Daniel Ellsberg, a whistleblower famed for exposing government deception over the United States’s war in Vietnam and an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons, has died at the age of 92 from pancreatic cancer.
The Washington Post was the first to report that Ellsberg died on Friday, citing a statement from his family.
“My dear father, #DanielEllsberg, died this morning June 16 at 1:24 AM, four months after his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. His family surrounded him as he took his last breath. He had no pain and died peacefully at home,” his son Robert said in a Twitter post on Friday.
While Ellsberg was best known for his efforts to bring a trove of secret documents known as “the Pentagon Papers” to public attention, he remained actively engaged in activism on a number of issues, such as protection for whistleblowers and the dangers of nuclear weapons, until the end of his life.
At the time of the Pentagon Papers leak, Henry Kissinger, an architect of US escalation of the Vietnam War and then national security adviser to former President Richard Nixon, called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs”.
Ellsberg had worked as a military analyst on national security issues for the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation, a prominent policy think tank, before becoming disillusioned with the US war in Vietnam and leaking thousands of pages of documents detailing government lies about the war to the media in 1971.
Original from www.aljazeera.com