Anthony Russo, my partner in the March 1971 leak of secret government archives (The Pentagon Papers) exposed how successive U.S. administrations manipulated America into the Vietnam War, died August 5, 2008 at his home in Suffolk, Virginia.

Tony Russo came to be my best friend at Rand after I came back from Vietnam in 1967, and we became even closer after he left. He was fired from Rand, despite my efforts to keep him, for the best of reasons: He had, in classified reports, analyzed the class basis of the Vietnam conflict, and he had exposed the widespread use of torture by our Vietnamese forces, with American involvement. I learned more from Tony than from anyone else about the nature of the National Liberation Front, some members of which had impressed him deeply when he interviewed them about a Rand research project. He was brilliant and funny, with a very original and creative mind. He was also very warm — more likeable than me, as many who attended our trial discovered.

Just before I decided to copy the Pentagon Papers, with Tony’s help, he made a suggestion that played a key role in my decision. Tony did not know that the Pentagon Papers were being held at Rand, or were in my safe, or even that I had worked on the study, because I was under orders not to tell anyone. But I did tell him in late September 1969 that I had been reading a study (which later became the basis of the Pentagon Papers) that revealed a lot of high-level lying. He said to me, “You ought to put that out.” This was an extraordinary thing for someone who had until recently held a top secret clearance to say to anyone, least of all to someone who still had a clearance. In fact, I never heard of such a suggestion being made before or since (except of course by me, later). A week after this conversation, with other events working on my mind, I called him up and said, “Tony, do you know a study that I mentioned last week? Well, I’ve got it, and I think I will put it out. Can you help?”

I don’t think there was anyone else in the world with past official experience I would’ve gone to with that request, no matter how close a friend they were. I knew that he was the one person with the combination of guts and passionate concern about the war who would take the risk of helping me. I asked him if he knew where we could find a Xerox machine, and within an hour he got back to me with the word that his then-girlfriend had a machine in her office we could use. We started either that night or the next, we were never able to recall which. If he had not found that machine, that very week, before Nixon had committed himself to staying in Vietnam in a speech on November 3rd, I don’t think I would have taken the route I did, because it simply wouldn’t have seemed promising enough. As it was, Tony took the exact same risks I did of prosecution. Frankly, at the time, I didn’t think that was true; I thought I was the only one at risk. But I was mistaken, as it turned out, when Tony was indicted on three felony counts in the fall of 1971.

One further note: It is frequently said in relation to the current trial of the former AIPAC employees that theirs is the first prosecution of someone for a leak who was not an official and did not have a clearance. That is false. Tony Russo was indicted on the exact same charges, with the exact same status. As is the case with the AIPAC employees, if he had been convicted on that basis, every journalist and even every newspaper reader who had possession of information that had been disclosed without authorization (that is, ‘leaked’) would be equally subject to prosecution. So it was crucial for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the public’s need to know that Tony was not convicted in our trial, by reason of governmental misconduct.

Our friendship was strained later (not so much during the trial, as far as I was concerned, but by some events shortly after the trial), and we saw each other only intermittently over the next 30 years. In the last few years, on several occasions when he was gravely ill, we did meet, and had very warm conversations which I appreciated. The fact is I will be eternally grateful to Tony for his courage and partnership in what proved to be a useful action. He set an example of willingness to risk everything for his country and for the Vietnam that he loved that very few, unfortunately, have emulated. I only hope that others will continue to be inspired by it.

True to his benefactor’s wishes, Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies Chairman Anatol Sharansky today endorsed John McCain for president, calling Sen. Obama a “risk” for Israel. Sharansky, an old pal of Richard Perle’s as well as a beneficiary of multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, made his endorsement during an interview on Shalom TV, a Jewish-American cable network. “In the case of McCain, we know exactly where his policy is,” said Sharansky. “I know, personally, McCain for 20 years. He is a person of principle, and he is also a person who has absolutely a great record of supporting Israel. Getting to Obama, there is no record. Nobody can know for sure what will be. It can happen to be good. It can happen to be very bad. It’s a risk.”

