 I'm Dan Ellsberg. I was 10 when my country went to war, having been attacked by aggressors. And we went to war against aggressors, the German imperialist expansionists in Asia and in Europe. And I grew up believing that my country was fundamentally against aggression, that we were ready to make great sacrifices for resources and even our own lives in order to defend people against expansionist aggressors. In 2003, my country committed aggression as clear-cut aggression as was committed against us in 1941 and against many other people starting really in 39, 40, 41 by the Germans. As a matter of fact, the people who got us in, who lied us into the Iraq war, we now know, had the intention that that would just be the first of a number of wars in that same region, including Syria, eventually even Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, a number of countries we were going to take over the Middle East. I don't know of another country that set out to change the entire political complex and put it under our control or their control by armed force since the Japanese and the Germans. There have been other cases of aggression, but usually just regional one neighboring country. In this case, having set out not only to commit regime change, which we have been doing for over 100 years, certainly since the Spanish-American war, but actually simply to be open clear-cut invaders and occupiers of another country as we did in Iraq. That's a shameful change. It's not as dramatic a change as it might appear on the surface since for over a century. We've been what I call a covert empire. The word covert really means not only secret, but plausibly denied, denied with evidence, misleading and false evidence that hides who is doing what to whom, who is really doing the attacking in what interests and who is actually directing it. In our case, the president. And so in Central America for well over a century. And in Indonesia, in the Philippines, in South Vietnam, in Brazil, in Chile, all over the place, we engaged in covert regime change, which is another word for empire. But again, it's empire that you deny you are doing imperial work. The cloak came off on Iraq. And actually the number of people killed by us in that case came off rose sharply with that. Our air power didn't have to be denied or was in the form of some proxy air as it was in South Vietnam from 61 to 64 at a time when US airplanes were being flown with a US pilot and a South Vietnamese in the back seat so that if the plane came down from mechanical trouble, there would be, in the words of the cables, another colored body, another color body in the plane to deny that it was actually US attack. And then of course, when the attacks became overt in 65, when I was in the Pentagon and then when I went to Vietnam, the scale became enormously higher. When we send US troops as we did in 65 or we did in Iraq, then they have to be protected, quote, by air power from the people who were shooting at them, the occupants of that country. And that air power is enormously more damaging. We don't really know yet. We've never had the curiosity or we've known better than to try to find out just how many people were killed by the war that we started in 2003 in Iraq and which is still going on. Is it 40,000? Is George W. Bush indicated 10 times 9-11? Or is it 10 times more than that or 20 times more than that? As other studies have said, there might be a million and a half and more people killed. The American people have never found it necessary to investigate that error, to really check what the body count is. They act as if we didn't care. And for practical purposes, the rest of the world can conclude we didn't care. Is that what we should consider about ourselves? The same has been true, of course, of Afghanistan where we have the color of replying to a provocation of 9-11, however thin that cover was. And that war is still going on at enormous human damage. It's time for us not only to drop the covert wars of regime change, which as I said, is a euphemism for empire, for deciding by force, by fraud, by paramilitary, whose assassinations bribery, who shall govern, who shall rule, and who shall die in someone else's country. But above all, at the same time, stop the wars of over-degression with the greater use of U.S. airpower of enormous damage. It's time for us to ask whether the rest of the world is wrong about us, when they look at us and see that the lives of other people don't matter at all, or are they right? That's up to us. Who are we? It's time for us to stop these wars, to get out of that area, and to stop pretending that we have the right to decide by fire and bombs, fire and steel, who shall govern and who shall die in those countries.