All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, guess what?
On the line, I've got Daniel Ellsberg.
If it wasn't for him, we might still be fighting the war in Vietnam right now.
He liberated the Pentagon Papers, of course, and wrote the book Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and he's featured in the great documentary that you can find somewhere online, The Most Dangerous Man in America, which is excellent, and he also wrote just a few years ago the book The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
In case you like having nightmares, you could try to give that book a shot, help you out a little bit with that.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dan?
Always glad to talk with you, Scott.
Well that's nice to hear.
Listen, it's also nice to see you sticking up for Julian Assange, and of course, there's nobody better to do so, since you are renowned.
I'm not as sure.
You know, you were the most dangerous man in America there back then, but nowadays the consensus is, thank God, Dan Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, and that's what good journalism is for, and that's what good patriotic public servants ought to do in your same situation.
That's basically been the consensus since, I don't know when, at least in my lifetime, which began a few years after that took place.
Well, I'm sure there's a lot of people who regard Julian Assange, along with his source, Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden, as the most dangerous persons in the world.
I have to say persons since Chelsea is a woman, but the meaning that they really set a model for whistleblowers all over the world, and every government in the world is concerned about keeping its dirty linen secret and not letting its own people know how much they knew about the lives they were making, and just every government in the world.
The wrong policies, the things that went bad, crimes that they may have committed, aggressive war that they participated in, and for example, when you, on that last point, it isn't only the U.S. who has crimes of aggressive war to keep secret on Iraq, for example, we had all the willing partners in there, many members of NATO who were taking part and participated with us in an aggressive war that's still going on, as you alluded to.
Yes, Vietnam could have gone on much longer than it actually did, without action by Congress, without leaks, without people telling the truth.
For various reasons in the course of that, it really could have gone on longer.
How much longer?
Well, now we have a clue.
Afghanistan has been 19 years, Iraq just about the same, 18 years, is it?
So 17 years?
That's how long.
And neither of those are over.
So we don't have the Afghan papers yet, the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan.
We don't have the Pentagon Papers of Iraq.
And I would like to see the Pentagon Papers about Iran before that attack occurs.
Well, in fact, you know, we do have something that's pretty close to a Pentagon Papers for Afghanistan, and that was the, what was published by the Washington Post last December, which was the background, the deep background interviews of the major players for the Special Inspector General.
And of course, that really was just like the Pentagon Papers.
It proved that they were lying.
And that's the bottom line.
This is what I learned about the Pentagon Papers even as a kid.
It proved that they were lying.
They knew they were lying.
They weren't mistaken.
They knew they couldn't win the war, but they kept pretending they could, so it'd be somebody else's fault when the thing finally fell apart and they'd be gone by then, and they all played the same game for years and years and years on end.
You know, sometimes people would comment on what I'd done as saying that the lies were the big issue.
You know, if you can't stand government lying, you can't be in the government for a week, and I worked with them for a decade.
You have to go along with that, hearing people lie all the time.
And if you were to speak out and give the lie to that, you'd be gone, and that would be the end of your career.
You'd never have a chance to influence policy for the better in the future.
You would lose your access, and you'd lose your clearance in your career.
So these things are all at stake, and they keep nearly everybody from telling the truth.
But in the case, as you implied, Scott, the problem wasn't just that they were lying.
It was what they were lying about and what the effects were.
They were lying about reasons for killing people, and how many they were killing, and how many Americans were dying in the process.
And that's true, of course, of Afghanistan.
It's true of Iraq and many other places where our special forces are involved.
What is it you probably know better than I?
I wouldn't be surprised if it's something like 10 to 16 places.
I don't even think that Nick Terse can keep an accurate count anymore.
I mean, if we're talking about where the special operations forces are deployed, it's definitely in the neighborhood of 14 countries.
At least, yes.
And you mentioned a very recent one, and this applies, by the way, I think we're going to be talking about Assange, but Julian Assange, which is a case intended to shut down leaks of this kind.
In other words, keep the public from knowing what you're doing, what your prospects are, what the costs are, and what the legality is.
No government really wants that out.
In the area of what they call national security, and Scott, I know you'll agree with me on this, I think what a misnomer that is.
How was our national security involved in Iraq, for example?
Well, they said they may have nuclear weapons already, or other weapons of mass destruction poised to use against us.
But they didn't.
They did not.
Our national security was not involved there.
Americans who have killed over there and who have died over there have not done it.
As so often is said, yes, they're brave, our brave boys, courageous.
They are.
On both sides, they're courage, as a matter of fact, whether the cause is good or not.
That's true in every war.
But in this case, when we say they were dying to save American lives over here, I'm sorry to say that's not true.
Their loved ones, the people who lose them, would like to feel that, that their lives weren't spent in vain.
They were protecting us, protecting our freedoms, they say.
That wasn't the case.
Our freedoms weren't being protected in Vietnam, let's go back to that, or any of these cases.
That's a very terrible lie that manipulates people.
But it isn't only in that field where the government needs to keep secrets.
As you know, the book Rage by Bob Woodward just now reveals to us, and I don't know whether it would be sufficient to make the point if he had simply reported it as somebody had said this to him or somebody told him and was just on the printed page.
He has tape recordings of the president saying how dangerous he knew this pandemic was, how bad it would be, how infectious it was.
At the time, he was telling us it was not a problem and there would not be a pandemic.
Frankly, as I said to you before, Scott, I don't easily figure out how, what he thought he was doing when he was doing that.
He may just think for the moment, keep the stock market from falling again, get him through.
But you know, given that he knew that it was going to go on as the presidents knew in each case in Vietnam, that this war was going to go on, it was not going to get away, go away.
It was not going to be won when they were telling the public the opposite, as they sent hundreds of thousands of Americans over there to kill and to die.
And they knew that there was not light at the end of the tunnel at that point, as they were encouraging General Westmoreland to say.
Yeah, the lie is terrible, but the deaths are more terrible.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, I mean, yeah, the lie is all, as you said, for the purpose of perpetuating that continuous cycle.
