February 21, 2003
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Daniel Ellsberg, Author of "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" -- Part 2 of 2
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW | Part 1
BUZZFLASH: You say in the preface to "Secrets" that telling the truth -– I'm quoting here -– revealing wrongly kept secrets can have a surprisingly strong, unforeseeable power to help a wrong and save lives. The Pentagon Papers revealed that even under Democratic administrations and the Nixon administration, we had been proceeding on two tracks in Vietnam. There was internal assessment that was far different from the official public assessments we were receiving from the Executive Branch.
ELLSBERG: Under the Nixon administration, he directed a series of bombing campaigns for which there were literally two sets of top-secret books, both classified. When he was bombing Cambodia, they recorded the true targets in one set of top-secret documents that were very closely held within the administration –- that they were bombing a supposedly neutral country. And in order to get the money from Congress for these bombing raids, they kept another set of books that implied that the raids were targeted on objectives in South Vietnam, a different country, so Congress was literally shown false top-secret records.
And the same was applied to the bombing of Laos starting in, I believe, 1970, a year after the bombing of Cambodia and Vietnam, and again in the raids against North Vietnam. So the idea of two separate records is not just a metaphor; it was literally the case.
BUZZFLASH: Now you faced, at that time, a prison sentence in the 1970s [for releasing the Pentagon Papers] that would have put you in jail at least through 2008.
ELLSBERG: With good behavior. I told somebody recently that I would have got out in 2008 –- that's after 35 years -– with good behavior. And she paid me the compliment of saying, "No, you wouldn't."
BUZZFLASH: What was your background?
ELLSBERG: I was an official of the Defense Department in '64-65, and of the State Department in '66 to '67 in Vietnam. And I was on the embassy staff there. And I'd been a consultant to several parts of the Executive Branch before and after that. I was, in effect, a consultant to the National Security Council in late –- well, in early '69.
BUZZFLASH: What was it that you were so concerned about -– in terms of the direction of the war and the country -– that made you willing to risk the good part of your life in jail to reveal the Pentagon Papers?
ELLSBERG: Well, I first revealed other secrets -– as this book reveals, by the way, for the first time. I had first made an unauthorized disclosure a year earlier, under the Johnson administration. It was about 1968; I went to the New York Times when I thought that Nixon backed the war in such a way that we would end up invading North Vietnam, probably using nuclear weapons eventually.
BUZZFLASH: Which the current administration is threatening to use in Iraq.
ELLSBERG: Which the current administration is threatening to use, and which, as I reveal in the book –- I don't know if you've gotten to the part where Nixon talks about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam –- they were very similar to discussions that are going on now. Like nearly all Americans who had been involved in Vietnam, I saw by '67 and '68 the war was hopelessly stalemated. And most of us -– not all -– saw that the dangers of expanding the war vastly outweighed any benefit that it might have.
So when I saw that the war was likely to expand decisively, I found myself ready to do anything I could to stop it, democratically and non-violently and truthfully. Then a year and a half later, I saw a new president going along the same path. I would say that there are hundreds of people in the government who have the access to information that I had then. And I'll put it in terms of rank, although that's not the only reason to do it: People who are GS-18s as I was –- that's the highest civil service rating –- people who are special assistants to assistant secretaries or deputy assistant secretaries –- that's what I was – most of those are not that high in rank, but they do have very good access to classified information. And there are corresponding people in the military –- staff colonels, all through the Pentagon and in the State Department, and in CIA, deputy assistant secretaries themselves, and assistant secretaries –- these are people who have a very broad range of knowledge and access to the planning and the estimates and directives, secret directives, within the Executive Branch.
If they know –- as I and all those people did know in Vietnam –- that the President is in the process of lying to the public about the information and the estimates he's receiving, and the directives he's giving, and the objectives he's aiming at, and if they know that these lies are concealing a policy that they feel on the basis of this information is very dangerous and reckless, or is illegal, they should consider doing what I came to –- well, I'll put it this way: They should consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964, when I was first in that position. And that is go to the Congress and the press with documents that are truthful –- and tell the truth with those documents.
BUZZFLASH: But of course, now they may be put in jail without legal counsel.
ELLSBERG: Well, the business without legal counsel at this point depends on their being defined as enemy combatants. Now that may be applied to a number of American citizens not of Middle Eastern descent, because the many people who are going to Iraq to put their bodies in the way of U.S. bombs in Iraq, to be present as a witness to what happens there -– it's just been announced by a high official that they will be treated as "enemy combatants" if they're captured by Americans. And they would be subject to detention without trial, even though they are civilians, and civilians who have the best interests of their country at heart. But that doesn't apply to just everybody right now. It may well, if further laws of this nature are passed.
