Pentagon Papers Quotes

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for war seem to know who did it or where to look for them. This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed--for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it off.

Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear,” scholar of fascism Hannah Arendt wrote after the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.13

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.

Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need nod exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism. That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though the Post was the second news organization to obtain a copy of the secret study of the Vietnam war, Bradlee noted that 'there was blood on every word' of the Times' initial stories. Bradlee could convey his opinions with a single disgusted glance at an indolent reporter or editor. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe:" but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things. In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that there should be anything of what you call a "solid" kind; but I dare say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight the Triangles, Squares, and other figures, moving about as I have described them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible, to us, except Straight Lines; and the necessity of this I will speedily demonstrate.

US military officials and advisers described explicit and sustained efforts to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common in the field, as military headquarters in Kabul, at the Pentagon and at the White House to skew statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion." [New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971) (concurring)]

Had I been given The [Pentagon] Papers themselves that early, I would probably have become a prisoner of them—as it was, I had a good sense of the bureaucratic history [in them] as related by an expert, but I was also free to do several hundred interviews, not merely to flesh out the bureaucratic history, but to balance the pure paper history with a human history, and to relate secret decisions as they were not always set down on paper.

The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish.

Do you ever feel like the Redcoats?

One of its analysts was Daniel Ellsberg, who at the time was back in the States compiling the report that—after he leaked it to the press in 1971—would become known as The Pentagon Papers. The study showed that American leaders had been systematically lying about the scope and progress of the war for years and had consistently enlarged it despite doubts that the effort could succeed.

I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson’s reaction to these revelations as “close to treason,” because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying “I am the state.” And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that.

[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.

Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity. The tycoon who lives in personal obscurity, the empire builder who controls the destinies of nations from behind the scenes, are vanishing types. Even nonelective officials, ostensibly preoccupied with questions of high policy, have to keep themselves constantly on view; all politics becomes a form of spectacle. It is well known that Madison Avenue packages politicians and markets them as if they were cereals or deodorants; but the art of public relations penetrates even more deeply into political life, transforming policy making itself. The modern prince does not much care that “there’s a job to be done”—the slogan of American capitalism at an earlier and more enterprising stage of its development; what interests him is that “relevant audiences,” in the language of the Pentagon Papers, have to be cajoled, won over, seduced. He confuses successful completion of the task at hand with the impression he makes or hopes to make on others.

There was no reason whatever to make a wholesale choice between handicraft and machine production: between a single contemporary part of the technological pool and all the other past accumulations. But there was a genuine reason to maintain as many diverse units in this pool as possible, in order to increase the range of both human choices and technological inventiveness. Many of the machines of the nineteenth century, as Kropotkin pointed out, were admirable auxiliaries to handicraft processes, once they could be scaled, like the efficient small electric motor, to the small workshop and the personally controlled operation. William Morris and his colleagues, who almost single-handed salvaged and restored one ancient craft after another, by personally mastering the arts of dyeing, weaving, embroidering, printing, glass-painting, paper-making, book-binding, showed superior technological insight to those who scoffed at their romanticism.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe:" but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.

I was exactly like the various White House officials who testified later during the Watergate hearings that they had believed—in the words of their boss, President Nixon—that “when the president does it, it is not illegal.

and just when I was ready to hit him, he’d laugh in that way of his to let me know he loved me. And he made me a better man.

The first eye-opener came in the 1970s, when DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, organized the first large-scale speech recognition project. To everyone’s surprise, a simple sequential learner of the type Chomsky derided handily beat a sophisticated knowledge-based system. Learners like it are now used in just about every speech recognizer, including Siri. Fred Jelinek, head of the speech group at IBM, famously quipped that “every time I fire a linguist, the recognizer’s performance goes up.” Stuck in the knowledge-engineering mire, computational linguistics had a near-death experience in the late 1980s. Since then, learning-based methods have swept the field, to the point where it’s hard to find a paper devoid of learning in a computational linguistics conference. Statistical parsers analyze language with accuracy close to that of humans, where hand-coded ones lagged far behind. Machine translation, spelling correction, part-of-speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, question answering, dialogue, summarization: the best systems in these areas all use learning. Watson, the Jeopardy! computer champion, would not have been possible without it.

