Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 18, 2023
Hello All – Daniel Ellsberg died this week at the age of 92. It is fitting to pause to reflect on the world that he lived through and how he changed it. He is best known to history as the person who copied the secret Pentagon Papers and released them to the world on June 13, 1971. As Noam Chomsky explains in the video talk linked below, Ellsberg had access to these secrets because he was the ultimate "insider," working directly and indirectly for the Pentagon in assembling a record of decision-making in the Vietnam War, from 1945 to the Tet Offensive of 1968. Chomsky notes that the effects of the Pentagon Paper's release rode on the crest of a substantial antiwar movement; and its record of lies and cover-ups further enraged a population disgusted with the war. As others of the articles linked below detail, the story of Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers had elements of daring-do and underground operations, making it a terrific adventure story with a heroic ending, not least because President Nixon's attempt to thwart Ellsberg ("the most dangerous man in America") helped lead to his impeachment.
For this writer, it was the second part of the Pentagon Papers, not released in 1971 and not readily available until the publication of Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine ((2017) that is most shocking. By 1971, participants in the antiwar movement were not surprised to learn that the politics and the media coverage of Vietnam were wall-to-wall lies. This was the Amerika we had come to know. The revelations in The Doomsday Machine – preceded by a number of articles and reminisces – describe the nuclear policy makers of the 1950s and 1960s as totally unhinged. The command-and-control systems in place for nuclear weapons commanded few and controlled nothing. For the most dangerous periods of the Cold War, the ability to launch nuclear war was scattered throughout all levels of the military command. Some of this is explained in the Chomsky video presentation.
Finally, Ellsberg should also be remembered for his dogged support of the most recent generation of whistle-blowers, the Julian Assanges and Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdons and the many others who have paid a heavy price for their willingness to report the crimes of their own government. It will be his legacy to serve as a model for the many whistle-blowers of the future who will undoubtedly step forward to tell us what they know and what we need to know. RIP Daniel Ellsberg.
Some Reading – What Daniel Ellsberg and Why It Was/Is Important
(Video) Chomsky on Ellsberg and the Danger of Nuclear War
---- Noam Chomsky discusses the heroic contributions Daniel Ellsberg made by releasing the Pentagon Papers and revealing the madness of American nuclear war plans. Ellsberg uncovered shocking information about the planning for nuclear war in the 1950s, during his time within the system and with high-level access. He revealed details about the planning documents and the existence of a "Doomsday Machine," a system designed by both the United States and Russia that would ensure total destruction in the event of communication failure. He also discovered the delegation of authority to launch nuclear wars, with lower-level military officials interpreting instructions in a way that allowed them to initiate nuclear bombings. [See the Program]
Daniel Ellsberg Wanted Americans to See the Truth About War
By Norman Solomon, The Intercept [June 16 2023]
---- Ellsberg died today from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 92. While he is best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War to the world, he went on for 52 years to expose other types of secrets — including hidden truths about the psychology and culture of U.S. militarism. His stunning intellect and vast knowledge of the American warfare state were combined with great reservoirs of emotional depth and human compassion, enabling him to lay bare the social pressures and fear operating within the media and politics of a country addicted to waging aggressive war. After his disclosure in early March that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, media coverage of him and his life was extensive. Yet the public discourse scarcely touched on core aspects of the ongoing "war on terror" that he explored when we spoke for an interview that appears in my new book, "War Made Invisible." [Read More]
My Fifty Years with Dan Ellsberg – The Man Who Changed America
By Seymour Hersh [March 8, 2023]
---- This is a story about a tutelage that began in the summer of 1972, when Dan and I first connected. I have no memory of who called whom, but I was then at the New York Times and Dan had some inside information on White House horrors he wanted me to chase down—stuff that had not been in the Pentagon Papers. … I first learned of Dan's importance in the summer of 1971, when he was outed for delivering the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times a few weeks after the newspaper began a series of shattering stories about the disconnect between what we were told and what really had been going on. Those papers remain today the most vital discussion of a war from the inside. Even after the New York Times exposures, their seven thousand pages would be rarely read in full. [Read More]
Dan Ellsberg's Parting Plea: Don't Wait
---- Sam Adams Associates for Integrity honored the late Dan Ellsberg with our annual award for fearless integrity on April 11, 2023. It was clear that Dan summoned much of his remaining strength to leave an unambiguous message to people of conscience as to why they should blow the whistle on government lies, as he did, but NOW, not later. [He said]:
So people did not break with the war because it was lied about; they did not go to prison because it was unwinnable, but because it was wrong. And they all knew it was wrong, that these lies were about crimes and sins and evil that should stop immediately – murder, not just your ordinary lies about cost overruns but lies that were killing people. And, thus, I've said to very many people since then, Do not do what I did. Don't do what I did. Don't wait till the bombs are falling and thousands more have died. Act like Katharine Gun; act like I wish I had done in 1964, when I knew that people were being lied to death. Put out documents to that effect before the war, right at the time, at whatever cost to oneself, at whatever risk, which is not even comparable to the massacres that were actually ongoing or in process….
