Film Review: The Most Dangerous Man in America

I just saw the DVD of the new documentary about Daniel Ellsberg and the 1971 leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam war from 1945 to 1967 commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to figure out how the US had got into that mess. You can see the film online for free until October 27 by clicking here.

Here’s the trailer:

For those who lived through those times and those who did not, the film gives a fascinating inside look at how that drama played out and into the evolution of the thinking of a man who started out being a faithful Pentagon insider and high-level analyst at the Rand Corporation and then became disillusioned by the realization that Vietnam war policy was based on lies by every single administration from Harry Truman onwards. As the Assistant Secretary of Defense told McNamara, the reasons for the US remaining in Vietnam was “10% to help the South Vietnamese, 20% to hold back the Chinese, and 70% to save American face.” One wonders what the corresponding proportions are now for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is also sickening to listen to the tapes of Richard Nixon and his total contempt for the public’s right to know and for civilian casualties, casually talking to Henry Kissinger about the option of dropping nuclear weapons on Vietnam. It was Kissinger’s description of Ellsberg that provides the title of this documentary.

Daniel Ellsberg has written an account about the corrosive effect of knowing high-level secrets, how it shuts you off from people. Ellsberg points out that he and thousands of people like him knew that what the president and others were saying about the war was simply false and that there was this silent collusion to maintain the façade of lies. There was one notable incident where Defense Secretary McNamara heartily agreed with Ellsberg’s judgment that the war was going nowhere while they were traveling together on a plane and then stepped onto the tarmac a short time later and brazenly told the assembled reporters that the war was going great. It is only people who are confident that the people around them will collude in their lies, at least for the sake of preserving their careers, that can do such things.

At that time, leaking those papers was an arduous task. The secret history was 7,000 pages long. Ellsberg had to take home a few volumes from the safe each night, photocopy them page-by-page with his young children as helpers, and then return the originals the next day. It took him months. He then had to find someone willing to publicize them and discovered that even elected officials who were outspoken in their opposition to the war were leery of being associated with such an explosive leak. The notable exception was a young senator named Mike Gravel from Alaska who used his congressional immunity from prosecution to read the documents into the congressional record during a filibuster. Although Nixon tried to stop publication of the papers, the floodgates had been opened as more and more newspapers began to print the documents. This film illustrates the importance of open government and the First Amendment.

Nowadays, it should be much easier to leak documents since they are in electronic form and all it takes is a few keystrokes and one does not need major newspapers or high elected officials to bring them to public notice. Outlets like WikiLeaks can do this and also keep your identity secret. In the film, Ellsberg makes the point that I have made repeatedly, that giving the public access to official documents and allowing everybody to analyze them is better than giving a few people access and depending on what they choose to tell you. Ellsberg has appealed to people in government now to not wait as long as he did but to leak information in order to hold the government accountable and to stop the lies about its current activities. WikiLeaks takes this same attitude, which is why I think they perform such a valuable service.

The film is engrossing and should be viewed along with the classic Hearts and Minds (1974) to get a picture of what it was like in those times, both here and in Vietnam. To get a glimpse of the casual racist attitude that existed towards the Vietnamese during the war, see this short clip from Hearts and Minds that begins with a scene from the funeral of a Vietnamese soldier and then cuts to the commander of the US forces in Vietnam General William Westmoreland.

I cannot watch this scene without tears springing to my eyes at the naked emotions on display of the soldier’s family, and then being jolted to fury at Westmoreland’s words. It is inconceivable to me that the people who planned and executed the war were not prosecuted for war crimes.

The slide continues…

Glenn Greenwald points to a study that further documents the steady collapse of the US from within. One indicator is life expectancy but Greenwald points to many others.

In 1950, the United States was fifth among the leading industrialized nations with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands. The last available measure of female life expectancy had the United States ranked at forty-sixth in the world. As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined.

The slide is quite rapid. In 1999, the US was 24th.

But not to worry. When it comes to incarcerating prisoners, selling arms, and starting cruel and unnecessary wars, we’re still #1! And we have risen to #5 in executions, just behind China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Who would not want to be in such distinguished company?

Is the US a nation of secret socialists?