And really, you know, at the time that the Manning leak came out, it's important for people to remember.
And all this is still available at Wikileaks.org.
I mean, spend some time, folks.
You got the more famous, you have the State Department cables that were very embarrassing, as they put it.
But you also had the Iraq and Afghan war logs, both of them just full of, I don't know, thousands, almost certain thousands of secret level, confidential and secret level reports from the military, you know, mostly from enlisted guys doing their after action reports after each mission and this kind of thing, intelligence they picked up along the way and stuff like that.
And the whole story was in there, too.
And well, you know, the legacy media even, you know, at the time, the New York Times really ran with that.
For example, they had access and they really publicized that.
And we could have, the American people at large, could have taken that as our Pentagon Papers moment and demanded enough is enough right then.
We knew enough from these leaks alone, if we didn't already know it before, to know that this war cannot work.
Well, the same, you know, you showed that so clearly in your in your book about Afghanistan time to get out.
I forget exactly when you brought that out, but it was probably 17 time to get out about 10 years earlier than that.
Right.
That wasn't just this year, was it?
When did you?
Yeah, that was in 2017.
OK, yeah, because you were working on your book the same time I was working on mine, I remember.
Yeah, well, three more years have gone on and it's going to go on longer than that.
You know, you mentioned secret and confidential, and a lot of it was unclassified.
When President Obama was asked at a fundraiser, and this is on YouTube, you can look it up, I think, Ellsberg, Manning, Obama, something like that on YouTube.
He's asked, isn't what Chelsea Manning then called Bradley Manning, isn't what Bradley Manning did just the same as what Ellsberg did?
And President Obama answers, Ellsberg's material was classified on a different basis.
Well, that's true.
All of Chelsea's stuff was secret or less unclassified.
Every page I put out was top secret, sensitive.
That's just good.
He's so disingenuous, isn't he?
What a great one.
Well, on this subject, of course, he set a precedent, you might say, for Trump in the following way.
I was the first person under Nixon, the first person ever to be prosecuted for giving information to the American public.
I'd been an official, I had clearances.
I was, let's see, at that time I was working, I'd left the Red Corporation, it's been 50 years ago.
I had actually left the Red Corporation, was now at MIT.
But I actually had copied the papers when I had a top secret safe in the Red Corporation doing research for the Defense Department.
And I had the study in my safe for that reason, studying lessons from failure in Vietnam.
And I felt that this was information that shouldn't be mine alone or the DOD's alone, that Congress ought to know this.
And when Congress, to whom I gave the information in 1969, did not, as Senator Fulbright initially promised me he would hold hearings and use this, a year and a half later, and I'm sorry I waited so long, I tried other avenues, I gave it to the press, for which I was put on trial for 12 felony counts, adding up to 115 years possible.
Julian, by the way, has beaten that record.
He's facing 175 years in prison.
But it would come to much the same thing for both of us.
So the point was, though, that I was the first person, I had been a source, I'd been a government official.
I was not a journalist.
That was very questionably constitutional, as a violation of the First Amendment to hold me responsible, especially when the Espionage Act did not allow me even to tell the jury why I had done what I did or what I intended to achieve and what the impact had been.
Any of that, that was all irrelevant.
Just had I received it, had I copied it, classified, nothing about intent.
So at that time, lawyers like Melville Nimmer argued, our top legal scholar on law of information said that that would not hold up under the First Amendment.
You couldn't use the Espionage Act, which was meant for spies against this kind of whistleblowing.
Well, that wasn't tested because the government crimes against me led to the dismissal of the charges.
But after that, there were just two other cases brought in.
One of them was dismissed under similar charges in the next decades until President Obama.
He brought nine cases, three times more than the three that had been done before him.
So he was setting a real precedent here of using this Espionage Act against leakers, against whistleblowers.
However, did not use it against the journalists because that would be so blatantly a violation of the First Amendment, which is, after all, intended to protect the press, freedom of the press, as well as freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of association.
But the press is the one profession or occupation that is protected specifically in the Constitution.
And that's because that freedom is for the good of the republic.
It's for democracy.
It's not just good for profits of newspapers.
And so they did not go after a journalist because they felt that would surely be found unconstitutional.
And the act would be in that case.
And then they'd have no threat.
There's no other act because we don't have the British type Official Secrets Act because it violates the First Amendment.
So they extemporized on using the Espionage Act for that.
It would be found unconstitutional against whistleblowers if it were tested.
However, that's what Obama thought.
And every previous president thought that.
So no case had been made.
The ACLU, right at the beginning of the Trump administration, I'm not quite sure what they based this on, but the head of it was saying this administration, the Trump administration, is going to go after journalists and publishers.
And that didn't happen for a year or two, but they were predicting it.
It has happened now.
Not only is Julian Assange quite reasonably regarded as a publisher, he's not a source, he's not a journalist as most people see it, but he's definitely a publisher putting out this information for the public, for public information.
And by the way, nothing that he's put out that I'm aware has been found to be false.
You know, we're forged or wrong.
Well, I never even mind the caveat of that.
You're aware it's never been proven.
I'm certain of that.
There's never been proven that they published a false document of any kind a single time.
Right.
I would go further.
I'm not aware that that's been charged even, you know.
Yeah, I mean, there was you know what they tried.
Some of the Democrats tried to imply that some of these documents were doctored back in 2016, but they certainly were never specific in their accusation because they could not back it up.
So, yeah, I didn't didn't.
It wasn't the case.
Right now.
OK.
That precedent of just his.
He's been indicted now.
18 counts.
I had 12.
He said 18 felony counts.
That prosecution is not just for publishing.
And by the way, Julian is notorious or controversial.
Many people thought he shouldn't have published some of what he published.
But he's not only charged with publishing.
He's charged with possessing, copying, holding information, all of which I did.
In fact, I was charged with that, with copying and holding.
He's also charged with conspiring with his source, Chelsea Manning.
