All Nixon crimes now legal

40 years to the date, the full Pentagon Papers are finally being published ... by the Nixon Library. Small irony there. Daniel Ellsberg is still around, of course has a website, and is not short of opinions. SOme of what he has to say is thought-provoking, indeed.

The "declassification" of the Pentagon Papers–exactly forty years late–is basically a non-event. The notion that "only small portions" of the report were released forty years ago is pure hype by the Nixon Library. Nearly all of the study–except for the negotiations volumes, which were mostly declassified over twenty years ago– became available in 1971, between the redacted (censored) Government Printing Office edition and the Senator Gravel edition put out by Beacon Press.

A big tragedy is that the word redacted actually has to be interpreted for readers. It is equivalent to teevee showing subtitles for people who speak English with an accent. How dumb are we getting?

One source of the Papers is the website of a Clemson university history professor, Edwin Moïse.

What that comparison [between the 1971 edition and today's] would newly reveal is the blatant violation of the spirit and letter of the FOIA declassification process by successive administrations (including the present one), in rejecting frequent requests by historians and journalists for complete declassification of the Papers over the years.

Each new President quickly becomes a roadblock for declassification and a fanatic for secrecy.

Our Founders sought to prevent this. Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, for the first time in constitutional history, put the decision to go to war (beyond repelling sudden attacks) exclusively in the hands of Congress, not the president. But every president since Harry Truman in Korea–as the Pentagon Papers demonstrated up through LBJ, but beyond them to George W. Bush and Barack Obama–has violated the spirit and even the letter of that section of the Constitution (along with some others) they each swore to preserve, protect and defend.

It certainly is true in Obama's case, as well as the others. US air forces have been involved in offensive military actions for months. Such are otherwise known as war. To pretend they are not is what Truman, Johnson and Bush did.

However, as has been pointed out repeatedly by Glenn Greenwald,  and Bruce Ackerman , David Swanson and others, no president has so blatantly violated the constitutional division of war powers as President Obama in his ongoing attack on Libya, without a nod even to the statutory War Powers Act, that post-Pentagon Papers effort by Congress to recapture something of the role assigned exclusively to it by the Constitution.

When Kucinich and others introduced and gained support for a bill to end US military action in Lybia without Congressional sanction, Speaker Boehner covered his flank.

Boehner's amendment -- demanding that Obama more fully brief Congress -- ultimately passed, also with substantial bipartisan support, but most media reports ultimately recognized it for what it was: a joint effort by the leadership of both parties and the White House to sabotage the anti-war efforts of its most liberal and most conservative members.

Some call it bipartisanship; others might call it collusion.

Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life. He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal.

War on terror? Or on what? Whom? Obama continues the same policies, and deepens them, that prevailed under Bush. Whether he has been coopted, or has chosen to be as conservative (or more) than his predecessor, the fact is that he has and is. Consequently, he has betrayed the trust he asked for and was given by those hoping for change from the prior administration. Yet the fault lies as much with us, who believed, as with him who lied.

After 40 years, the complete Pentagon Papers

At first blush, it sounds like the release of one of the worst-kept secrets in history — finally unlocking the barn door four decades after the horses bolted. The study, after all, has already been published by The Times and other newspapers, resulting in a landmark First Amendment decision by the Supreme Court. It has been released in book form more than once. But it turns out that those texts have been incomplete: When all 7,000 pages are released Monday, officials say, the study can finally be read in its original form.

That it took until the era of WikiLeaks for the government to declassify the Pentagon Papers struck some participants as, to say the least, curious. “It’s absurd,” said Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND Corporation analyst who worked on the report and later provided it to The Times. He said Tuesday that the report should not have been secret even in 1971, when newspapers first published it, adding: “The reasons are very clearly domestic political reasons, not national security at all. The reasons for the prolonged secrecy are to conceal the fact that so much of the policy making doesn’t bear public examination. It’s embarrassing, or even incriminating.”

the secrecy has persisted. Timothy Naftali, the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, said that when he recently put together an exhibit on Watergate, he wanted to display just the blue cover of the Pentagon Papers report. “I was told that the cover was classified,” he said, adding that he was astounded. 

THAT is absurd.