07/28/10 – Daniel Ellsberg – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined on the line by Daniel Ellsberg, the heroic Daniel Ellsberg, author of the book Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and the man who, let's see if I can figure out how to say this in English correctly, the persecution of this guy, anyway, is what I'm trying to say, is what really led to the downfall of Richard Nixon.
And so not only did he help end the Vietnam War, he also helped end the presidency of Richard Nixon, and that's a hell of a great thing.
Welcome back to the show, Dan.
How are you?
Thanks.
I'm fine.
Thank you for your comment on your English.
On the one hand, it was the prosecution by Nixon, and he had in mind a lot of persecution, but you'd have to say attempted persecution.
It rebounded on him.
It didn't hit me.
And the upshot was that he was faced with prosecution himself and impeachment and had to resign.
So I'm not a martyr at the hands of Nixon.
He had that in mind for me, but he didn't succeed.
Right.
You were within a hair's breadth of being martyred by him, it sounds like to me.
And by the way, the video is out now.
The movie is out now, The Most Dangerous Man in America, which I highly urge everybody to go and watch.
And Dan, I'd love to do a whole Vietnam interview with you.
It's been a while since we've done that, but we've got more important and more timely news to talk about.
Well, not more important, but more timely news to talk about right now.
And that is really the advent of WikiLeaks and the effect that they're having on journalism in America and hopefully maybe on the Afghan war.
And so I guess that's my first question is, do you think that this massive leak of ninety two thousand documents is going to or has already changed the conversation in any way as far as the future of this policy in Afghanistan?
Well, I think it has changed the conversation.
I think it has gotten as much attention as could have been hoped for, really, from the media.
Nixon gave the Pentagon Papers a lot of drama by his attempts to censor the press beforehand by his injunctions, which were unprecedented.
And without that, I don't know how many people would have paid that much attention to a tremendous amount of newsprint.
But in this case, hard to get people to dig through ninety two thousand reports.
But the very volume has given that a drama that has drawn attention.
And with all the efforts of the administration to lowball this and then imply that all it's all old stuff and nothing new.
The fact is that it is on it has been, as I understand, on a lot of front pages because of the very volume, which is possible because of the ingenuity of Julian Assange, I guess, in his software and his technology.
And of course, the whole digital era here, I couldn't have Xeroxed ninety two thousand reports here.
I couldn't have done the seven thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers and several copies without Xerox.
So I couldn't have done it ten years earlier than I did.
But even then, I couldn't have done what this is.
So it does usher in a whole new possibility of transparency.
Well, you know, I read one analysis of this and comparing and contrasting this largest intelligence leak ever with your leaking of the Pentagon Papers.
And one of the things they said is that the narrative that, oh, well, there's really nothing new here, et cetera, is basically part of well, it's sort of that that there should be some cognitive dissonance here.
On one hand, you're jeopardizing the soldiers in the field.
On the other hand, it's no big deal at all.
That's what the critics said about the Pentagon Papers back then.
This analysis that I was reading was saying that, well, what was really important about the Pentagon Papers wasn't stark revelations that the critics, you know, had no idea about or anything like that.
But basically what it did was it told all the people who weren't the critics that, hey, the critics have been right all along, that they've been lying to you, that this war is to prop up a government that has no legitimacy, that we're not going to win.
They've been going along a losing policy for years and years and they've known it and they've been lying to you, just like the critics had been saying all along.
But that really made it official that the critics were right.
And that at least could be, it seems like, without major, you know, strategy or policy changing revelations here.
At the very least, that's what this document dump should do, right, is...
That's true.
You put it well.
Actually, I've had a laugh over some of the statements by the administration, which take the form, we've learned nothing new from these.
Well, how, duh, you know, surprise, these are their own reports.
They're not supposed to be seeing something new from their own reports that hopefully they've been reading over the years.
But when President Obama says, well, this has all been a matter of public discussion before, yes, as you say, it's been charged by Afghans that their civilians were being killed.
It's been charged by President Karzai, even, that civilians were being killed and that it was being covered up.
But that's been accompanied by official denials that we were hitting civilians or statements we are investigating, which itself is almost surely untrue.
There's no evidence of real investigations in these many thousands of pages of documents.
