Whistleblower: Military Leaders Knew Vietnam War Would Fail, Decided to Do It Anyway

Whistleblower: Military Leaders Knew Vietnam War Would Fail, Decided to Do It Anyway:

Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg traveled to Vietnam for the first time in 1961 as part of a task force commissioned by President Kennedy to seek alternatives to nuclear war

Minneapolis, MN — MintPress News is proud to host “Lied to Death,” a 13-part audio conversation between famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and social justice activist Arn Menconi.

Menconi wrote that these interviews are a “mixture of historical, political science and Dan’s sixty-year scholarly analysis as a former nuclear planner for Rand Corporation.”

For more information on the interview and Daniel Ellsberg, see the introduction to this series.

Chapter 3: U.S. colonels knew the Vietnam War would fail before it began

In the third chapter of the interview, Menconi asks Ellsberg to explain more about the origins of the war in Vietnam and how it led to Ellsberg’s eventual decision to leak the “Pentagon Papers.”

The whistleblower explained that the war in Vietnam began as a covert war, with Kennedy in the 1950s publicly claiming only to be sending “advisors” to the region who would not participate directly in combat, although it’s clear they did participate directly in several parts of the conflict.

Today America seems to be using the same strategy on a global scale. From Iraq and Syria, where our military advisors try to train “moderate” rebels and local forces to fight ISIS, to Africa where ‘AFRICOM’ advisors are embedded in dozens’ of countries’ armed forces, the U.S. is involved in over 100 regional conflicts.

Ellsberg became involved in studying the brewing conflict in Vietnam in 1958 when he was loaned from the RAND corporation to the military’s pacific command, where he was asked to familiarize himself with all major U.S. war plans. A few years later, in 1961, Ellsberg traveled to Vietnam personally as part of a “limited war task force.” With the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Defense Department pushing for nuclear war, President John F. Kennedy created the task force to seek alternatives.

However, even as the military advised Kennedy to commit thousands of ground troops to fight on behalf of South Vietnam, privately the military brass on the task force doubted the effectiveness of the plan:

“The colonels I was speaking to gave the impression that even American ground troops would be very unpromising. They would make more of a difference than advisors but unless they were in very large numbers they would not be able to beat the Viet Cong, and probably not even then. In other words, our prospects were not better than the French prospects had been. That was the conclusion that Kennedy personally came to ten years earlier, that we should not replace the French.”

Nonetheless, Kennedy continued to increase the number of troops on the ground in Vietnam throughout the remainder of his presidency, setting the stage for Johnson to further escalate the conflict into a full ground war when he assumed the role of Commander-in-Chief after the Kennedy assassination.

Ellsberg also revealed that before becoming a whistleblower by leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he spoke out against the Vietnam War internally within the Pentagon. He also came to the attention of Robert Kennedy when the U.S. senator ran for president in the 1968 election and offered the whistleblower an advisory role on his campaign.

Although Ellsberg turned down the position so that he could freely advise all candidates, Ellsberg said that, when they met in 1967, “He was the first person I’d seen in Washington who seemed passionate about getting out of Vietnam, an urgency of doing it.”

A year later, “Bobby” Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan on June 5, 1968 after winning the California primary.

Listen to Chapter 3 | U.S. colonels knew the war on Vietnam would fail before it began:

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