Ellsberg scorns official 9/11 probes

Daniel Ellsberg, the man who exposed government deception about the Vietnam War by leaking the "Pentagon Papers," says that "very serious questions" concerning possible government complicity in the 9/11 attacks require a new "hard-hitting investigation of a kind we've not seen."

Ellsberg, an intellectual once employed by the RAND Corp. think tank, said that the Bush administration was "capable, humanly and psychologically, of engineering such a provocation."

Ellsberg detonated a national firestorm by leaking the "Pentagon Papers" to the press. Those secret documents showed a pattern of official deception concerning the Vietnam war.

Ellsberg told an interviewer that though he found much of the inside job theorizing "very implausible," other criticisms are "quite solid, and there's no question in my mind that there's enough evidence there to justify a very comprehensive and hard-hitting investigation of a kind that we've not seen, with subpoenas, general questioning of people, and raising the release of a lot of documents."

Ellsberg continued that "there's no question" that "very serious questions have been raised about how much they [government officials] knew beforehand and how much involvement there may have been."

Ellsberg, who worked as an analyst in the Johnson administration, said he was familiar with the use of provocations, noting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as a pretext for hostilities, potentially could have resulted in numerous American casualties.

Ellsberg warned that another 9/11-type attack could result in a "Reichstag fire" decree that ends liberty altogether.

These comments come from a transcript of an interview with Ellsberg in Infowars. The Infowars article is dated July 19, 2006.
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http://www.infowars.com/articles/terrror/pentagon_papers_author_gov_maybe_did_911.htm