Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Why the Pentagon Papers matter now



While we go on waging unwinnable wars on false premises, the Pentagon papers tell us we must not wait 40 years for the truth

Daniel Ellsberg
guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 June 2011

"....In other words, today's declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That's because we're mired again in wars – especially in Afghanistanremarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don't have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it's likely to go.

What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We're not likely to get them; they probably don't yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad substitute, definitely worth learning from....."

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