06/09/10 – Daniel Ellsberg – The Scott Horton Show

I'm your host, Scott Horton, and I'm lucky enough that I'm joined on the phone right now by the heroic American patriot, Daniel Ellsberg.
Welcome to the show, Dan.
How are you?
Good to be here.
Thanks.
What do you know?
Dan Ellsberg, he stole and leaped the Pentagon Papers, risking life in prison, knowingly risking life in prison to do so, and writes for truthdig.com.
The book is called Secrets, A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
So there's this extraordinary story here, Dan, about the guy who supposedly, allegedly stole from the government, if that's not an oxymoron, video of the collateral, what became the collateral murder video, as it was known, put out by WikiLeaks.
And apparently he has been arrested and has been held by the military for at least the last couple of weeks, and they're saying is responsible for turning over another very important video of a massacre, this one in Afghanistan.
And although I think it's denied all around so far, the rumors are that he may have even stolen and turned over to WikiLeaks as many as a quarter of a million State Department cables at the highest levels of classification.
So we're all anxiously awaiting your comments, sir.
Well, I must say that I rise to the word stolen that you've used there a couple of times, as is commonly done.
I was often described as having stolen the Pentagon Papers from the Defense Department or the Rand Corporation.
And in fact, as I got a legal education in this subject, having started as a layman and being one of the very first people ever prosecuted for allegedly stealing information aside from leaking information, I discovered that at that time, it was very clear that you couldn't steal information.
I had copied information.
And in fact, although there is a copyright law, that's in almost all cases a civil law.
In other words, you can sue for damages if copyrighted material has been has been copied or misused.
The government can't copyright information, and for the very interesting reason that it's information from information is seen as essentially the property of the people who are regarded as sovereign in this peculiar constitutional system that was invented here.
So there wasn't at that time any any concept of stealing information at that point.
Now, as the electronic media have proliferated, I understand the law has evolved in that respect and that they can make a case for stealing information.
But in this case, in any case, he was copying information and putting it out.
And whether the government properly owns the information that war crimes have been committed in Iraq or Afghanistan is, I would say, a very dubious proposition.
Certainly it's not a clear-cut legal proposition.
So let's try to get away from the notion that he stole, actually.
He had information that we should have had in the first place.
He copied it and didn't deprive the government.
By the way, the reason is I understand it, that you didn't have a concept of stealing information in those days, and perhaps not now, was that stealing or theft basically is depriving an owner of the use or the value of property that he or she has.
And when you copy information, you're not depriving the owner of any use of it.
That's certainly the case here.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell that to the music companies.
But no, you're absolutely right.
You're talking about copyright there, the use of copyrighted material.
And I believe that that is almost entirely a matter of civil law, not criminal law.
I'm raising that distinction because I was prosecuted, of course, under criminal charges.
But that was unprecedented in my case.
So again, with the music companies, they have a right to sue for taking their property and to keep you from getting any income out of it.
But that is not, as I understand it, a crime.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Well, and the important point here, which without getting diverted off on the music, the important question, whether we're talking about taking and copying and disseminating classified government documents or whether that is criminal behavior or not, it is a question for the law.
And as you say, even the law is not settled and clear on this.
But certainly there's a moral law as well, which at the time, I guess you're saying that technically you should have been acquitted because it wasn't really you weren't really guilty of the crime that they were trying to prosecute you for.
I was not guilty of the crime, but regardless, you were a hero.
And what you did was the right thing and it was worth to you risking life in prison to do it.
And you told me before your only regret was that you waited too long to make clear.
I assumed wrongly at the time that I was breaking various laws.
Right.
And I was doing that deliberately.
And certainly if laws were passed by Congress, which I would say violate the Constitution in various ways, but if laws were passed that made what I did illegal, I would certainly do it again if I had the opportunity under those circumstances.
In other words, trying to save American lives and or in other cases, protect the Constitution by revealing government wrongdoing.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
And of course, you know, if the if the court or the legislature changes the definition of property, we still know what it means and we still know that public employees under this Constitution have no moral claim on secrecy to cover up criminal activity.
Well, I agree with you entirely.
You know, when you raise the question of morality as distinct from legality, many of your American listeners, maybe not to this program, but I've been watching the comments on Bradley Manning, the guy who allegedly gave this information out.
Many of them say that what he did was immoral, whether illegal or not, that he promised to keep those secrets.
He broke that promise.
That's true.
And that, of course, applies to me.
I broke a promise to keep secrets.
