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Mar 2, 2026 - World

When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. Truth and Consequence, being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.The book’s subtitle — offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope” — could hardly be more timely.Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.At the center of Truth and Consequence are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me … to shake hands with me … to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing — sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence — and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power — those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders – or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.” Daniel Ellsberg in 2002. Picture: Christopher Michel/Wiki Commons.1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence — from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.

Mar 2, 2026 - World

The Trump administration was expected to move forward with continued strikes in Iran regardless of how Americans feel about it, a New York Times reporter said Monday. In his first comments since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran this weekend, President Donald Trump signaled Monday that the campaign was progressing, said Tyler Pager, White House correspondent for the New York Times, during a live broadcast with CNN anchor Dana Bash. Trump's comments come as a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS revealed that 59% of Americans do not approve of the strikes in Iran and anticipate a long-term conflict in the region. "Most say they lack trust in Trump to make the right decisions about US use of force in Iran, with 60% saying they do not think he has a clear plan for handling the situation and 62% saying he should get congressional approval for any further military action," CNN reported."I think the White House will largely ignore some of this data," Pager said. "But I think one of the things that we just saw is the president has clearly struggled to outline clear objectives for what he is doing and what measures of success are and how long this is going to go as Kristen [Holmes] said, this is the first time we're hearing from the president in a live setting," Pager explained. "And I think there's a lot of Americans who woke up Saturday surprised by this operation, surprised that this could go on for weeks and have a lot of questions about what we're trying to do here and how will Americans know when it ends, and I think the president did not provide a lot of clarity there about what the length of this operation looks like."Trump suggested Monday that the conflict could last four to five weeks, or possibly longer. "And he also is saying that American troops may be on the ground," Pager said. "The one thing that I spoke to a lot of the president's most ardent supporters over the weekend and they are giving him a long leash, the MAGA base, there's obviously some high-profile, vocal opponents Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, but a lot of the rank and file are giving the president some space to operate here, and we'll see how long that lasts."

Mar 2, 2026 - World

President Donald Trump took time out of an update on his strikes on Iran to rant about his plans to build a ballroom at the White House.During a Monday event at the White House, Trump said that he had projected "four to five weeks" for the operation in Iran before speaking about his ballroom plans."In this beautiful building, isn't it?" he said. "We're adding on to the building a little bit. Beautiful? We're improving the building. See that nice drape? When that comes down, right now, you see a very, very deep hole. But in about a year and a half from now, you're gonna see a very, very beautiful building.""In fact, it looks so nice, I don't think I'll even, I think I'll save money on the doors because it can't get more beautiful than that," he continued. "I picked those drapes in my first term. I always like gold. But I think we can save a lot of money. I just saved curtains. But, and it will be, it'll be spectacular. It'll be the most beautiful ballroom. I believe it, because I built many a ballroom. I believe it's going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world."Trump noted that the sound of "hammering" could be heard outside the building."And when you hear all that hammering out there, you know why the first lady is not thrilled exactly," he revealed. "She said, will the pile drivers ever stop? You know, they go from 6 in the morning till 11.30 in the evening. Can you imagine? Here? You know what? To me, that's a beautiful sound. She doesn't like it. I love it.""But when I hear that sound, that beautiful sound behind me, it means money, so I like it," he added. "But my wife isn't thrilled. She said, this is getting crazy. I said, don't worry about it. We'll be all finished up in a few months."

Mar 2, 2026 - World

Jews across Israel gathered in bomb shelters to mark the holiday of Purim as a precaution against possible Iranian missile attacks

Mar 2, 2026 - World

Faced with overwhelming odds combating US military might, one Middle East expert predicted the leadership of the war-torn country looks to be aiming to get to Donald Trump by going after one of his biggest weaknesses.Appearing on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” New York Times columnist Tom Friedman claimed that, if there is one thing Donald Trump uses to gauge how he’s doing, it is the stock market and the surviving Iranian leadership knows that is one of his vulnerabilities.Friedman made those comments when asked about Iran’s decision to lob missiles at its Middle Eastern neighbors, which has put the entire region under strain while the US conducts military operations.‘’Let's talk about the region, a region you know so well,” co-host Jonathan Lemire prompted his guest. “You know, Iran is striking at moments. It feels indiscriminately. Other times targeted, like targeting civilian hotels in some of the major capitals there in the Gulf, striking potentially some energy infrastructure as well. But by doing so, what do you think happens next that's simply going to push, you know, the region more and more aligned with the US efforts or descend into that chaos you're talking about?”“Jonathan, I think that Iran's strategy,” the columnist replied. “They think Trump's soft underbelly, because they've seen this before on tariffs, is the stock market and the economy.”“And Iran, I think, wants to create as much chaos, turmoil in global oil markets and global financial markets,” he predicted. “They think that will freak Trump out and make him more vulnerable in negotiations.”He added, “Drive the price of oil as high as you can, drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average down as far as you can, and hope that Trump, as in the past, will chicken out.” - YouTube youtu.be