Now, the acts that he's charged with are the kind of acts that every journalist covers.
Quote.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Let me let me stop you right there just to clarify thing and make sure everybody's on the same page here for this part of the discussion is, as you pointed out before, that in this analogy, you are not Assange.
In the analogy, you're Manning.
You're the source for this stuff leaking the Pentagon papers.
So Assange, in your story, is Neil Sheehan at The New York Times.
Exactly.
Well, or or the the editor or publisher, he's.
Yeah, it'll be a little better to call him like Punch Sulzberger.
OK, Sulzberger then.
And now Nixon, he did move against The New York Times, but he didn't try to indict Sulzberger, did he?
What do you do?
As a matter of fact, I mean, this is a little known.
And I from your question, I suspect you do know what Scott isn't very well known, is that there was a Boston grand jury that was looking toward an indictment of The New York of New York Times people, but they didn't want to take on the the whole institution, major establishment institution here.
But they were planning to indict Neil Sheehan, you mentioned, and Henrik Smith, who had both public.
Now, I had forgotten that.
Don't give me that credit because I had forgotten that.
So I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
So they did try to do that.
But then what happened?
I learned it more from James.
Goodale, who wrote a book recently, I mean, a few years ago on who had been the counsel for The Times at the time.
And he was talking to the lawyers who were representing the lawyer who was representing both Sheehan and Smith.
And that lawyer expected them to be indicted, possibly could be that would be just like Assange now.
Right.
They backed off from that, I think primarily because they had been listening to all these people on warrantless wiretaps, as they did me.
And when that was raised by some of their lawyers, they seemed to back off on that.
And at any rate, that grand jury was dismissed.
So the precedent wasn't set.
I see.
Either way.
Yeah.
No, there was no precedence.
Right.
So then Obama looked into it, prosecuting Assange.
I just noticed, by the way, that another person who looked at it in 2010 was Donald Trump, who said that the person who did this should be killed, should be executed.
And of course, he was surprised there years later.
But he's back at it.
He's back to his original position.
He's not calling for execution, actually, on this just for 175 years in prison.
So if this extradition takes place right there, first of all, the extradition is amazing because it means that a foreign journalist, Assange is Australian and now also Ecuadorian, and certainly not American, is going to be, in effect, kidnapped legally or anyway, taken over to the U.S. to face charges for releasing U.S. secrets.
That's pretty peculiar in itself.
Next part of it, which is very like my case, is that just at the end of his several weeks, three weeks of hearings on the extradition, sworn testimony came into the court, which is all virtual here, digital, except for a few people in London, sworn testimony from people in Spain where there is a judicial process going on on this, that they had been conducting surveillance of Julian in his exile or his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy with cameras and microphones in every room that he had access to, including the ladies washroom, where he did go with his lawyers several times to evade what he thought was probably surveillance elsewhere.
Wong, there was microphones in the bottom of the fire extinguisher in the ladies bathroom and in the plug.
They were hearing every conversation he had with any of his lawyers.
Now, that would seem to make that case unprosecutable in this court.
How can you, when you found that the prosecutor, by the way, they were doing this at the behest of the CIA, which was they were sharing all this information.
Which, by the way, Dan, can you enlighten us at all about the tradition of attorney client privilege protections in England compared to the US?
Well, I can't do that in terms of, you know, I mean, you know it all.
But what they were saying indicated no difference from the US.
You're not the prosecution is not supposed to be listening in on conversations.
And I'm just saying that's not just American law.
That's English law as well.
Right.
Let me let me just presume that I don't I frankly don't know.
But by the way, it was well, yeah, he was in an Ecuadorian embassy in the Ecuadorians.
So they heard about it.
The guy who had given him the asylum certainly felt that was illegal.
Actually, the people doing it thought it was illegal at the time.
It turns out they were very antsy at the time, very concerned that what they were doing was illegal.
And that's why they turned state's evidence on this or Assange's evidence.
They testified under oath in Spain and now here that they had been they had been doing this because their conscience hurt hurt them on this.
But they said it went a little beyond that.
There were also discussions between their boss who ran this surveillance operation and the CIA about kidnapping him from the embassy or poisoning him.
Now, that's pretty dramatic.
Less so to me, because in my case, I was not only overheard on warrantless wiretaps, which the FBI had for a year and a half denied falsely that did not exist, they denied that they existed.
But also it came out that on May 3rd, 1972, when I was in a break in my trial, when I was giving a speech on the steps of the Capitol about the Iraq war that was going on at an anti-war rally at the Capitol, 12 CIA assets had been brought up from Miami with orders to incapacitate me totally.
And when the prosecutor told me that later, I said, well, what does that mean, kill me?
And he said, the words were to incapacitate you totally.
But you have to understand, he said, these guys, all CIA assets, never use the word kill.
And he doubt, you know, terminate with extreme prejudice, neutralize, eliminate.
So they might be overheard by somebody if they use the word kill.
So a little careful about that.
And he thought they were to kill me.
I'm not sure that was the intent.
I think they wanted to shut me up at that point.
Well, they want to shut up Julian Assange for good.
So the poisoning was definitely.
Now, how could England be sending somebody over to America who's had this done to him by the administration that's calling for his extradition?
It would seem, you know, ludicrous or awful to to do that.
The judge is going to decide in January.
So he gets to stay in his isolation in a terrorist prison till then, in total isolation, 23 hours a day in a cell and in a very, very bad physical condition, which has been described by the U.N. rapporteur for torture and humane conditions as tantamount to torture.
And that's still true in the UK.
So there are people in this country, more than one, not just Trulina, not just Donald Trump or who's the other guy, Huckabee, former presidential candidate who called for him to be killed at the time.
He said you should hunt this guy.
What's your name?
I assume you forget the vice presidential nominee under McCain, Paul Ryan.
No, that was under Romney.
Oh, no.
From Alaska.
Come on.
Oh, Palin.
I mean, what?
Palin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sarah Palin.
Right.
I'm 89.
That's probably so.
