Wow. Western Digital has pretty bad documentation. This is a very simple solution to the problem of Read Only Permission on Western Digital External HD My Book Essentials on Mac OS X:
What did NOT work:
Formatting partitioning the drive from Disk Utility or DiskWarrior
Installing NTFS drivers from here: http://mac-free.com/download/NTFS-3G.html
Using the WD Quick Formatter as installed on the Western Digital External HD from the factory
Restarting, restarting in Safe Mode, zapping the P Ram, etc.
What DID work:
I moved the WD WD Quick Formatter onto the internal HD in my iMac and then ran that copy to reformatt the External My Book Essentials HD.
Problem fixed, and a very easy solution.
