02/20/08 – Daniel Ellsberg – The Scott Horton Show

The coming Balkan Caliphate, the threat of radical Islam to Europe and the West and bringing on an additional guest, the great whistleblower, the man without whom we might still be fighting the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg.
Welcome, Christopher, back to the show, and Dan, welcome to the show.
Thank you, and good to be on with you, Chris.
It's an honor to be there with you.
Good, I've been reading your pieces for a long time.
I'm glad to be talking with you.
And you both can hear each other okay?
Yeah, I'm good.
Okay, good.
Now, a story that's been of interest to all three of us has been the story of FBI leader-turned-whistleblower, Sabel Edmonds.
And I don't want to rehash too much of the basic story that most people know by now, but maybe we can focus on some of the deeper truths revealed by Sabel Edmonds' case, and in particular, the international crime rings tied with the terrorist groups that we've been talking with Chris DiLiso about here.
International drug running, money laundering, and then getting into nuclear black markets and so forth.
Seems like Sabel Edmonds stumbled across an international crime ring.
Dan, can you give us the basic outline of what it is that you think she's talking about there?
Oh, I have a new sense of that now, just recently.
And I tried it on Sabel, actually, just before she left the country for several months.
And I was almost surprised that she seemed to agree with it very strongly, because it wasn't what I'd heard from her before.
Maybe what the public has known up till now, we should let Chris talk on that for a minute, because, Chris, you've written many articles on that.
And then let me give my interpretation as of now.
Is that okay?
Okay, yeah, that sounds good.
Well, I'm dying of curiosity here.
I don't know, what is the absolute latest, Scott?
Maybe you should fill us in.
Okay, all right.
She has now, as of January 5th, in the London Sunday Times, begun to allow herself to be quoted directly on what she learned as an FBI translator of Turkish, Iranian, and other Turkish languages in Central Asia for the FBI, and what she actually heard on warrantless wiretaps of various counterintelligence targets by the FBI when she was working for them.
And she was looking at the period at Tate, from the period, as I understand it, 1996 to 2002, when they terminated her as a whistleblower in fear that she would begin to talk to Congress.
And she has told these things after that to Congress committees in secret.
But they have done nothing.
There have been no public hearings, no follow-up on anything she's given them.
And now, finally, in some desperation to get this information to the other members of Congress and to the public, she has some accountability and some American understanding of what our secret policies really are.
She has begun to talk openly, and that puts her in, I would say, in direct risk of prosecution, because revealing what she heard definitely is the kind of thing that this administration and others, for that matter, could interpret as grounds for prosecution.
I think she's the first person since myself and Tony Russo back in 1971, we're putting out the Pentagon Papers 37 years ago, to take a conscious, explicit risk of prosecution in order to put out truths that have been wrongly kept secret.
And what we're hearing in these news stories now that's just in the last six weeks or so, January 5th, I think January 20th, a later story, a third story by the Time and Sunday Times, there's more than three stories.
Three so far, and one I understand in a couple of weeks further.
She has revealed in the very first story on January 5th, was that she had overheard, or they have on tape, a man not identified in the London Sunday Times by name, but which she's identified elsewhere in other interviews as Mark Grossman, then the number three man in the State Department, and at other times Ambassador to Turkey, and now I believe a major lobbyist for Turkish interests of various kinds, he's Vice Chairman of the Cohen Group, but that he was overheard tipping off Turkish agents, Turkish sources, apparently in embassies or otherwise, that they should stay away from Brewster Jennings, the cover firm that provided cover for Valerie Claim and her counter-proliferation efforts in the CIA, tipping them off that Brewster Jennings was a front organization, and they should stay away from it, and this information was in turn passed by the Turks to the Pakistanis.
So the cover of Brewster Jennings, according to Sebel, was blown by American official, high American official, in 2001, not in 2003, later, by Richard Armitage to Richard Novak, and by Karl Rove and others in connection with Valerie Claim's husband, Joe Wilson, although it sounds complicated, but the point here is that they were protecting Turkish sources that were involved, on the one hand, in illicit arms dealing, and specifically the transfer of nuclear information and technology to Turkey, illicitly, which Turkey in turn, according to Sebel, was selling to the highest bidder, but specifically to Pakistan, among others, part of the Pakistani secret program, which we now know is secret from Congress and from the American public, not from the administration.