(In addition to his Institute at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, Adelson, of course, is the major funder of Freedom’s Watch and is himself the beneficiary (although I imagine he pays handsomely) of Karl Rove’s political advice, according to a recent account by the National Journal. An intriguing report from Adelson’s Las Vegas headquarters suggests that he may be having some problem with his Macau interests.)

Sharansky’s intervention comes in the wake of warnings several days ago on the reliably Likudnik Wall Street Journal’s editorial page by two other Adelson beneficiaries and Institute officials, Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevy, against any attempt by outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to continue pursuing peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority or with Syria before he leaves office. “Members of Mr. Olmert’s party, Kadima, and of the governing coalition need to ensure that all substantive negotiations with Arab leaders are suspended until a new prime minister assumes office,” they argue. “Allowing Mr. Olmert to negotiate over life-and-death issues means continuing to hold Israel hostage to his political maneuvers.”

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Having read and even reviewed (rather unfavorably) the first book in the thoroughly anti-semitic “Left Behind” series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, I found this analysis of the recent McCain ad on Obama as “The One” pretty persuasive. It doesn’t follow book one exactly (Obama is not from central Europe or Carpathia/Romania), but it’s close enough. The ad can be found on the link to beliefnet.com.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

It was brought to my attention this morning that some people have recently been using last month’s Iraqi government sale of Yellowcake uranium to a Canadian company as vindication for starting everyone’s favorite Middle East quagmire that’s totally going less awful now that most of the integrated neighborhoods in Iraq have been violently purged of one group or another.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves here… lets have a look at this story when the AP first ran it. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the important part:

Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam’s nuclear efforts.

Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Citing most of the same evidence that I have written about over the past few weeks, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, whose access to key policymakers (outside of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office) is second to no other Washington daily journalist argues in his Sunday column that the Bush administration is unlikely to bomb Iran before it leaves office. It’s an important column, not only because he is more specific about the messages conveyed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, (and DNI chief Adm. Michael McConnell before him) to top officials in Israel this summer — that the U.S. would “oppose overflights of Iraqi airspace to attack Iran” — but also because he has been told by a “senior official” that the administration will announce what has been rumored for the past month — that Washington will indeed open an interest section in Tehran. Given the trauma of the 1979-81 hostage crisis, I personally believe that the presence of U.S. diplomats in Tehran virtually guarantees that the U.S. will not attack Iran so long as they remain there. If the prediction of Ignatius’ senior official comes true, it’s a very, very big deal in my view.

Ignatius is particularly close to both the Pentagon brass and the intelligence community (and he’s writing a book to be published in September with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft). His mention of the study by the Washington Institute for Near Policy (WINEP) — which clearly tries to downplay the international consequences of a U.S. and/or Israeli preventive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities — is particularly interesting in that respect. The study, which its authors have strenuously denied is aimed at making such an attack much more “thinkable,” is nonetheless quite concerning, even more so because Tony Lake and Susan Rice (among Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers) effectively endorsed it. It’s clearly on the minds of some people who count.

After reading the column, you should also look at Col. Pat Lang’s caution about it on his always-incisive blog. He generally agrees with Ignatius’ analysis, expands on it in important ways, but notes that the current commander-in-chief could prove disturbingly unpredictable in the wake of the November elections. If, on the other hand, U.S. diplomats are in place by then, I think his options will have narrowed considerably.

A brief update on Devon Gaffney Cross’ Policy Forum on International Security (www.policyforumuk.com) whose cozy, off-the-record briefings by senior Pentagon officials, fellow-neo-cons and fellow members of the Defense Policy Board (DPB) for select British and European reporters in exclusive clubs and cafes in London and Paris, we discovered earlier this year, were the beneficiary of a no-bid contract by Defense Undersecretary Eric Edelman’s Policy office last September. We just learned that the Policy Forum was also the beneficiary of the Smith Richardson Foundation, for which Cross has in the past served as director of research and a program office, according to the Foundation’s 2006 annual report which was published late last year. Cross’ group, the report said, was to have received a grant for $25,000 during 2006 to “organize a series of events that bring current and former U.S. policy makers and strategic thinkers together with leading European journalists and opinion makers to discuss key foreign and security policy issues.”

