Daniel Ellsberg in Fort Meade, Maryland, December 22, 2011. PAUL J. RICHARDS / AFP
Overused and debased through abuse, the term whistleblower has an original incarnation in modern democracies. A man of exemplary career, strong convictions and courage.
Daniel Ellsberg died on Friday June 16 at the age of 92 of complications from pancreatic cancer. He entered the military, political and media history of the United States by deciding to divulge what should be kept secret, thereby provoking the most important and devastating intelligence archive.
In 1971, after ending an exemplary career as a private adviser 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 governments regarding the United States on war in Vietnam. A total of 58,000 Americans lost their lives in this conflict. These “Pentagon Papers” were the result of a 1967 order by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to document the history of that war and the United States’ involvement in the region beginning in 1945. attention of his followers.
Also read: Article reserved for our subscribers Daniel Ellsberg, the first whistleblower
After unsuccessfully alerting the senators, Daniel Ellsberg had acted as a strategist, allowing a first salvo of disclosures in the New York Times – the newspaper was quickly hit by a Supreme Court injunction to stop publication.
Then it was the Washington Post and the Associated Press, followed by other dailies like the Boston Globe, that made the updating of this confidential and scathing documentation unstoppable. In late June 1971, the same Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of the documents being made public in the name of freedom of expression.
For Kissinger “the most dangerous man in America”
For example, while Ellsberg, hunted by the police, became a hero of the anti-war movement, the Nixon administration and advocates of a continuation of the conflict saw him as a traitor who needed to be chastised. For Henry Kissinger, the president’s diplomatic adviser, he was “the most dangerous man in America”. But his two trials in Los Angeles and Boston ended in defeat for the prosecution due to procedural flaws and police abuse.
A secret team of ex-agents, disguised as fake plumbers, had been sent to search Ellsberg’s former office in Beverly Hills, California. The aim was to find compromising notes on the patient.
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