Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Ellsberg Hits U.S. Media, Congress for Ignoring Nuclear Secrets Story

Legendary whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg has written an Op-Ed shaming the American media for failing to report the shocking story of Sibel Edmonds. A former FBI translator who was recruited after 9/11, Edmonds has accused the agency of covering up evidence of a complex web of foreign governments, U.S. officials and nuclear secrets.


Ellsberg in a Brad Blog commentary:

And this is the time for those who have so far creditably leaked to the Times of London to come forward, accepting personal risks, to offer their testimony --- and new documents --- both to the Congress and to the American press. I would say to them: Don’t do what I did and waste months of precious time trying to get Congressional committees to act as they should in the absence of journalistic pressure. Do your best to inform the American public directly, first, through the major American media.

But perhaps today the alternative media and the international press are a necessary precursor even to that. It shouldn’t be true, but if it is, it’s a measure of how far the New York Times and Washington Post have fallen from their responsibilities to the public, to their profession and to American democracy, since I gave them the Pentagon Papers in 1971. They printed them then. Would they today?

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