Smith Richardson, whose considerable endowment is based on the Vick’s VapoRub fortune, has been a big funder of neo-con organizations and individuals since the 1970’s, as well as more-mainstream organizations and universities.

Despite the Pentagon’s and Smith Richardson’s largess, the Policy Forum’s website remains as dormant as ever. For more on the Forum’s and Cross’ activities, just type in her name on this site. I’ve posted about half a dozen times on them over the past year or so. Cross, of course, is the sister of Frank Gaffney, the ultra-hawkish president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP) who last week wrote a remarkable column in the Washington Times in which he associated Sen. Obama’s use of the phrase “citizen of the world” in Berlin with the Terror in Revolutionary France, “Citizen Kane,” the Organization of Islamic States (”a Muslim mafia organization”), “Communist China,” Russia, the non-aligned movement, the specter of gun control, and Rodney King. As you will see from the other posts, the Policy Forum appears to be closely associated with the people at Anatol Sharansky’s OneJerusalem.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

If you don’t already know about it, the ongoing battle between Time magazine’s Joe Klein and the hard-line neo-conservatives at Commentary’s Contentions blog, as well as the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Abe Foxman (whose recent silence on the issue suggests he thinks this can’t turn out well for his side), over the question of divided or dual loyalties and what is in the respective interests of the U.S. and Israel appears to be heating up. One hopes that it will soon move from the blogosphere (including Time’s “Swampland”) to the mainstream U.S. media. Perhaps Klein himself will get the go-ahead from his editors to devote one of his magazine columns to it so it actually gets in print.

Daniel Luban and I wrote about the controversy today for IPS in which we tried to put it in the context of a series of events that have made it possible for a mainstream, centrist journalist — Jewish and proudly “pro-Israel” no less — like Klein to go after the neo-cons for their war-mongering, their “very, very dangerous form of extremism” and, a propos my last post, their “really dangerous anachronistic neocolonial sensibility,” as Klein described it in a very compelling interview with Jeffrey Goldberg on the Atlantic Monthly’s blog Tuesday. (I praised Goldberg’s own extraordinary attack on AIPAC and other right-wing Jewish groups in the New York Times two months ago as a major advance in the ongoing battle over the media’s reflexive use of the “pro-Israel” moniker to describe such groups.) Klein followed up the interview with a very concise restatement of his position and his determination to continue denouncing the neo-cons in a post, entitled “When Extremists Attack,” on the Swampland blog.

Led by John Podhoretz and Christian Right activist and Bill Kristol protege Peter Wehner, now with the misnamed Ethics and Public Policy Center (where Elliott Abrams spent most of his time after his pardon by President George H.W. Bush), and provoked by Goldberg’s interview, the neo-cons have returned to the attack, once again accusing Klein of anti-Semitism (which was Foxman’s concern) and adding charges of both intellectual and emotional instability for good measure.

But, as he argued in his interview with Goldberg, Klein argued that he is not anti-Semitic; he’s anti-neo-conservative — a very useful distinction that underlines the difference between religion or ethnicity, on the one hand, and political ideology on the other. Now, if all Jews were neo-conservatives, then Klein’s critics, including Foxman, might have a point, but, as Klein notes, Jewish neo-conservatives, to their great frustration, have always been and remain a rather small minority within the larger U.S. Jewish community.

In any event, both Klein’s interview and latest post are well worth reading, and the controversy he has provoked will hopefully soon move into the mainstream press. Oh, and don’t miss M.J. Rosenberg’s review of the latest developments at talkingpointsmemo.com.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Spurred by Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s calls for impeachment, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings today on the “Imperial Presidency.”

This hearing was broadcast on CSPAN and is archived here:

Part 1
Part 2

Witnesses includes former representatives Bob Barr and Elizabeth Holtzman, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, former Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, and Elliot Adams of Veterans for Peace.

If, as I do, you believe that the writings of the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes reflect the views of Dick Cheney, particularly on matters having to do with the “Axis of Evil,” then you would have to conclude from the lead editorial in this week’s edition that the vice president is really, truly angry about the drift of U.S. policy toward the Axis’ two surviving charter members, especially Iran. “Stunningly Shameful” is the name of the piece written by Hayes on behalf of the editors, which also, of course, includes Bill Kristol.

