Pentagon Papers Leaker Daniel Ellsberg Praises Snowden, Manning, Scott Neuman, NPR News

Pentagon Papers Leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, PraisesSnowden, Manning

Here's a reflective, connective story and personality that helps us to see the need for leakers when democracy at large is asleep. 

'Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who in 1971 leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers detailing the history of U.S. policy in Vietnam, tells NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday that unlike Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, he "did it the wrong way" by trying first to go through proper channels — a delay that he says cost thousands of lives. 

. . . Asked whether he thinks Manning and Snowden, the CIA contractor who leaked details of secret U.S. electronic surveillance activities to The Guardian newspaper, had been discerning in what they chose to release publicly: "Yes, that's obvious with Snowden," he says.

. . . Since The Guardian's exposés, based on information obtained from Snowden, first broke in June, "the whole focus has been on the risks of truth telling, the risks of openness, which are the risks of democracy, of separation of powers," Ellsberg says. 

"I've really heard nothing at all about the risks of closed society, of silence, of lies," he says.”'

                                                                                                                    Scott Neuman, NPR News / August 03, 201312:16 PM