You have your excuses.
I don't have one.
But go ahead.
Well, remember that she'd like to hunt from from a plane.
You know, she he should be hunted down, she said, you know, and shot and so forth.
Well, Hillary has famously said, why don't we just kill him?
Yeah.
Can't we drone him?
Right.
She said, yeah, very, very similar.
OK, so they're presumably not worrying about his conditions of confinement at this point.
But journalists in this country should be very concerned whether they like Julian or hate him or hate him, because they do if they cover the Pentagon or CIA or NSA or the White House, they do every day or every other day what he's charged with by the Trump administration.
And remember, no journalist has ever before been charged by a president with this.
But they he won't be the last if he is prosecuted, whether he's convicted or not.
The prosecution itself, of course, is tremendously intimidating to journalism, to speech.
And I just read, you know, just just before this, by chance, Scott, two articles that just came out in the last week or so on the Freedom of Press Foundation, of which I'm on the board, along with Ed Snowden, actually, and Julian, Glenn Greenwald, John Kozak, several others.
And Trevor Tim, the great Trevor Tim.
Director, we both Trevor and I both testified virtually in these in these court proceedings.
Well, there are two articles by a guy named Parker Higgins, who works for the Freedom of Press Foundation.
They're very, very striking on this one back in March, and one just now last week, pointing out that it isn't just the Espionage Act that could be invoked here.
He said that the New York Times publication of Trump's tax reporting or reporting on tax data could very well be the subject of a prosecution by this administration, not by earlier ones, or the reporting by various people of the COVID history of the White House right now.
How many people have COVID?
They could claim that that was a violation of their privacy or not.
In other words, this is a major Rubicon that they're crossing here if they succeed in prosecuting this guy.
You're talking about America before that happened and America after.
Well, well put.
And as Trevor has pointed out, at the time the indictment was made, it was widely noticed that this was pointed, you know, at all journalists at the time.
This was earlier this year, at the beginning of this year, when it was announced.
It had been the indictment was secret before that, but they haven't covered it.
I don't think there's been a single story from London or from the virtual proceedings here in the New York Times or the Washington Post that I'm aware of.
They're ignoring it as if, I don't know, as if it somehow wasn't a threat to them.
And it is.
I've been saying for 50 years now, for half a century, I've been saying to journalists when I spoke to audiences of them and others, this, the wording of the Espionage Act applies to you.
Now, that should be found unconstitutional, but it applies to you just as much as to me.
But nobody paid any attention to that because after all, the case had never been brought.
I said, well, it had never been brought against someone like me before either.
But then another 30 years go by or more, it still hasn't been brought.
So they don't worry about it.
The case has been brought now.
It's facing them all.
They're looking down the barrel of that case and they're ignoring it.
Of course, it's somebody they don't like.
And even though, think about it, Dan, the left should love Assange for what he did with the Manning leak and the right should love Assange for what he did with the DNC leak.
And the consensus of the Americans should be that we love Assange and we all stand for him and fight for him.
But instead, the narrative is the left hates him or the liberals, at least, hate him because of 2016 and the right still hates him for the Manning leak.
And so instead of rallying around the guy, everybody turns their back on him.
You're exactly right, Scott.
And, you know, remember, it was Donald Trump and some others in his administration said, I love WikiLeaks, when he liked what they were putting out.
Well, OK, he got over that.
Right.
Yeah, he sure did.
That was that was before he indicted him for on 18 counts.
Right.
So and tried to extradite him.
So.
We are back to a situation, I think, where the, God knows, Obama was not a friend of the First Amendment or the free press with the prosecutions he was getting against sources.
And I'll tell you one thing about that.
I can say from personal experience, journalists don't, from my own experience, I say journalists don't seem to regard sources as part of the journalistic process.
They don't feel any need to protect them except their identity so that they get the information.
They will keep that secret.
But in terms of in any way supporting or or even encouraging moral whistleblowers, no, they don't.
Or even respecting them.
I think they regard the sources, their own sources, as kind of snitches, like a police regard their informants.
Well, the good the good sources they regard as snitches, the horrible sources they regard as authoritative word from God must be true.
And so put it.
No, they they don't care whether it's true.
It's just right.
Yes.
The heroic leakers, those are the presumed bad guys.
But when CIA hands a ready-made scandal against a foreign state over to these guys, they just lap it right up.
You're absolutely right, because remember, the officials are in a position where they can give them more leaks day after day, any any time they want.
So don't antagonize them, not only keep their identity secret, but don't print anything bad about them.
Don't criticize them because you wouldn't get access again.
I actually have a feeling that journalists who cover this beat, even the good ones, you could say there are very good.
I won't name them in this context because I'm going to say I think they feel a kind of synergy with the secrecy system when an official gives them a secret, which happens about every hour to somebody.
The other journalists don't have it.
That's an exclusive.
It's not in a press conference.
It's not in a press release.
They're giving them something that is protected from the other journalists at the moment.
So so he has a secret exclusive.
He doesn't care.
He doesn't.
I don't know if they're conscious of this, but it really doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
It's from an official.
He tells his editor or her editor who the official is.
Oh, well, the public deserves to know that, you know, it's Kissinger, Secretary of Defense.
It's somebody whoever.
Yeah, that deserves to be out.
And OK, next week, the exclusive goes to somebody else.
But the wheel comes around.
And if you're nice to your source, you get another one, your own one another month later.
And that's it's a very self-serving situation.
Backgrounders, I've often said, are journals where press conferences are for lying to the public.
Backgrounders are for lying to the press.
And that's fine, fine with everybody except the press.
The public does not get out of that what they need to know.
They were lied into Iraq as effectively as they were lied into Vietnam.
And that can go on again, as I hinted earlier.
I will say right now, anybody who knows inside plans for provoking a war with Iran in various ways should very much consider letting the public know about that and the Congress know about that, even though it will be at great personal risk because we're talking about a war's worth of lives.
And yes, it can be worth doing that.
And it can be effective with no guarantee.
