Official full release of papers proving the lies from the White House about the war

Politics and religion
1

To quote the Archives:

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force”, was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. In June of 1971, small portions of the report were leaked to the press and widely distributed. However, the publications of the report that resulted from these leaks were incomplete and suffered from many quality issues.
On the 40th anniversary of the leak to the press, the National Archives, along with the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Presidential Libraries, has released the complete report. There are 48 boxes and approximately 7,000 declassified pages. Approximately 34% of the report is available for the first time.

    What is unique about this, compared to other versions, is that:

[ul]
[li]The complete Report is now available with no redactions compared to previous releases[/li][li]The Report is presented as Leslie Gelb presented it to then Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford on January 15, 1969[/li][li]All the supplemental back-documentation is included. In the Gravel Edition, 80% of the documents in Part V.B. were not included[/li][li]This release includes the complete account of peace negotiations, significant portions of which were not previously available either in the House Armed Services Committee redacted copy of the Report or in the Gravel Edition[/li][/ul]

2

If the media had a hardon for news like this half as much as they do for Weiner’s wiener…

3

Or for Palins emails. Stuff like the pentagon papers is real news to be reporting.

4

Kinda old news but holy shit that is some newsy news indeed.

5

Thanks for the link, I’ve never really looked over them in depth.

6

Is it sad that I didn’t know which war you were talking about in the thread title?

7

I’m not reading all that! Someone sum it up for me.

8

More than one administration wanted to go to war in Vietnam because of the theory that if the Communist take one country, they will take the next one, etc. So they lied to give the public a reason to go to war, and they conspired to be complicit in overthrowing the South Vietnamese regime early on, then they lied throughout the war about a wide variety of things. An incredible amount of bad decisions were made for political purposes.

But it is worth keeping the link up and browsing through a bit at a time when you have time, because the details and information is a lot more fascinating and interesting and informative than my glib summary.

9

Almost everything released by the government has already been made public in one form or another. Most was leaked by Daniel Ellsburg in the early 70’s and printed in the NY Times.

There is very little “new” there.

Interesting they released it on the anniversary of Ellsburg leaking them.