With all their variation in goals and means, OpenLeaks, IMMI, BalkanLeaks, GlobaLeaks, and even Jones’s OpenWatch smartphone apps are all stepchildren of a movement that stretches back to the cypherpunks two decades earlier and the Pentagon Papers two decades before that. And with its greatest successes in just the last few of those forty years, its work is only starting.

In addition to the peerless Levering Smith, Raborn held another trump card in dealing with the Pentagon—a “magic piece of paper”: a memo from the CNO, Admiral Burke, affirming that Raborn “was to have absolute top priority on anything he wants to do” and that everyone in the Navy was to be responsive to his requests. If they found that they could not be, they were to report to Burke, and he would take it upon himself to say no if he felt the denial was proper. This unprecedented talisman got Raborn whatever he needed from the Navy’s frequently rivalrous bureaus, though Burke preferred to build willing support within the Pentagon rather than compulsory (and thus potentially grudging) support. In this, his and Raborn’s personal credibility and persuasive gifts carried the day. The economics of the SLBM program were useful too.

(see note to p. 249), which I can still recommend

To reinforce the message, Obama administration officials touted statistics that distorted what was really happening on the ground. The Bush administration had done the same, but Obama staffers in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false.

In his paper, Dr Davis referred to the infamous 1980 Cash-Landrum UFO case, covered earlier in this book, where the Landrum family reported a massive diamond-shaped UFO hovering over their car in the road near Dayton, Texas. As well as the trio reporting terrible burns from what experts declared was ionising radiation, one of the weirdest claims in the Cash-Landrum sighting was that they said they saw 23 helicopters, including massive CH-47 Chinooks, closely following the object. The US military denied any of its choppers were in the air nearby that night, and 23 of them in one place does sound implausible. Dr Davis’s paper gave an explanation – that the helicopters were ‘mimicry techniques employed for the manipulation of human consciousness to induce the various manifestations of “absurd” interactions or scenery associated with the UFO encounter. This in combination with the mimicry of man-made aircrafts’ (helicopters) aggregate features were prominent in the Cash-Landrum UFO case’. There is no explanation for how Dr Davis reached this conclusion. No known science describes the capacity to manipulate human consciousness to induce hallucinations as described. Modern science would say it was science fiction. However, an answer may lie in extraordinary PowerPoint slides we know now were prepared for a briefing of senior officials at the US Department of Defence, detailed online by The Mind Sublime. The individual behind that site told me he found the intriguing PowerPoint slides in early August 2018 while he was trawling through former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Christopher Mellon’s personal website.4 (This was shortly after The New York Times had revealed the existence of the previously secret Pentagon UAP investigation program.) The Mind Sublime researcher screenshotted his discovery to prove the slides came from Mellon’s website, and, importantly, because the document was stated to be a PowerPoint for a briefing of the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence. Perhaps it was these slides that prompted Senator Harry Reid to ask the Department of Defence for Special Access Program protection for the investigation – because what the slides said was momentous. If the unredacted slides accurately reflect the Defence Department’s knowledge of the UAP phenomenon, they are explosive. They reveal how the Pentagon’s UAP investigation unit advised the Defence Department not only that the mysterious craft were a ‘game changer’ but that the US military was powerless against them.5 One of the slides, headed ‘AATIP Preliminary Assessments’, shows that Elizondo’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program privately advised the Defence Department that ‘Preliminary evidence indicates that the United States is incapable of defending itself towards some of those technologies . . . The nature of these technologies and the fact that the United States has no countermeasures is considered Highly Sensitive’.6 The document, prepared for the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence, pushed for further investigation ‘in order to determine the full scope of the threat and their capabilities to be either exploited or defeated’.