"Do what I wish I had done in '64, not what I waited till 69 and 71 to do. Act like Katharine Gun and Ed Snowden and Tom Drake, Bill Binney, and many others on the list of Sam Adams awardees, in particular, Ed Snowden and Julian Assange." [Read More]
Ellsberg on Democracy Now!
Dan Ellsberg appeared many times on Democracy Now!, including during the months before his death. In April he was interviewed for the length of the program, reflecting on the release of the Pentagon Papers and how/why he did it. In Part 2 of the same interview, he reflected on the danger of nuclear war arising out of the conflicts in Ukraine and over Taiwan. For the complete archive of Democracy Now!'s interviews with Dan Ellsberg, go here.
Indian Point Update
The fight to stop the decommissioning company Holtec from dumping a million gallons of radioactive water into the Hudson River will reach a milestone on Tuesday – at least that is when the NYS legislature (Assembly) legislation to prevent such dumping is calendared to come to a vote, during the legislature's "special session." Then the legislation must be signed by Governor Hochul. There is concern that Holtec might dump before the legislation is signed; and even that it might ignore the legislation, do the dump, and pay the fine. County Executive George Latimer sent an excellent statement to the recent Decommissioning Oversight Board meeting, which you can read here. NB Holtec is not a nice decommissioning company – you can read about their record at New Jersey's Oyster Creek nuclear plant here. If you have some time tomorrow (Monday), please call Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (518-455-3791) and strongly express your view that the Stop the Dumping legislation MUST be voted on during the Tuesday session. Thanks!
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
This week's Rewards for stalwart Newsletter readers remembers the Coventry/British band "The Specials," which caught my interest this week when Democracy Now! played their rendition of Rod McKuen's Soldiers Who Want to be Heroes." When the band's leader Terry Hall died last year, a memoir described the band's work as "providing a musical backdrop to economic recession, urban decay, and societal fracture in the early 1980s." Interested? I think you will like "Freedom Highway," "Nelson Mandela," and (in their natural habitat) "Enjoy Yourself!" Yes, enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
The Long War on Black Studies
By Robin D. G. Kelley, New York Review of Books [June 17, 2023]
---- Who's afraid of Black Studies? White supremacists, fascists, the ruling class, and even some liberals. As well they should be. Not everything done in the name of Black Studies challenges the social order. Like any field, it has its own sharp divisions and disagreements. But unlike mainstream academic disciplines, Black Studies was born out of a struggle for freedom and a genuine quest to understand the world in order to change it, presenting political and moral philosophy with their most fundamental challenge. The objects of study have been Black life, the structures that produce premature death, the ideologies that render Black people less than human, the material consequences of those ideologies, and the foundational place of colonialism and slavery in the emergence of modernity. Black Studies grew out of, and interrogates, the long struggle to secure our future as a people and for humanity by remaking and reenvisioning the world through ideas, art, and social movements. It emerged as both an intellectual and political project, without national boundaries and borders. The late political theorist Cedric J. Robinson described it as "a critique of Western Civilization. … It would be a mistake to think of such rhetoric as a "culture war." This is a political battle. It is part and parcel of the right-wing war on democracy, reproductive rights, labor, the environment, land defenders and water protectors, the rights and safety of transgender and nonbinary people, asylum seekers, the undocumented, the unhoused, the poor, and the perpetual war on Black communities. To read more, paste this link - https://archive.ph/ZFAeq – into your browser.