Our administration moved from at every stage what Pakistan was doing with nuclear, in its nuclear program, and the fact that, as Sebel puts it, a great deal of money was being skimmed off, the taxpayers' money we were giving to Pakistan for the mujahideen in Afghanistan who were fighting the Soviets, and that money was being skimmed off to support the nuclear program.
We, in effect, were financing the Pakistani nuclear program, and knowingly doing so, all these years.
Now, she also reported, and this is almost mysterious, but reported that Grossman and others were arranging money transfers to themselves.
Money was coming to them, cash, from Turkish agencies, as it was to several congressmen, including, and she's named in the past, Dennis Hastert, who recently speaks for the House, and a number of others that she's indicated.
So, in that sense, we have criminal activities going on.
We have illicit arms transfers, and specifically nuclear, and a tolerance, or let's say the acceptance of what was known to be drug money in this process, also financing the Pakistan nuclear program, but very particularly, and I think this is not in the Times stories, but she has said this elsewhere, that al-Qaeda was profiting from this drug trade at various steps in Afghanistan, and along the way to Turkey where it was processed, and elsewhere, that most of the money supporting al-Qaeda was coming from a drug trade involving U.S. friends and allies, such as Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, and some of the Central Asian countries, that, in effect, we were tolerating and facilitating a drug trade, not acting against it, which was supporting al-Qaeda, and is supporting al-Qaeda, all of this being protected by high-level people in the government who were cutting off FBI investigations and CIA investigations and cases, she knows of the FBI cases, and they were being cut off to the great frustration of the FBI high officials involved, but at a level higher than them, they were being told to lay off.
And this is where this story ties in with what Chris DeLiso is telling us about terrorism and gangsterism in the Balkans.
Can you kind of tie these stories together for us, Chris?
Well it's the same dynamic, I think.
It's what she calls certain foreign relations, and this is the subtitle of one of the chapters in my book, where we have civilians, you know, diplomats, who create a policy of friendship with unsavory characters.
But, you know, the U.S. goes into a place like Kosovo, and they want to make order.
Who's going to make order?
The most violent people possible.
So they get on the side of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the successor politicians from that organization, because, you know, it's a very brutal, real politic look at things, but if you want to keep control over a place, you have to use, you know, your junkyard dogs, the only ones who can keep a population down if you want to achieve certain goals.
And so, you know, it's been reported, not just by me, but many of the sources that I was speaking to over the years, that the people, the high-level officials in Kosovo, Albanians, who were involved with this international drug mafia, were never touched, even if there was an Interpol warrant, you know, a couple of times one of them would be arrested, I don't know, in Slovenia or Slovakia or someplace, to be extradited, and the U.N. officials would personally intercede to have them released, because it was, that's the policy, you have certain, you know, friends that you work with, and if you want to keep control over a rough neighborhood, you have to find the roughest people possible.
Unfortunately, these are the people who are going to be involved with organized crime, and it just makes sense, because if you want to be involved with large sums of money, you have to, you know, be able to protect yourself, and in order to do that, you have to have a large amount of firepower.
So, you know, unfortunately, it all fits together like this, and it's very, very basic, and it means that in the end, you're, you know, diplomatic people end up covering for very large-scale criminals, and, you know, the Justice Department or whoever would be investigating them is always prevented from doing so, because you need to keep those foreign relations intact, otherwise, you know, who knows what can happen.
That's their way of looking at it, anyway.
Yeah, could I add one thing to that, Chris, that I've learned from my, over the years from my friend Peter Dale Scott, here, who's written a lot about the nexus of intelligence and government and covert operations, namely that one other characteristic of these criminal gangs is, well, two, actually.
One is that they are skilled in smuggling, in illicit transfers across borders, things that are off the books, so that if you want to, for example, make illicit arms deals, it's very easy to use these same routes that these people have developed for the transfer of drugs.
The other, another point being, I know that the criminal gangs, and this goes back a hundred years, throughout the period, do not tend to be, quote, socialists or communists.
They're capitalists.
They're robber-makers.
