THE RETURN OF THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA
By Kevin Stoda, Wiesbaden , Germany IN EXILE
Well, I'm sitting at my computer in Germany with my wife about 15,000 kilometers away in the Philippines .
On Democracy Now, I'm listening to the wife of Daniel Ellsburg, Patricia Ellsburg, speak of how U.S. government officials had spoke in terms of torture in terms of bombing whole populations in Laos and South East Asia in the late 1960s. She learned this all just a few days before her husband, Daniel Ellsburg sent the Pentagon Papers to many American newspapers.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/16/the_most_dangerous_man_in_america
Today, Amy Goodman was interviewing Patricia Ellsburg on her memories. Mrs. Ellsburg responded "it really struck "the pivotal moment, perhaps, in my adult life was the time when Daniel said, I think that I want you to read the papers.' He had protected me, because it was top secret. He didn't want my fingerprints on the copies. And I'm considering putting out the papers,because he knew that Nixon was going to expand the war and that the peace "the peace plan was not going to work. So this is our first year of marriage, first few months of marriage. And I was thirty-two, and I had spent a lot of years looking for Mr. Right. I had not been married before. And I'm reading documents that are horrifying to me.
THE LANGUAGE OF TORTURERS
Mrs. Ellsburg stated, as she read through these documents, "Amy, I saw something that Dan hadn't seen, that in the language that was being used by the leaders of our country, they were using words like one more turn of the screw, ratchet up the water-drip technique, and much phrasing, much, much language of torturers. And I was horrified at the indifference to human suffering of both Americans and Vietnamese, their indifference to Congress, to the American public, the manipulations. And so, Dan said, Should I put these out? And I said, with tears in my eyes, These have to get out to the American public, knowing that my beloved husband, who I still love after forty years "he's still my hero "might go to prison for the rest of his life. And I look back at that, and I am really proud. I'm really proud of "I was not groomed to be chopping top secrets off documents as we were about to publish "to copy them so that they could be given out to more newspapers.
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