These brief statements are truly amazing and in some respects may be among the most important lines in the entire New York Times presentation of the Pentagon Papers. They show how deeply the clandestine, operating side of the CIA hid behind its first and best cover, that of being an intelligence agency. How can the Times miss the point so significantly? Either the Times is innocent of the CIA as an intelligence organization versus the CIA as a clandestine organization, a highly antagonistic and competitive relationship, or the Times somehow played into the hands of those skillful apologists who would have us all believe that the Vietnam problem was the responsibility of others and not of the CIA operating as a clandestine operation. Let us consider an example:

The New York Times goes on to editorialize: “The Pentagon study does not deal at length with a major question. Why did the policy makers go ahead despite the intelligence estimates prepared by their most senior intelligence officials?” These brief statements are truly amazing and in some respects may be among the most important lines in the entire New York Times presentation of the Pentagon Papers. They show how deeply the clandestine, operating side of the CIA hid behind its first and best cover, that of being an intelligence agency. How can the Times miss the point so significantly? Either the Times is innocent of the CIA as an intelligence organization versus the CIA as a clandestine organization, a highly antagonistic and competitive relationship, or the Times somehow played into the hands of those skillful apologists who would have us all believe that the Vietnam problem was the responsibility of others and not of the CIA operating as a clandestine operation.

Though the moral onus for promoting war has made the munitions manufacturers the scapegoats, the fact is that the paper-profits of war equally enrich every other part of the national economy, even agriculture; for war, with its unparalleled consumption of goods, and its unparalleled wastes, temporarily overcomes the chronic defect of an expanding technology-'over-production.' War, by restoring scarcity, is necessary on classic capitalist terms to ensure profit.

This book is about the real CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon personal experience generally derived from work in the Pentagon from 1955 to 1964. At retirement, I was Chief of Special Operations (clandestine activities) with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. These duties involved the military support of the clandestine activities of the CIA and were performed under the provisions of National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2. Since this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized release of the “Pentagon Papers,” “Watergate” and the resignation of President Nixon, the run-away activities of the “Vietnam War,” the “Arab Oil Embargo” that led to the greatest financial heist in history, and the blatantly unlawful “Iran-Contra” affair. All of these were brought about and master-minded by a renegade “Secret Team” that operated secretly, without Presidential direction; without National Security Council approval—so they say; and, generally, without Congressional knowledge. This trend increases. Its scope expands . . . even today.

(The term “sheep-dipped” appears in The New York Times version of the Pentagon Papers without clarification. It is an intricate Army-devised process by which a man who is in the service as a full career soldier or officer agrees to go through all the legal and official motions of resigning from the service. Then, rather than actually being released, his records are pulled from the Army personnel files and transferred to a special Army intelligence file. Substitute but nonetheless real-appearing records are then processed, and the man “leaves” the service. He is encouraged to write to friends and give a cover reason why he got out. He goes to his bank and charge card services and changes his status to civilian, and does the hundreds of other official and personal things that any man would do if he really had gotten out of the service. Meanwhile, his real Army records are kept in secrecy, but not forgotten. If his contemporaries get promoted, he gets promoted. All of the things that can be done for his hidden records to keep him even with his peers are done. Some very real problems arise in the event he gets killed or captured as a prisoner. There are problems with insurance and with benefits his wife would receive had he remained in the service. At this point, sheep-dipping gets really complicated, and each case is handled quite separately.)

Suppose you could pick up a turtle, dip his tail into coloured ink, place him on a piece of paper and make him walk around so that his tail paints a spiral shape, a pentagon or a noughts and crosses grid? This adventure introduces you to different ways that you can create shapes or line drawings using code.

the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which indicated the war had not been driven by idealism and that the US government had lied to the public and to Congress,

Deep down there is the feeling that what we participated in was morally wrong, and can never be looked upon as legitimate. We can make all kinds of excuses, but it can never justify the murder, the savagery and the barbarism that was inflicted on the Vietnamese people under the guise of saving the world from communism.

Vietnam was never a threat to America or Australia, but it was a threat to their perceived interests. For those selfish interests we fought and were maimed and died. It was not for patriotism, and not to save freedom or humanity: it was to save vested interests.

Members of RAND, including analyst Daniel Ellsberg, were famously part of a study team that produced the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg leaked copies of the papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971.

