Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Daniel Ellsberg.
He's a former company commander in the Marine Corps.
And of course, very famously was a nuclear weapons expert at the Rand Corporation and leaked the Pentagon Papers, the secret Pentagon true history of the Vietnam War and almost got life in prison for that.
Most recently, well, Aniz, the author of the book Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And then the most recent is from two years ago now, The Doomsday Machine, which our last interview was about all about America's nuclear weapons systems and the rest of that.
Welcome back to the show, Dan.
How are you doing, sir?
Glad to be back, Scott.
Very happy to talk to you again.
Your name is at the very top of my book, and I'm very proud of that.
So once again, I appreciate that endorsement there.
Yeah.
All right.
So Julian Assange and Manning, too, today, but especially Assange.
So can we start with the U.N. reporter on human rights and his statement about the psychological torture of Julian Assange and the trauma that he has suffered?
Can you be more specific about what's going on with that?
Yes.
I'm not surprised at that report.
And I'm glad that he's been so explicitly critical of the U.S., U.K., Ecuador and Australia as well for not having done anything for the Australian citizens.
Julian Assange, they act as if they had no connection with him at all.
And they claim that they are now looking into his medical treatment and so forth.
But he doesn't have much to thank them for, his home country, for the last seven years.
I'm not surprised by his condition, though I'm very unhappy about it.
I visited him twice in prison, and the second time, his health had clearly deteriorated considerably.
His mind seemed fine, but no sunlight for years at that time.
And I knew that he had dental problems, that he couldn't be treated in the Ecuadorian embassy, and bad shoulder pain, which needed an MRI, clearly.
Doctors had said the doctor could visit him, but he couldn't get an MRI in the Ecuadorian embassy.
As far as I know, he still hasn't.
They say they're not treating him, his lawyers say they're not treating him worse than other prisoners or better.
And I'm not sure that he's gotten the treatment that he needs at all.
But meanwhile, the repertoire for torture and a four-hour examination and discussion concluded, as his lawyer had, that it was almost impossible to carry on a conversation with him.
He was traumatized by the years of this, and probably the current arrest as well, and that it had been torture as a matter of years to keep him in that room.
Or a couple of rooms in the embassy, but out of sunlight for over seven years, while demonizing him in the press regularly, and cutting him off from visitors for the last year, cutting him off from the internet for a long time, which for Julian Assange would be about the most terrible torture you can imagine.
And that's not just a joke.
I mean, that was his form of relation to the outside world, as it is for many other computer hackers initially, which is what he was, and then digital journalists right now, and people like Snowden or Manning.
To cut them off entirely from computers is, well, to call it torture is a kind of joke, but definitely a psychological pressure on him.
Well, as you say, in circumstances where essentially he's locked up alone in there, which I'm a little confused about.
Could he not go out in the yard and get some sunshine and some exercise?
And did he not have the embassy staff and other people to talk with visitors in and out?
It sounds more and more the way I hear it described, like he really was in prison there almost.
Well, yeah, for all practical purposes.
Now, there is a difference.
He had a room there to himself and could at times go out into the other rooms.
It's a very small embassy.
It's just really an apartment.
I did see a couple of pictures of it where, you know, where they leaked the picture of him standing on a skateboard there.
It's a very small little living room.
That's right.
Now, no, he could not go out into a yard and get sunlight.
He did have a little balcony and apparently got very little use of that.
They had policemen right across the street from him watching at every moment to make sure that he didn't get out of that balcony and lower himself to the ground.
I'm not clear as to why he didn't seem able to make much use of that balcony to get any sunlight.
He's, of course, very, I don't know what to call it.
You know, he's not an albino literally, but he did have white hair earlier.
And in short, he has very fair skin.
But he looked absolutely white.
When I saw him both times in the embassy, his skin didn't look good.
Well, now they're saying that he couldn't show up for court, Dan, because he was just too ill even to do an appearance by teleconference.
Yeah.
So do you have any specific information whether they're saying he has a cold or the flu or this is part of this overall he's unfit because he's just he can't.
It's a specific illness.
Yeah, it's time.
But two people have now and you were asking whether he had whether he was able to talk to people earlier.
Well, for most of that time, he was able to receive visits and not only from his lawyers.
And as I say, I went got in twice.
I had to virtually threaten civil disobedience to get in.
They weren't allowing visitors at that moment, but they ended up by by letting us in.
And after I had said on the phone that it was my intention to lie down in front of that door and and make anybody going in or out of the embassy to have to either step over me or arrest me.
And somehow, mysteriously, after I made that phone call, they changed their ruling and allowed us to go in, which which is my hope in making the phone call.
But he was able, in other words, to do some talking to people.
And that was better, you could say, in itself than prison.
He also was able to get on the Internet.
That's a very big difference from prison.
Now they're able to say it.
Now they're asking for a computer not to go on the Internet, but just to be able to write notes that he can make for his lawyer.
But according to two people who visited him, he's in no psychological shape even to have a conversation now.
And he's been transferred to the health clinic of the prison.
And they gave him, what, six weeks over skipping bail.
You know, so he still has, what, at least half of that to go, right?
Yes.
And then we don't know whether they're going to ship him off to Sweden or the U.S. at that point, but probably they will.
