"Pentagon Papers"-Leaker Warns, US Is "Close To Nuclear Armageddon"

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon papers which exposed the government’s lies during the Vietnam war is vocalizing a warning. He says the United States is really close to a nuclear Armageddon.

Ellsberg, now 86-years-old, leaked the Pentagon papers back in 1969 and he’s now got a new book out which serves a warning to those who care to listen.

According to the Daily Mail, Ellsberg’s 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon’s presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that was supposed to advance press freedom.

In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Ellsberg details how easy nuclear bombs can be triggered and shot off on a false alarm – and that the president isn’t the only who can launch the nukes, as we are often told. 

Low-level military commanders are capable of launching nuclear weapons too...

“All out-nuclear war - an irreversible, unprecedented and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth  - has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these,” writes Ellsberg in his new book.

Adding to fears of a nuclear armageddon is North Korea’s insistence on building a nuclear weapon.  This has created a mass panic in nations all around the globe.  Not to mention, last month, President Donald Trump put North Korea back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that allows the US to impose more sanctions and risks inflaming tension over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.

North Korea then denounced Trump’s decision to relist it as a state sponsor of terrorism, calling the move a “serious provocation and violent infringement,” as the rogue nation sentenced the US president to death, saying he “hurt the dignity” of the “supreme leadership.” All of this is alarming, according to Ellsberg, who believes a nuclear war can be started simply by a false alarm.

Nuclear bombs “are susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch or a desperate decision to escalate,” Ellsberg wrote in his book.

 

“They would kill billions of humans, perhaps ending complex life on earth. This is true even though the Cold War that rationalized their existence and hair-trigger status - and their supposed necessity to national security - ended 30 years ago.”

Many US citizens falsely believe that only the US president, in this case, Donald Trump can order the use of nuclear weapons. But Trump isn’t the only military commander authorized to launch nuclear weapons, according to the New York Post.

“There has to be a delegation of authority and capability to launch retaliatory strikes, not only to officials outside the Oval Office but outside Washington too,” Ellsberg wrote.

Ellsberg says that the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust is full disarmament by the United States and Russia.

“The risk that one city will be destroyed by a single (perhaps terrorist) weapon in the next year or the next decade cannot, unfortunately, be reduced to zero,” Ellsberg writes.

 

“But the danger of near-extinction of humanity - a continuous possibility for the past 65 years - can be reduced to zero by the dismantlement of most existing weapons in both the United States and Russia.”

American Leaker Warns: The US Is ‘Close To Nuclear Armageddon’

Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon papers which exposed the government’s lies during the Vietnam war is vocalizing a warning. He says the United States is really close to a nuclear Armageddon.

Ellsberg, now 86-years-old, leaked the Pentagon papers back in 1969 and he’s now got a new book out which serves a warning to those who care to listen. According to the Daily Mail, Ellsberg’s 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon’s presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that was supposed to advance press freedom.

In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Ellsberg details how easy nuclear bombs can be triggered and shot off on a false alarm – and that the president isn’t the only who can launch the nukes, as we are often told.  Low-level military commanders are capable of launching nuclear weapons too.

“All out-nuclear war — an irreversible, unprecedented and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth — has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these,” writes Ellsberg in his new book.

Adding to fears of a nuclear armageddon is North Korea’s insistence on building a nuclear weapon.  This has created a mass panic in nations all around the globe.  Not to mention, last month, President Donald Trump put North Korea back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that allows the US to impose more sanctions and risks inflaming tension over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.

North Korea then denounced Trump’s decision to relist it as a state sponsor of terrorism, calling the move a “serious provocation and violent infringement,” as the rogue nation sentenced the US president to death, saying he “hurt the dignity” of the “supreme leadership.” All of this is alarming, according to Ellsberg, who believes a nuclear war can be started simply by a false alarm.

Nuclear bombs “are susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch or a desperate decision to escalate,” Ellsberg wrote in his book. “They would kill billions of humans, perhaps ending complex life on earth. This is true even though the Cold War that rationalized their existence and hair-trigger status — and their supposed necessity to national security — ended 30 years ago.”

Many US citizens falsely believe that only the US president, in this case, Donald Trump can order the use of nuclear weapons. But Trump isn’t the only military commander authorized to launch nuclear weapons, according to the New York Post. “There has to be a delegation of authority and capability to launch retaliatory strikes, not only to officials outside the Oval Office but outside Washington too,” Ellsberg wrote.

