Ellsberg/Bush
From DNguyen@KQED.org Thu Apr 15 10:05:50 2004
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 10:17:31 -0700
From: Nguyen Qui Duc <DNguyen@KQED.org>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: ellsberg/bush
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32462-2003Oct15.html
Paying Homage To Truth and Its Consequences
By Reilly Capps
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers more than 30 years ago,
was introduced at the National Press Club yesterday as "the ultimate
whistle-blower." But, grinning from the dais, Ellsberg said he'd
finally achieved another great ambition: to meet Joe Wilson's wife.
Former CIA officer Valerie Wilson (nee Plame) made her first public
appearance among journalists yesterday as she watched her husband, Joseph
C. Wilson IV, receive the first Ron Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling.
Wilson, 53, is the retired diplomat who was sent by the CIA to Niger
last year to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake"
uranium there for possible use in nuclear weapons. In July he accused
the Bush administration of using the bogus allegations to help make
a case for war. President Bush later backed away from the claim.
After Wilson went public, Valerie Wilson's name and occupation were
leaked to journalists in what her husband calls retaliation for his
criticism of the administration. The Justice Department is investigating
the leak.
Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, was on hand yesterday
to accept an honor of his own -- the Ron Ridenhour Courage Award - for
hauling 7,000 pages of the government's secret history of the Vietnam
War out of the Pentagon in the middle of the night. Deborah Scroggins
was awarded the Ron Ridenhour Book Prize for "Emma's War,"
the true story of an aid worker in Sudan that shed light on how international
aid can be misused, sometimes fueling wars instead of helping the poor.
The awards are named for Ron Ridenhour, the soldier in Vietnam who exposed
the 1968 My Lai massacre. After hearing the stories of soldiers mowing
down civilians in a hamlet called "Pinkville," Ridenhour wrote
a three-page letter to federal officials. An official probe got underway
a year later, and war crimes charges were brought against 13 officers
and enlisted men. Ridenhour went on to become an award-winning investigative
reporter. In 1998, at the age of 52, he died of an apparent heart attack
while playing handball.
"These are meant to keep alive Ron's spirit, which was the spirit
of the truth teller," said Randy Fertel, whose foundation sponsored
the award along with the Nation magazine's foundation, the Nation Institute.
Each award comes with a $10,000 prize.
In their remarks, Wilson and Ellsberg leveled blistering criticism at
the Bush administration.
The decision to go to war, Wilson said, "ought to be based on a
commonly accepted body of facts, and if the commonly accepted facts
aren't based on facts at all, then we have poorly served our country
and our men and women in uniform."
Thirty years after the Nixon administration, Ellsberg compared the Wilson
Scandal to the Nixon era. "I believe this situation is exactly
parallel, "Ellsberg said. "By trying to punish him and his
wife, they're trying to intimidate those who might be thinking about
coming forward."
Nixon administration operatives broke into the office of Ellsberg's
psychiatrist looking for a way to discredit him, Ellsberg recalled.
"Hopefully the trajectory of this episode will end very similarly,"
he said, "with indictments, resignations."
The FBI is investigating the identity of the "two senior administration
officials" quoted in the Robert D. Novak column that outed Valerie
Wilson.
Bush has said he is eager to learn their identity and is cooperating
with the FBI. The bureau has requested that all relevant documents be
turned over by Saturday.
Wilson was most emotional when addressing his wife's exposure. "I'm
sorry for that," he said, looking at her and fighting back tears.
"If I could give you back your anonymity . . . I would do it in
a minute."
She sat quietly, wiping away a tear, as her husband added, "Frankly,
frog-marching is too good for those who decided that their political
agenda was more important than either American national security or
your life."
He also directly criticized Bush for the first time, saying he was "appalled
by the apparent nonchalance of the president of the United States....
His attitude toward this simply cannot stand."
Valerie Wilson would not talk to reporters and attended the event only
after receiving assurance that she would not be photographed.