Beware: we ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr's candidacy at our peril
By Naomi Klein, The Guardian [June 14, 2023]
---- When Robert F Kennedy Jr announced his plan to run for president in the Democratic party primaries this April, the dominant liberal strategy towards the once tough environmental lawyer – now spreader of all manner of dangerous, unsupported theories – seemed to be: ignore him and wait for him to go away. Don't cover, don't engage and don't debate. Jim Kessler, a leader of the pro-Biden think tank Third Way, called him a "gadfly and a laughingstock"; Democratic consultant Sawyer Hackett brushed him off as "a gnat." Well, if recent developments in the Kennedy campaign have demonstrated anything, it's that denial is not a viable political strategy. Kennedy honed his social media skills over years to spread his anti-vaccine message, so he has simply done an end-run around traditional media and party structures. [Read More]
War & Peace
The Surprising Pervasiveness of Pro-War Propaganda
By , , and June 9, 2023]
[FB – Code Pink has been a leader within the peace movement, calling for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations, and questioning the wisdom of sending more offensive weapons to Ukraine. This has attracted some flak, including an article in Foreign Policy in Focus by The Nation's John Feffer. Here is the Code Pink reply, which is also a good statement of their antiwar position.]
---- In the Foreign Policy In Focus article "The Surprising Pervasiveness of American Arrogance," John Feffer belittles champions of the U.S. peace movement for their support for a ceasefire and negotiated peace to end the suffering in Ukraine and avert a nuclear catastrophe. … Feffer doesn't believe NATO expansion was a significant factor in this conflict, he doesn't believe that the U.S. was a significant player in the 2014 Maidan uprising that overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych, and he doesn't believe that U.S. policy has turned this war from a valiant defense by the people of Ukraine into a long war to sacrifice them for the U.S. geopolitical goal of "weakening" Russia. These are obviously fundamental disagreements. Our insistence on U.S. responsibility for a long series of diplomatic and policy errors affecting Ukraine does not in any way justify the war, but it does help in understanding possible solutions.
War Made Invisible
, Counterpunch [June 16, 2023]
[FB – This is a review/appreciation of the just-published book by Norman Solomon, War Made Invisible, a follow-on to his important book and film, War Made Easy.]
---- "War Made Invisible," even as it so thoroughly exposes the machinations of the US military, the White House and the State Department to hide the country's wars and interventions, and even as he provides details of the horrible war crimes and genocidal killing that the US has been perpetrating around the globe, this book is also a kind of update to that classic Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky media analysis work Manufacturing Consent. It is entirely focused upon the way the mainstream corporate media work hand-in-glove with the national security state and Pentagon to hide the costs and the bloody reality of America's 21st- Century militarism and endless war policy. In painful detail, he documents how major news organizations and their top journalists and talking heads avoid asking the hard questions when US bombs slaughter civilians, and base most of their reports on US wars and counter-insurgencies on unchallenged press releases issued by the Pentagon and the State Department. [Read More]
The U.S. and Iran are on the verge of a new nuclear 'deal' — why is the media ignoring the story?