But to say that that per se makes his conduct immoral is to imply, as many people do believe, that keeping a promise to keep secrets is absolutely the highest moral priority absolute that you could have.
Bradley Manning contravenes that.
And in this case, when it's a question of a promise to keep secrets where the secrets involve criminality, endanger other people's lives, or subvert the Constitution, I would say that a reasonable interpretation, a reasonable understanding of morality puts much higher priority on protecting the Constitution or protecting lives than it does on keeping that promise.
It's a question of priority of obligations and loyalties there.
And as I see it, the priority very clearly is in favor of life and of really fundamental law of the Constitution, which is violated by many of these government actions which are kept wrongfully secret.
Now, I agree with you when you're saying that morality would point toward his putting out that information, and against, and even condemn as immoral, the actions of those who kept the secrets.
I totally agree, obviously.
Well, in fact, as long as we're on the point of...
Many Americans don't, I'm sorry to say.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's too true.
People conflate the law with, you know, the highest order of morality.
The highest morality as they see it.
That's not what I would say is the fundamental basis of our constitutional system.
It is in other countries, the Fuhrer, the General Secretary, or whoever it was, the dictator, his word is law, and obeying him is the highest value.
But I wouldn't say that's, I don't want to get into the argument of what's really American and who's un-American and who's patriotic or un-patriotic.
I will say that the founders of our country did not have that concept.
They did not embody that in the Constitution.
Right.
We have our Declaration of Independence first, and then our Constitution.
And even, well, the Constitution, and when I say that, I'm thinking in particular of the amendments which were insisted on being added to the Constitution before it could be ratified by most of the states.
The original Constitution also had some very good ideas, which are, had some bad ideas, supporting slavery, but it had some good ideas, such as putting the decision of war and peace in the Congress, and that was a wonderful idea, and an invention in the world.
And should be, we should get back to that, but it's a long way back, because for the last 60 years there's been a steady erosion and a drift of that authority to the President, with the acceptance of Congress, who are glad to shut themselves of that responsibility.
Right.
Now, it's funny, they say like Eskimos have 16 words for snow or whatever.
In this society, we must have at least 16 words for tattletale, snitch, and rat, and stool pigeon, and on down the line.
Every country has those.
Sure.
And it is, you know, it's certainly not a moral thing, whatever you call it in whatever language to go around being a tattletale, but it seems to me that there's one giant exception, and that is, particularly, executive branch employees ratting on their bosses.
It seems like the morality goes exactly the other way there.
You're absolutely right about that.
You know, a lot of people don't like the word, a lot of whistleblowers don't really like the word whistleblower.
They think there's something, it has a bad ring to it, and certainly a lot of people do look down on it, especially bosses of any color, in or out of the government, hate the idea of whistleblowing, and they do all they can to promote the idea that it is equivalent to snitch, rat, tattletale, as you say.
It's funny you use those words, because let me tell you quickly an actual experience I had with that.
I was getting an award in Germany for whistleblowing, or whistleblowing, and it was from the Federation of Judges in Germany, and also in association with the Federation of German Scientists, and before I got the award, which had been given once or twice before, I, biannually I think, I asked the judge who was going to present the award, who was in fact a judge of their administrative Supreme Court, and I said, what is the German word for whistleblowing?
And he said, thought for a minute, and there were some other judges present, and they all thought, he said, I don't think there is a German word for whistleblowing, that's why it's a whistleblowing award, spelled with a W, and I said, well, what's the closest German equivalent, do you think?
So he thought for a minute, and then he said, freighter, and the others nodded, yes, freighter, well, what's that?
I don't speak German, crater, so I said, perhaps there's another alternative here, so he thought for a moment, and he said, petzer, and again, they all agreed, and that meant, tattletale, so I thought, well, it's pretty much the same associations in English, and the truth is that you're almost stuck with the word whistleblower to describe, you're talking about the revelation of wrongdoing from an insider to an organization, to outsiders, to outside authorities, or to the public, always at risk, that's an element of it, because doing that is always very risky of your job, if not prosecution, so there's an element of courageous truth-telling to this, and from inside an organization, about wrongdoing or deception within that organization to outsiders, and it's, I would say, obviously, you can say I'm self-interested here, but I wouldn't have gotten in this position if I didn't have this understanding to start with, which led to my actions.