What happened in 1970 in Los Angeles was the worst economic episode I’ve ever had to fight through. Unlike the post–Cold War Recession, we did not have the waves of in-migration from Mexico, nor were drug sales as great. I believe the underground economy was a silent savior of Los Angeles during 1990–94. The Kent State Massacre and the Pentagon Papers scandal didn’t help the 1970 scene. Furthermore, things didn’t get better in the early 1970s. The sharp recession of 1970 was followed by a sudden inflation caused by Vietnam spending. Nixon “slammed the gold window shut.” From 1945 to 1971, the U.S., under the Bretton Woods Agreement, had agreed to back its currency to a limited extent with gold at $35 per ounce. Other nations’ central banks were withdrawing our gold so fast that Nixon had to renege on the promise. This was followed in 1973 by the end of fixed currency exchange rates. The dollar plummeted. Traveling to the wine country of France in the summer of 1973, I was unable to cash American Express dollar-denominated traveler’s checks. Inflation jumped with the 1973 Energy Crisis. Nixon imposed wage and price controls. Then Watergate, accompanied by the Dow Jones hitting bottom in 1974. Three Initiatives to Turn the Tide Against all this, Trader Joe’s mounted three initiatives. In chronological order: We launched the Fearless Flyer early in 1970. We broke the price of imported wines in late 1970 thanks to a loophole in the Fair Trade law. Most importantly, in 1971, we married the health food store to the Good Time Charley party store, which had been the 1967–70 version of Trader Joe’s. Together these three elements comprised the second version of Trader Joe’s, Whole Earth Harry.

Kai Bird,

McNamara revealed in his memoir In Retrospect that he had secretly advised President Kennedy, and after him President Johnson, that under no circumstances should they ever initiate nuclear war. He didn’t tell me that, but it was implicit in everything he had said. There is no doubt in my mind that he did give that advice and that it was the right advice. Yet it directly contradicted the U.S. “assurances” on U.S. readiness for first use he felt compelled to give repeatedly to NATO officials throughout his years in office. (NATO retains a first-use policy to this day, as does the United States outside the NATO area—perhaps now with a new degree of sincerity, indicated by the first-use premises of the Bush administration’s nuclear policy review leaked in March 2002.)

This was one of Kissinger’s first visits to Rand, after a long period of coldness that had begun in the late 1950s because of Rand’s critique of his advocacy of limited nuclear wars as instruments of U.S. policy in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.

At the Post, we received a lot of unpleasant phone calls, many readers expressing the sentiment that they imagined we were all popping champagne corks to celebrate the result we had wanted from the beginning—in short, the “I-hope-you’re-satisfied” school of thought.

remember someone saying that we were

Richard Nixon was elected president with 43.4 percent of the vote.

Vietnam to defend democracy, and remembers me responding that the Saigon regime was no democracy.

carrying on a war in someone else’s country, a country in no way implicated in attacking our own or anyone else’s. To continue to do that against the intense wishes of most of the inhabitants of that country began to seem to me morally wrong.

These had explicitly denied that the demilitarized zone (DMZ) was an international border separating two independent states.

you and I disagree…is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.

don’t think it occurred to me in 1961 that the White House might be lying about what the president had been told.

files in the McNamara study offices, I had discovered that this assumption was mistaken. Every one of these crucial decisions was secretly associated with realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public, just as in 1964–65.

in the summer of 1964, coincided with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the basis for a congressional resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson almost unlimited authority to pursue the Vietnam War. Ellsberg establishes that the incident was not the military attack on an American ship that Congress thought it was, and that the administration was cooking up evidence to justify a course of action it had already decided upon.

Worst of all, the release of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal had demonstrated that a cynical mentality of advertising and public relations—so central in persuading Americans to desire more and more in a nightmarish pattern of meaningless consumerism—had invaded the realm of politics like some lethal disease. For government officials, the falsity of image-making was now taking precedence over actual facts, problem solving, and a genuine attention to the public welfare, leading first to lying and then, inevitably, to criminality. Politics was becoming theater, and theater had no place in politics. Arendt reached for an analogy familiar to her. Totalitarian governments, she said, were willing to kill millions to conceal unpleasant facts. The United States was a long way from that: the manipulation of public opinion, not terror, was Washington’s way of hiding the truth. But the signs were not good; the country was on a road to perdition. A “stab-in-the-back” theory, used so effectively by the Nazis to vanquish their enemies, was already developing with regard to Vietnam. And unless the docile, materialist-minded citizenry woke up to the true realities and demanded real solutions to real problems, instead of trying to escape into “images, theories and sheer follies,” far greater troubles lay in store. She believed the country might be at a turning point in its history. The handwriting was on the wall. The chickens were coming home to roost.