[act-ma] 3/34 Ellsberg: Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers (Thurs)

[James in Cambridge]

Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers: Government Secrets and the Public’s Right to Know
A conversation with Daniel Ellsberg and Scott Horton


 followed by a screening of
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Academy-Award nominated documentary film by Judith Ehlrich and Rick Goldsmith 


5:00PM, Thursday, March 24th
Austin West, Harvard Law School

Sponsored by the Human Rights Program, Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights, and the HLS Chapter of the National Lawyers' Guild (HLS Chapter).


Forty years after leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press, Daniel Ellsberg discusses with lawyer-journalist Scott Horton the Wikileaks disclosures and the U.S. government’s attempts to prosecute Army Private Bradley Manning and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
 
This event is open to the public. Food will be served.  
 
Daniel Ellsberg graduated from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in Economics, and earned his Ph.D. in Economics, also from Harvard, in 1962. In between, he spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander.
In 1959, Dr. Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. In 1967, Dr. Ellsberg worked on the top secret McNamara study of 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. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.


Scott Horton is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, where he covers legal and national security issues.  As a practicing attorney, Scott has focused on investment in emerging markets. He is also a life-long human rights advocate, serving as counsel to a number of human rights and democracy advocates in the former Soviet Union and directing major research projects dealing with U.S. government interrogation practices in the war on terror and the practice of extraordinary renditions. Mr. Horton is a lecturer at Columbia Law School, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the board of NYU’s Center on Law and Security, the National Institute of Military Justice, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association. 		 	   		  
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