who uh just reading here was an American military analyst, economist and renowned whistleblower best known for leaking the Pentagon papers in 1971. Can you tell me about who he was and the importance of him?Oh yeah. Well, he's an absolutely brilliant guy. I I'm proud to say I was a friend, you know, for 10 15 years
They didn't know about the earlier period. Pentagon Papers hadn't come out yet.And so he was talking.
you that you still invited me if you don't know about this we got big problems cuz you're the Pentagon well I went from uh being a hippie I'd been a radical then I became a hippie then I went to live in amonastery and this is the ashram that I lived in it's kenhi it's at the corner of India and Nepal and China and this is
And he made available to the New York Times almost all the volumes that had been prepared of what became known as the Pentagon Papers. And the Times started writing articles about it, and the government under President Nixon went to court seeking acourt order requiring the Times to stop publishing this material, which was labeled top secret, which is the
And I remember seeing him on PBS and hearing him on NPR and reading about him in "The Washington Post." Al-Aulaqi was a very public figure after 9/11 and was much Pentagon to come and speak at a luncheon on the state of Islam in the world today.
I think that's a big, big deal, big change. Pentagon , for bureaucratic reasons, they're all committed to the proposition that they want to sustain and, if
little Boutique Think Tank Center for a new American Security and about half the people there are actually going into the Pentagon State Department in White House um they're smart people but there's no secret data out there there's no secretinformation we the facts are basically known of the war and the situation uh what they recognize is what
outfit called the National geospatial Intelligence Agency this is an agency that's dear to my heart it's the pentagon 's geography department and uh their entire budget is a blank spot if you look at the defense budgetparticularly over time you'll find thousands and thousands of these code names these strange
foreign intervention and and wanted to force us out and it's funny cuz McName later says that I guess he didn't read the Pentagon papers that no we were just sure that it was the capitalists versus the communists like all this stuff about they didn't want to be ruled over foreign white devils and that never occurred to us, you know, like come on.
Watergate is a great example of where reporting revealed serious government misconduct. The Pentagon Papers case, which also kind of arose at that time. That was a top secret study of the reasons why the US government got into the Vietnam War and also, the reasons
But at the same time, Liz Hannah's screenplay was really about Katharine Graham becoming Katharine Graham. The Pentagon Papers were presented in it as though it was a treasure chest, but we didn't know what was inside the treasure chest. Josh Singer who wrote "Spotlight," among many other things, he ended up teaming up with Liz
A gene drive is an aspect of genetic editing that could turn into a weapon very quickly. The Pentagon is certainly concerned about gene drives. If you've heard of gene drives, you've probably heard about it in relation to Zika virus or malaria, some mosquito-borne virus.
In fact, when I saw them do that in a total of about 3 and 1/2 hours, I was thinking, why do we take six weeks? The Pentagon had also been hit.
I'm smoking some illicit substance there um I was honored and invited to the Pentagon and given an award uh and asked to speak to the three and a half million Soldiers and Sailors and Marines we have and to talk in the Pentagon Auditorium to the Army brass to generals
Reproductive health care, again, mothers being in good shape means their daughters are more likely to go to school. The Pentagon has put out research suggesting that there's going to be increasing economic instability, political instability, and military instability worldwide.
I think that's a big, big deal, big change. The Pentagon itself, as a powerful entity within the federal government, the services as a sub-set of the
where the original spy planes would would land and I had asked him if I could have the tour of Groom Lake and the pentagon 's letter back to me said your tour of Groom Lake cannot happen and they put that in quotes and I thought how fascinating they don't even want to have the name Groom Lake on
worked for the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation 40 years ago, had Top Security Clearance and decided... If you ever wonder, by the way, if protest matters, he would look outside his Pentagon window and see sometimes massive protest, sometimes a few stragglers holding signs against the Vietnam War, and it just started to get to him. And then heard about and met young people who were going to jail saying they would not fight in the war. And he thought, "What am I doing to bring this war to an end? And he realized right behind
Um and the Pentagon came out days later at the time and canceled the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises, as it was called back then, for the summertime
that it's a relatively new one. Imagine the Pentagon Papers, but these things happen.
And yet the Pentagon , when it does a procurement process, it usually comes back really late, hugely over budget, and not really what the soldiers on the ground need.
Those guys in the Pentagon that were causing offense among the military types had what they called a letter of mark from the Secretary of Defense,
He had Pentagon -funded research.
What is this? The movie, a documentary that was made from "Secrets" is called "The Most Dangerous Man in America, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers." It got an Academy Award for the longest title, actually. But really, the movie, "The Post", now, in which I figure, played by somebody who looks a lot better than I did then,
There were whole scenes that didn't exist until, for example, we met Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers with the Rand Corporation. And there are scenes in the movie that came directly from our talk with him.
It should draw a pentagon .
and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001, and the United States' ongoing global war on terror, ushered a new wave of xenophobia and prejudice
Goes to the Pentagon .
Is it the Pentagon ?
That's at the Pentagon .
And the Pentagon said, this is-- Actually, Congress said this is unacceptable, assigned DARPA to the job, which meant the arrival
an industry at the Pentagon .
So the Pentagon spent all the way until the late '80s pushing technology, pushing sensor technology, pushing drone technology, building entire industries.
So then the Pentagon created a program called the robot ethics program to educate people about it, and the problem persisted.
But the Pentagon Papers raised, again, the issue.
And one of the first cases I worked on, which is discussed in this book, was all the way back in 1971,. And it was the Pentagon Papers case, in which the US government went to court to try to get an order stopping the New York Times from publishing information it had received about a secret study that the Defense Department
liquidated, this elicits no more notice from the average American then the presence of a cop on a city street corner. Even before the Pentagon officially assigned itself the mission of quote unquote "shaping" the international environment, members of the political elite-- and again I would emphasize liberals and conservatives alike-- had reached a common understanding that scattering US forces around the globe to restrain, inspire, influence,
me to collateral murder in Iraq. I'm sure that some of you here at Google have watched the videotape from Wikileaks. Uh, you know Dan Ellsberg, an American hero, the man who worked for the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation 40 years ago, had Top Security Clearance and decided... If you ever wonder, by the way, if protest matters, he would look outside his Pentagon window and see sometimes massive protest, sometimes a few stragglers holding signs against the Vietnam War, and it just started to get to him. And then heard about
in the Pentagon on an idea called the 'Domino Theory' -- you know, the idea that, "If Vietnam
Because the Pentagon 's policy was a global view -- you know, rightly or wrongly. Okay?
equal three Pentagons . Which, I don't know if you've seen that, but it's an enormous building.
It's used in the Pentagon and on US nuclear submarines.
So the military was working with the Pentagon to find him a job.
fight like mad. They had to go back and forth over and over and over to even get the war plan from the Pentagon and they finally got the war plan from the Pentagon and it said that if we have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China. So that would be I don't know if that includes all the
and run with them in order to justify war. That's right. That's going to be a theme. Absolutely. What what was what was uh important in the Pentagon Papers? What are some key ideas?
They don't obey orders from the Pentagon . You can't order the shippers to go through because the ships are expensive.
Um he's just only directed the Pentagon to substantially reduce the scale of exercises. So, um it's really up to
I went to the big Pentagon meeting to gain approval.
But the civilian leadership in the Pentagon intervened and, in essence, forced the Air Force-- Dr. Currie did, as a matter of fact--
Both the twin towers and the Pentagon had just been hit.