There's no guarantee of it.
I think it's so important that you always do that.
And I'd like to add that, you know, when you talk about the wars here, the ones we got these things going on, this isn't abstract at all.
You look at the war in Afghanistan, for example, where GIs regularly get their legs blown off and get their manhood blown off and then live.
And now they've got to be stuck in the hospital for not that that's necessarily a fate worse than death, but it's pretty close.
And and yet, as you were mentioning before, everybody focuses not on the mission, not on the politics.
None of that makes any sense.
But they focus instead on the valor and the bravery of the fighting men going over there, risking everything, risking their lives and their limbs for these things.
Well, if that is so important, then the people, especially at the Pentagon, civilians and military working at the Pentagon with access to all that truth that can debunk all these lies that keep us in these wars and keep those men at risk, they ought to be willing to take a risk that, you know, what if they do have to sit in the penitentiary for a couple of years?
Big deal to do the right thing.
How's that compared to getting your balls blown off?
You know, that's nothing.
And they ought to be happy to go and serve a few months, probably max a couple of years maximum to do something like, you know, put out the truth to good journalists to publish in order to be able to stop these wars.
And it's a different kind of courage.
But, you know, essentially it's the same thing.
And it's the decision that you made and you described all this in your book perfectly that at one point you decided, well, OK, maybe I will go to prison, but I'm still doing it.
And then you did it.
Well, that's what they all ought to say.
That's what every single person that works at the Pentagon and the CIA ought to be saying every day is, you know how many megabytes I can fit on one of these micro SD chips?
I'm doing it.
How dare they not do it?
Well, very well put, Scott, I couldn't agree with you more and you said it very well and with the passion that it deserves, because there is, you say it's the same courage.
Not exactly.
Yes, it's both courage.
You can say that.
But.
Moral courage, which risks losing a job, risks in civil, rarely penitentiary, by the way, if these people are high enough, are actually rather high officials, the chance of penitentiary is out of the question.
Right.
But but if it's their secretary, not so much.
The secretary could do it, too.
Well, look at Kiriakou.
He did what, two years or something, a year and a half.
Well, he's the John Kiriakou, the one person in America who is prison, imprisoned in connection with our totally criminal, systemic torture program.
He's the one person because he exposed the name of a torturer.
The torturers, not one of them was even prosecuted, let go to prison.
Right.
So that illustrates what you're saying.
But of course, it took the courage.
And what I'm saying is John Kiriakou had moral courage, as did Chelsea Manning, as did Tom Drake, as did Catherine Gunn in Europe.
There was a movie about her and Official Secrets, I think that was called.
OK, now, when you talk.
About the difference here, there is this difference when soldiers on both sides, actually, but when soldiers are courageous in combat, I've seen that, by the way, you can be by training people and make them feel part of a team here.
For a reason, you can you can teach young people to be young men and now women to be very courageous for their teammates and carrying out the mission.
And I have seen that in Vietnam.
I was a civilian, but I was a former Marine.
And I used that training to walk in combat.
And I saw courage all around, not to denigrate that in the slightest.
It's real.
But it didn't involve what moral courage in the civil sphere does.
And that is ostracism.
On the contrary, you're supposed to be courageous there.
It's for the president.
It's for the nation, supposedly.
It's for it is for the president, but supposedly for the security of the country.
You're you're honored and admired for taking the risk.
And if you if you actually suffer that horrible, if it's life is a paraplegic or something, but it is not it is not accompanied by contempt or being called a traitor or losing any job, whatever.
We have, after all, Tammy Duckworth in Congress who lost both legs in Iraq, as I recall, below the knee or above the knee.
But anyway, you can you can have a career if you tell secrets on your boss because she or he is doing crimes or lying or deceiving people terribly.
You will have trouble getting a job later because nobody wants somebody who follows their conscience and tells tells on the boss.
So the the prospect, not just a prison, rarely a prison, if you take the whole set of leaks and so forth, a dozen, two dozen people have gone to prison, but or less, actually, but in terms of the number of leaks.
But the risk of losing your career, your job, your clearance, your marriage, possibly all that keeps people in line.
Understandably, the costs are real, even if they're not physical.
They're very, very harsh.
But the stakes may be enormous, as you said, saving the lives of other of other troops and the atrocities that are committed on both sides and the bombing.
So we heard so much about, you know, for the last 40 years, support the troops in those 40 years.
The way to support the troops was to bring them home from the war that they were fighting and should not have been fighting.
I think you brought to my attention recently, Scott, a group called Bring the War, Bring Our Troops Home dot US.
Right.
Sounds great.
Sounds very good to me.
That's very good.
You know, you probably too young to remember that McGovern, George McGovern, who lost every state but Massachusetts and D.C. in 1972.
But his motto, I wonder if you remember, was come home, America.
Yep.
Come home from empire.
He was a former bomber pilot in World War Two.
Come home.
And Vietnam was still going on at that point.
Absolutely.
We hadn't gone to.
I interviewed him one time, by the way.
Yeah.
Well, that was a good that was a good program.
I mean, that was a good slogan.
I would like to hear it now.
You know, come back from empire and these these other imperial wars.
And you mentioned, of course, Rand Paul, very, very reliable on that question.
Very outspoken.
Even Rand Paul, I think, to me, a more mixed figure.
But on this subject, very good on free speech, on civil liberties, on any war.
Both very good.
So it's not a question in this case of left or right.
It's a question of recognizing what truly serves the preservation of a republic and a democracy and what doesn't.
And these wars do not.
And the amount of secrecy and the prosecution on secrecy does not.
And that's that's the distinction that we want patriotic Americans to understand.
First is no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg.
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Now he's gone.
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It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
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The Scott Horton Show interviews 2004 through 2019 interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state and more.
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Pretty good, right?
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And thanks.
All right.
So two things left.
But first of all, could you talk about Julian Assange's treatment in custody here, awaiting judgment on whether he's going to be extradited?
