Daniel Ellsberg Quotes
It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn't want the question raised, 'What's your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?' And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn't want a letter of theirs to show up in my trash - which the FBI had been going through.
Cooper, Arnie. "A Life of Dissent: Daniel Ellsberg on the Pentagon Papers, the Bush Administration, and the Threat of Nuclear War." The Sun, no. 379, July 2007.
Jones constantly told King and other associates that the FBI was tapping their telephone conversations. Senator Joseph McCarthy was a right wing paranoid who imagined communists throughout the government. Jones turned out to be right. During that period, the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the FBI was listening, recording, and transcribing, every single phone call to or from King including the conference calls and calls with his attorney. FBI Director received frequent briefings on what King and his associates were doing. Although he ordered the wiretaps, it was Robert F. Kennedy, then the Attorney General, who had to approve them.
Agree had resigned from the CIA in protest to its political positions. This prediction was right after the 9-11 attack. He not only predicted the attempts to restrain American civil liberties, but also the length of the war. See {632811}.
This was a critical shortcoming in that the NSA had the personnel for electronic intelligence. It was the major job of the CIA to place human agents—abroad—who could act as spies and/or recruit or manage spies.
This was the reason that the FBI withheld information from the Warren Commission investigating JFK’s assassination. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director was concerned that some people might conclude that the FBI bore some of the responsibility for the assassination for losing track of him. The CIA also withheld information to the commission to cover some of their misdeeds.
Edward Snowden, a defense contractor and government employee, publicly revealed that the U. S. intelligence agencies were intercepting and keeping a data base of ALL telephone calls and all Internet e-mails. The government had denied that this was so, and had classified the domestic spying program as Top Secret. Snowden had signed an agreement not to reveal any classified information, and he violated the agreement. Therefore the government was trying to extradite Snowden from Russia at the time so that they could criminally prosecute him. However, there was great debate as to whether the spying on all Americans was legal and Constitutional. Many saw Snowden as a “whistleblower” and pointed out that the government which had lied wanted to prosecute Snowden for telling the truth. Fein, an attorney, was representing Snowden and his family.
For example, most of the documents that are classified as secret in the CIA are so classified because the censor thought the information might be damaging to the CIA’s interest, not the American citizen’s. However, there is a strange logic that is sometimes given to justify censoring material that would embarrass the agency: If the agency is embarrassed, public support and confidence in the agency will be eroded, and that in turn will cause investigations, reviews, and possible diminished budgets. This would be distracting from the agency’s mission of keeping Americans safe, so the public should be kept in the dark about embarrassing material.
Daniel Ellsberg is an American economist, political activist, and former United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers.