It's a good thing, generally a good thing, obviously the person can be mistaken as to what he or she is looking at, or its implications, or the consequences of putting out the truth, anybody, you can be wrong, but in terms of your perception that wrongdoing is happening here and covered by secrecy, and could be stopped or obstructed by telling the truth, I would say it's generally a good thing, but that's not the way, of course, people, the bosses or the people in the team look at it, and interestingly, in our society, as well as Germany, the boss's attitude is accepted by most of the people.
Right, and now, you know what, I've got to say here that this is among the most intriguing parts of your extremely important book, Secrets, this really does blow my mind, honestly, and you describe so well the psychology of an executive branch employee with responsibility, and the way that the incentives are set for them to go along to keep their mouths shut for 40 years about the worst things in the whole world, they will keep secrets.
For you to take the papers and give them to the papers was such an outstanding and incredible thing.
The rest of, with the exceptions excluded, the rest of them, that's why y'all are the exceptions, the rest of them will internalize the responsibility to keep the most horrible crime secret because of their oath, their fear of losing their job, their fear of going to jail, their need to want to impress the boss in advance further, and then they can do something about it, and on and on down the line.
Please explain to the audience, and everybody, go read Secrets, too.
Well, you've laid it out pretty well.
Not much needs to be added except what we were just saying.
You could add on to your list of reasons, and that is that really a lot of them do have the feeling of either a moral dilemma on the issue, or it doesn't even rise to a dilemma because they do see morally that what they're called on to do is to keep that particular promise of keeping the secret, and they would feel guilty.
It isn't entirely careerism or fear, though that's probably the main aspect, but I would say a very important aspect is a feeling that they would feel guilty if they broke that promise, even in a situation where, and this they rarely think about, where they have made a higher promise in their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, and I think if they confronted the conflict between those two promises, some of them at least would realize that the oath of the Constitution takes precedence, but I don't think they ever do confront in their minds the thought that that oath might have some real substance to it and might contradict other obligations or orders they've gotten, promises they've made.
You know, it was Rumsfeld, of all people, who said the day after the Pentagon Papers started to be published, said about them, and I'm quoting here, I pulled it off my shelf here, that out of the gobbledygook and the Pentagon Papers comes a very clear thing.
You can't trust the government, you can't believe what they say, and you can't rely on their judgment.
Very true.
That's what, of course, Bradley Manning, the guy who alleged, if he did reveal this, and we have yet to learn his side of it, but let's suppose, hypothetically here, that he didn't believe it, or whoever did reveal this information.
That's what they were looking at, and then Rumsfeld goes on to say, and the implicit infallibility of precedence, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things that the president wants to do, even though it's wrong.
And the president can be wrong.
And you know, when I read that, it gave me a very good impression of Rumsfeld.
I thought, wow.
Yeah.
Late in the game here.
I thought it came from the Oval Office tapes, which were revealed very much later.
I thought, wow, the guy has his feet on the ground, he's pretty sharp there, and the second thought was, how could he have done the lying and the wrongful things later, with that clear-cut perception?
He'd looked at the Pentagon Papers, he'd gotten this lesson, which couldn't be said better, and how do you explain his later career?
Well, because the lesson he learned was that this was a terrible thing, that people would lose their faith in the president to do even the wrong things.
Well, you're absolutely right, and one other thing.
The lesson he learned was, you know, that was bad, though he didn't say it in that particular paragraph.
But the other thing I think that he learned was, and the president can get away with it.
People do keep their mouths shut, they will obey even though the president says it's wrong.
You can do it, and you can get away with it, and you can count on their silence, as the Pentagon Papers demonstrate.
And that's a true conclusion about reality, that he could get away with it, and that you don't have to proceed to go ahead and do the wrong that you can get away with.
But since the president ordered it, that's what he did, too, like everybody else.
Well, and you know, as far as the importance of this and exposing crimes, there's too many to count.
We know that much.
Dick Cheney announced on September 16th, half this war is going to be fought in the darkness, and it's been more than half, and we already know they're doing torture experiments on them, you know, like Nazis, Dan.
And we know that there's got to be, what, you know, Walmarts full of papers that demand by justice to be exposed to the light of day.
If it's not really a quarter of a million documents to WikiLeaks in this case, it ought to be.
So please take this time to make your case directly to any government employees who end up ever listening to this thing on MP3 format tomorrow or years from now, why it's time for them to do the right thing.
We're in the era of the permanent crisis here, and we need a little bit of help from inside with the facts.
Well, you've made the case here.
I don't need to make it more, but I'll just add my voice to it.