Well, it was described by one person in the system in the UK that and there's a lot of a lot of articles about this on Consortium News dot com that has been covering the trial.
As I said, the mainstream press hasn't been covering it to speak of at all.
But there's a lot of testimony about how he's been treated.
And the one that struck me was that to come to court was a question for him of being getting up at something like three, four or five a.m.in the morning.
It's on the other side of town from the courthouse.
And so being naked, strip searched, in some cases, x-rayed.
Wow, that's pretty good.
And going from one set of custody to another being handcuffed and stripped a number of times.
On one occasion, they said 11 times in the course of the day.
Now, this is a man who in the Ecuadorian embassy was not out in sunlight for one day for seven years.
Wait a minute.
Listen, Dan, Dan, I know you're 89 and you get confused sometimes.
I think you strayed off and started telling the story of some old horror story out of the Soviet Union or something like that.
We were talking about Julian Assange.
Yeah, right.
So Julian Assange and I was in this Ecuadorian embassy with a bad shoulder.
When I when I saw him there, I was there twice, second time, much worse shape than the first time I saw him a couple of years later.
Bad shoulder, he needed an MRI.
No, can't do that in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Could he get permission to get out of there to a hospital and get an MRI for his shoulder, which is still a problem with him?
No, he would be seized immediately and subject to extradition.
Bad dentist problems, pain in his teeth.
Now, I'm sure, Scott, you know, everybody has had pain in their teeth.
They know what that feels like.
He's lived with that for years.
So could he get he needed dentistry that he could not get in the embassy.
So that goes on for seven years.
Not OK.
He is, in effect, kidnapped because with the permission, in this case, of the the new Ecuadorian president with a new ambassador and so forth.
They agreed to have him removed from from asylum, which is not a diplomatic protocol here.
I mean, you don't make deals to kick out somebody who you've given asylum for years and even given citizenship.
OK, he made a deal and I'd say within a week or two got a multimillion dollar loan from the IMF, IMF.
OK, so I don't think there's exactly a smoking gun.
Well, there is a smoking gun.
What you don't have on that one is still smoking.
But the it's very obvious that there was a deal there to let him be kidnapped by police outside, out of the embassy, dragging him by his legs, essentially in his arms into a black Mariah, goes to this this terrorist prison, by which I mean it's a maximum terror, maximum security prison meant for terrorists on the other side of town from the court.
And again, he's in, I said, 23 hours a day in his cell.
Actually, that was kind of a slip of the tongue.
I think it's 23 and a half hours a day in a cell.
And at some point when the other prisoners are not up, like the middle of the night, he is allowed into an adjoining cell.
We're still handcuffed.
He can walk around bigger than the cells that he's he's staying in.
OK, those are the conditions.
More than 100 doctors have signed a petition in the UK saying that this amounts to torture, that it could lead to suicide, but especially that his physical conditions are just terrible, you know, that they're in depression, everything else, as who wouldn't, who wouldn't be suffering at this point?
And lawyers have said, including the UN rapporteur Nils Mälzer, for torture, has said this amounts to torture.
Now, I come back, Scott, we are talking about a man who is hated by many people.
So a lot of people on, as you say, left and right.
So I'm describing something where a lot of people would say, well, OK, at least somebody is getting what he deserves.
They're not they're not really thinking too clearly, I think, about he's not being picked out because the left wing hates him, let's say, or the liberals hate him or anyone else.
That's not why he's under these conditions.
He's under it because, in fact, he didn't do anything bad to Trump.
When you come down to it at all, he's there because they want to make an example of a journalist.
They want to set a precedent.
They being?
They, the administration, they want to set a precedent that even the Obama administration, with its nine prosecutions, shrank from doing because it was so obvious that it would apply to The New York Times or to you, Scott, or to anybody else.
So they didn't do it.
They want a precedent for it.
They want to intimidate people even before they pursue other other prosecutions.
I mean, Obama was under a lot of pressure to do this, too, from who?
I mean, he was afraid to do it because of The New York Times precedent.
You know, The New York Times problem, as they called it here.
But he was under a lot of pressure to do it, too.
Trump is going along with the wishes of is it the CIA or the Justice Department or the NSA or who hates him the most?
You know, you have a theory or do you?
No answer.
What what part of the government?
Yes.
To tell its secrets, the things it's kept secret from the public.
Seems like the military has more reason.
Well, it isn't just the military.
It's health and health and housing.
Everybody else.
Well, yeah.
And the CIA, the Vault 7 thing, that must have really pissed those guys off.
But they haven't charged him with that.
That's interesting.
I assumed they would go after him on things he'd released from the CIA.
No, they are charging him with things in 2010, which I helped him do.
I actually went to London and stood by him and introduced him actually to a press conference where he released the Iraq war logs on that.
They could they could go after me on that.
Yeah, sure.
And but that was the stuff that should have been out.
We can go into what it did reveal.
I'll tell you, they want to charge, by the way, not even charges, but in making him look bad, that he exposed informants to danger.
Well, by not redacting all the names, what the hearing has showed very clearly, better than I knew from people who work with it, with newspapers and others, he went to enormous efforts and to redact names more than the press wanted to do.
They wanted to meet a deadline to get this stuff out.
And no, he said, no, we got to wait.
We've got to get more out.
Some names got through, it seems anyway, but in 10 years they have admitted they have found not one person that was actually harmed by this.
And as I said to the prosecutor here, the government is claiming they're so worried about these these informants who might have been endangered, not one of which was harmed.
And this is a government that set in motion in the Iraq war.
A blaze in the Middle East that has not yet gone out and that has resulted, I said, in 37 million refugees on this.
Their concern for human welfare and rights is just ludicrous for them to be claiming that this is a matter of concern.
It isn't.
And I read actually in some of the journalism at Consortium News about your testimony that you got into it with the on redirect, where you were saying that, look, it's the government's fault that all these unredacted names were in those files in the first place.
And they bear primary responsibility before Manning ever got his hands on them back then.
