Invitation to a Demonstration: The World Can't Wait By DANIEL ELLSBERG

[Guest guest]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ellsberg02032006.html

 

February 3, 2006

Invitation to a Demonstration

The World Can't Wait

 

By DANIEL ELLSBERG

 

I would not have thought of copying the Pentagon Papers, risking a

possible lifetime in prison, without the example of thousands of young

Americans who were doing everything they could--including non-violent

disobedience to the draft regulations--to oppose a wrongful, hopeless

war. They showed civic courage, and I can attest to its effectiveness;

as a government consultant and former official, I felt its power on my

own life.

 

In the face of a president blatantly violating the law, pursuing

another stalemated, hopeless, wrongful war, and proclaiming his intent

to continue both, civic courage is needed today from those who can

hold him and his administration to account: members of Congress,

journalists, potential whistleblowers inside the government,

prosecutors and judges. " Everything they can do, " even at cost to

their positions and careers, is what is needed from those in such

strategic positions at this moment, and what we should demand of them,

by our own example. Nothing less is appropriate to this constitutional

crisis.

 

Courage is contagious. One way members of the public can awaken

courageous initiatives by such people is by confronting them with the

spectacle of masses of plain citizens showing their faces together in

public streets and squares to express their outrage, their

condemnation and rejection of official practices. Demonstrations

scheduled for this Saturday in Washington, D.C. can, among other

things, encourage Congressional representatives to use their full

powers in upcoming investigations to expose and curtail governmental

abuses --starting on Monday in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the

blatantly illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying by the

administration.

 

Members of the Republican majority have taken the same oath as

Democrats and their official witnesses-- to uphold the Constitution.

Asking questions that meet with evasion, lies or refusal to answer is

not enough to fulfill that oath. Committee powers include subpoenas

for testimony and evidence and criminal citations for contempt or

perjury. Illegal practices must not only be identified and condemned,

but stopped, and officials who originated and persist in them must be,

at the very least, removed from office, and that before 2009.

Candidates in primaries and elections this year should be put on

notice that their own ability to hold office will depend on their

willingness to investigate and to impeach and remove officials, from

the president and vice president on down, who endanger our freedom and

democracy.

 

There will be dozens of ways to do that. Demonstrating at the White

House on February 4 is a good start.

 

Daniel Ellsberg made history when as a top Pentagon official, he

released the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War,

which exposed government lies going back 20 years. His act of

resistance helped galvanize opposition to the war and triggered the

events leading to Watergate and the downfall of Richard Nixon.