American media

Speaking on the Fox Business show “Follow The Money” on Monday, Bob Beckel excoriated Assange for leaking the State Department cables that have roiled the world in the past week, and said that American special forces should kill him.

“A dead man can’t leak stuff,” Beckel said. “This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in 1971, talking:

It’s not only Republicans like Sarah Palin and others, and Peter King, who will be a high—have high position in the House in the next term, who are calling for this kind of thing. In my case—I’m sure, by the way, that if I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me at this time, the same material, same instigations. I would be called not only a traitor, which I was then, which was false and slanderous, but I would be called a terrorist, as a matter of fact. Now, that’s the word today for someone who is beyond the pale of any rights, of any rights of citizenship or any human rights, someone who can be just dealt with summarily like that. The reason for calling for illegal shooting, which is an odd and unusual call, is because our legal system, with its glorious First Amendment, we don’t have a law that makes it clearly illegal to do what—the truth telling that WikiLeaks and New York Times and Julian Assange has done. Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am, and I’m not.

And that is a—it’s appalling that our conversation after 9/11, in the last ten years, has reached a point where what Nixon did to me covertly can now be called for and actually done openly and very specifically. Nixon brought a dozen Cuban American émigrés, Bay of Pigs veterans, up from Miami to at least beat me up. The words were “incapacitate Ellsberg totally,” which covers the word “kill,” which, as their prosecutor said to me at the time, these guys, who were CIA assets, they don’t use the word “kill.” They avoid it. They use words like “neutralize” and “eliminate” and “with extreme prejudice,” “terminate,” that sort of thing. They avoided the word “kill.” I notice that the change now is that not only is that, which was a covert action, which actually was critical in bringing Nixon down because it was recognized as not only illegal, but really against American values in a fundamental sense, that has now become something you can talk about quite openly. And even the President can refer to special operations teams worldwide whose work is to capture or kill. The word “kill” is no longer avoided in these circles, assassinating people who get in the way by telling the truth.

– from democracynow.org

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