In June 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War, a US government military analyst with the Rand Corporation and senior research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Daniel Ellsberg[1], released to the New York Times and Washington Post what became known as the “Pentagon Papers”, 47 volumes of confidential records comprising some 7000 pages of secret government reports that documented the US involvement in “dirty tricks” and illegal actions under the Presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. The documentsdemonstrated that successive US Presidents had lied to the American people, that false flags had been organized, “fake news” disseminated, phoney narratives issued by successive Secretaries of Defense. As a New York Times editor wrote, “the Johnson administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress about a subject of transcendental national interest”[2]. The rational implications of the Pentagon Papers were succinctly articulated to the then President Richard Nixon by his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. Bottom line was that through such disclosures the American people would feel that “ You can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment; …the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that … the president can be wrong.”[3]
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