Daniel Ellsberg: The "Heroic" Most Dangerous Man in America

Class this past week was all about the Pentagon Papers and the person who leaked them. For those of you who are not familiar with them, they are papers that list political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Now if that is all you knew about them you would say why are they so important? But the details on these papers exposed a couple presidents' in their lies and intentions upsetting many people. The papers were first publicized on the front page of the New York Times. It was not until June 2011 the papers were publicly released again. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/us/08pentagon.html?pagewanted=all)

  Daniel Ellsberg, a former government official, was the man who leaked the papers. (http://www.ellsberg.net/bio) He faced charges under the espionage act of 1917, which helped bring his sentence to 155 years in prison. The charges eventually ended up being dropped when irregularities appeared in the governments case. Ellsberg was being called "the most dangerous man in America" and even had a documentary made about him called that. Was what Ellsberg did so bad? Wouldn't you want to know if the leaders of your country were lying to you, especially about issues dealing with war? I think the government should not blatantly lie to the people, cover it up and hide it away, then get mad when somebody finds out and exposes them for their crime. There are certain things that are probably better for the public to not know about for security and safety reasons. But when it comes to things that just affect the President's likelihood of being reelected for another term, it should not hidden from the people!