As the George Bush war machine rolls on toward its much-anticipated Mesopotamian blow-out and the U.N. Security Council meets to prevent that, Daniel Ellsberg heads south from New York on the Acela to once again do his part to stop the madness.

It is a Monday night and Ellsberg, the former Rand Corporation employee who photocopied 7,000 pages of internal documents that would later become known as the Pentagon Papers, is traveling to Washington, to a National Press Club press conference where he will speak out against the war and in favor of whistleblowers who have evidence that our government is lying and spying.

For Ellsberg, who knows a little something about leaks and lies, the case of the 28-year-old British woman arrested for tipping off the London Observer that the U.S. was spying on the U.N. really hit home.

Getting up from his seat to get a better cell phone connection, Ellsberg says the woman's actions almost make him feel guilty that he did not disseminate the Pentagon Papers -- which showed that four U.S. administrations had lied about this nation's ability to win a war against North Vietnam -- before our involvement was escalated by President Lyndon Johnson.

"If I had given the contents in my safe in August of '64 -- before Johnson was elected -- it would have had enormous effect," Ellsberg says. "It would have been impossible for Johnson to go ahead with the Rolling Thunder bombing that escalated the war in Vietnam."

Instead, Ellsberg "waited" until 1971 -- well into Dick Nixon's first term -- before turning the papers over to The New York Times.

Already disenchanted with the war and the administration, Ellsberg -- at the time a consummate insider -- had been writing letters to editors opposing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. But then he began to identify with "the young Americans who were deciding to go to jail rather than cooperate with a wrongful war. I realized that my background was not different from theirs and that I should be doing more, be willing to make very significant personal sacrifices."

And that's when he decided to turn over the 2.5 million-word "History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy" to the press. The results of Ellsberg's action, of course, are history.

Still, given last week's public disclosure that the U.S. was bugging Security Council members, Ellsberg wonders aloud whether he did enough.

"Putting out the truth, that didn't occur to anyone, so I don't blame myself for not having thought of it [in '64]," he says. "But I don't entirely excuse myself either. Why didn't I? I do feel a real failure on my part, but the important thing is to learn, to do better in the future. Eventually I did, and I hope other people learn from the same history."

What advice does Ellsberg offer to this generation's would-be Pentagon Paper purveyors?

Lavishing particular praise on the unnamed British woman who leaked the bugging information, Ellsberg says anyone with proof of government lying should come forward now, "before the bombs start falling.

"They have a real chance, small as it may be, to save a tremendous number of lives," he says of anyone who would follow in his footsteps. The British woman "did the right thing. The recent, very good disclosure of the bugging operation against all the members of the Security Council in their homes, that does seem even more illegal than usual. Sweeping private matters into the net, that could be used to coerce, intimidate and blackmail, that should have been exposed, because there is a small chance it could affect votes in the Security Council. It could have a chance of preventing a terribly dangerous war."

"I think that this war is likely to endanger Americans at home very severely and lead to a great increase in the numbers of suicide bombers that Osama and colleagues can recruit."

Speaking of Jews opposed to Bush's folly, a recent poll released by the highly regarded Zogby International (ZI) offers some fascinating breakdowns on who supports the president.

Overall, 57 percent of U.S. voters support war against Iraq, while 40 percent are opposed.

Not surprisingly, Republicans overwhelmingly back Bush, with 84 percent in favor and 12 percent against. Democrats are very opposed (35-61) and so are blacks (19-75).

Interestingly, ZI found that the more often people attend religious services, the more likely they are to favor war. Three-fifths of those who worship at least once a week back Bush, while 49 percent of those who worship once a month want war; 45 percent of those who seldom worship want war and only 28 percent of those who never worship want war.

Most surprising, especially against the cacophony of propaganda that this war is a Zionist plot, ZI -- owned by John Zogby, who is Palestinian -- found that Jews want war the least.

Protestants were the most supportive (64-33), followed by Catholics (54-42) and then Jews (45-44). According to ZI spokesman Duncan McCully, pollsters were able to reach only two people identifying themselves as Muslim out of 1,120 people polled, rendering any breakdown on war sympathies among Muslims unusable.

Hope that, despite some very powerful pro-war people in the Bush administration who happen to be Jewish, and despite the highly influential Israeli lobby, most American Jews are like me: fed up with Ariel Sharon, fed up with his brutal occupation and adamantly opposed to a war that will only make things worse, not better, for Jews and Arabs who want peace.