Yeah.
You know, for years, people have been saying that his claim that he was willing to go to Sweden to face charges there.
And by the way, no legal charges have yet been brought against him, to my knowledge.
Certainly not, as of yesterday, ever.
They've just, the arrest has to do with their wanting to talk with him and see whether charges should be brought.
So he's always said he was ready to go through that process in Sweden or in Britain if he could be assured that he would not be extradited to the U.S. if he left the embassy.
Now, let me stop you right there, because that's such an important point.
And I just read, I'm almost positive it was the Washington Post this morning, saying the exact opposite thing.
That he was in the embassy hiding out from charges that he had sexually abused these two women in Sweden, when he had said exactly the opposite.
As you say, he had invited the Swedes to come and talk to him there in England, which they refused, which is their normal course of business.
They do that all the time.
And then he said, well, I'll even go to Sweden if you promise not to rendition me off to America.
And they refused to do that because, of course, that's why they wanted him.
That's right.
Scott, if you read that this morning, it's rather amazing because, of course, the whole world knows now, in effect, that his prediction that there would be a request for extradition from the U.S. at that point has been confirmed.
That's a matter of fact.
It's happened.
So for them to say, still, he was hiding out to avoid extradition to Sweden, in contradiction to what he was saying, has just been refuted.
It's amazing if people are still saying that.
But I was always certain that he would be extradited.
And moreover, when he got his initial indictment a couple of weeks ago, that was just for one count of computer misuse or attempted hacking or something, which had only a five-year sentence.
I was certain that was not going to be the last indictment he got because I was certain the U.S. had no intention, if they got their hands on him, of keeping him in prison just for five years.
As a matter of fact, this is a speculation, but I think that either Julian Assange or Ed Snowden, who is in permanent exile, essentially, from the U.S., might very well have accepted a four- or five-year sentence if that was all it was.
They could make a plea bargain.
But no, they were both facing the prospect of life sentences.
By the way, I think the charges brought against Snowden so far don't add up to a life sentence, but that means that's not the last charges he'll face.
I was faced with 11 counts of theft and espionage act, adding up to 110 years, plus five years for conspiracy for 15 years.
He's facing 17 charges of the espionage act, 10 years each, and five years for conspiracy, so 175 years.
He beats me on that charge.
But, you know, it's a life sentence in either case, so there isn't a significant difference.
I was sure they would go after that.
And by the way, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they bring further charges against him in the next, they have about 10 or 12 days still to bring charges before, to reveal what he'll be facing in the U.S. before the British have to make a decision on extradition.
So I think he could very well be facing other charges.
And a reason for that is that the 17 counts on the espionage act are so blatantly unconstitutional against the U.S. First Amendment that I don't think they'll be content just to have the, of course, simply bringing the indictment and forcing him at the least to undergo fundraising and millions of dollars in years.
Years of agony, basically, facing their anguish, facing these charges.
That's a very chilling effect on a journalist, even if he were acquitted, even if the law is found unconstitutional in the end.
Not many journalists want to go through that.
And I say this very indictment, which is unprecedented, the first use of any law to put in jail an American, he's not an American, into an American jail, someone for doing journalism.
That is an attack on the First Amendment that we have not seen since, a new attack, since the Supreme Court effort to have prior restraint in an injunction against the New York Times back in 1971, 48 years ago, and then to prosecute me.
Now, I was prosecuted as a source.
There have been about a dozen other prosecutions of sources since then, nine of them under Obama.
But even Obama's Department of Justice held back from abusing the Espionage Act or any law against the journalist, because after all, the First Amendment does say Congress shall not pass any law restraining freedom of the press.
And to simply prosecute or convict a journalist or editor or publisher for doing that is a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
So, I don't know whether they'll be content simply to take their chances on getting passed, getting that law regarded as constitutional.
Incidentally, why is he the first?
He's not the first journalist to infuriate a government, Democratic or Republican.
Those are legion nearly every day.
Why just now?
And I think the answer is the same as why we're seeing a hundred blossoms, a thousand blossoms bloom by abortion foes.
Now, to get a case before this Supreme Court that will test Roe versus Wade and hopefully overturn it.
It was Kavanaugh and the other judges now, the new Supreme Court, that have encouraged anti-abortion people to bring these cases now.
And I think it's the same reason that we have this unprecedented attack on the media, who after all, Trump is the first to say openly the media is the enemy, the press is the enemy of the people.
Now, that's not the first time a president has had that thought, but they usually keep it to themselves or in Nixon's case, tape themselves, but they don't tell the public.
Trump's big difference from some of his predecessors is not so much in his personal characteristics or attitude toward the press or Jews or blacks or a lot of other people.
Nixon was as racist and bigoted as Donald J. Trump, but he kept it to his own office.
And he did tape himself as others had done, but those got out.
And so we know that now, but he didn't say to the public.
And I could give examples, but it would only lower the level of discourse actually to recall.
Nixon used to say in private, but Trump now is saying it in public.
That's the difference.
And legitimizing, encouraging people to say it.
They all hate political correctness.
They love Trump for being against political correctness.
And the political correctness they're against is telling ethnic jokes that forbid them to make racist comments in public all the time.
