Glenn Greenwald
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Worked inside the Rand Corporation, was one of the key planners of U.S.
nuclear strategy at the height of the Cold War, was also a key planner of the Vietnam War.
And then in the 60s, started to discover through his access.
He had the most unfettered access to top secret documents because he's a war planner that the Pentagon and other war planners inside the U.S.
government knew that they could never win the Vietnam War, that at best it could be fought to a standstill if they fought for many years, but probably they were going to end up losing.
And yet publicly they would go testify before Congress and give interviews and they would say exactly the opposite.
They would say, we're six months away from winning.
You just need to stop tying our hands with these protests and we're going to win.
And, you know, tens of thousands of American troops, to say nothing of millions of people in Vietnam were dying.
And he went and took the study, the Pentagon paper study, where they concluded they could never win and made it public.
And for that, they wanted to put him into prison for life.
For for showing the truth about a war that huge numbers of Americans were dying in, like, you know, 20 year old kids are coming back in body bags by the thousands for a war that they kept saying they were going to win, but knew that they couldn't.
He should have immediately been treated as American hero.
But the only people who in general are punished or pay any price for severe government deceit and wrongdoing and criminality are the people who expose it, not the people who do it.
I mean, what does winning look like?
You know, I mean, originally, like think about even what happened with Venezuela, like leading up to the abduction of Maduro in Venezuela, we kept hearing about the drug trade and drug boats.
Like, does anybody think the drug trade has been meaningfully interrupted in the United States?
Is it harder to get drugs?
If you're an American inside the United States, would anybody credibly claim that as Roosevelt of what we did in Venezuela, blowing up a bunch of boats and abducting the Venezuelan president or even freeing the people of Venezuela from this like harsh dictator?
Have we done that?