They appreciate the capitalist system very well.
That's true in Sicily, and Corsica, and all over Southeast Asia, and so they work well with our capitalists, let's say, with our capitalist system.
They look down on socialist systems of various kinds, which have, on the whole, had a tendency to be negative toward the drug trade, as in times in China.
We prefer to work with the Chinese nationalists rather than communists on that, and the nationalists were heavy into drug trade.
Right.
It's interesting that you mention Peter Dales' case.
I was reading one of his books about Kennedy assassinations on recently, and I was really struck when I was looking in the context of the Sebille Edmonds case.
We're talking about specific individuals, like you mentioned Grossman and so on, but the thing that really struck me after reading that, talking about events of the late 50s, early 60s, was how systemic this kind of high-level corruption and organized crime mixed with politics, and until it is ripped out from the system, these kind of things will just keep happening and happening, and especially with the influence of the foreign lobbies, which has just gotten bigger and bigger over the decades, this increases all of the, you know, from bribery to sexual blackmail to other kinds of things that they've used on a systematic level to compromise officials, to gain intelligence, to profit, to protect their operations, that this is really a systemic problem gripping the entire U.S. government and, of course, many others.
Well, and this is the biggest heroin pipeline in the world, right?
Tens of billions of dollars every year.
Right.
This isn't, you know, some small-level operation smuggling in cocaine from Mexico.
This is some massive, or at least some substantial portion of the world's economy every year, is this pipeline of heroin products from Afghanistan through the Turkic countries and then into the Balkans for sale to European and American customers.
Yeah, and it was quite interesting, Loretta Napoleone, you know the author of Terror Incorporated, who wrote the foreword to my book, in that book she made a very, you know, astute economic judgment from the economic side of terrorism, and her thesis in the end was basically that the, you know, illegal economy and the terrorist economy is so large now that, you know, it would, to really, you know, kill it would have irreparable, do irreparable damage to the legitimate economy.
So it's here to stay.
Yeah, that's in some countries more than others, but including our own.
Again, a point that Peter Dale Scott makes, often made to me, is that many banks, including major American banks, are so involved in the money laundering, in effect, maybe a second or third move of these profits of the dope trade, and also investors in countries like Mexico or Colombia that rely very heavily on the trade, that if the trade were, in some hypothetical sense, stamped out, these banks would be in great trouble, and in turn the banks have major influence on many congresspersons in their district, campaign contributions and others, which makes it very hard to investigate the drug trade, that it's heavily, heavily infiltrated into our, quote, legitimate economy and politics.
Now central to all of this is the state of Turkey, the bridge between the East and West, the bridge between the European Union and the Islamic world, the former seat of the Ottoman Empire, and crossroads for a great many things, including a lot of this heroin, and of course, according to Sabel Edmonds, it's the Turkish lobby that is at the core of so much of this criminality in the United States.
I'm wondering if you can tell us, Chris DiLiso, a bit about what's called the Deep State.
You have a recent article at Antonware.com called Deep State Coup Averted in Turkey.
What is the Deep State, and how close were they to a coup d'etat in that country?
Well, we don't know how close, because they were planning, this is a, the Deep State refers to this shadowy underworld of ultra-nationalists and criminals and smugglers and militants and intelligence agents and police who form this sort of shadow government, controlling things from behind the scenes, and in the past they have carried out military coups, although not very recently.
They had planned for 2009 to take out this incumbent government.
The thing that is very interesting about this is the continuity.
I've been doing a lot of research because I'm kind of a history buff as well, and the seeds of the current Deep State are at least 100 years old.
At that time it was not involved with organized crime, but with ultra-nationalism.
And if you think about it, this summer, in July 2008, is going to be the 100 year anniversary of the Young Turk Revolution, which started off in the town of Resin, which is a three hour drive south of me here in Macedonia, where the Ottoman army, who had been infiltrated by this revolutionary ideology, marched towards Constantinople and they forced the Sultan to renew the constitution of 1876, and they were talking about liberty, fraternity, equality, and all this.
But it was actually a very large movement which was motivated by fear that the Ottoman Empire was being destroyed by avaricious foreign movements and that the Christian minorities inside the empire were getting too big for their britches and that something had to be done to avert this.
