18. Wikileaks - Another Watergate?

The man responsible for what is now known as "Watergate", Daniel Ellsberg, supports Julian Assange.

Said Mr. Ellseberg, "Julian Assange is not a criminal under the laws of the United States. I was the first one prosecuted for the charges that would be brought against him. I was the first person ever prosecuted for a leak in this country—although there had been a lot of leaks before me. That’s because the First Amendment kept us from having an Official Secrets Act. . . . The founding of this country was based on the principle that the government should not have a say as to what we hear, what we think, and what we read. . . ."

Read more from DANIEL ELLSBERG.

Watergate
Daniel Ellsberg was a Marine from 1954-1957, and when he visited Vietnam during the war he was astounded by what he discovered.

Ellsberg had 47 volumes - 7,000 pages - of documents in his safe at Rand. On October 1, 1969 he started secretly xeroxing them. They were later called The Pentagon Papers. These documents proved that each President, from Truman to Nixon lied to the public about Vietnam. “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side,” he says, “We were the wrong side.” The Presidents lied to the public about many things happening in Vietnam, including the Tonkin Gulf incident which led America deeper into the war. According to his papers, this was a completely fabricated incident.

Daniel Ellsberg faced 115 years in prison, but a mistrial was pronounced during the trial.