He had actually, Assange had actually proposed to the, before any of it was published to the State Department, to the Defense Department, that they should go over and eliminate anything they thought, you know, names, at least raise it.
And they were prepared to take out any names that they thought were a problem.
The government refused to do that, meaning that the advantages they saw in prosecuting him overweighed any concern that they had for these people.
Well, that's another point.
But one last point on Trump.
We've lit up to this in a way.
For them to break this constitution breaking precedent, which really leaves very little of freedom of the press, and as I say, not only on classified material, but what they can claim is private, anything that shouldn't be out, health data, whatever, tax data, enables them to go after it in a new way.
If they're going to break ground like that constitutionally, that is, break the constitution, you want a defendant who doesn't have public sympathy.
And they've got practically a perfect one here in Julian Assange.
At the beginning, you could already say, well, he's not really a journalist.
And actually, Bill Keller started out in The New York Times by saying that.
He's not a journalist.
He was, you know, throwing him to the wolves, in effect.
He's not a journalist, as I can see it, which is later, of course, that Obama thinks that we can't tell him from Bill Keller very much.
You know, he's doing the same kind of thing.
But Bill Keller said that eventually came around, said he wasn't in favor of the prosecution.
But the fact is, they wrote, Keller wrote in The Times, treating the way they usually treat sources, including me, by the way, going back 50 years.
But they said about him, they didn't say this about me.
He looked like a bag lady.
He he dressed badly.
He smelled badly.
He worked at night and he didn't take showers enough.
All of this is in the story.
Assange was a little bit shell-shocked from that.
But I said, Julian, I can tell you, I could have told you from my experience, that's the way they treat sources.
Definitely arm's length.
But in this case with Julian, it's it's come to be perfect.
So many people hate him that they cannot bring themselves to realize that this case threatens the freedom of the press.
And so they stay away from it.
It's the perfect, perfect precedent for him.
Yeah.
And a nightmare for the rest of us.
Terrible.
And listen, I'm really glad that you mentioned Nils Melser there.
Everyone needs to even memorize that name.
It's a funny one.
Nils Melser, the U.N. special reporter for torture.
And he wrote the single best thing I've ever read about Assange's treatment during this entire year, not about WikiLeaks, but about him and his exile in the embassy and the trumped up charges of sexual abuse of those women in Sweden and the trumped up charges of skip and bail and the trumped up charges of, you know, espionage and how well and the guys, the special reporter on torture.
So it's, you know, about how he's being held, his isolation and all the rest of it.
And, you know, it kind of went without saying, but it shouldn't.
You know, I want to make sure that we specify here.
And, you know, it was pretty much clear in what you said, but make sure that nobody misunderstands that he has no cellmate.
He's being treated.
He's in solitary confinement like the Unabomber on full supermax restrictions, even though he's just held on skip and bail on a B.S. charge that is not even a charge anymore.
And he's being treated, you know, in this glass cage and everything.
They're treating him like they did Mohammed Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood after the coup in Egypt.
Or as I like to put, because it really reminds me of this.
It's I'm not sure if this is actually literally in the movie, but close enough with Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal from the Silence of the Lambs.
This guy has to be tied to a dolly and have a hockey mask over his face and all these things, because anything short of that and he would certainly kill us all.
And there it's so prejudicial to the entire process to treat him in that way.
You know, you're absolutely right.
You know, it is quite a striking image.
But, you know, Hannibal Lecter was not nonviolent.
So at least they had something of a, you know, an excuse.
Sure.
Yeah.
I would have been afraid of him, too.
But Julian Assange is a computer nerd, you know, as his OK.
He's not a threat.
He is clearly physically harmless, absolutely harmless.
All you need is one bailiff in the room if you're really worried about it.
But otherwise, you're pretended, you know, simple.
I think you were alluding to something here that the listeners may not know that Hannibal Lecter was was that way in prison, you know, had a cage around him.
We're talking about a courtroom where Julian Assange is in a glass cage remote from his lawyers to get their attention.
He has to knock on the cage or do make something or something.
He can't just hand them a note as I could sitting at the defense table for a year and a half or more on trial here at the end, four and a half months.
I was able to irritate my lawyers tremendously by giving them notes of what questions to ask.
He didn't like that.
But they they would ask the questions usually on that.
Julian can't talk to them at all.
He's he's it's ridiculous.
So even the prosecution has said he can sit at the table with his lawyers.
No, he's like Adolf.
He's like Eichmann, Eichmann in the trial in Israel, in a glass cage.
The man in the glass cage is if he's, you know, a terrible wild werewolf and, you know, all of this is intended to intimidate journalists on the grounds this could happen to you.
Yeah.
And how could it not help but be intimidating?
I mean, what the hell?
Right.
You know, people look at that and they're more careful.
That's terrifying.
It's like being buried alive.
It's supposed to be.
I mean, that's the whole point of the supermax is you want to get buried alive.
You better not do this thing then, you know, which is.
And who do they lock up in places like that?
It's people like Ramzi Yousef, who tried to topple one tower into the other.
You know, now there's a scary guy, although even then, I think he probably deserves at least a cellmate.
You know, it's not really fair to treat people that way.
But, you know, there was testimony at the trial about what he would face in the supermax prison to which he would go, both in Alexandria, where he was being tried, but also in a supermax prison where he would go.
He is fighting extradition because he and his lawyers regard the present circumstances we've described as better than he would probably face in the US for the rest of his life.
Now, I, I have not followed all that closely what the at all what the conditions in these supermax prisons are.
But other people did.
Well, it's essentially exactly what you described with the 23 and a half hours a day, total isolation, exercise by yourself for half an hour.
And, you know, that's about it.
OK, well, the big thing, as I say, though, is is even not that.
But it's the well, here's the bright side.
Given what has been revealed, as in my trial, almost identical.
It seems obvious that Julian Assange should be freed by the British.
But now there will be appeal by the prosecution, so that'll keep him a little longer.
But the higher court in Britain, I think it's the House of Lords, basically should free him and he would be a free man.
