We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Daniel Ellsberg: Covert Ops ‘Provoke Our Adversaries’ To Create An Excuse For War [Chap. 6]

Click here to access article and access to a 32:13m video interview with Ellsberg from Mint Press News.

This is an opportunity for you to recover more of your country's real history instead of the patriotic pablum you are fed daily by corporate media and schools. You will learn from someone who during the Vietnam War was a military analyst employed by the Empire's military research tank known as the RAND Corporation. During this segment you will learn specifically about how US planners manufactured an incident in order to deceive the American public and declared war against (North) Vietnam. 

After learning of so many lies being told to the public, he became a whistleblower by releasing The Pentagon Papers which revealed the true war policies of our masters. (Should you wish to order the Papers, I strongly advise you to order v. 2 of the Senator Gravel edition published by Beacon Press. As a part of a damage control effort, the NY Times flooded the market with a distorted edition of the Papers.)
MintPress News is proud to host “Lied to Death,” a 13-part audio conversation between famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and social justice activist Arn Menconi.

Menconi wrote that these interviews are a “mixture of historical, political science and Dan’s sixty-year scholarly analysis as a former nuclear planner for Rand Corporation.”

For more information on the interview and Ellsberg, see the introduction to this series.