Debra Sweet | April 19, 2023
Daniel Ellsberg Week:
A Week of Education & Action to Honor Peacemaking and Whistle-blowing – April 24-30
Daniel Ellsberg — the Pentagon Papers whistleblower who has been an inspiring activist for peace since the early 1970s — recently wrote a public letter disclosing that he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with a prognosis that he has only three to six months to live. Dan was a major source for the film The Movement & the Madman, above.
He became a whistleblower by giving the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. Ellsberg’s subsequent trial on twelve felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, leading to the convictions of several White House aides and figuring in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for principled whistle-blowing.