And so they developed all these kind of clandestine networks and secret societies, and it's great reading, you know, they have notebooks and secret codes and invisible ink and all that stuff.
But they were very, very successful in infiltrating the army and creating this kind of Turkic nationalism which Sabel Edmonds and other people have talked about.
So that just progressed after 1903, 1908, on and on.
In the 50s, after NATO came into existence, there was a policy in the NATO countries for making these kind of stay-behind armies.
The big example is the Gladio movement in Italy, and these groups were made of various kinds of nationalists and criminals and fascists and so on, who were supposed to be sort of paramilitary or sabotage agents in case the Soviets advanced.
And this was in, I don't know, 13 or 17 countries, but one of the places where it stuck the most was in Turkey.
And this is why you have this problem now, because through the 60s and 70s, this deep state evolved through this nationalist group and a group called the Gray Wolves, which was motivated by this pan-Turkic ideology.
And then the Kurdish war started in the early 80s, and the drug trafficking and so on, and it became a very powerful force in Turkish political life.
And the current government, in a way, is similar to the situation 100 years ago, because these nationalists are looking at Erdogan and the President Gul from the ruling party and saying, these people are sort of Islamists, and they're going to overthrow the constitutional, secular government that Abitur created, who was a young Turk himself, in 1923.
And they're very nervous about this, and Erdogan, who was the Prime Minister, was previously banned from being involved in politics because of his association with an Islamist party, and now you're having all this debate about should headscarves be allowed in school and so on.
So Turkey is trying to keep this secular Islamic balance, and the military is constitutionally set up to be the protector of the people, and to protect it against excesses of religion.
So it's a very interesting and complex and dynamic situation there.
These dissatisfied people in the deep state who are involved now were retired and present military and intelligence-type people as well as corrupt businessmen and smugglers, and they were saying amongst themselves, look, guys, we're headed towards an Islamic state, and we'd better do something about it.
We have to take these people out.
And fortunately, the government, which is not a radical government at all, but they found this plot and they uncovered it in time.
Well, I just read your piece on that, Chris, which was very interesting.
This is Dan Elford.
But can I move back for a moment to what I was hinting at earlier about a new interpretation of Turkey, of what Sabel Edmonds has gotten onto?
Mainly, it so happens that I just finished reading a book that I found very fascinating, called Deception, and the subtitle is Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade of Nuclear Weapons, by Adrian Levy and Katherine Scott Clark.
And the description of the American, the secret American dealings with Pakistan over the last five and even six administrations, starting with Carter, namely what is usually called turning a blind eye to their nuclear weapons program, which culminated in tests in 1998, which constitutes them now as a nuclear state.
This book makes clear that that's a very misleading description of our relation to that program, because not only did we know about it and choose not to tell, but it wasn't just that we blinded ourselves, certain aspects of the government, but that they acted very actively, not just passively, to blind others to the ongoing program here, others who might object to it and might block it, specifically people in Congress, like Senator Glenn, who put very high priority on stopping proliferation, much higher than the executive branch actually did.
And to keep Glenn from knowing, and others like Representative Solars comes into this in various ways, but Solars opposed in legislation the Pakistan program, and to keep them from learning what the executive branch knew about that program, they would be lied to in testimony under oath by administration officials, State Department people, including high officials, the kind of thing that Sabel is charging specifically in connection with Turkey.
In fact, when FBI agents and later DOD agents like Richard Barlow actually developed a very clear picture of the Pakistani program, he found himself confronting absolute perjury by other people testifying in front of Congress, and when he objected to this, he was pushed out of CIA, went to DOD, and he had the same experience there, where he lost his clearances.
He was eventually determined for no other reason than that he was objecting to an administration policy of protecting a Pakistan program.
It's not just a matter, then, of passively failing to stop it, but actually facilitating it, protecting it, in effect, participating in it, and in the program for various reasons.
The reasons varied over time.
The desire to have the Pakistanis help or actually run operations in Afghanistan using Islamic radicals to do that from all over the world, and later, even earlier than that, there was a desire to use Pakistan as a listening post for the Soviet Union, and more recently, to have them help rather than obstruct our efforts to get Osama bin Laden or to deal with terrorists.