I think that depends mainly on the next large terrorist attack. We don't have a police state here yet. We're in that direction, and we don't have the freedoms that we had a year or two years ago. But we're not reasonably called a police state for the majority of Americans now, especially for citizens. That could change with one more major attack. I'm afraid that the degree of fear caused last time, and the response to that fear in terms of our willingness to give up freedoms, causes me to fear that the American public would go along with new measures that really would close the society down. So I think it's very important for us to be using our freedoms now in order to keep them and in order to avert this war.
I got away from your question a little bit, and I want to come right back to it. You quote me as saying that telling the truth can have an unforeseeable power to affect events. And the point I would like to make is that, in my opinion, any one of these hundreds of people with wide access to high-level decision making could probably avert this war by simply taking documents from his or her safe that they know not only would give the lie to Presidential or to administration statements, but which are wrongly kept secrets –- information that the public needs to have in order to judge policy. We're talking now about a file drawer worth of documents, which was about what I put out eventually with the Pentagon Papers. But I'm talking about current documents, on the whole, though some of these might also be historic documents.
For instance, the revelations of our secret dealings with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s right up to 1990, and the degree to which we directly were implicated in the acts we are accusing him of now -– of poison gas attacks on Iraq, Iranians and Kurds. It's almost as if we were rationalizing the bombing of Britain on the grounds of Britain's bombing of Dresden in World War II –- something we totally collaborated in at the time. If they reveal this, I believe that could stop this war.
BUZZFLASH: But now in an even harsher environment, I think the punishment would be swifter.
ELLSBERG: I think if they did it anonymously, as most things are done with documents, their personal risks would be limited. But if they put out a large number of documents, as I eventually did, they'd have to expect to be identified, as I was. And their chance of being prosecuted would be very high, even though, up until this date, this administration has prosecuted no one. But I would say, yes, they would have to face the risk of losing their clearances, their careers, their way of life, their income, which in turn would put very heavy strains on their family relationships. It could be one of the worst costs. And they could well go to prison.
That's a very high price to pay, but the context here is the chance of saving an untold number of lives –- a war's worth of lives.
BUZZFLASH: Your whole book is about your transformation to the point that you took the step of walking out of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica and copying the Pentagon Papers, knowing that at some point you were going to probably go to prison.
ELLSBERG: I assumed I would. At that time, I thought wrongly that I clearly must be violating some law. I was mistaken. It would have been true in Britain or most other countries, let alone various police state regimes like China. But it's not true in the United States. So most of the stuff I'm talking about them releasing, it would not, in fact, violate any clear-cut law. We don't have an official secrets act. That doesn't mean, though, they wouldn't be prosecuted, just as I was prosecuted.
BUZZFLASH: What were you technically prosecuted for? What was the charge?
ELLSBERG: I was prosecuted under the act that Rumsfeld would
have to use, or the administration would have to use, if it carried
out its frequent threats to prosecute people for leaks, the so-called
Espionage Act. It, in fact, was enacted by Congress in 1917 and then
amended later solely for delivering information to a foreign power
secretly and with the interest of advancing that foreign power over
the United States. It was not intended to criminalize disclosure
of information to the American public, or leaks. And in a discussion
in Congress, they made it very clear at the time that that was not
the intent of Congress.
To use it in that way carried a very significant risk, if on appeal
those parts of the Act were found unconstitutional. In other words,
because of the lack of intent by Congress to criminalize leaks, the
effort to use that act for that purpose would be found unconstitutional
because it excessively constrained the First Amendment -– freedoms
of speech and the press. For that reason, a number of administrations
have wanted to get passed an official secrets act of the kind that
they have in Britain, which simply criminalizes leaks. But it was
never really brought to a vote until three years ago, when, in the
last months of the Clinton administration, Congress actually very
quietly passed an official secrets act as part of the intelligence
organization bill, without debate, or with very little debate, and
with no hearings. Very few Congressmen even fully understood what
they were voting for. But they did pass it. There was sufficient
uproar after that, and Clinton actually vetoed that act, even though
Janet Reno, his Attorney General, had supported it in its final stages.
