Pentagon Papers for the First Time has been Published Complete, Original, and Unredacted

Los Angeles, CA – BACM Research/Pentagon-Papers.com has announced the publishing of the Pentagon Papers in their entirety, which has never been before available anywhere before June 13, 2011. This release Includes 2,400 pages never seen before June 13, 2011. The Pentagon Papers are now completely declassified and fully available.

More information can be found at http://www.Pentagon-Papers.com

BACM Research/Pentagon-Papers.com researcher Jerry Spencer says, “From now on the best reference for the Pentagon Papers will be the actual Pentagon Papers.”

In June of 1971, small portions of the report were leaked to the press and widely distributed. However, the publications of the report that resulted from these leaks were incomplete and suffered from many quality issues.

This publishing of the complete Pentagon Papers is now available with no redactions compared to previous releases.

This copy of the report is exactly as it was presented by Leslie Gelb to Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford on January 15, 1969.

This publishing includes all the supplemental background documentation. In the Gravel Edition only 20% of these documents in Part V.B. were included.

This release includes the complete account of peace negotiations, significant portions of which were not previously available either in the House Armed Services Committee redacted copy of the Report or in the Gravel Edition.

More information can be found at http://www.Pentagon-Papers.com


PROBLEMS WITH PREVIOUS RELEASES OF THE PENTAGON PAPERS

Having the complete 7,000 pages of the report solves problems that were inherent in the previously leaked and partially declassified published editions. Until June 13, 2011 no one except those cleared to view the formerly top secret document has actually seen the real Pentagon Papers.

New York Times Publishing - The papers that were first published were only a small fraction of the complete 7,000 page report. The conditions under which they were copied and urgency to quickly release the information limited how well the report could be reproduced.

Gravel Edition - Additional pages of the report were leaked to members of the U.S. Congress. Democratic Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel entered his copy of 4,100 pages from the report into the Congressional record. The publishing company Beacon Press than published those pages in book form. The poor quality of the pages leaked to Senator Gravel meant that the Beacon Press reproduction had words, paragraphs, and complete pages missing, compared to the original of same sections in the complete report. The editors at Beacon Press arranged the volumes in an order different from the original report. Three volumes not leaked were completely missing from the Grave edition, Part IV.A.1., NATO and SEATO: A Comparison; Part IV.A.4., U.S. Training of the Vietnamese National Army, 1954-1959; and Part IV.C.10., Statistical Survey of the War, North and South: 1965-1967.

House Committee on Armed Services Version - The House Committee on Armed Services also published its version of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. This version went through declassification review before release. This meant that much of the material was redacted and is missing from this publishing.


ABOUT THE REPORT

This 7,000 page report commonly referred to as the Pentagon Papers was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. McNamara appointed Defense Department officials John McNaughton, Morton Halperin, and Leslie Gelb to lead a task force named the Vietnam Study Task Force, to complete a history of United States involvement in the Vietnam War. The task force completed its duty and produced a 47 volume report on the history of U.S. decision-making on Vietnam policy known as the Report of the OSD (Office of Secretary of Defense) Vietnam Task Force and given the title United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967. The report was given the classification Top Secret. It was drawn from information gathered from classified documents from the Department of Defense, CIA, Department of State, and the White House.

Years later McNamara would say he requested the report so that in the future historians would have a written record of the Vietnam War. Measures were taken to make even the creation of the report a guarded secret. As few people as possible were made aware of the work on the report. President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were not informed about the work of the task force. Johnson and Rusk did not learn about the task force’s report until after it was leaked to the New York Times. “I never thought to mention the project to the President or the Secretary of State,” McNamara wrote in his memoirs. “It was hardly a secret, however, nor could it have been with 36 researchers and analysts ultimately involved.”


ABOUT THE LEAK

The New York Times published what it called the “Vietnam Archive” on June 13, 1971. The sources of the first unauthorized release were Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo. Daniel Ellsberg briefly worked on the task force that produced the report. In 1968, he returned to work at the RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development), a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It later became financed in part by the U.S. government.

A copy of the Report, one of only fifteen copies, was deposited at RAND. Ellsberg began copying pages of the report on October 1, 1969. He was aided by a former RAND employee Anthony Russo. Ellsberg left RAND at night with batches of the report in his briefcase and returned them the next morning. Russo and Ellsberg made copies using a Xerox machine at an advertising company owned by a friend of Russo. Ellsberg tried to give copies of the material to several individuals including Henry Kissinger, Senator William J. Fulbright, and Senator George McGovern. No one he contacted was interested in receiving the papers.

In February of 1971, Ellsberg contacted Neil Sheehan of the New York Times who was interested. On Sunday, June 13, 1971, The New York Times began publishing excerpts of the Pentagon Papers along with staff written introductions, summaries, and information to place the material in context. The headline of the New York Times that morning was, “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement.”

The Nixon Administration was granted an injunction to stop the New York Times from further publishing the report. The case New York Times Co. v. United States quickly rose to the Supreme Court. On June 30, 1971, just 17 days after the New York Times first published excerpts of the Pentagon Papers, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in what at the time was called the most important American case involving the media in the last half century. In a 6-3 decision the Court ruled on the side of the decisions made by the two lower courts that had previously heard the case, that the government had not met its “heavy burden of showing justification for the enforcement of such a restraint.” The majority issued six different opinions with different degrees of support for the First Amendment.

Ellsberg and Russo were arrested and charged with stealing and holding secret documents. On May 11, 1973 their trial was halted and a mistrial was declared. Charges were dismissed by Federal District Judge Byrne citing irregularities in the government’s case. Judge Byrne ruled that, “the totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case"


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Contact Information

Jerry Spencer

Research Director

BACM Research – Pentagon-Papers.com

Contact via E-mail