But what is true is that a lot of the reporting was perfectly knowledgeable that civilians were being killed and that official denials were false.
Right.
And that really is a big part of the story here, is just how many, I think, Assange said there are 144 incidents here of civilians killed, many of which are stories that were never reported at all.
And others are stories where now, you know, when the journalists go back and look, we see vastly different versions of what was claimed to have happened then and what we see now.
I'll tell you, there is another thing that I find very familiar.
Let me tell you this.
What they're saying now, another way of putting down the significance of this is to say that it's all old stuff, that it was six months old and it's all changed now with Obama's new strategy.
Although, of course, this account of six years of war shows the factors for our failure there and our continued stalemate, factors that have remained the same, as you say, an illegitimate, corrupt government, a fact that the Taliban, which is intrinsically impopular among most of the Afghans after its brief time in power, has as its main recruiting basis the fact that it is leading a struggle against foreign invasion and that it's our very presence there that strengthens the Taliban.
Well, they're saying, okay, all that is different now, that was all seven months ago.
It reminds me that when I left Vietnam in June of 1967, the last thing I did on the way to the airport with an official car taking me to the airport, I had it stopped by the embassy so I could pick up copies of the latest province reports, the kind of thing that I had been reading for two years in the country, and a lot of reports of the kind that I'd been writing during that period, all of which showed a thoroughly stalemated war.
And I wanted to get the very last edition, which had come out just about the day I left, so that I could go to Washington to refute the people who said, oh yeah, Dan, what you were telling us over the last two years about a total stalemate and the lack of any progress there was true then, but it's all changed now, you know, since you left, or in the last month or two, we've turned the corner.
I knew that Wal Rostow, working the National System for National Security to President Johnson, would certainly take that line.
So I wanted to have the very latest reports and stave off by at least one month the claim that things had changed.
And indeed, when I got into the White House and talked to Rostow, he said, Dan, I want you to see the charts here, you know, how things have all turned around and where victory is within sight.
And I remember saying to him, Walt, I don't want to see your charts, I don't need your charts, I've just come back from Vietnam, victory is not within sight, it is not near, it's nowhere in sight at all.
And that's, I'm sure, the latest reports, which we await from some new leaker, I hope, would show that there has been not only no essential change, but let me make this strong guess, that if someone were to leak, and I hope it happens, to Congress and to us, the inside estimate of the strength of the Taliban in December, when President Obama, I'm starting to say Johnson, when President Obama made his decision to escalate the war, what was their estimate then of the strength of the Taliban in its various forms altogether?
And what is their current estimate?
I'd like to see that one leaked, or if not announced officially.
And I don't think they will announce officially those two figures, because I'm sure they would show that the Taliban is stronger now.
And the basis for that prediction is that that's been true for years, that as we put troops in, and money in, and we fired from the air on people on the ground, as in that Apache helicopter video that WikiLeaks released, we're strengthening the Taliban.
And that the money that Congress voted yesterday to pay for that escalation went into strengthening the Taliban by our very presence and by the essence there.
That's what happens.
And it is time for us to be, past the time, to be asking ourselves, how much can we afford to strengthen the Taliban?
How much more money is it worth doing that?
Well, and it's not even just indirectly.
I mean, there's been all kinds of reports.
Gene McKenzie at the Global Post did, I think, the best work on the fact that the Army and the CIA are outright paying the Taliban to please let us drive our trucks through here so that we can fight you later.
And they're just directly paying the enemy.
Never mind all the indirect ways, which we are very limited on time.
Again, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Daniel Ellsberg here, the heroic whistleblower, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers.
And I want to give you a chance to call out government employees and ask them to go ahead and liberate documents and serve their higher oath to the American people.
But first, Dan, I'd like to get your comment on the New York Times and the rest of the American media spin, that we're indirectly supporting our enemy, but really it's all the Pakistanis' fault, well, and the Iranians, too.
But the Pakistanis, they're stabbing us in the back.
Apparently, the New York Times, which has been reporting about Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban for years now, just found this out all over again.
And now everything would be fine there, as Chris Floyd is complaining on his blog.
The narrative is now everything would be fine, but now we see why it's not working out, because our so-called friends, the Pakistanis, are letting us down.
Well, there are so many reasons it's not working.
I'm really looking for humor in this situation to counteract all the bad clouds.