The title is taken from a quote attributed to “former adviser to Condoleezza Rice,” the principal villain of the piece about whom, you’ll remember, Hayes did a real hatchet job in a lengthy feature article in the magazine’s June 2 edition. One can speculate who that “former adviser” is — it could be someone from her National Security Council days like Elliott Abrams or J.D. Crouch or from the State Department, such as Robert Joseph or, of course, John Bolton whose complaints about the ”intellectual collapse” of the administration, if not Bush himself, has become a staple of New York Times coverage since Rice sent William Burns to the Geneva talks last weekend. In any event, I can’t imagine Hayes writing about anything of special interest to the subject of his fawning biography without the latter’s presumed or even actual approval. (The 2007 book, Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President, is available used and new for as little as $2.79 on amazon.com.)

“It has been a dispiriting few weeks,” Hayes sighs. “Several conservative political appointees have said that they are embarrassed to be working the Bush administration.” Would that include the vice president?

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

It would be an interesting case study to pin point the exact moment in time in which the political class was given a free pass by the press regarding visits to foreign countries.

For instance, one of the recent headlines that continues to run across the network tickers is Barack Obama’s visit to Europe and the Middle East — to boost his foreign policy credentials.

Exactly how does visiting heads-of-state, for mere hours, boost ones credentials?  Remember, these are the same officials that never drive themselves, use their own Blackberry’s or ride the very public transportation that they champion at election time — let alone breath the same air as hoi polloi.

In fact, I have spent the last year living and working in Korea and Taiwan yet I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on anything but the ability to find the nearest washroom (and McDonalds).

Thus, what about the foreign policy credentials of backpackers, retirees, businessmen and other expats who at least lived with and regularly dialogued with the local taxpayers?   If Obama or McCain visited a nuclear power plant for an hour, do they receive a engineering bump and are now capable of  designing reactor cores?  Dare one relish the day when the politicos visit a brain surgeon or OBGYN?

See also: The Rise of the Imperial Class

As Justin Raimondo points out in his article this morning, “A Brazen Evil,” noted Israeli scholar Benny Morris wrote an op/ed in Friday’s New York Times, “Using Bombs to Stave Off War,” in which he advocated that the U.S. government or the Israeli government attack Iran. In his op/ed, Morris wrote, “if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.”

Why is this quote so striking? Because Morris implicitly admits that the Israeli government has nuclear weapons, even though that government has never so admitted. In 1986, Mordecai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician, revealed that fact and for his troubles, was kidnapped by the Israeli government, tried for treason in secret, and forced to spend 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement. His treason? Revealing Israel’s nuclear weapons program. It’s true that he violated a non-disclosure agreement, but that’s not treason. Presumably the treason is that he revealed Israel’s nuclear weapons program, with the non-disclosure agreement being irrelevant.

Guess what? In last Friday’s New York Times, Benny Morris revealed Israel’s nuclear weapons program. So shouldn’t he be charged with treason too?

I missed the interview, but Colonel Pat Lang, the former senior intelligence officer and Middle East expert whose blog I always find highly informative, plain-spoken, and not a little provocative, is certainly asking the right questions about Bill Kristol’s reference on Fox News today his recent visit, along with a “small group,” to Fort Hood to talk to Gen. Odierno, who has just been confirmed as Gen. Petraeus successor and Washington’s top military commander in Iraq. I can’t imagine what Kristol, who reportedly speaks with Sen. John McCain pretty regularly and has long been close to some of McCain’s top foreign-policy advisers (Randy Scheunemann, Bob and Fred Kagan, etc.), would tell Odierno about Iraq or military strategy that the general does not already know, so the question is why Odierno wanted to arrange a talk with one of the neo-conservatives’ top polemicists, if not to seek his advice about how to wage the war on the home front, or, worse, how to help boost McCain and the Republicans in the run-up to the November election. And did the Pentagon actually pay for the trip???

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.