It's regarded as politically incorrect.
And that's very frustrating to a certain fraction of our public, which is not a small fraction.
It's at least a third.
And now I think we're going to see a lot more of those little jokes come along, along with violence.
Well, here's the irony of all of that, though, right?
The media is the enemy of the people.
And it's because 99.9 percent of the time they serve the interests of the state.
They tell the lies of the state.
They republish the secrets that the state wants them to republish in order to spin the American people to believe a bunch of lies so they can do horrible and cruel things.
Donald Trump's just mad because in this case, he's Saddam Hussein, the guy that they're demonizing and targeting, when usually that position is reserved for a foreigner.
But he's not wrong about the Post and the Times.
I mean, what is the Washington Post but the publishing PR branch of the CIA?
True.
So it's just fun that way.
And that's why he's there, right?
Everybody knew what a wrecker he was, but that was how he got elected was because everybody wanted this system wrecked because it deserves to be wrecked so badly.
But, you know, the Washington Post, of course, I live in California, but I see a lot of it on the Web now.
Even on the Web, it's been years since I looked at their editorial page because it drove me crazy.
But I've been told that it's not as bad now.
Is that possible?
Now it's been taken over by Bezos, is it?
That actually their editorial page is not as awful and anti-democratic as it was for years.
Or can you not tell the difference?
Yeah, well, I mean, again, if Trump is the real worry, then I guess the CIA and the Washington Post are the heroes.
But if the CIA is the real worry, like in my world, then yeah, no, them standing up to the elected president is more like, you know, the establishment protecting itself in power from an attempted correction rather than, you know, preserving democracy.
In the face of the Trumpian onslaught or whatever.
Not that I'm on his side, but I'm just saying from the outside, he's the one who won the election and he's just temporary.
They never won an election and they're here to stay.
And so those dynamics are really important.
You know what I mean?
Well, OK, we could have not to have a fight with you here, actually, or even an argument, but to have a little discussion.
Let me raise the following case.
He says the Washington Post did get concerned, and not to make a joke out of it, they really did reveal a lot from the CIA about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy.
Now, generally, you see, I'm not aware that the CIA is the enemy of Saudi Arabia.
At least I haven't noticed it for years.
But, you know, that's come out around the world.
And that's one of the things that has put them athwart.
Trump, who wants, who's doing something rather astonishing now, almost.
Who vetoed the first time that Congress, House and Senate, Senate controlled by Republicans, tried to cut off money for an illegal crime against the peace war against Yemen that we're participating in.
That's the first time since 1973, to my knowledge, that Congress has ever done that.
And Trump vetoed it.
And they couldn't override the veto by so much.
Now, you know, there are people who, okay, you know, what does one say about that?
So, there is the Post, you know, saying that Mohammed bin Salman is a murderer.
And, well, he hasn't been tried, you know, he deserves to stay in court, I would say.
But that information is from the CIA, it appears, and other intelligence services.
Now, are they wrong?
No, but although, I mean, a couple things on that.
I don't think they did that in order to try to help the Senate end the Yemen war or something like that.
Which I would give them credit if I thought that that was really, you know, their intention.
And also, really, it was the Turks who told that story.
The CIA were in the position of trying to deny something that sure seemed true, since the guy's missing, last seen in Turkey.
And the Turks are saying that this is what happened.
So, I wouldn't give them too much credit for that.
I see what you mean.
After all, the CIA, by and large, is better on Iran than Trump.
But then again, they're also the ones behind this entire Russiagate hoax.
And the entire agency should be abolished for that.
Just for letting John Brennan even run that place, or do any of the things that he did in Syria, in Yemen, in launching the Russiagate catastrophe, and all of that.
I mean, that to me is, anyway, we're off on the tangent here.
As far as Yemen, let me say, if they really wanted to impeach this guy, and if the liberals and the leftists really thought that he is so dangerous, he must be removed from power right now.
There's your charge right there, is genocide.
A deliberate war against the civilian population.
A starvation campaign against the people of Yemen.
But the only way to do it credibly would be to indict Obama, too.
To prove that it's not a partisan witch hunt.
And that actually, we're going to go ahead and start locking up our war criminals now.
That's the law.
Otherwise, forget it, right?
Otherwise, how could you say, we've got to go after him for obstruction of justice on a charge that wasn't real, but we're going to ignore his absolute committing of genocide, when the only rub is, though, the Democrats started it.
Joe Biden and Barack Obama started that war in 2015.
You know, if I may say something here, I don't know if you feel the right answer or not.
I am not a fan of Nancy Pelosi, generally.
And, you know, on many grounds.
In fact, I guess it was on this other program for, Joe Lawyer's program for Assange, I was pointing out that it was Nancy Pelosi that forbade Conyers from impeaching George W. Bush after Conyers had written a book calling how he was impeachable and how he should be impeached.
And after the election in 2006, Nancy Pelosi told Conyers there will be no impeachment proceedings.
And the reason was that that will bring in inflamed Republicans so much to the polls that we Democrats will not be able to win in 2008.
And, of course, Conyers was especially sensitive on that point.
He didn't like to give it up, but he didn't want to be accused of preventing Barack Obama, the first black nominee, from getting that.
