of our Chicano boys. It was just an imperialistic war.”
In this sense, Kissinger’s policies in Southeast Asia can be viewed as indirectly boosting the burgeoning struggle for Mexican American civil rights at home.
Despite Kissinger’s fierce anti-communist stance, declassified documents published in the book “Back Channel to Cuba” by Kornbluh and William LeoGrande recounted how Kissinger secretly pursued normalized relations with Cuba in the mid-1970s.
But Kissinger abandoned such efforts in 1976 in the wake of Cuba’s military support for the newly independent nation of Angola in Africa. If Cuba’s military presence in Africa expanded, Kissinger told President Gerald Ford, the U.S. might have to “smash Castro.” He favored “clobbering” the country with military force and drew upcontingency plansin 1976 for apossible U.S.attack on the island. These plans were never implemented, as Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president later that year.
In 1983,under President Ronald Reagan, Kissinger headed up a commission charged with studying the problems in Central America and proposing solutions to them.His commissionrecommended that the U.S. mount a large economic aid program to the area. Kissinger was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Late in life, he became something of a foreign policy oracle, with lawmakerssuch as Marco Rubioseeking his counsel.
🤬#Fight Chinese Oppression #Viet Lives Matter 🤠 #Stop Chinese absorption of Vietnam. #Free Uyghurs #Free Austronesians in Taiwan. #free the Tibetans.