So, varying reasons, but all of them had the effect perhaps a side effect of providing interference for their nuclear program, and even providing money for it, as I was saying earlier, providing money to Pakistan, which we knew was being diverted very largely to their nuclear program.
Now, as I read that, I thought, this fits almost exactly what Shabell is talking about is happening.
It's the systemic nature of the setup in Washington.
It's been famous for 50 years.
What I'm saying is, the word Turkey hardly appears, it so happens, in the Adrian Levy and Scott Clarke book, just a couple of references, but when I put that down, sort of a light bulb shone over my head, which was that I would guess that what Shabell Edmonds, and not just she individually, but her department of the FBI was investigating, was in fact a presidential policy under various, several presidents, very much so under Bill Clinton and since, are to protect, conceal, facilitate a Turkish nuclear bomb program, as well as what she has explicitly said, a conduit of information, nuclear information, to Pakistan and others.
My suspicion is strong here at this point, and there is some other evidence bearing directly on this, that Turkey has renewed very old interest in a nuclear weapons program, and particularly, probably, in connection with Iran's move in the late 90s and early part of this century, apparently terminated in 2003, for now, toward nuclear weapons.
But in any case, from about 1993 on, and certainly from 96 on, my guess is there has been a Turkish bomb program, nuclear bomb program, very similar to the Pakistani bomb program, with which they were certainly cooperating.
The fact of cooperation there, I think, is attested by a number of people, including...
The only difference I would say, though, is for political reasons.
I mean, I've read in Turkish newspapers, you know, speaking with officials that, you know, if they wanted to have a bomb, they could have had it 10 years ago.
For political reasons of trying to join the EU and not antagonizing Greece, which would certainly veto any EU membership if Turkey had a nuclear bomb, I don't think that they want to do that politically.
Maybe military people do, but I don't think politically that's in their interest.
I wanted to try this, Chris, and I do want to hear your criticisms or objections bearing on this, because I specifically wanted to present this idea to you.
This is my first chance to do it.
But let me respond to that.
That would bear against their turning the key, as they say in a turnkey program, and actually deploying a bomb, but especially it would come against their testing it or openly avowing it.
Remember that Israel, which by now, thanks to Panunu and others, everyone knows has many, many bombs, has not openly tested and has not openly admitted, although they've come close to it in recent years, for political reasons.
That doesn't mean they don't have bombs.
In fact, hundreds of them.
The Turks, yes, could have had one 10 years ago, no doubt.
I haven't looked into that.
I'm interested to hear you say that.
But who is to say they don't have one now?
Well, the next question would be if they don't have it, and that's an elastic term here, as to what stage do you say they have it?
Well, the question is, in the longer term, how could they see themselves as using it?
Maybe Israel does.
Israel has let their neighbors know.
Well, that's a different case.
Israel is surrounded by hostile neighbors, who are at least in population are much larger.
But Turkey does not have any real...
They would not want to bomb Greece with a nuclear weapon.
I googled, and anybody can do this, Turkey and nuclear weapons, and found a lot of things coming up, among which a fairly recent statement by a high-level Turkish general pointing out that, A, Turkey is surrounded by nuclear neighbors, and they point all around, you know, Soviets, Israel, and in the area, you know, Pakistan, the U.S., not a neighbor, but is in the area, there's nuclear weapons all around, and they ought to have them.
That was one of the major...
That came up right on Google just the other day, yesterday.
And many other quotes like that, to the effect, if Iran has a weapon, will Turkey want to...
Well, that changes things.
That's sort of a domino effect.
Well, it just seems to me like, you know, Dan, you could be on to something, Daniel Ellsberg, with the idea that all this, what's been identified as criminality by Sabel Edmonds and this story, could possibly just be part of a covert action program.
The conclusion doesn't necessarily have to hold, it may or may not, it's speculation one way or another, but it could just as easily be that you're right, it's a covert action program designed simply to help the Pakistanis and the Turks, or simply the middlemen.
What we know is that there are people inside this government who are breaking the law, selling nuclear secrets on the black market, whether the President told them it was okay or not.
Yes, it's not inconsistent to think that it's a covert, or at least secret, program, and to say that it involves large criminal aspects to it.