So there was no impeachment proceeding.
Very, very bad.
But Pelosi now, interestingly, if I read this correctly, is talking about, first of all, she's pushing against impeachment for the same reason as before.
And politically, you know, it's a serious, difficult question.
But she seems to be raising the question of bringing some kind of action against him for overriding the veto, which he has a right to do constitutionally.
I'm sorry, for vetoing.
He has a constitutional right to do.
But to vetoing in this case where it's so clearly a criminal war that we're participating in.
And unauthorized in the first place, right?
She shouldn't have had to pass.
And to her credit, she did, as Speaker, pass that War Powers Resolution invocation there.
But she shouldn't have even had to do that.
The war is illegal in the first place.
You're absolutely right, Scott, in saying that this was essentially started under Obama.
No question.
I don't think it goes back.
You would know better on this than I.
I don't think it goes back into the George W. Bush regime, does it?
I think it's Obama.
No, I mean, really.
So the war against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula really started.
There were a couple of strikes under Bush, but it really started under Obama in 2009.
But this is worse, because see, that at least you could spin as associated forces, even though that term isn't in the authorization to use military force.
But al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, some of those guys were originally related with Osama bin Laden's group back then.
But this is the war for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula against their enemies, the Houthis.
And that's a war that only was launched in March of 2015.
So now we get in, see, to these complexities here where the ruling class isn't always of one mind.
Not everybody is.
There's no right on one side.
For instance, only right and only wrong on the other side.
Take Yemen on the one hand.
Congress, even the Republicans in Congress, this, I have to admit, kind of amazes me.
But the Senate voted against funding Yemen.
I don't entirely understand that, how they came.
But it was the right thing to do, so they did it.
So Trump feels that.
It's an amazing thing, actually.
Much larger in its way.
But then another amazing thing, which he's supposedly considering, which is pardoning all the major war criminals who've actually been convicted, which is a tiny fraction of the people who commit war crimes.
And they actually got convicted, and he wants to pardon them.
So he does this kind of amazing stuff, which, by the way, this just came back to me this minute.
What triggered me in the last moment in copying the Pentagon Papers, in 1969, anniversary year here, in 1969, I woke up in my bed, I read the LA Times in bed, and I read that the case against the Special Forces, the amazingly broad case against the Special Forces for assassinating an alleged double agent in Vietnam, who, by the way, I know from other sources and other reasons, was not a double agent.
But anyway, without any due process, whatever, they assassinated him, they bullet in the back of the head, put him into the South China Sea with the chains on.
And General Abrams was enraged by the fact that the head of the Special Forces in Vietnam lied to him about it.
He wasn't enraged about the murder, but he was enlarged that this guy had actually lied, that they had actually done the killing.
So he brought charges against him, and Nixon dropped the charges.
But of course, Nixon, the White House said, oh, we didn't have anything to do with that, which the LA Times reporter pointed out.
Well, that was obviously a lie, you know, because obviously it was from the White House.
They didn't want to try a war criminal any more than they wanted to try Kelly for the My Lai Massacre.
You know, he was doing his job the way Trump thinks of all massacring people.
So they dropped it.
Supposedly then the Army Secretary, Rezor, had made the decision.
And the LA Times says, oh, that was obviously a lie.
It came from the White House, and so forth.
And why was it being brought at all against Nixon's wishes?
Because Abrams had been lied to by the head of the Special Forces, who had been lied to, though he knew it was a lie.
He had been lied to by the lower people who had actually done the murder.
One of them, a warrant officer, you know, just the sort of in-between enlisted and officers who had actually put the bullet in his head.
So I read that story, and I said to myself, this is the government I have worked for for almost a decade now, in the Marines and Vietnam, elsewhere as a civilian.
It's a government that lies from the White House down to the warrant officer, or you could say the other way around, from the warrant officer up to the commander-in-chief, just lies routinely about murder.
I thought, I'm not going to do that anymore.
I have in my safe, it ran 7,000 pages of documents showing lies and murders and war crimes, you know, broken treaties, everything.
I'm not going to collaborate in this lying anymore.
So I called up my friend Tony Russo and said, do you know where there's a Xerox machine?
And he said yes.
He had a girlfriend at that time who ran a small advertising office.
She had a Xerox machine.
Those were the early days when they didn't abound.
And we started taking the Pentagon Papers over to copy it.
And I just thought of that just now, in connection with that pardoning, which he refrained from doing as far as I could think, on the other day, you know, on Sunday, Memorial Day.
So that's where we have been.
Yes, it's a government that lies from top to bottom.
And as you say, the newspapers almost always, but not 100%, purvey those lies, lie us into war, as in Iraq, as we are being prepared to do in Iran.
I think the crackdown on journalists right now with this new indictment of Assange, unprecedented indictment, is a preparation for closing down the press in case Trump decides to do what his national security system wants, Bolton, and attack Iran.
So just as, you know, they didn't need to attack journalists in 2002 to get them to carry on lies about Iraq.
They did it without any such prosecution.
There hadn't been any prosecution of a journalist then.
And no one leaked.
No one leaked at a high level at that point.
