Jim Ross
Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon analyst who leaked 7,000 pages of revelatory top secret documents about the Vietnam War to the media in 1971, still lives and breathes his watchdog persona, promoting the lessons still to be learned from Vietnam and applied to present and future (*cough*Iran*cough*) conflicts.
He thinks The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, the new documentary about his whistle-blowing days by Berkeley-based filmmakers Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, is coming to the public's attention at the perfect fulcrum point of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Ellsberg, a formidable mind, is painstakingly precise about what the lessons are. As he flew into Toronto last night, he began scribbling down the parallels he sees between Vietnam and today's wars, which he calls "Vietnamistan." Over breakfast this morning, he pulled a yellow pad of ruled paper from his briefcase and flipped through several pages of small, neat script. "I got to number 97," he says matter-of-factly, adding that he woke in the middle of the night to write down number 92.
I asked him to leak the full list to me, but so far, he only gave up number one: "We can't back down now. The stakes are too high, the investment has been made," he says derisively.
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