Ellsberg says that the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust is full disarmament by the United States and Russia. “The risk that one city will be destroyed by a single (perhaps terrorist) weapon in the next year or the next decade cannot, unfortunately, be reduced to zero,” Ellsberg writes. “But the danger of near-extinction of humanity — a continuous possibility for the past 65 years — can be reduced to zero by the dismantlement of most existing weapons in both the United States and Russia.”

In The Police-State-Versus-Freedom Arms Race, Freedom Seems To Be Winning

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

In the past 48 hours, two stories broke that illustrate how dominant technology has become in the age-old war between freedom and control:

(Wired) – A group of researchers at Ben-Gurion’s cybersecurity lab has devised a method to defeat the security protection known as an “air gap,” the safeguard of separating highly sensitive computer systems from the internet to quarantine them from hackers. If an attacker can plant malware on one of those systems—say, by paying an insider to infect it via USB or SD card—this approach offers a new way to rapidly pull secrets out of that isolated machine. Every blink of its hard drive LED indicator can spill sensitive information to any spy with a line of sight to the target computer, whether from a drone outside the window or a telescopic lens from the next roof over.

————-

(CNN) – Conservative provocateur James O’Keefe is setting his sights on CNN.

O’Keefe said in a telephone interview with CNN on Wednesday that he has “a few hundred hours” of “secretly recorded material” from inside the network. “We’re calling it CNN Leaks,” he said, drawing inspiration from WikiLeaks’ document dumps.

He said “part one” would be published Thursday at about 10 a.m. ET. “This is all legally recorded information,” he said, declining to be more specific.

The first article illustrates the extraordinary – and increasing — power that cutting-edge tech offers governments to watch and otherwise control their citizens. Combine the above relatively-narrow-gauge application with the NSA’s existing ability to monitor pretty much every electronic signal, facial recognition software that can pick individuals out of crowds, algorithms that lip read, and tiny drones that can see without being seen, and the potential result is a police state that’s slicker, subtler and therefore scarier than anything envisioned in dystopian novels like Brave New World or 1984.

But the second story is the counterweight, illustrating how those same technologies are being used around the world to expose the secrets of the powerful. Where Daniel Ellsberg once had to spend months photocopying the Pentagon Papers and physically sneaking them out of his Defense Department office, today all that’s required for a major leak is one disillusioned or otherwise motivated insider with a thumb drive, laptop or smart phone.

In just the past few years, Sony’s emails were hacked and released, to the profound embarrassment of Hollywood; US military misbehavior was exposed by a lowly private named Bradley Manning; the Democrat National Committee’s emails – which exposed collusion between political operatives and mainstream media, among many other things — were published just in time to cost that party the presidency; and of course the great Edward Snowden, an outside contractor for the NSA, exposed the breathtaking illegality of US spying here and abroad.

Every big organization now lives with the knowledge that it’s one leak away from existential crisis — and that there is no fix. Doing big, bad things requires a lot of people with the ability to access and understand what you’re doing. And it only takes one of them with widely-available technology to expose you to the whole world.

With all the issues now dividing people – abortion, Israel, immigration, etc., etc. – this might be the most telling. Do you see Snowden and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange as traitors or heroes? Because the worlds in which they end up one or the other couldn’t be more different.

5 Controversial Whistleblowers You Should Be Following on Social Media

January 12, 2017   |   Alice Salles

(ANTIMEDIA) “Whistleblowers,” former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden once said, “are elected by circumstance.”

“More critical than who you are,” he continued, “is what you see.” And when you see something wrong but choose to look the other way, you’re part of the problem. At least that’s what the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seems to suggest.

Nowadays, whistleblowers are more important than ever. As more and more news organizations are outed as perpetrators of phony information, using their platforms to spread propaganda that helps boost a particular political party or politician, the whistleblower’s presence in news organizations, government bodies, and major corporations is what guarantees the truth will be exposed — sooner or later.

But to many of those who have already gone down that path, enduring soul-crushing scrutiny as a result, the work wasn’t over when they blew the whistle. Instead, they kept on going. Some even turned out to be investigative journalists, while others, like Snowden, continue to offer their expertise and input from afar. Indeed, Snowden is active on Twitter, and so are many others who have risked everything to speak out.

Here’s a list of the top five whistleblowers you should be following on social media and around the internet.

1. Jesselyn Radack

In her tenure as an ethics adviser for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Radack reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had committed an ethics violation while interrogating John Walker Lindh.

Lindh was dubbed the “American Taliban,” and he was captured in 2001 when America invaded Afghanistan.

In the book, TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the “American Taliban,” Radack explains her ordeal in detail, showing that due to her actions, the DOJ retaliated by giving her a poor performance review. She was also advised to leave and find employment elsewhere, risking a tainted reputation.