Obviously this President would not veto that act. Now it hasn't been brought up again because the administration doesn't want another fight like that in the press. But I say that in the event of the next terrorist act of -– and we have to expect that there will be another terrorist act -– that resolution will be brought up again, probably by Senator Shelby who was a big advocate of it. And it would pass this Congress, and it would be signed by Bush. And in that case, leaks could really be shut down any time a newspaper announced, as the L.A. Times did just last week, that it had secret documents showing that the President was prepared to use nuclear weapons first against an enemy that had not used nuclear weapons, but had either possessed chemical or biological weapons, or had used them against our troops and perhaps others.
BUZZFLASH: How do you know the administration didn't leak that story?
ELLSBERG: We don't know, strictly speaking. But that would, in that case, have been putting out a trial balloon. Put that into the public's consciousness and see how much reaction there is. And I could say, in this case, there wasn't much reaction. You're pointing to the fact that most so-called leaks really are authorized attempts that some high official decides will serve the President's purposes by a selective release of information.
BUZZFLASH: I think there have been some clear cases where one can speculate pretty firmly that the Pentagon has actually leaked some material and Rumsfeld then went through the motions of complaining about the leaks when he might have authorized some of them in the first place. But it was a way to have it both ways.
ELLSBERG: On many occasions, the reporter would know who did the leak, and pretty well know what the purpose of it was when they're not revealing the source. But take the minority of cases –- the very tiny minority of cases –- in which the release of information is not really authorized and, as Nixon would say, "restricts the freedom of the President to pursue his chosen foreign policy," thus endangering national security as the President sees it.
In those cases, they could call up the newsperson and say we're not pursuing you. We simply want you to tell us in the grand jury who is the perpetrator of this crime. In other words, if there was such a law that was upheld by the Supreme Court, it would then be a crime to have released this information and the newsperson could be asked in a grand jury, under penalty of contempt, to say who the source was. And if he or she refused, they could be immediately jailed for contempt and kept there indefinitely, initially for the length of the grand jury. But a new grand jury can then convene, and that can go on indefinitely. A number of journalists would accept that. Would they go to jail? But with that example in front of them, a lot of other journalists would think twice before they accepted such documents. And even more seriously, the people in the administration could not easily rely on their particular journalist keeping them secret. So I think the flow of unauthorized exposures would close down very sharply.
We rely on unauthorized disclosures. Vietnam is proof of that. And of course, it went on long after the Pentagon Papers' history was revealed. And Iran Contra is proof of that. If we're to have democratic control of foreign policy, we need 10 to a hundred times more unauthorized disclosures than we actually have. An official secrets act, which we're heading toward, will make those disclosures fewer. But even without that, we need a different climate of norms, and a different sense of what the range of loyalties should be of a government official. It's got to be comfortably understood that their loyalty should not be to their boss, their party, their administration, to their president, but to the Constitution, to human values, to the truth.
[Important BuzzFlash Note: BuzzFlash does not offer legal advice. Anyone who might contemplate leaking government documents should consult with an attorney specializing in this area of law about the possible consequences of their actions before doing so. BuzzFlash is not advising anyone to break the law.]
BUZZFLASH: You talk in the preface of your book that first you saw the Vietnam War as a problem, then you saw it as a stalemate, and then you saw it as a crime. What pushed you over the threshold where you said, in essence, "I'm willing to risk everything to disclose these papers?"
ELLSBERG: I think the essential point was that I saw more than a policy: They were going to continue the war, contrary to what the public had been led to believe. And I was inspired by the example of other Americans who were giving everything they could –- their freedom, or their whole future prospects –- and going to prison as draft resisters rather than quietly leave the country or become COs [conscientious objectors] even, or participate in the war, in order to say that the war was wrong.
And it was that it was a moral question, and that it was a question that deserved our doing everything we could. I heard that message. And I then asked myself: well, am I doing everything I can? If I'm willing to pay the cost in my own life, if I'm willing to go to prison, if I'm willing to give up my career –- are there things I could be doing that I'm not doing? And I thought of a number of things, of which the Pentagon Papers were the only one, and they didn't even look to me like the most effective course, but they were worth doing.
Looking back, as I had to do in the course of writing this memoir over my experience, I was forced to think a lot in the last couple of years about what were changing moments in my experience that changed what I was going to do. And I see more clearly than I might have seen earlier that the key turning point was when I recognized that by reading the history of the origins of the war, I realized that our policy of supporting the French colonial reconquest, the imperial reconquest of a former colony which had declared its independence, particularly from 1949 on, that that was a policy that had no legitimacy in U.S. terms.