I've always said if Ed Snowden or Chelsea Manning had been at a high level at that time, before that, we wouldn't have had to have that war very much because there wasn't much support for it.
It was the administration that wanted to do it.
Now, right now, people in the government who know, if they know that we're on the verge of attacking Iran, or if they know that the planning is going on to provide a provocation or an excuse, or whether a false flag, or just to go ahead and attack, they should consider putting out those documents because you need documents to make people really believe that the guy they voted for and the guy they didn't vote for is lying to that extent.
You should put out those documents now or consider doing it at whatever personal cost because a war's worth of lives is at stake and that war's worth is much, much larger in Iraq, in Iran, than it was in Iraq.
Is it worth somebody's life to try to prevent that?
Of course.
Especially for high-level CIA analysts or agents or officers or for military officers, you're talking about quite literally demanding the very highest level of physical courage and bravery by your men out there fighting.
If you're willing to risk less than that, or you're not willing to risk much less than that, sitting safe in a brig somewhere for a few years for the cost of telling the truth to the American people so that we can stop something horrible from happening that shouldn't be happening, it's absolutely worth it.
You've been saying things like that on my show since 2004 or 2005 or something, and I like to think that maybe that does have something to do with, and I know you say that to everybody, not necessarily just on my show, but I think that probably does have something to do with Manning and Snowden.
I don't know if they've ever told you specifically that they heard you call specifically for new whistleblowers, but they're not the only ones.
There are a lot of other whistleblowers, too, and I know it's very meaningful when the grandfather of all whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg, says, hey, it's time to step up, because we are in a crisis right now, quite a few different ones.
It's got to be worth it, right?
Absolutely.
In the case of Manning, she's so young, and I've only seen her for a few minutes once, face to face.
We've corresponded, but I don't really know her the way I feel I do know Snowden.
I went to Moscow and saw him for a couple of days.
I've been on many hours of encrypted chat logs with him.
I feel like I do know him.
I identify with both of them, very much so, even the one that I don't know very well, Chelsea, but because, on the one hand, Chelsea, then Bradley Manning, had said to the person who turned her in, she shouldn't have said all this, but she said she was willing to go to prison for life or even death, for a capital sentence, to get this out, and I thought, wow, that's the way I felt, and I haven't heard anybody say that for 39 years.
This was in 2010, three years later.
Some things are worth dying for, and he escaped from dying, I think, by the skin of his teeth, practically, and he is in permanent exile and permanent fear, not fear, he's not very afraid, but risk of death, and now when they look at Assange and the word is coming out, the word about the torture of him all this time, in effect, that doesn't encourage people to go to prison, or he's a journalist, not a source, or me or anybody else.
I wish that my escaping from prison had encouraged more people.
Granted, being on trial for a couple of years and facing a possible 150 years is a chilling effect, but I would have thought that since I did get away with it by a miracle, that would encourage people to not just whistleblow, which is fine, and leaking, which is fine, on a small scale, but to do it on the scale I did it, or Snowden or Manning, which is really necessary to have a big effect, and nobody did for 39 years till Chelsea Manning, and I'd almost given up, and then she gave me hope, and then that others would do it, and then Snowden did it, but not very many.
It was on a large enough scale that they would really face it, and remember, not just going to jail for a few years.
If you're putting out stuff that's important enough or on a large enough scale to make a difference, you're not going to go away for just a few years.
A few years, you're going to go away, you're at least going to be charged with going away for a long time under bad conditions, and that's very bad.
One of the things I love about the Pentagon Papers is you talk about really what it's like to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary of whatever at the Pentagon or the State Department, and the economics of the bureaucratic politics of the office essentially, how it all works and how your only job really is making your boss look good whether he deserves it or not, and then I guess someday, like you, like wow-wee, I got to talk to the National Security Advisor for six minutes one time, and that made my whole career in the State Department worth it or something like that, and that you can get, I think as you put it in the book, you can get 40,000 people to lie about the Gulf of Tonkin for 15 years or something until the papers finally come out, but because of the, and also the threat of prison, of course, for telling these secrets, but hey, having an effect within the system and this kind of thing is enough to get people to go along with any atrocity apparently.
That's true.
Any atrocity, meaning risking nuclear war that would kill most people on Earth.
Those risks have come up both in Russia and the U.S. a number of times, and humanity has been lucky enough in two cases.
They both involved Russian officers who would have said yes to pushing the button, and that's why we're still here, so you could almost, you could call that a couple of miracles, and who knows, we may get more miracles or not, but it turns out that most people aren't willing to take any risk at all.
That's very dismaying, I've found, about the species of which I'm part.
It's just the nature.
People don't take a risk to become their own status.
It may not just be that you're waiting to get six minutes with the national security system, though that is enough to keep them quiet.
You might get to be the national security assistant or the secretary of state.
Powell knew better than to go along with torture, which he was against, or going into Iraq, which he was against like virtually every acting general.
He retired, he was no longer chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was a civilian, State Department, head of it, the secretary.
He knew better than that, and I don't think there was a single acting general that I've ever heard of, brigadier or higher, who thought it was a good idea to go into Iraq, but they all did it, and they kept their mouths shut, all the way up through the Joint Chiefs, secretary of state and so forth.