In order to reveal what she saw and experienced, she eventually went around the DOJ, releasing emails after a court order for all Justice Department’s internal correspondence concerning Lindh came up short.

Her actions in the name of truth eventually landed her in hot water, with the government “sending letters to bar associations in jurisdictions where she was licensed to practice law, referring her for a possible ethics violation, which kept her from finding work for years.”

Now, Radack heads a Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts.org. In the recent past, Radack has represented the likes of Edward Snowden and other NSA whistleblowers.

Follow her on Twitter at @JesseleynRadack.

2. Thomas Drake

A former senior executive of the NSA, Thomas Andrews Drake is also a decorated U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy veteran whose dedication to ethics and the constitution nearly turned him into a pariah.

In 2010, the former official was indicted after being accused of providing classified material to a newspaper reporter between 2006 and 2007. Drake, who was 52-years-old at the time, “was also accused of obstructing justice by shredding documents, deleting computer records and lying to investigators who were looking into the reporter’s sources,” the New York Times has noted.

At the time, the Times admitted the then-indictment of Drake proved “the [Barack] Obama administration may be no less aggressive than the Bush administration in pursuing whistleblowers and reporters’ sources who disclose government secrets.”

Within the agency, Drake was one of the few officials who preferred to employ projects such as ThinThread, which was intended to protect the privacy of individuals while intelligence was being gathered. Despite his stance, leadership moved forward with another project — the much more expensive and invasive Trailblazer Project.

“Designed to gather similar data but without the encryption feature built into the ThinThread technology to provide privacy aspects,” Trailblazer was seen as a nightmare to those within the agency who were concerned about privacy issues. Drake attempted to use formal channels to voice his concerns, but his internal complaints seemed to go nowhere. After he contacted a staffer for Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that he had met years prior to the adoption of Trailblazer, the staffer, along with three former NSA officials, filed a DoD Inspector General report that mentioned Trailblazer. Drake was a source for this report.

In 2005, Drake contacted the Baltimore Sun’s Siobhan Gorman, sending her emails regarding a variety of topics. Being careful not to give her sensitive information, Gorman used what she learned from Drake, writing several pieces on waste, abuse, fraud, and of course, the Trailblazer program.

The FBI eventually raided Drake’s home and seized his computer and files. Later, journalist Jane Mayer wrote that Drake felt president Obama’s NSA was committing crimes more serious than those committed by President Richard Nixon.

Thanks to the work of people like Radack, all original charges against Drake were eventually dropped. Nevertheless, Drake did plead guilty to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer.

Follow him on Twitter at @Thomas_Drake1.

3. Mordechai Vanunu

Vanunu is a former nuclear technician from Israel.

In 1985, after he lost his job amid government cuts, he was able to be readmitted as a technician at Negev Nuclear Research Center. At the time, Vanunu smuggled a camera into the facility and took 57 photographs. On October 27, 1985, he quit, and in 1986, he leaked the information he had obtained to British media, revealing that Israel had a nuclear program — a fact the country has long denied.

Vanunu was eventually imprisoned and remained behind bars for 18 years, “11 of which were spent in solitary confinement.” He is now under house arrest and is not allowed to “own a cell phone, enter internet chat rooms, have contact with foreigners or leave Israel.”

Follow him on Twitter at @VanunuMordechai.

4. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo

Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) senior policy analyst Marsha Coleman-Adebayo blew the whistle on dangerous conditions African workers faced at a U.S. mining company in South Africa, but the EPA failed to respond. She then went to other organizations for help.

She eventually sued the EPA, inspiring the passage of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act). Currently, Coleman-Adebayo serves as a member of the National Whistleblower Center’s Board of Directors. The group focuses on protecting the rights of employee whistleblowers.

Follow her on Twitter at @nofearcoalition or on Facebook.

5. Daniel Ellsberg

The former military analyst for RAND Corporation was the man behind the Pentagon Papers leak.

The 7,000-page document disclosed information on the Vietnam War, showing the Lyndon B. Johnson administration “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.”

Ellsberg faced a series of felony charges, but his case was eventually dismissed in 1973. The judge at the time claimed the government had acted improperly. Ellsberg is a celebrated author and can be followed on Twitter, at @DanielEllsberg.

***

It goes without saying that Edward Snowden is a must-follow on Twitter, as is John Kirakou, who blew the whistle on the use of torture by the CIA.

Other whistleblowers who deserve honorable mention but are not on Twitter include Chelsea Manning — who released footage of American soldiers shooting at journalists in Iraq and is now forced to endure solitary confinement during her life sentence — and Jeffrey Sterling, who revealed information about the CIA’s cyber warfare.

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