Palestine

I think it was mostly 2020 organizers who died 'mysteriously'?

Citation? I don't think this is true. If it is true, I want to know more about it.

Ellsberg was deep throat right? The shit he leaked made a lot of outrage, and he did hide for a while.

Close. Ellsberg was a contractor for the Pentagon (more or less) who smuggled thousands of pages of secret documents out, detailing all the lies the American government was telling people about the war. Once they were all out of the building and he'd had time to take out anything that would actually put any American individual person in danger, he leaked the whole thing in huge chunks to the press, and they printed the entire thing in the newspapers, huge massive pages of super-secret government stuff just filling up the pages so it could all go into the public record irrevocably.

The executive branch, predictably, lost its goddamned mind, and was hunting him to make him stop (and also screaming at the newspapers and the courts to stop publishing the stuff, since it took quite a while to get it all into print one section at a time, the newspapers kind of took turns publishing big chunks of it). Because the press back then had integrity, they told the executive branch to go fuck itself, and kept doing it. Ellsberg was able to avoid the FBI with the help of the Weathermen, basically through the single and sufficient method of never saying a damn thing on the phone. Since the FBI's whole MO was phone surveillance, they couldn't catch him until it was all in print, at which point he turned himself in to face charges. What the press had done wasn't illegal, no matter how much the White House wanted to scream about it, but what he had done had been a crime, since he'd been the one with the security clearance. Anyway, once what was done was done, he showed up to face the music.

I don't know too many of the details of the trial, but I know that he went free on everything. Basically, the press, the courts, and most of the public opinion felt he had done the right thing (especially after reading what he had leaked), and so history wrote him down as a hero and he was fine.

The world has changed since then, surveillance has gotten better and the spine has gone out of a lot of those institutions that went to bat for him back then. But, also, in some ways the world of the middle 1960s was way more authoritarian than the world we currently inhabit.

What I'm saying is, your simplistic picture where the people on top are all on one team, and they always 100% of the time protect each other with violence and there's nothing we on the bottom can do, isn't accurate. People are just people. Sometimes they do wrong, sometimes they do right. Doesn't really matter where in the hierarchy they are; actually what's a lot more important is what habits they have and where public opinion and public narratives are at.