In May of 2015, I did a series of interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, a man Henry Kissinger called, "the Most Dangerous Man in America" when Dan released 7000 pages of top secret documents called the Pentagon Papers in 1969. 

The Pentagon Papers revealed how Presidents from FDR to Nixon lied about how and why we were in Vietnam. Dan was forty and could have been sentenced to jail for 115 years, but instead his case was dismissed when the judge learned that Nixon knew and approved of the break in to his psychiatrist office and to have him “roughed” up by C.I.A. operatives. This was Nixon’s unraveling which lead to ending the Vietnam War and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Over 2 million lives where lost in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during that time and Dan knew that Nixon was threatening to use nuclear weapons.

Our conversations are called “Lied to Death: How U.S. Leaders Keep Taking Us Into War” and is raising money for national security whistleblowers. The oral history is mixture of historical, political science and Dan’s sixty-year scholarly analysis as a former nuclear planner for Rand Corporation. He’s best line to me is when he says, “Arn, no one knows of these things because even I didn’t until the Freedom of Information Act released it.”

So what makes this important is how we are being lied to and how to understand how to use this same applied principles to today’s wars and national security state. 

A year ago and 5 days ago, I would have shook my head and moved on, but I’ve come to understand in the hundreds of hours of stories I’ve listen to and studied that there is too much empirical evidence on how our government works covertly for special interests of the military, oil, finance and other corporate powers. It’s the story of every Empire from the Iraqi Sumerian Empire in 4000 B.C. to ours, expand and control.

Artwork by © Scott Meskill 2015

Lied To Death: Conversations With Daniel Ellsberg On Why We Go To War

The Israel-Palestine issue is not complicated; an apartheid regime abuses and oppresses an indigenous ethnic group who don't have the same rights as others. The only reason anyone thinks it's complicated is because they assume if it were simple, the news would've told them so.

Really Israel-Palestine is one of the easier conflicts to understand on the world stage; conflicts like Ukraine or Syria are much more complicated. It's obvious at a glance that there's one group in power and another group being treated very badly by that group, but because the press frames it as a complicated issue with its sympathies wildly slanted toward the apartheid regime, people assume it can't be as simple as what it looks like at first glance.

It is, though. Israel is exactly the abusive apartheid regime it looks like on the surface. Remember this as the bodies pile up and Gaza is turned into a smoldering crater. This is exactly what it looks like.

Reading by Tim Foley.

This Is Exactly What It Looks Like

In May of 2015, I did a series of interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, a man Henry Kissinger called, "the Most Dangerous Man in America" when Dan released 7000 pages of top secret documents called the Pentagon Papers in 1969. 

The Pentagon Papers revealed how Presidents from FDR to Nixon lied about how and why we were in Vietnam. Dan was forty and could have been sentenced to jail for 115 years, but instead his case was dismissed when the judge learned that Nixon knew and approved of the break in to his psychiatrist office and to have him “roughed” up by C.I.A. operatives. This was Nixon’s unraveling which lead to ending the Vietnam War and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Over 2 million lives where lost in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during that time and Dan knew that Nixon was threatening to use nuclear weapons.

Our conversations are called “Lied to Death: How U.S. Leaders Keep Taking Us Into War” and is raising money for national security whistleblowers. The oral history is mixture of historical, political science and Dan’s sixty-year scholarly analysis as a former nuclear planner for Rand Corporation. He’s best line to me is when he says, “Arn, no one knows of these things because even I didn’t until the Freedom of Information Act released it.”

So what makes this important is how we are being lied to and how to understand how to use this same applied principles to today’s wars and national security state. 

A year ago and 5 days ago, I would have shook my head and moved on, but I’ve come to understand in the hundreds of hours of stories I’ve listen to and studied that there is too much empirical evidence on how our government works covertly for special interests of the military, oil, finance and other corporate powers. It’s the story of every Empire from the Iraqi Sumerian Empire in 4000 B.C. to ours, expand and control.

Lied To Death: Conversations with Daniel Ellsberg Chapter 6

Arn Menconi

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