Whoever put out that video, and let's say that it's who is charged at the moment, hypothetically or tentatively here, we'll know more later.
But as of now, Bradley Manning is charged with doing this.
If he did, he did the right thing.
Whoever did it did the right thing and should be admired, congratulated, thanked, and emulated.
I hope that he did, as he's allegedly said, give a video of another massacre to WikiLeaks or somewhere else.
On the question of giving a quarter of a million, 260,000 cables, I hope they're out there, and I hope we get to see them.
The fear that there was some bad will come of that as a result of all those being available is, in my case, having read maybe not 260,000, but an awful lot of State Department cables, that fear is very exaggerated.
The idea that that will actually hurt lives or are legitimate policies is, I think, very, very small compared to the good that could come from a wholesale understanding of how this empire is operating right now.
I hope those are out there, and if he or someone else hasn't put them out already, he's told others how to do it, how to burn those CDs and get the information out to WikiLeaks or otherwise.
He has done, or somebody has done, what I've been urging officials to do for years now, and that is, don't do what I did, don't wait until another war has started or thousands of tons of bombs, more have dropped, or many thousands more people have died.
I didn't wait consciously, I went ahead quickly when the idea occurred to me, but I wish that it had occurred to me and I'd done it many years before I did, and could have averted the entire Vietnam War, I believe, had I done it early enough.
That may sound grandiose, but actually I think it's realistic.
I'm not saying that doing it just any time would have had a major effect, but doing it before the war had really gotten heavily underway in 1965, doing it in 1964 when I could have, I do believe, would have had a very big effect, and you didn't have to be at my GS-18 level, that's the major general equivalent level, to do it.
There were secretaries who had access to that, there were individuals, thousands of people, and here we see a case where somebody had been demoted for some reason to basically a PFC category, private, was able to do something that may actually, I would expect it's much, much more likely that his revelations will save, or could save, many lives than that they would endanger anyone.
Obviously, the video that he's describing, there's virtually no chance that they could endanger anyone, and I would hope they would save lives, but of course there's always the problem here, I have to say, that in the past experience shows that you can put the information out, and people can see it, and not much happens as a result.
They don't rise to it, they accept it.
Take the case you were just mentioning of Cheney and Bush, and so forth, on torture.
Bush has just now openly, in a public meeting, and on video, acknowledged that he, under his orders, he waterboarded Khalilzad Mohammed, and that he would do it again.
Well, he's admitting breaking a law, in this case a very clear-cut law, I thought I was breaking a law, but I was mistaken.
He would not be mistaken to think he'd broken a law, in this case, the torture conventions of domestic laws on torture, the international treaties that we had ratified could not be more clear.
So he is admitting breaking a major federal law with major penalties.
Will anything happen as a result?
Obama, so far, has told us that he's not going to prosecute for those offenses, actually, it would have been quite explicit, about the torture, meaning that he's giving himself a free pass, basically, on that.
He's decriminalized, Obama has decriminalized torture, I think that's a fair statement.
That's the way people think about decriminalizing marijuana, not prosecuting, not imprisoning anyone for marijuana, that's a concept, even if some form of law has remained on the books, it would be decriminalized.
Well, he's decriminalized torture, and it's kind of an agreement between presidents, we won't go after our predecessors, and we'll count on you not going after us, his successors.
The reaction, I think, is very serious, but what is the public's reaction to that?
Well, is there a great move now to go after Bush, which he could be done, not too late to impeach him, but I don't think it's too late to prosecute him for what he's just admitted.
But that's clearly not going to happen.
What's more striking is that there isn't a major public concept, a major public pressure to do it.
So I do believe that it is important putting this stuff out, as someone, possibly Bradley Manning, has actually done, and I thank him for doing that, and I hope others will do the same.
Well, as you know, Dan, it has to be done without a guarantee that it will have a big effect.
Right, right.
I mean, that's really the thing.
Back to the pressure of keeping that secrecy agreement, as you're well aware, Barack Obama, at the same time that he's decriminalized torture, has been the toughest prosecutor on whistleblowing.
Absolutely right.
That's what I was going to say.
You know, I mean...
I lost the thread.
Here he is, and he isn't looking back for the many crimes that were done, blatant crimes, the NSA warrantless wiretapping, again, blatant violation of an existing law, a law that was in part came out of the revelations in my trial, where I was overheard on warrantless wiretapping, and then contributed later to the FISA Act that required a warrant.
So you had all this.
