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Sept. 12: Sunday Monitor
KPFT - Pacifica Radio
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<> 6 pm to about 6:15 pm HEADLINES
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GUEST 1: DANIEL ELLSBERG Daniel Ellsberg is the man who distributed the Pentagon Papers. He did this believing he might go to jail for the rest of his life, but his act of heroism did much to sway U.S. public opinion against the Vietnam War, and shorten the war. The former Marine faced 12 felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years. The charges were dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him.
Ellsberg authored a book,
Secrets - A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, describing the events in the 1960s and early ’70s that led to his public release of 7,000 pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. Ellsberg is a vocal anti-war activist, and has been speaking out against the Iraq war since before the war started.
On Thursday, Ellsberg and other whistleblowers appealed to insiders to leak documents, so that policy discussions will have more basis in fact. Ellsberg said claims of government deception and lies have "little credibility" unless supported by documentary evidence, which often is available only in classified materials.
In a memo to current government employees, the group said federal insiders owe a "higher allegiance" to the Constitution, the public and American soldiers in Iraq than to their government bosses.
"A hundred forty-thousand Americans are risking their lives every day in Iraq for dubious purpose," the memo said. "Our country has urgent need of comparable moral courage from its public officials. Truth-telling is a patriotic and effective way to serve the nation. The time for speaking out is now."
Ellsberg said a new support network for whistleblowers is being established. The network includes pro bono legal counsel from the American Civil Liberties Union and advice from the Project on Government Oversight. The network also includes Ellsberg's Truth Telling Project and Ray McGovern's group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
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GUEST 2: MAUREEN SULLIVANMaureen Sullivan is author of a new book looking at gender, family creation, and lesbian mothers:
Family of Woman: Lesbian Mothers, Their Children, and the Undoing of Gender. She is a young sociologist, and a visiting assistant professor at Harvard.
When she taught at Northern Illinois University, she was "turned in" by one of her students to Rush Limbaugh as a "feminazi." Are two-mom families shattering the existing social order? How do biology and kinship fare in families with artificial insemination? From her in-depth study of 34 lesbian families, Professor Sullivan will discuss some of the twists and turns in American family life.
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