Daniel Ellsberg died on Friday at his home in California. He was 92. With his passing, the world loses a transcendent whistleblower with a powerful ethos of compassion and resolve.
Ellsberg's renown for openly challenging the mentalities of militarism began on June 23, 1971, when he appeared on "CBS Evening News" 10 days after news broke about the Pentagon Papers that he had provided to journalists. Ellsberg pointedly said that in the 7,000 pages of top-secret Defense Department documents, "I don't think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There's neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever."
