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Source: Al Jazeera English

“It’s the old Latin slogan, Cui Bono, who benefits? Going all the way back to the wars you could name in the last century,” says Pentagon Papers whistleblower and renowned anti-war activist, Daniel Ellsberg.

In 1971, Ellsberg, then a military analyst, leaked to the press a 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study, uncovering years of official lies about United States military involvement in the Vietnam War.

Ellsberg, and many like him, hoped that these revelations could change how the world viewed war. But decades later, with conflicts raging in Ukraine, Yemen and Ethiopia, to name a few, the decision-making process behind wars remains murky as ever.

So who is benefitting from these wars?

War is “very profitable for the people who are supplying those weapons to keep it going”, Ellsberg says.

This week, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, anti-war activist and author Daniel Ellsberg joins Marc Lamont Hill for an UpFront special looking at the biggest players behind the global war machine.


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Daniel Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931. In 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House. Ellsberg worked on the top-secret McNamara study, U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing. He was awarded the 2006 Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm, Sweden “…for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.” Ellsberg is the author of four books: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017); Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002); Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001); and Papers on the War (1971). He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst; a Distinguished Researcher at UMass Amherst’s W.E.B. Du Bois Library; and a Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

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