He kept his mouth shut.
Still, what was he trying to be?
President?
No, I don't think so.
Well, by the way, he was, of course, a major candidate for president.
As a matter of fact, I haven't thought as much about that, but I'm not sure that was still in his mind when he was secretary of state.
I agree.
Yeah, I don't think so.
His wife had really vetoed him, so it was just the job he already had.
He wasn't willing to risk, and he only kept it for the first term.
He wasn't willing to risk giving up two years of the secretary of state job.
That's right.
He wanted to be in on the action, and he had this excuse, the following excuse, which in his case had a good deal of plausibility.
If he left, if he resigned over Iraq, and by the way, that he must go for a second vote, you know all this stuff, in the UN, that the first vote clearly was not enough to make this war legal.
There had to be a vote specifically from the Security Council that would endorse this war.
So he forced them to go for it.
Bush didn't want to do it.
Cheney didn't want to do it.
And they didn't get the vote.
They didn't have the votes there because of a leak of a woman in England.
Right, Catherine Gunn.
And we won't go into that whole story, it would take too long, but by her revealing illegal actions at a higher level than Top Secret and exposing herself to prison, she made it impossible for them to get that vote.
So he's going ahead without the vote, which the secretary of state had said was essential, or they would all, he didn't say this, after Nuremberg, they would be guilty of a crime against the peace as they are, as they were and are, including Powell.
So why did Powell do this?
He said, well, if I leave, I leave the president to Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith, what's the other guy?
Strict with P.
You know, the dark prince.
I forgot his name.
But anyway.
Richard Perle.
Perle, Perle, P.
Right.
And known as the Prince of Darkness.
And I leave him to those guys so he won't hear my point of view.
He'll only hear their point of view.
Well, that's plausible.
Your secretary of state, surely you're going to be listened to to some extent, you know, might counter these guys.
He didn't.
It was what wasn't worth a goddamn.
Right.
It went differently than it would have gone had he left.
And it went very differently from what would have happened if he had not just resigned, but gone out and testified to Congress that this was illegal.
This was wrong, but not just illegal.
It was going to be, you know, lots of things are illegal.
This was going to be a legal catastrophe, a dangerous, costly crime, not just one that you get away with.
Had he done that, he could have prevented the war.
Absolutely.
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Hey, isn't it right that he really got his start on the promotion chain in the U.S. Army by helping to cover up the My Lai Massacre?
I say, when you started that sentence, I remembered where you were going with it.
I don't know if that would start.
He was already I think a lieutenant colonel or something.
He'd been going along.
OK.
But it was one of his early moves.
And his excuse was he had just gotten there and there were no reports on it and so forth.
But no, he did cover up My Lai.
That's true.
All right.
So back to Assange for a minute because, you know, everybody always says, oh, Assange, he's a real bad guy.
Believe me.
But still, we shouldn't invade Iraq over it or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Same as they did about Saddam and this and that.
But I think he's a hero.
Right.
And I like the Manning leak and the Hillary leak.
And I don't care if it was Vladimir Putin who handed that stuff over to Julian Assange on a silver platter or what.
I love all these leaks.
And I think Julian Assange is the greatest journalist in the whole world.
And here they're persecuting the hell out of him.
It's got some people worried that he's not even going to live to see his trial.
And you know what?
OK.
So let me form that in the form of a question you can answer.
You talked about how the case and that superseding indictment is so flimsy where they just sort of pretend all of a sudden that Manning's last name is Assange for a couple of paragraphs so that they can sort of try to make it look like he's the source, the leaker, not the leaky or something.
But it just doesn't hold up.
I don't know quite what the point you're making there.
Is that true?
In the 17 count indictment, there's some peculiarity about it?
Well, it's just they don't make the case that, aha, see right here, he stops being a journalist and instead becomes a hacker who is conspiring with Manning to do this thing.
They imply it in a few places, but it's just very sloppy and they don't really make the case for the transitive property of Manning's sourceness onto Assange.
Assange is the New York Times in this case if Manning is Ellsberg.
Assange is not half of Ellsberg.in this story.
And that's the way the indictment reads.
So it's, I mean, and in fact, speaking of the Washington Post, I think they reported that two of the people working this case in the Trump Justice Department didn't want to do this and advised against it because they said that this just won't hold up.
It's, you know, it's obviously runs afoul of the First Amendment, as you said.
So where does that leave him when they want him this bad politically?
They'll do anything to get him.
But legally speaking, we have Benjamin Franklin and James Madison and them to thank for the fact that they really just can't.
When you say they can't, that's like saying that this Supreme Court absolutely and clearly 100% will not ignore the fact that it's unconstitutional, that they won't pass it.
I'm afraid the odds aren't quite that good.
They are taking a danger that even this court will notice that this indictment is unconstitutional.
But it's far from a sure thing either way.
It's a better risk for them than the court 40 years ago.
But by the way, Scott, on one point there, I think what you're referring to is his first indictment for the one count in the five years, which was, you know, most of what you're referring to was on that.
This second thing is not flimsy.
It's just unconstitutional.
But why is it not flimsy?
Well, because this is the second indictment now.
Because the wording, the language of the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C.
793, paragraph E, it so happens applies here.
