By Consortium News

Daniel Ellsberg died at 92 on Friday in hospice care after a battle with pancreatic cancer. 

Ellsberg was considered the greatest whistleblower of certainly his generation if not in U.S. history.  His decision to leak the top-secret government study of the Vietnam war to the press was clearly one of the most courageous acts in the nation’s history. 

The decision by the Nixon administration’s Department of Justice to order the press to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers led to a landmark Supreme Court decision against the government’s use of prior restraint.

Then President Richard Nixon had Ellsberg charged under the Espionage Act nonetheless. Ellsberg gained his freedom only after gross prosecutorial misconduct was revealed. 

In his later years, Ellsberg continued to speak out against injustices and supported a new generation of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. 

He was also a fearless advocate for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange as he battles against his own Espionage Act case. 

Dan was a friend of Consortium News, served on our board and appeared on many of our CN Live! webcasts. We extend our condolences to his family and his many friends.  

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https://consortiumnews.com/2023/06/16/rest-in-peace-daniel-ellsberg/

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Washington has openly embraced the goal of destabilizing Moscow, with an eye to the 2024 presidential election, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.

The US is not stopping its “vicious practice of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries,”Lavrov told the meeting of the ruling United Russia party. 

“The forms of such interference are very diverse, including threats, blackmail and the organization of ‘color revolutions’. The bloody coup d'état in Ukraine that succeeded in 2014 was attempted again six years later in Belarus, unsuccessfully,” the foreign minister explained. “This obviously won’t be the last step. They openly set the goal of undermining domestic political stability in our country –  in the context of the 2024 presidential elections.” 

While the situation in the world is “not easy,” it is also increasingly apparent that the main trend is the strengthening of multipolarity, Lavrov added. New centers of growth and global decision-making are emerging in Eurasia, the Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, based on the “natural, inalienable right of peoples to determine their own destiny.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the 2024 presidential election will be held “in strict accordance with the law,” and in compliance with all democratic and constitutional procedures. He is eligible to run for re-election, but has not yet announced if he intends to do so.

In March 2022, US President Joe Biden publicly declared that Putin “cannot remain in power,”though officials in Washington later said he was expressing a personal sentiment and not an actualpolicy change. 

Several months later, former national security adviser John Bolton openly advocated for “regime change” in Russia, urging the US to encourage “Russians themselves to exacerbate divisions among those with real authority,” in order to bring about a revolution.

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https://www.rt.com/russia/578311-lavrov-us-election-meddling/

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The final revelation of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died on Friday at the age of 92, was to reveal details of top secret US plans to launch a nuclear invasion of China.

Millions would have died in the bombing, planned for 1958, which was set to start with Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on the Chinese mainland near Taiwan and then move to larger nuclear weapons on a path going north to Shanghai. The resulting nuclear war would lead to countless deaths across mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan.

The Chinese at the time had only conventional weapons.

While it had long been rumoured that the US had considered “nuking” China in the 1950s, Ellsberg revealed full details of the secret plans in 2021, sharing the original papers documenting the plans. There was a little coverage of the revelation in some mainstream media outlets, but then the story quickly disappeared.

Here’s what happened—and how details were hidden for more than half a century.

Tension across the Straits

When there was tension across the waters between parties on mainland China and a military group, the Nationalists, which had fled to the island of Taiwan in 1958, US military officials met to discuss what role they should play. Mainland fighters were making headway against the group on the island, a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting was told.

The US decided it was in their interest to maintain control of the region by holding key islands in the South China Seas. If mainlanders fought with the Nationalists on Taiwan, the US would launch an invasion “to destroy the war-making capability of Communist China”.

The decision was made that the US would act in “a situation in which there would be a Communist military offensive against Taiwan that would be countered by an American attack with atomic weapons against the Chinese mainland”.

(It’s interesting to note that planners repeatedly used the word “communist” to reinforce negativity about China, a technique still used by the mainstream media today, despite the country having run a state capitalist system for more than 40 years.)

Islands useful to America

Classified notes of the meetings reveal that there was no discussion of the need to defend people living on the island of Taiwan, but were wholly focused on the military value of offshore islands to US maintenance of control of the region.

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https://johnmenadue.com/before-ellsberg-died-he-revealed-detailed-us-plans-to-nuke-china/

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