The death of Daniel Ellsberg, the informant who revealed the “Pentagon Papers” to the world.

Overused and belittled by misuse, the expression “whistleblower” has a unique embodiment in modern democracies. A man with an exemplary career, strong convictions and a certain courage.

Died at the age of 92, on Friday 16 June, following pancreatic cancer, Daniel Ellsberg entered the military, political and media history of the United States, deciding to reveal what had to be kept silent, causing the most important and devastating confidential information leak archives.

In 1971, after concluding an exemplary career as a private consultant and adviser to the federal government, he released copies of nearly 7,000 pages of “top secret” documents to the press, exposing the lies and cover-ups of four successive administrations regarding the war in Vietnam. A total of 58,000 Americans died in this conflict. These “Pentagon documents” were the result of an order made in 1967 by the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who wanted to document the history of this war and the US engagement in the region from 1945 onwards. .

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After unsuccessfully alerting the senators, Daniel Ellsberg had acted as a strategist, allowing an initial barrage of revelations in New York Times- the paper was quickly hit with a Supreme Court injunction to cease publication.

Then it was the Washington Post and the Associated Press, followed by other newspapers such as the Boston globe, making the updating of this confidential and incriminating documentation unstoppable. At the end of June 1971, the Supreme Court itself ruled definitively in favor of the publication of the proceedings, in the name of freedom of expression.

For Kissinger, “the most dangerous man in America”

While Ellsberg, hunted down by the police, became a hero of the pacifist movement, the Nixon administration and supporters of a continuation of the conflict considered him a traitor to be punished, for example. For Henry Kissinger, diplomatic adviser to the president, it was “America’s Most Dangerous Man”. But the two trials against him, in Los Angeles and Boston, ended with a defeat of the prosecution, for procedural errors and abuses by the police.

A clandestine team of former agents, disguised as fake plumbers, had been sent to search the former studio of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills (California). The goal was to find incriminating notes on the patient.

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By James Brown

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