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Thu Apr 15 10:05:56 2004
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 17:08:01 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: ellsberg/bush
I try not to talk about my war interests on this list, but since Duc brought it up, I have been dying for a chance to mention the work of Randy Fertel, who has created and maintains the Ron Ridenhour awards that Ellsberg and the others have won.
People who write for the New York Times, and authors who consult that newspaper, often refer to staffers like Neil Sheehan and Sydney Shanberg as breaking the Pentagon Papers and the killings at My Lai.
That is the self-importance of an institution, and everyday class prejudice against men who have worked with their hands, under command. Daniel Ellsberg, a Marine, stole the Pentagon Papers, of course.
He had climbed socially after his military service, but I attribute his conscience and his guts to that subaltern experience. None of his Harvard classmates made a gesture like Ellsberg's. It was a discharged US Army sergeant, Ron Ridenhour, who labored for months to document and bring to public attention what Medina and his company did at My Lai.
Ridenhour lost his world of meaning when he did that, banished from his father's dinner table for breaking the deal working men made with the Cold War: fight it, come home and take your bennies and shut up. Giving up your evenings with Archie Bunker may seem like a small sacrifice. Tell me that when you've given up your world.
Ridenhour went on to make another life as an investigative reporter, achieving great things before he died young. But for many his biggest story remained his first, an amateur job, nailing down before a national and international public the facts of a massacre by the Army that had liberated half the world just twenty years before.
Randy Fertel brought Ridenhour to Tulane University in New Orleans twice before he died, and videotaped the reporter's testimony about how he came to learn what the men did at My Lai. The transcript from the 1994 talk is available in a university press book of the conference proceedings, and the 1998 one is on video from the institute.
The 1994 talk is the most moving document I encountered in thirty years among the flotsam and jetsam from that war, before I learned Vietnamese. It is also the best answer to a question lecturers on the American armies in that war have to address: was what Medina and Calley and their men did at My Lai typical of USMACV?
There was only one Ridenhour and there is only one My Lai in the English-language public record. You can have a professional debate to interpret those facts. Or you can attend to Ridenhour's words, about how he heard casually about the massacre from men who had taken part in it, fellow career professionals, men who follow orders, and how both he and they didn't necessarily think it was such a big deal.
You can follow his train of thought as he realizes that sodomizing and murdering a couple hundred women and old men and children was in fact a big deal, and as he reviews his own initiation to the war to understand how such antics might not stand out in the course of a day that included free-fire zones, harassment & interdiction artillery fire, napalm and defoliants.
From an American, it's testimony in our national religion, like a Klansman telling Studs Terkel about becoming an anti-racist, like a slaver writing Amazing Grace. You want to witness, "Tell it!". After Ridenhour's death, Randy Fertel has made it his business to memorialize the man by honoring those who work in his spirit.
This year, the honorees include Daniel Ellsberg. Folks at the Times like to make fun of Ellsberg for chasing skirts and doing drugs and living off his wife. Look, no one at that newspaper ever committed treason for the sake of justice for foreigners.
Moreover, the people who own the place did not earn their wealth, and no one wants a candid account of sex and drugs there. And they don't even know who Ron Ridenhour was.
His obituary in the Times was like Edward Said's, a slighting recital. Said they disagree with, Ridenhour they just can't perceive. That the outstanding intellectual of the Cold War was a US Army sergeant is a proposition which a journalist would have to take a college course from me even to entertain.
The habitus of American reporters is doxically middle-class, unshockable in its regard for self and authority. You might as well try to have a conversation about politics with a Rostow, or cultural difference with Samuel Huntingdon. He knows it all and he doesn't get any of it.
What's more, the academic authority to cite on arbitrary distinction among intellectuals is Pierre Bourdieu, a Parisian who uses words that are easy to make fun of. I'm not sure I could get habitus and doxa across to hard-core journalism majors.
But Randy is in there swinging, and what do you know, he has got three awardees in Ron's name at the National Press Club. You can learn more about Fertel's work to remember Ridenhour, a hero of the war in Viet Nam, by contacting Randy at fertel@aol.comor through www.fertel.com.
Dan Duffy