I happen to know that all because I was the first person prosecuted.
Right.
A real interest in knowing that.
Yeah.
Now, it's the only law I can roll that one off so quickly.
But that was used against me as a source.
Now, this is the first time it's used against a journalist.
But that's not a stretch for the wording.
It's just a stretch for the First Amendment.
The wording makes it very clear that if you're not authorized to have this information, if you held on to it, if you give it to someone else, like a reader of the New York Times who reads what is described as a classified document and doesn't, quote, turn it over to the proper authorities, you know, like turn in his copy of the New York Times, what if it's on his computer?
What does he do about that?
And if he gives it, he or she gives it to their spouse, they aren't giving it to someone unauthorized.
The language absolutely criminalizes that.
But you know what, though?
I mean, I was talking with Trevor Tim earlier, and he's a lawyer.
And I know you know him from the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Oh, you're part of that with him.
And so I was asking him about that because, of course, as you're saying, the Espionage Act language is very broad.
But I was asking him, so the way I read it, it looks like they're not saying that the Espionage Act is so broad that it applies even to the publisher in this case, that instead they're really in the indictment.
They're trying to twist the facts to fit Assange the square peg into the round hole of being, you know, just like in the first indictment, of being, in a sense, the source himself.
Rather than a new interpretation or a broader interpretation of the Espionage Act, it's a twisted interpretation of Assange's role in the publishing of the information that really seems at stake, which is, I think, why it's so ridiculous.
First Amendment aside, it just, it's really not true, right?
It's like, I'm sorry, what's the name of your guy at the New York Times who did the best work there?
It's right on the tip of my tongue.
When you leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, Dan?
Neil Sheehan.
Yes, Sheehan, exactly.
So this is like saying that Sheehan was the leaker with you is what they're trying to say in that indictment.
Seems flimsy as hell to me.
I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me to be crazy, you know?
I'll have to reread the thing closely, Scott, too, on that.
Anyway, either way, the whole thing is a travesty.
And obviously, as you're saying, it's a real assault on the profession of national security journalism overall.
And it could leave us far more blind than we already are on the eve of whichever war is next here.
So it really does mean everything.
That's true.
If this makes a difference, and it does, it's because the media don't always go the same way as the administration wants, even when the administration is wrong.
When the administration is wrong and going to criminal...
The media doesn't always go with it.
If it did, it would be no use to be a leaker or a whistleblower.
It would edit it out, couldn't get through.
So the reason we want more whistleblowers and we do not want journalists and whistleblowers criminalized, as Obama did on such a large scale, as my case did before that, or journalists as this one, is because sometimes we get truths from them that the government really doesn't want out.
And it might keep them from catastrophes that were otherwise.
It hasn't worked very much.
It didn't get us, keep us out of Iraq.
It didn't keep us out of a lot of other things or Afghanistan persisting for 17 years or 18 years.
But there is a chance.
There's a chance that the media will find something so newsworthy that the government is doing criminally that they'll reveal it.
And that's why Trump wants to shut that down, as did other presidents.
Other presidents would have wanted to shut that down, but they were afraid that the Supreme Court wouldn't let them.
And now, not only Trump, but his successor will face a Supreme Court that will not protect the Constitution, as a matter of fact.
So it's not just Trump.
This case is a case that will fundamentally change national security investigative reporting to nothing other than putting out handouts.
Yeah.
And you make a great point, too, earlier when you say that, you know, they get him into court in Virginia, as John Kiriakou was saying, he's guaranteed to just be railroaded there.
And so then it's a question of all those levels of appeals and years and years, and then maybe, cross your fingers, the Supreme Court does the right thing.
But boy, if they don't, then that's the end of everything.
Well, this very indictment, you know, is already very chilling, whatever happens from this, because every journalist now knows, flimsy or not, she or he can be prosecuted.
They knew that from the language before, but it had never been acted on.
So they ignored it.
Hey, do you think that tactically the government made a mistake by issuing the superseding indictment now?
Will that make a difference in terms of the extradition from Britain or from Sweden, do you think?
I was very surprised when they did that because I expected that to wait.
Me too.
They had it in their hands.
But it seems that Britain is, by their laws and regulations, are not allowed to extradite somebody for a political offense, or at least they don't have to indict for political offense.
Now, that's on the one hand.
That means that this superseding indictment is so clearly political that it does give, makes it more difficult for the British to do what they would like to do, and that is go along with the U.S. and ship over Assange.
It complicates that.
It means the process will be more drawn out because of that.
So why did they do it?
And the answer seems to be that they can't extradite by their own rules unless the U.S. has revealed and assured them of all the charges that will be brought against this person.
You know, not just the first ones, but they have to bring them.
So I think they felt that to get an extradition, they had no choice but to take the chance of telling that they had a 100-year sentence waiting for them and not just a five-year sentence.
In other words, I think they thought, otherwise we can't get the extradition.
So that's the way it goes.
That's interesting.
So it could be a double-edged sword for them where they kind of have to do it, but it'll also maybe make it more difficult in the end, too.
Yeah, but they make it more, they have the chilling effect anyway by, not the ultimate, it'll be more if he gets over here, and if he gets convicted, that will be more chilling.
