Daniel Ellsberg is lauded in death by the same media that lets Assange rot in jail
The stark difference in treatment of the two truth-tellers is a measure of how state criminality is now completely unchecked | Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam. The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to stop further publication by the New York Times and Washington Post, helped to bring the war to a close a few years later. As an adviser to US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in the 1960s, Ellsberg had seen first-hand the Pentagon’s brutal military operations that caused mass civilian casualties. Entire villages had been burned, while captured Vietnamese were tortured or executed. Deceptively, the US referred to these as “pacification programmes”. ● But most of those today loudly hailing Ellsberg as an “American hero” have been far more reluctant to champion the Ellsberg of our times: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. For years, Assange has been rotting in a London high-security prison while the Biden administration seeks his extradition on charges that ludicrously equate his publication of the Afghan and Iraq war logs – a modern Pentagon Papers – with “espionage”.