Dan Ariely of Duke Business School is quite ingenious when it comes to devising experiments to determine how people think and what drives their decision making when it comes to economic matters. In his entertaining book Predictably Irrational, he challenged the traditional notion of economists that people are rational actors on the economic stage, making decisions in their own best interest. Instead he argues that people are irrational (i.e., not really thinking things through to get the best result for themselves) but irrational in a predictable way.
[Read more…]

Lawyer jailed for refusing to say Pledge of Allegiance in court

Yes, believe it or not, a judge ordered a constitutional lawyer to jail because he refused to vocalize the Pledge of Allegiance, although he stood while others did so.

Judges do abuse the power they have in their courtrooms on occasion, treating it like their own private fiefdoms, but this is going too far. The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that children could not be forced to recite the pledge but the judge thinks that adults can?

Managing the media message

Many people may not realize how carefully scripted talk shows are. When we watch people even yell at each other in seemingly spontaneous ways, we are actually watching a carefully planned show. People are selected to appear on these shows based on positions that they will take. So if you want to have a career as a media commentator, it is best if you have a predictable response to the stock issues that the media covers. It is even better if you can say predictable things in unpredictable ways, like Ann Coulter. But woe to you if you are an original thinker or a thoughtful person who actually responds based on the specifics of the situation. You are of no use to the producers of these shows because you are simply too unpredictable. The best way to understand these shows is to think of them as plays in which the actors are allowed to improvise within the limits of the characters that they play.

John Amato provides a revealing look behind the scenes at how the ‘news’ shows set up the guests for their programs, selecting guests who will only say what the producers of the shows want them to say. For one show, the producers sent out an email to someone saying, “Wanted to see if you’re available today at 4:05 for Neil’s show today. The topic is on Obama and his cockiness. We’re looking for someone who will say, yes, he’s cocky and his cockiness will hurt him.” Yes, they can be that specific.

Journalists often ‘work the phones’, as they like to call it, calling up lots of people on their Rolodexes until they have the quotes they need to flesh out the story that they have already written. I have been interviewed on occasion for some news story. When I read the story later, it is always the case that my comments have been selected to fit into a narrative that the writer seemed to have decided upon even before talking to me. The same is true for the ‘person in the street’ interviews. They may interview many, many people to get the quotes they need to drive the pre-ordained narrative.

But in order to ensure that the pre-ordained message gets transmitted, truly original or different or dissenting voices have to be marginalized. Glenn Greenwald describes how that is done:

[I]n our political discourse, the two party establishments typically define what is “sane,” and anyone outside of those parameters is, by definition, “crazy.” “Crazy” is the way that political orthodoxies are enforced and the leadership of the two political parties preserved as the only viable choices for Sane People to embrace. Anyone who tiptoes outside of those establishment parameters — from Ron Paul on the right to Dennis Kucinich on the left, to say nothing of Further Left advocates — is, more or less by definition, branded as “crazy” by all Serious, mainstream people.

The converse is even more perverse: the Washington establishment — which has endorsed countless insane policies, wrought so much destruction on every level, and has provoked the intense hatred of the American citizenry across the ideological spectrum — is the exclusive determinant for what is “sane.”
…
While all of that is happening, those whom all Serious, Sane people agree are Crazy — people like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul and Alan Grayson — vehemently oppose most if not all of that and try to find ways to expand the realm of legitimate debate and political alliances beyond the suffocating stranglehold of those responsible. So who exactly is Crazy?

You can read more by Greenwald on this topic.

The media is at its worst when it is implicated in wrongdoing. Then it closes ranks and stonewalls in exactly the same way that the government or businesses do. A classic case is when it was revealed that the so-called ‘military analysts’ who gave supposedly ‘objective’ views on the Iraq war were actually being briefed by the Pentagon and paid for promoting a particular view. The news networks knew this and did not reveal the information to their viewers. Even after their lack of forthrightness was revealed, the media did not cover it.

The US is governed by a corrupt and incestuous business (mostly finance sector)-politicians-media oligarchy that is slowly but surely diving the country into the ditch because of its relentless pursuit of private wealth at the expense of the public good. The only silver lining is that all oligarchs are inherently unstable and eventually collapse under the weight of their own greed, as the groups and individual members within it start attacking each other once the public treasury has been thoroughly looted. But while that is going on the general public will suffer.