In fact, it pretty much ends most.
You know, there are reporters who will risk this.
People like Sheehan or Hedrick Smith or Cy Hirsch, and there are others, or James Risen, but not too many.
And when you mentioned John Kiriakou just now, it made me think, in all the years of this entirely criminal torture process, one person was prosecuted and went to prison as a result of that process, and that was John Kiriakou for revealing the name of a torturer.
And that, it occurred to me, you know, the 30 years of our illegal criminal, first support of the French in Indochina, and then our carrying out, you know, of the bombing and everything else, millions dead, in all the years of that, one American was prosecuted.
And you know who that was?
Oh, well, Cali, right?
Nope.
I'm sorry.
I said it wrong.
I meant to say one civilian was prosecuted.
Cali was military.
Oh, okay.
I'm sorry.
No, I don't know.
Me.
You're talking to him.
Oh, yeah, of course.
Well, you've screwed the joke up.
I would have got it right if you...
No, I'm just kidding.
No, I sent that one to my wife, and she didn't get it either.
That's funny.
No, well, actually, I thought you were talking about you, but then I thought, no, you were talking about the bombing campaign over there, something that sounded more like military.
I was close to it, but I was part of that.
By the way, if I'd been tried for that as a precedent for trying other people, I would have been very happy at the point when I realized how criminal the war was.
Okay, if trying me as a war criminal will get this process started, fine, let's go ahead.
But no, no, just like Kariakou, the person who was prosecuted was the person who blew the whistle on it.
Right, of course.
So that's the way things are, but there are other people.
Oh, by the way, you asked if anybody else had heard the call.
I think I started by saying Manning, I'm sure, did not know the Pentagon Papers.
Scott, Ed Snowden, of course, also was young, older than Manning, but he did see the movie Most Dangerous Man in America.
Oh, good, yeah, I was just going to mention that.
Papers, which got the Oscar for the longest title, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.
And he saw that while he was considering what to do.
So he has said several times publicly, I've heard him say this, without Dan Ellsberg, no Ed Snowden.
That's the biggest compliment I ever got.
And very gratifying, as you say.
So I hope there will be people who can say without Ed Snowden or Chelsea Manning, I wouldn't have told what I did.
And I hope they're listening right now.
Okay, I'm going to say goodbye to you now, Scott.
Is that okay?
That's a good deal.
Thanks very much for your time, Dan.
Great to talk to you again.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Okay, bye, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Dan Ellsberg.
He leaked the Pentagon Papers.
He wrote Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And the Doomsday Machine is the latest.
Oh, got a postscript here.
Go ahead, Dan.
Well, from one to two today, I spent with Tulsi Gabbard, who's running for president, but who is a young representative in the House right now.
Did I tell you this earlier?
You had mentioned to me on the phone that you had spoken with her, but that was all, though.
The significant thing there is that she is the one member of Congress that I know of who has said, and certainly the only one running for president, but I think the only one in Congress who said the following on television in the last two days, Julian Assange should have all charges dropped against him and should not be extradited, and Ed Snowden should be pardoned.
Right.
And she went on further.
She gave a thing and said that it was how important it was that we uphold our freedoms.
He says this indictment, this is a quote, has a very chilling effect on both journalists and publishers and also on every one of us as Americans.
It was a warning call saying, look what happened to this guy.
It could happen to you.
It could happen to any of us.
So I'll tell you, there is a congressperson who is speaking out very clearly, and as she knows, I'm backing Ed Snowden at this point, and so I am not endorsing her.
I am definitely saying actually that on this point and on nuclear matters in general and on foreign policy in general, I'd be happy to see her be president.
She's not going to be this time, obviously, but it's wonderful to see a younger person now coming along and taking such a good stand, such a strong stand.
She's 38, which is the age I was when I gave the Pentagon Papers to Fulbright, so she's not half my age yet, but she's going to have a great future.
Yeah, I'm predicting she's going to do real well in this campaign too, and she's up against a lot of lightweights, to be polite about it, and what I think is unique and really fun in this case is that the entire media establishment are just certain that her weakness is her foreign policy, when in fact it's her strength, so they do nothing but attack her, but essentially all they're doing is pitching her perfect fastball line drives to knock right out of the park, and I think once the debates get going and the American people get a chance to actually see her speak for herself and tangle with the rest of them, well, let me just say my hopes are high.
That's all.
She's right.
You're right, and she's right.
Her foreign policy is her strong point.
It is what makes her opposed by the democratic establishment, and here's one thing that'll strike you.
One person who has come out very strongly in favor of Tulsi Gabbard precisely on this point is Ron Paul, and it so happens that Ron Paul, when he was in Congress, was the one congressman that I can think of who credited me and said that I had done the right thing.
I don't remember who else ever said that in Congress, but that made me feel warmly toward Ron Paul.
That's cool.
Yeah, he definitely is a very principled guy, and I didn't know that, but I would have bet that he was pro-Ellsberg, of course, yeah.
In fact, he's written quite a bit of pro-whistleblower stuff over the years, and yeah, I think I remember him citing you.
Right, okay.
All right, well, thanks again, Dan.
Really appreciate it.
Bye.
Take care.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