By
---- The U.S. and Iran may be moving toward a diplomatic understanding that, in some ways, revives the nuclear deal that Donald Trump unilaterally ended in 2018 — but the American mainstream press is mostly missing the story. The tentative new agreement, under which Iran would freeze its enrichment of nuclear material in return for some relief from U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, would unquestionably reduce the chances of a conflict in the Mideast, including an eventual nuclear confrontation. … If the U.S.-Iran understanding does happen, it would be the best news from the Mideast in years. The new arrangement with Iran will slow or even stop a nuclear arms race in the region. Even if you set aside the chances of an intentional conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, an accidental clash between the three nuclear powers would still be catastrophic.
The Climate Crisis
We are gambling with the future of our Planet for the sake of Hamburgers
By Peter Singer, The Conversation 'June 15, 2023]
---- Plant foods typically have far lower greenhouse gas emissions than any animal foods, whether we are comparing equivalent quantities of calories or of protein. Beef, for example, emits 192 times as much carbon dioxide equivalent per gram of protein as nuts, and while these are at the extremes of the protein foods, eggs, the animal food with the lowest emissions per gram of protein, still has, per gram of protein, more than twice the emissions of tofu. Animal foods do even more poorly when compared with plant foods in terms of calories produced. Beef emits 520 times as much per calorie as nuts, and eggs, again the best-performing animal product, emit five times as much per calorie as potatoes. Favourable as these figures are to plant foods, they leave out something that tilts the balance even more strongly against animal foods in the effort to avoid catastrophic climate change: the "carbon opportunity cost" of the vast area of land used for grazing animals and the smaller, but still very large, area used to grow crops that are then fed — wastefully, as we have seen — to confined animals. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
'Anti-antisemitism' was meant to unite American Jews. Why is it backfiring?
By Nathan J. Brown and Daniel Nerenberg, +972 Magazine [Israel] [June 13, 2023]
---- Analysts scrutinizing U.S. President Joe Biden's recently unveiled "National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism" are rightfully asking what the effects of the new policy will be. But there is a backstory to the White House's document — and to broader efforts to define and combat antisemitism — that shouldn't go untold. Much of that story centers around how several American Jewish organizations have, for more than two decades, forcefully combined Israel advocacy with fighting antisemitism in their pursuit of a unified Jewish identity. Those same actors advised the White House as it prepared its new strategy — and while their victory was limited, the implications of their efforts may be far-reaching. The origins and development of this campaign for Israel-oriented "anti-antisemitism" reveal that it is less about protecting Jews than it is an attempt to rescue a dominant but threatened approach to ensuring Jewish continuity. But with Israel no longer constituting a unifying force for American Jews, the effectiveness of this project seems increasingly in doubt. [Read More]
(Video) Zohran Mamdani on the Not On Our Dime Act
From Beinart Notebook [June 9, 2023]
---- On June 9, Peter hosted an online discussion entitled "Zohran Mamdani on the Not On Our Dime Act." He was joined by special guest Zohran Mamdani, who represents Astoria, Queens in the New York State Assembly. He's author of the Not On Our Dime Act, which seeks to end tax-deductions for New York State contributions to settlements in the West Bank. [See the Interview]. CFOW is an endorser of the "Not on Our Dime Act"; to learn more about the Act/issue, go here.
Our History
Black Troops Spreading the Word with Every Marching Foot
By Greg Carr, Zinn Education Project [June 2023]
---- While General Granger read the Emancipation Proclamation off that veranda in Galveston, there were at least nine regiments of the United States Colored Troops marking their way through Texas, the last of the 10 states in the Confederacy to give up. Black troops, some of those same Black troops that have captured Richmond, those Black troops were now in Texas. So while Granger makes the formal announcement on June 19th, and a year later to the day, Black folks start celebrating Juneteenth formally, those Black troops are spreading the word with every marching foot as they come across the South. June 19th is the official day marking these emancipation celebrations as it formally comes into the African awareness in Texas. But the dates are usually linked to whenever people found out they were free, which is why in Mississippi, in Alabama, in Arkansas, in Oklahoma, you might see an August date or July date. [Read More] And I think you will like this short video from the TV series "Black-ish," "We Built This."
