Daniel Ellsberg Works to Give Radical Imprimatur to Latest WikiLeaks Disclosures

I've been following the latest WikiLeaks document dump, but haven't had a chance to comment. Certainly the truth about the morally bankrupt Julian Assange is starting to go mainstream, "WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety." And it's no surprise that when under some real journalistic questioning the dude can't take the heat:

But the latest buzz over WikiLeaks has mostly bypassed the criminal corruption of the top leadership. And of course most MFM reporting, as well as leftist blog commentary, has gleefully focused on the charges that Iraq forces used torture and the allegedly "grim portrait of civilian deaths." Of course what was most astonishing, and by far much more important, was the latest evidence of massive Iranian intervention in the war, and not to mention the evidence that WMD --- long alleged by the left to have been a Bush administration lie --- were being used by insurgents as recently as 2008. And on top of all this, in one more interesting relationship, the New York Times featured a story on the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, "WikiLeaks Founder Gets Support in Rebuking U.S. on Whistle-Blowers." Given how dramatically the MFM has been all over the Wikileaks agenda since we first were lied to with the doctored Apache video early this year, this latest report on the communist Daniel Ellsberg (shown here at an ANSWER protest in March) should be getting more attention than it has:

LONDON — Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, lashed out together on Saturday at the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of whistle-blowers, including those responsible for the release of secret documents on the Iraq war.

Mr. Assange also said that WikiLeaks, which released the trove of almost 400,000 Iraq war documents on Friday, would shortly be posting an additional 15,000 remaining secret documents on the Afghan war.

Mr. Assange, speaking at a news conference in a London hotel a stone’s throw from the headquarters of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, was joined by Mr. Ellsberg, 79, the former military analyst who leaked a 1,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Mr. Ellsberg, who said he had flown overnight from California to attend, described Mr. Assange admiringly as “the most dangerous man in the world” for challenging governments, particularly the United States. He said the WikiLeaks founder had been “pursued across three continents” by Western intelligence services and compared the Obama administration’s threat to prosecute Mr. Assange to his own treatment under President Richard M. Nixon.

Both men hit out at what they described as the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of whistle-blowers, which Mr. Ellsberg said put the United States on a path to the kind of repressive legal framework that Britain has under its broad Official Secrets Act. He said the criminal investigations under President Obama of three Americans accused of leaking government secrets represented a new low.

The three men he was referring to were Pfc. Bradley Manning, a former military intelligence analyst suspected of providing the documents on Afghanistan and Iraq to WikiLeaks; Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency who was indicted this year; and Shamai Kedem Leibowitz, an F.B.I. linguist who pleaded guilty to leaking five classified documents in late 2009.

Mr. Ellsberg said the Pentagon’s demand that Mr. Assange “return” any classified materials in his possession was carefully couched in language similar to that used in the aftermath of the Pentagon Papers release, when he was threatened with criminal prosecution for espionage. “Secrecy,” Mr. Ellsberg said, “is essential to empire.”

Cross-posted from American Power.