It wasn't clearly illegal, in terms of the U.N. Charter, if Indochina were regarded still as a colony of France. They had declared their independence, but that hadn't been recognized by many countries, and not by the United States. So it wasn't clearly illegal to support the French. But in terms of our own values and our own ideals, and our own stated policies of anti-colonial, self-determination, that was clearly an illegitimate policy on our part. This wasn't a noble cause that had gone wrong, but it was an unjust war from the start in American terms. So when I saw the continuation –- where it was not just a mistake, but a crime –- as immoral, illegal and unjust, I saw then that every death in Vietnam as unjustified. We had no right to succeed or to kill in Vietnam, any more than the French had. And that meant that that killing was homicide, something that should stop immediately, not just eventually. And meanwhile, it obliged me to do whatever I could, even at risk to my own career or my own life, to stop it.
I didn't aspire to convincing many other Americans of that, because they'd have to read this history, which I didn't really expect them to do. The difference today is that in the absence of U.N. authorization, the proposed Bush administration attack is on a country that has not attacked us and is not about to attack us is -– what we're proposing to do and claiming the right to do is, in fact, aggression of a very dangerous sort. From the point of view of the administration, it would involve killing thousands of innocent civilians, or more than were killed in 9/11. Much more likely, something in the order of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, would be killed. If Saddam is so vengeful and murderous as to use nerve gas against the invading troops, which he probably will, we might well usher in an era of nuclear explosions.
BUZZFLASH: No one wants to be a victim of a terrorist. But what Vietnam evolved into –- and what we're seeing Iraq now really plugged as -– is the assertion of power for the assertion of power. At a certain point in the Nixon administration, they couldn't afford to lose, even though they couldn't find a way to win.
ELLSBERG: Here's a difference from the Vietnam case. You could prove, and the Pentagon Papers did prove, I think, that the reasons they were giving on the whole weren't valid or were undermined by internal documents. But they didn't answer why the President was doing what he was doing. And that remains truly controversial to this day. I have my own strong guesses on it after 30 years, but I can't say that we have what constitutes proof as to exactly why Johnson or Nixon did what they did –- and the reason, by the way, that that's so hard, compared to Iraq, is that there's no oil in Vietnam, or nothing corresponding to it.
But in the case of Iraq, the reasons they're giving are clearly false. The real reasons aren't hard to guess, and they have a lot to do with an imperial grab for resources, namely oil. I saw a sign at one of these rallies that I went to -– "How did our oil get under their sand?" And I think there's going to be what amounts to American occupation of the oil fields for a very long time. And what then remains to be determined is whether we allow our leaders to send Americans to die and kill for those purposes, and whether other nations will allow Bush to do that.
Above all, it's not so much that we need it at home -– I think that's an important secondary reason -– but we need to control the world. We need to control other people's oil –- German, Chinese oil, Japanese oil. We need to be the ones who provide that oil to them through us. And Saddam was insufficiently subordinate to the U.S.
The people I'm calling on to make these unauthorized disclosures could reveal, I'm sure, two things: A strategy that goes far beyond Iraq and reveals to the American public what we're taking on in our effort to run the world, and what the costs are. And secondly, I suspect strongly, without knowing the specifics, that they would know of imperial actions we're taking that would be very revolting and unacceptable to most of the American people, including, by the way, the planning for a nuclear target that is going on right now.
BUZZFLASH: This is a bit of a change, but I just had to ask you about something because it just so intrigued me: On page 440 of your book, you have an interaction from the Nixon tapes between Kissinger and the President, and Kissinger's concerned that you have more information which might be disclosed. And he says, "I would bet that he has more information that he's saving for the trial," meaning your upcoming trial, "examples of American war crimes that triggered him into it."
Is Henry Kissinger de facto acknowledging that war crimes occurred?
ELLSBERG: I think he's pretty close to it, because I think that's strongly implied. And I read it that way myself, because, of course, from one point of view, he's just saying that I would claim that. But on the other hand, why worry about it if these claims couldn't be sustained? He's clearly worrying that I had documents that would uphold the idea of war crimes. Now what I've been saying is that although I didn't, unfortunately, have current documents about what they were doing that might have been crimes of war, my own reading of the early Pentagon Papers convinced me that I was reading the documentation of crimes against peace. In other words, it was a war of aggression, and that the whole war was a crime.
There is a distinction, you know, between so-called war crimes in a war, like killing non-combatants and killing prisoners and torturing. And I would have said that there's no question that we were committing war crimes.