And frankly, that was not foreseeable early on without this testimony.
The conditions they were talking about would not do it.
Nobody shows any no official shows any concern about that.
But when you're talking about having planned in the government to poison somebody in there, as there was planning to incapacitate me, that should end the trial, as it did in my case.
Right.
Actually, so that's a prospect that Julian didn't face before.
So people it's it's it's in a way wonderful for those who have been following this process so long.
Yeah, that's an important point.
And, you know, I was happy to be chastised by Patrick Coburn for being too pessimistic about this, because, you know, I really am cynical about the power of law to protect good people when it comes to issues as political as this one is.
But Coburn said that, hey, listen, I mean, this fight is not over yet.
And of course, and we've covered the, you know, every aspect of the hearings as best we could on the show all these weeks.
And, you know, politics and power on one side.
But every single argument wins on the other when it comes to the rule of law and the Western tradition and free speech and free press and his mistreatment.
And, you know, all of these things, the federal law and the court precedents and Trevor Tim's entire testimony and everything is really arguing for him to be released here.
So that's what politics and power are up against is essentially an ironclad case against what they want to do here.
And so it is possible, especially as you're talking about with these completely illegal things that they have done to him pretrial here, that those are exclusionary rule type of things where if the cops treat you that way before your prosecution, then that counts against your prosecution.
Same kind of thing with torture.
Like once they torture somebody, sorry, you got to let them go now.
You weren't supposed to do that.
Well, the people in Guantanamo, there's a lot of them there that they haven't found.
They had to let go, even though 40 of them are still there.
They can't bring charges because there's so much torture involved so they can just sit there forever.
It's not actually part of our constitution, but there it is.
Really, when the president is out to get you or feels he can't afford to let you go, the odds are against you.
I think whatever the law is, as you were saying, Scott earlier.
However, miracles do happen.
Watergate, the revelation of Watergate was something like a miracle.
Dean talking, Alexander Butterfield revealing the tapes, which was miraculous.
I mean, you couldn't predict anybody would do that.
Two major people who'd gone along with things all their lives.
Elliot Richardson.
I don't know if that's true of Ruckelshaus, but very possibly.
Two of them resign rather than fire the special prosecutor.
People who've been appointed by Nixon in the Supreme Court ruling against him that he had to turn over the tapes.
All of these, all of these things had to happen to get Nixon out of office and actually just to get me off a trial.
So it can be done.
It can happen.
There's no odds in favor of it.
But that's why I say to people who are facing the question of whether they should keep secrets on which on which people will be killed if they get those secrets or our constitution will be overruled in various ways.
They often tell themselves because it's very, very hard to face what they will face if they tell the truth here.
They tell themselves, well, it can't help.
Can't help.
Well, actually, it's unlikely to help.
That's the truth.
But it can help.
And the stakes are just enormous.
And let me let me say what I feel, if I may, with with your audience in particular, there is nobody facing office at this point that I can endorse, as you view.
One of them, the Democrats was Biden, was at the law at the end of of my preferences in about 20 Democratic candidates to be to be nominated.
And I don't endorse Joe Biden or what he's likely to do.
And I don't endorse, let me just say, Donald Trump.
So I don't endorse either of them at all.
However, I will say that for people who follow, who feel that same way and then say, what's the use of voting?
Why vote or use a protest vote on something, you know, something that somebody they really believe in, whoever it is, who has no chance of winning.
Very understandable motion.
I want them to keep the following in mind.
This has nothing to do with an endorsement.
Noam Chomsky has.
Well, I won't even go into that.
I'll just say.
There is a leader of a major nation, the richest nation, the strongest nation in the world, one that the candidate for leadership of the world, the nation and the leader who has done in the last four years everything he can to maximize, maximize the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, the greenhouse gas that is warming the climate.
And when I say maximize, I don't think he's a CO2 fan.
He's a fan of the profits of the oil industry.
That's my inference.
This is just my understanding of the events.
He wants that support.
He wants the campaign donations.
He wants the Gulf partners, whatever.
But he has, unlike anybody else I know in the world, been actually removing all restrictions on that emission.
Things that Obama, not, I'm not a fan of the Obama administration.
I didn't vote in his second term for him, but did make many restrictions on using the EPA, on auto emissions, on lead, on a lot of toxics, but especially on greenhouse gases of various kinds.
Those have all been rescinded by our current president.
And that's what I say when I say maximizing exploration of new oil permits in national parks and everything.
None of that should happen.
That oil should stay in the ground, in my opinion.
So I'm just saying when it comes to deciding what to do on election day, I won't tell you who to vote for.
I'll just say that, in my opinion, four more years of this administration will make irremediable damage to the world population, the climate effects of four more years as we face a 10 year target of reducing emissions by 50 percent by 2030.
Four more years of that will make that unattainable.
It will make getting two degrees, let alone 1.5 degrees of increase, unattainable.
So we're in a crisis.
That's my message.
OK, well, happy to hear it.
OK, guys, so listen, this is Daniel Ellsberg, the great Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon whistleblower, the Pentagon Papers, of course, and his book.
You got to read this.
Both of these are just so good.
Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
In fact, you can read Chapter one on my website, Scott Horton, dot org slash fair use and page through there.
And you'll find Chapter one all about his first day on the job at the Pentagon and his new job of watching the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin come over the teletype there.
Blow your mind.
And that whole story of the Pentagon Papers and all that is in the book Secrets.
And then he just published this book back a couple of years ago called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, which is absolutely full of essential information on the most important issue in the whole world, of course, bar none, the H-bombs.
So there is all of that.
And thank you again, Dan, for sticking up for Julian Assange.
He sorely needs the support, as you mentioned there, with the rest of the media turning their back on him here.
And your word on his behalf, of course, is so important.
So really appreciate that.
And as always, it's great to talk to you, my friend.
Well, I love being on your program, Scott, and I listen to it every day I can.
I learn a lot from it.
Great.
Happy to hear that.
Thanks a lot, man.