The template here, the example would be Iran-Contra, very obviously, which was a presidential program, but it involved dope runners, among other things, it involved illegal arms deals at both ends, it involved breaking laws and the Constitution when it came to getting money to fund terrorists, that is the Contras, in Nicaragua, which had been forbidden by Congress in various ways.
All of this involves illegality, and in the case of dope, a very clear crime, in part to enrich some of the people involved and get their cooperation, and in part to fund the efforts which Congress was unwilling to fund.
So, and another aspect, to say that it's covert and presidential is not to say it's good or justified.
It can also be a criminal project, and it can also be criminally insane.
To say that very smart people are pursuing this complicated policy for what they think is in the interest of the United States does not give us any assurance that it's not wacko, like Iran-Contra, or like the invasion of Iraq, which among other things, you know, criminal and aggressive, and it was crazy.
It was extremely ill-advised, and unfortunately, very smart people like Apollo Wilkowitz and others can convince themselves for various reasons that a policy that anyone else can see is either terribly dangerous and reckless, but also nutty, and a whole storm, as well as immoral, illegal.
Look at Vietnam, look at Iraq, look at the Pakistani bomb program, which, in fact, we have facilitated throughout this period, and now which is causing tremendous problems.
When I look at that, I say, that keeps me from saying that aid to a Turkish bomb program is out of the question, just because it's illegal and crazy.
Well, and it does seem like what qualifies it as an American covert program.
Well, it seems like worldwide here, what we're talking about is a network of arms sales, and foreign aid, quote-unquote, programs, mixed with black markets and nuclear secrets and drugs, and it sort of seems at this point that, well, it's not just the Turkish deep state, it's the deep state of, you know, at least a few of these different countries in Western Europe, Pakistan, America.
I wanted to say that, you know, with a focus on the Sabel Edmonds case, I sometimes feel like we're picking on poor Turkey in a way, because this is just, you know, if she had been working in the Russian section or the Chinese section, you know, she would have found out probably the same things about illegal cooperation with those countries.
Right.
So we should, you know, remind the listeners that probably there's much more going on involving many more countries, and that it's just that we've seen a very small piece of the picture, which it shows us the, you know, the way things work, in a way, but there's much more to be found.
Well, this fits in, what you just said, also fits in with a broad conceptual framework that I've had for a long time, which is this, that specifically our alleged, our declaratory policy of opposing all proliferation of nuclear weapons has always been a hoax.
It's been a sham.
What I'm saying is not unique with me, but it is unusual, it's an unfamiliar statement, and I'll tell you that it's based, in my case, on a number of things that I knew in the government and have come to learn lately.
But the Pakistan example is a very strong one.
But I was aware in the government of an attitude expressed once by Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, which was, if our enemies, and this was right after the Chinese nuclear test in 1964, October, within a week of that, he was saying, if our enemies have the bomb, why shouldn't our friends have the bomb?
And this is specifically in reference to India.
And of course, the point was made right away, well, if India, Japan, which hasn't yet happened, Germany, his reaction was, well, why not?
And what could have been said very clearly was, if India, then Pakistan, and that's what did happen.
And we're seeing the effects of that now, and I'm concerned.
Now, I wanted to ask you a question, Daniel, if I could, based on your experience.
Would you say, since the time when you were in public service, and I know that this general scheme has been going on with, you know, corruption for a long time, but would you say that the average worker, middle-level worker, even upper-level worker in security services of the U.S. has become more jaded since you were working there, or more...
Well, hard for me to know, because I don't have contact with those people anymore.
My relations with those people were pretty well terminated when I chose to go public in 1971.
Right.
But did you feel back then like they were in some way more patriotic about, you know, being at least honest and accountable?
No, no.
That's a good question.
An interesting question to raise, as I say, I don't have direct knowledge of that.
My guess is that now, as of then, most people go through a large part of their careers, maybe most of it, maybe all of it, under various delusions themselves that they're serving idealistic purposes and national interests, which, in fact, are not really ruling things.
They're fooled in the same way that the public is fooled.
The public is fooled into believing, let's say, that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11, you know, the total hoax.
Well, the people inside know better than that.