The current plans that have been leaked, as far as I know, with or without authorizations, for a so-called campaign of "shock and awe" tactics, which involve six to 800 cruise missiles in two days against Iraq –- 300 to 400 on the first day, 300 to 400 on the second day -– and the stories describing an officer quoted as saying no one in Baghdad will be safe, there will be no place to hide and so forth. Those would appear to be orders that involve the foreseeable destruction of non-combatants on a scale that is pretty clearly a war crime. And there should be a protest on that level. I think they are probably assuming that if they're successful as they expect, no one will criticize that after the event, and that may well be true. It still is a test of us, not only then, but right now, as to whether there is any question of whether we can accept such planning right now.
Nelson Mandela has clearly denounced these plans in very forthright terms. And maybe I can sum up here by saying, what can we do now? I'll mention two things that are in my mind. One is along the lines of what I was saying earlier: Anyone who is in a position to know information, it should not be secret if it's a wrongly kept secret that supports a dangerous and wrongful policy. Obviously nobody reading this, if they're not in the government, knows specifically what secrets may be hidden. But if you know an official, if you're the spouse of an official, the child of an official, then you can pretty well know from past experience, or if you read my book, that that friend or parent or brother or husband or wife knows things that are being wrongly withheld, because that's the nature of government. And in a life and death situation like this, anyone can put to those people that they should consider telling the truth.
The second point applies to all of us. I think this is a very good time for discovering the truth as best we can while we still have the freedoms to do that. And this month is a time for searching for truth and for speaking the truth as we see it, very forthrightly, not shrinking from words like –- not in a rhetorical sense, but in a narrow and technical sense –- words like empire, aggression and murder. Speaking of wartime killing is rarely described as murder, but in an unjust war or an aggressive war, all the killing by the aggressor is unjustified homicide. And that's murder and it should be seen as such, I think, and not just rhetorically, but in a legal and moral sense.
I propose to be doing that more than I have done in the past, just to say these things very bluntly. As we speak, we have very little time to stop this war. And it would be very bad if we have to look back after our freedoms have been abridged, or after thousands and thousands of innocent people have died, and say that we did not do everything that we could to stop this war.
BUZZFLASH: Any final thoughts?
ELLSBERG: I had meant several times to refer to a statement in the Feb. 1 New York Times, on page A8, as an example of what I was saying early on –- that the statements being made for this war are absurd. Both Bush and Blair in a recent meeting tried to make the point that the reason for this war is the combination of threats of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the threat posed by terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda. And the implication is that there is a link directly between those, which, of course, gives their attack the flavor of self-defense, which would make it legal even in the absence of a U.N. authorization, and would seem to make it necessary and justified.
To support that, here at the end of this quote on page A8, Secretary Powell warned in the nexus quote between "irresponsible rogue states with these kinds of weapons and terrorists who would be bent on acquiring them. And nowhere is that danger more" -– in other words, states that might give them to terrorism -– and "nowhere is that danger more grave than in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."
Well, that's a very important statement for their argument, implying the basic underpinning, apparently, of their case for going to war within weeks. I say it's certainly a false statement. On the contrary, the danger of Al-Qaeda getting a nuclear weapon is a very ominous possibility. And the danger of Osama bin Laden or Al-Qaeda getting a nuclear weapon from Pakistan, from North Korea, or from Russia's loosely controlled stocks is incomparably greater than the risk of getting it from Saddam Hussein.
The mobilization for war is, right now, at this moment, reducing our national security significantly because it is causing the administration to deprecate the crisis raised by North Korea right now, and to fail to prepare the public for the kinds of compromises with North Korea that would be essential in stopping their progress toward nuclear weapons. The administration is, as far as we can see, doing nothing to stop this movement toward nuclear weapons which is a genuine crisis, in that it could reduce world security within weeks or months from now.
So here's a case where they're really neglecting our national security, and there is a possible nexus between North Korea and possible terrorist networks. To say that that's more true in Iraq is simply ridiculous, and I can't believe that Powell believes that for a minute. But to stay in office and to exert what influence he can, he's paying the price that we see so often in the Pentagon Papers of making false and absurd statements in support of the President's position.
BUZZFLASH: Daniel Ellsberg, thank you so much for your time.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
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For Daniel Ellsberg's latest thoughts on Iraq and more material related to his new book, visit www.ellsberg.net.
Ellsberg's book, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," is available as a BuzzFlash premium at http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/Secrets.html
