And the Good evening. It's Friday, June 16th. Welcome to a new episode of System Update,

a little bit late, but nonetheless we are here it is our live nightly

show that it is every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on

Rumbull the free speech alternative to YouTube tonight Daniel Als, who made history by leaking the Pentagon Papers, died today of pancreatic

cancer at the age of 92.

The 1971 leak for which Ellsberg was responsible was likely to send him to prison for decades, if not life, as he well knew when he did it.

And yet, at the age of 40, with some of the most impressive establishment credentials anyone could compile,

he knowingly sacrificed his liberty because he believed it was so imperative that Americans

know the truth about the Vietnam War, namely that while top officials in the Johnson and Nixon

administrations were continuously promising Americans

that they were months away from victory in private they were saying exactly the opposite

and were doing so from the very start of the war.

Namely, they knew that victory was not only impossible, but that the best case scenario was a stalemate with the North Vietnamese.

Ellsberg is most famous for the Pentagon Papers case, which fostered as well one of the most

important press freedom rulings in the history of the Supreme Court,

but his significance was not confined to that controversy.

It extended well beyond that.

Indeed, the same values and causes that led him to that extraordinary act of self-sacrifice

were the same that motivated his work until the last month of his life as he battled

a very malignant form of cancer that took his life relatively quickly.

One of the great honors of my life is that I was able to meet and then work with and develop

a friendship with Ellsburg, someone who is really a childhood hero to me.

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