And they should, I believe, give the lie to those public attitudes when they can, but they don't.
It would end their career and their chances for good later if they lost their parents and if they said these things.
But what is the good they're doing otherwise?
They can be just as easily fooled.
You can fool a con man and buy another con man very well, the history of con games shows very well.
And the middle-level people you speak of, I think of as having their own ideologies which have as much delusion in them as anything else.
For instance, they know, for instance, that we're not supporting democracy in many parts of the third world as the public may believe.
They know that the notion that we always support democracy is contradicted by everything they see.
We're dealing with dictators all the time.
But they're easily fooled.
I went through this.
They're fooled into believing, well, yes, we are supporting a dictator, but that's to keep an even worse dictatorship, a communist dictatorship, which will be from coming in.
And that may have some validity in some cases.
In other cases, as in, let's say, Iran, which we overthrew, where we overthrew the chance that the communists were going to take power in Iran, which was our excuse for a coup, was extremely thin, and that was pretty much of a hoax.
But probably most of the people involved did believe that's what they were doing.
They were opposing a communist takeover.
And that's true again and again throughout the world, especially in Latin America and Central America.
Take Guatemala the very next year in 1954, when we overthrew a democratic government.
Well, what we've seen in the last five years, I think the biggest thing is the increase of independent contractors, whether military or intelligence and private consulting and so on, and doing a lot of outsourcing from government work.
When we look at these disastrous foreign policies the last six or seven years, and the fact that the Iraq War wasn't based on anything realistic and a lot of false intelligence, would you say that this is keeping the best and the brightest of the potential young intelligence or security class from joining the government, and will affect in the long run its actual ability to operate?
Or is that an over-exaggeration?
I'm not in a position to judge, but let me specifically about right now.
There may be a lot of disillusion now.
The question is, is CIA having a lot of recruiting problems right now?
My guess would be not in the longer run, or not very much.
The incentives to join it probably are pretty much what they were before.
I'm sure there is a lot of low morale and disillusion and frustration.
Well, I had just read something yesterday in the L.A.
Times, which had said this, you know, the idealistic class of people who joined the CIA in 2002, you know, to fight Obama and all this, that a certain, you know, large number of them had just gotten disillusioned and given up and had gone into some other line of work.
Yeah, that's in part because a lot of the CIA has found itself bypassed a good deal in favor of the Department of Defense and DOD, and they didn't like what they were getting from CIA, so they just ignored them.
Do you have any predictions about the next administration, whether it's Democratic or...
Yeah, I mean, the money is there and the inducements are there for recruiting.
Coming back to your question, people can easily be induced to believe, even very smart people, things that justify what they're doing or that allow them to continue in their job and move toward retirement incomes and feel important.
Even when an outsider would say, boy, that's pretty implausible, or that's pretty thin, I used to say anyone can be as dumb as he has to be to keep his job.
Intelligence was no obstacle to this, even brilliance was no obstacle.
You could be as smart as anybody might be and still manage to be very dumb when it's necessary, when the alternative would be to feel that what you're doing is illegitimate and is criminal, murderous, or hopeless.
In the case of Iraq, for example, where they could see, I think they were heading into a train wreck, most of the people in intelligence knew that, and the military, so what kept them in?
What kept them all from resigning?
And very few did resign, few took early retirement, and almost nobody spoke out.
Well, you can always tell yourself, well, the guys at the top have certain delusions.
They think that there's a big nuclear program, or they think that Saddam was behind 9-11, and although I know that's wrong, maybe I'll be able to persuade them otherwise, or at any rate, we'll get a new president, before long.
And what they don't see, by the way, are possibilities in American policy, as in the case of Vietnam, that make it very unlikely that the next president is going to behave very differently.
I don't expect very much difference, in particular from Hillary Clinton in Iraq, or in these other respects.
Scott, if it's okay with you, to the Edmonds case.
Yeah, sure, go ahead.
I just want to say to the audience that you're listening to Chris DiLiso interviewing Daniel Ellsberg on KS Radio right now.
Go ahead.
No, no, I wanted to present my thought to you, Chris, to see what your reaction was, but I'm very open to your...
Well, I just wanted to ask you about...