You had the torture, the detention, the kidnapping, and aggressive war, also.
For none of those is Obama prepared to look back, which is to say prosecute, since prosecutions are based on looking back, not on looking at what may be done in the future.
But he is looking back for actions taken during the Bush administration that involved revealing wrongdoing.
He's looking back at whistleblowing, which Bush did not indict anyone for.
Bush complained about.
He and his Department of Justice investigated, in some cases found, as in the case of Thomas Drake, whose clearance they took away, found someone who had, in fact, revealed massive waste by the National Security Agency.
Bush did not indict, although he had that information in late 2007, when they took the clearance away.
So he's got another year and a half to indict him.
He didn't indict him.
Obama has now indicted Drake for those actions taken three years ago, in 2007.
Moreover, he indicted and got a guilty plea from another linguist contract worker, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison, again for leaks whose content has not been revealed, but where the person going to prison has said he believed they revealed illegally.
And let me just guess, he was probably right.
And that's why we haven't heard what the actual leaks were.
So there's two people who have been indicted.
That's more than any other president in history.
My indictment was the first.
Other presidents have had one indictment, which has led to one conviction.
There have been two other prosecutions, one conviction, each by one president.
This is, Obama's the first president to have indicted two people.
Assuming now that Rodney Manning, who has been arrested, will be court-martialed, however it comes out, that will be the third.
It's a world record here for Obama, in terms of the man who came into office on a promise of transparency, and who has used the state secret's privilege as much or more than Bush, and has been absolutely un-transparent.
It's one more of his campaign promises, on which he's done a 180-degree turn in national security matters.
He's been at least as secretive, probably more than Bush.
And having said that he wouldn't prosecute, he's prosecuting the first two for actions taken under Bush.
Now, in this case, Drake, I'm sorry, in this case of Manning, this is an action taken under Obama, so he's getting nailed.
And who knows how many more lie ahead.
I am saying that I hope people will not be deterred from doing what Bradley Manning did by the prosecution.
Obviously, many will be deterred, that's the point of it, and that's understandable.
But we're talking about matters here that justify taking a personal risk, even the high risk of loss of your personal career, even prison.
They justify it.
They don't compel you to do it, but they justify it.
And Dan, I know you're a former Marine and a former executive branch guy for a long time, and I know you spent a lot of time in Vietnam, especially in the early days there, and you know how it is, and we all know how it is.
American soldiers do incredibly brave things to protect the lives of each other, if nobody else, and they're willing and they're signing up to put their life in danger to do what they think is the right thing, and that's mostly, in our current era, that's mostly who we're talking to anyway.
We're asking you to be brave and take a sacrifice, maybe even go to prison, a scary thing that nobody wants to have their life spent years in a cage.
It's almost impossible to imagine.
But think all the soldiers that gave their lives fighting for nothing.
Think of little Rachel Corey, who I only just found this out, Dan.
That house that she was standing in front of when the bulldozer ran her over had little kids inside of it.
That's why she was standing in front of the building.
Her mom and dad told me that on the show last week.
And she said no.
This little girl, she was 23 years old, and she said no and stood in front of a bulldozer.
So you know what?
Leak some documents.
I agree.
I agree.
And the advantages of a leak of 200,000 documents, cables, I hope I get to see those, and I hope everybody does.
And it hurts our relations with other countries because it reveals our true feelings about some of the crooks, corrupt dope dealers, dictating, torturing dictators in the world.
That's fine.
It's all right with me if we hurt our relations with them.
Craig Murray, the British ambassador in Uzbekistan, was fired in the British Foreign Service for having revealed and complained about the man to whom he was accredited, the dictator of Uzbekistan, who liked to boil people alive.
That was his preferred form of torture, of which he had many forms.
And that was very tactless, they felt, of Craig Murray, to reveal that.
And he lost his job as a result.
Well, according to the alleged conversations with Bradley Manning, he told the man who informed on M. Lamo that what he was revealing was criminal, or almost criminal, as he said.
I suspect that's a euphemism.
He did say that it would reveal, in virtually every embassy, that is, country in the world, it would reveal wrongdoing of various kinds, scandal.
I believe that.
We'll see.
I hope we get to see it.
But I would guess that he was right on that.
And I would, as of now, from what I've heard of Manning, the statements he's allegedly made, I trust his judgment as to what the public ought to know, more than that of any of the officials, top to bottom, who kept those secrets.
Thank you.
Everybody, that is Daniel Ellsberg, American Hero.
Thank you.