I was just rereading Michael Steele's comment, the brilliant chairman of the Republican National Committee, who actually said something very sensible, as I read it, for which, of course, he was denounced by not only his own party, but the Democrats, and he said, let me quote, I actually wrote it down, I thought this was so great, talking of Obama, he said, if he's such a student of history, has he, this is Steele, has he not understood that, you know, the only, the one thing you don't do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?
Everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed, and there are reasons for that.
Very well said by Michael Steele.
Right.
Well, even when, you know, going back to the memos, when Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski were trying to provoke the Russians into invading Afghanistan, one of the Brzezinski memos, or at least he claims this now, one of his memos, or his first memo to Carter when the Russian army crossed the border to support their commie puppet there, was, now we will give them their own Vietnam.
Vietnam shorthand for when you stupidly engage in a land war in Asia, and it tears your own society apart back home.
And that's what they were trying to do by getting the Russians to invade there.
And here we are playing the wrong end of our own dumb script, giving ourselves our own another Vietnam.
Again.
Well, let me, you know, it's not just us who have been given another Vietnam, and it was not just the Russians.
I'm afraid the real background, the backstory to that particular boast of Brzezinski's that he had given the Soviets, and he had helped give the Soviets their Vietnam, was that we all gave the Afghans their Vietnam, the Afghan people.
And they lost a million people in the course of that 10-year war, which we had deliberately provoked and encouraged, and which we fueled through Pakistan, supplying money to people like Hekmatyar, the warlord, the one who actually throws acid in women's faces, who aren't wearing the burka.
We were, we built up that force, and we're now fighting him now that he has new foreigners to oppose, namely ourselves.
But in other words, we have been making life hell, literally hell, for Afghanistan, not just for two years here, not for 10 years, but for 30 years.
The quotes you're talking about for Brzezinski go back to 1979 and 1980.
And for all that period, we have been fueling conflict in Afghanistan of a kind that did not exist before the Soviets were provoked to come in.
It's a terrible, terrible thing we've been doing, and it's really time to stop.
There's a spill of blood, like the spill of oil in the Gulf, that's been beneath the surface, like the oil, for so long.
And one thing these reports do, which the administration, of course, has not done, is to bring that flood of blood near the surface, where we can see it a little.
It's really brought it into public consciousness, where I hope it really will make a difference.
All right, now, Dan, I'm sorry, I know you're really short on time, and I am, too.
I've got to get Julian Assange on the phone here, but please, tell the government employees who may ever hear this that it's time for them to risk prison in order to get the truth to the people.
No more games.
Well, I think, I really admired the statement that Bradley Manning's informer reported, his having said to him, which was that Bradley Manning said he was willing to go to prison for the rest of his life, he said, or even be executed, he said, in order to get out truth that had sickened him to read and that he thought might shorten this war.
And that was a very appropriate, courageous thing for him to do.
Bradley Manning, I think, is a very great patriot, and I admire him a lot.
And I think he will, as a military person facing the universal code of military justice, not civilian law, he probably, if the government can prove its charges against him, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he will spend a lot of time in jail.
And my prediction from the experience of other whistleblowers, including Mordecai Venunu, who spent 11 and a half years in solitary confinement for revealing the Israeli nuclear arsenal, Venunu said he had never regretted for a minute telling that truth, and he paid virtually an ultimate price for it.
I'm sure Manning will not regret if he is the one who is the source here, and we don't know that for sure.
But if he was the source, I think he won't regret it, and he will deserve our gratitude and our admiration.
That is Daniel Ellsberg.
Dan, we've got to cut it there.
He deserves our support for his defense.
There is, I think, groups doing a Bradley Manning support group, maybe Assange can tell you more about that.
That deserves our full support.
Yeah, well, we actually interviewed Mike Golgoski from BradleyManning.org, and they do have an official and verifiable, you know, with lawyers and paperwork and legitimacy, Save Bradley Manning Fund going on right now at BradleyManning.org, and I'm sorry that we have to leave it there, but I thank you so much for your time, Daniel.
Okay, sure.
Bye, Scott.
Everybody, that is Dan Ellsberg.
His website is Ellsberg.net.
The book is Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and we will be right back with Julian Assange, the public face of WikiLeaks, right after this.