You said that the importance of this is that Sybille Edmonds is opening herself to potential prosecution by saying what she knows, and I was really curious.
I haven't been in contact with the London Times at all, but they have never named the official who is allegedly, and also people are piecing this together from different sources.
She's said Mark Grossman a number of times.
You put it in that article.
They don't, and I'm kind of wondering whether...
The attitude still seems to be of the government to ignore, ignore, ignore, rather than prosecute, because if you prosecute, then you're admitting that you did something wrong.
Would you think that...
I don't know where the Times is going.
You said they're going to have another special in a week or two.
I don't know how much more they're going to put into it, but do you think that there is some kind of damage control going on, which says, we will ignore, ignore, ignore, until...
And what would force them to finally make some kind of reaction against her?
Well, what would force them, unfortunately, in a way, I think, would be if this story broke into the major American newspapers.
Well, we saw Philip Giraldi, you know, the Dallas Morning News, I think, they ran his piece on the American conservative, right?
Which was very good.
I think the first mainstream paper to have reprinted that stuff and taken more than a month here, if you see where that goes, I'm not sure the Dallas Morning News is the most challenging media for Washington to worry about.
I'm not deprecated, but...
It's Bush's home state.
Or this...
Yeah, or this...
Bush is from Connecticut.
I wish this remained true, but it's not what I include in that category.
In other words, what has been in the London Sunday Times has been all over the Internet, and it's been all over the world press, and in many cases, front pages, in Israel, Pakistan, Turkey, elsewhere, stories saying the London Sunday Times reports, the Bill Edmonds reports, not a word of that in the American press.
And I think there is some, a strange kind of censorship going on, which I don't fully understand.
I think it probably does involve some direct phone calls from the administration to press people saying, stay away from this.
It's a complicated covert operation.
It's counterintelligence.
You may upset ongoing investigations, which is probably true.
It might well upset covert operations of the nature of the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra, the Pakistan program, and so forth, or crazy crackpot operations that are illegal and dangerous.
That isn't to say every operation has that character, but this one has every sign of being in the great tradition of awful covert operations that deserve to be made public.
Daniel Ellsberg, would you have stolen the Pentagon Papers and leaked them to the New York Times and Washington Post if you didn't have any reason to believe that they would even publish them?
And that's the situation that a modern whistleblower is facing.
On anybody being willing to publish, right up to the last minute, I was still trying to get it out through Congress, and I considered various, my colleague and co-defendant, Tony Russo, had the idea that we should rent a helicopter and drop 7,000 pages of top-secret documents over some city, just rain it down, and the thought that, well, you can't get it back now, it's all over.
We didn't have the internet at that time, and we would have done it then.
But there was no assurance then that it would ever get out.
But I want to agree with something Chris was saying earlier, that I think a disincentive to the Justice Department to prosecuting Sebel for the London Sunday Times choice is that would almost surely put it into the American press, and that's something they want to avoid.
So on the one hand, that protects her from prosecution, but at the same time, she wants it in the American press because she thinks that only that will eventually force Congress to do some open investigation, and I think she's right about that.
So I wasted 22 months, in a way, hoping to get the papers out through Congress, and they didn't come close to doing that.
They were waiting for the press, really, in effect, to bring it out so they wouldn't be blamed for releasing these secrets.
And even when it came out, this is very interesting, by the way, even when it did come out in the press, both Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, whom I'd given them almost two years earlier, and Senator Mansfield, Senate Majority Leader, a two-thirds Democratic majority in the Senate, both said, aha, now we'll have hearings, we've used these documents, and that's just what I wanted to happen.
I wanted there to be hearings with subpoenas and testimony under oath, and really going far beyond what the Pentagon Papers could reveal.
The hearings never happened, despite a Democratic Congress and a Republican president.
Why not?
Because what I was revealing was mainly about the Democrats, made them look bad.
And that gets right back to Sibylle Edmonds now.
Dan, I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
That's it for Antiwar Radio, everybody.
Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and Chris DeLiso from Balkanalysis.com, and author of The Coming Balkan Caliphate, The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West.
Thank you both very much for your time today.
Thank you.
And I want to interview you, Chris, immediately.
Okay, we'll be in touch.
Thanks.
Okay, bye.