This is Daniel Ellsberg. About 40 years or so he leaked what are known as the Pentagon Papers. The War du jour was in Viet Nam. Now a dozen or so adventures or misadventures depending on your politics and less on reality, there is another leak - some 90,000 pages of "raw intelligence" regarding Afghanistan where we are and Pakistan where it appears the bad guys are.
Frank Rich, for all his detractors, is a keen brain and a careful observer and writes about it here this morning in the Times.
I saw Ellsberg back then and just saw him on a talking heads program the other night. He has a glint in his eye that reminds me of John Brown (of civil war fame). Slightly crazy, a zealot - or in the parlance of my Michigan upbringing - a loon. He was, of course, unrepentent and perhaps did a lot of damage or didn't. What he did do was drop a load of stuff on the American public that Mr. Nixon, really wasn't keen on seeing the light of day. Ultimately Nixon, over this and other things, formed the plumbers group in the White House to do really bad things - illegal things - and it cost him
There will be no witchhunt over the Wiki-leak stuff now. The last presidency so cloaked themselves that it would appear if any of this ever got to court, that they didn't know anything about it - the war, how it was going, or for that matter where Afghanistan is on a map. Now again we are left to sweep up the mess without knowing how the dish of salt was dropped on the floor.
I don't like it that our actions are now guided by cleanups rather than discussion at the time. It doesn't seem fair.