All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on LRN.
FM, Liberty Radio Network.
And our next guest on the show is Daniel Ellsberg.
If it wasn't for him, we'd probably still be fighting in Vietnam instead of trading with him and sending Hillary Clinton over there, which is the worst kind of carpet bombing we're doing this week.
Welcome to the show, Dan.
How are you doing?
Good.
Good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
No, seriously, though, guys, if it wasn't for Richard Nixon's quite criminal persecution of this man, he would not probably have had to resign from office and that war would have lasted much longer.
It wouldn't last this long.
There aren't any formal colonies in the world anymore, although I think our intent in going into Iraq and occupying was to come pretty close to making that a colony.
Yeah.
Well, and, of course, in parallel with Afghanistan.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
In parallel with Afghanistan, especially you have Pakistan there serving as the perfect Cambodia with the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Northwestern Territories and all the rest of this.
That's right.
Julian Assange in London the other day made a comment that I thought was very good.
He said that what we call nation building should rather be called colony building.
Yeah, or attempted colony building anyway.
Yeah.
Well, actually, tell us a bit about that, because I know that you were a Marine officer in Vietnam as early as 1961 over there, right?
So what we're doing is just building a colony.
No.
First of all, I was a Marine officer in the 50s.
In 61, I made a tour there, a brief visit, actually, which taught me quite a bit for the Pentagon.
I was an employee of RAND, a consultant to the Pentagon.
Oh, I see.
Already.
I was in Vietnam as a civilian, but I used my Marine training from the 50s to be able to walk with the troops.
Right.
So now to the point, though, that's all it was?
Colony building?
Empire?
Yes, I think that's a pretty good description.
You were saying attempted colony building.
Well, no, nation building is the attempted, I think, is implicit there.
We weren't very successful at either in Vietnam.
Actually, Vietnam was a nation.
We were trying to convert part of it, South Vietnam, into a colony.
All right.
Well, now there's a lot different directions we can go talking with you, obviously, but I want to pick up on your mention of Julian Assange there.
There are some people who are smart enough to not have a television or something, and maybe they don't know about Julian Assange, but he's the public face of WikiLeaks, the website where people can liberate documents from their governments and from powerful private interests and upload them to this site, and then these people will post it, they categorize it.
It's not just the war logs that get all the attention.
There's tons of stuff about every kind of thing in the world on there.
It sure seems like the future of journalism to me, and I know a lot of us, Dan, and you've really been championing their cause.
I'm looking at an article you have here.
Well, I don't think they're the future of journalism.
I think they are probably the future of unauthorized disclosures, which are certainly essential, not just to journalism, but essential to maintaining a republic, I would say.
In other words, the supplement to authorized disclosures or propaganda.
I think that's going to get increasingly risky for sources and for journalists, as Obama and probably his successors use the Espionage Act, in a word, which Obama has now used three times, which is as much as all previous presidents put together.
He used it against leaks, and if those are successful, for example, the case against Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower who revealed great boondoggling in NSA to the tone of a billion and a half, and is now on trial for it, releasing that information, having tried to get action within the system, going through the whole system on that.
I think that if people are going to do that in the future, they will probably do that through WikiLeaks or some organization like it, which provides a better chance of anonymity, because the prospect of prosecution is going to get larger, and the prospect of pulling journalists whose byline is on the story into a grand jury and demanding that they reveal the source if they know it.
Now, in this case of Bradley Manning, who's on trial for this, he's facing a court-martial, because the odds are stacked very heavily against him.
It's harder to say how the Drake case will come out, but even if they lose those cases, I think that a Republican Congress, if we were to lose, if we Democrats, or self-hating Democrats, in which I count myself, were to lose both houses, then there will be an Official Secrets Act passed, I think, by Congress, like the British Official Secrets Act, and there will be a lot more...
Yeah, but then Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia and them will protect us from that, right?
I think not.
I wouldn't...
I think the Pentagon Papers case would not have been in good hands in this Supreme Court, and that's why I think, by the way, the nature of the Supreme Court having changed so much, and the intermediate courts as well, that this administration is going ahead to prosecute leaks with an act, the Espionage Act, which was never intended by Congress to cover disclosures to the American public, but they figure they can get away with it with these courts.
Well, of course, part of this is because they have so many secrets to keep, because they kill so many people all the time, Dan.
Well, that isn't exactly new.
What's particularly new is that the President is saying it quite openly, saying that he's condemned an American citizen, O'Rourke, to death, who he's now accusing, I notice, unlike Glenn Greenwald describes as pretty close to zero evidence, they're accusing Awlaki as behind these bombs from Yemen, which is awfully convenient, since they've condemned him to death, you know, sentence first, and then trial never, but charges after the sentencing, actually.
So here's an act that they would love to pin on Awlaki, and who knows, maybe it's true, but when the President, when the administration says, oh, we have evidence, but none of it revealed, or we suspect, that gets printed as though it were the fact.
Right.
Well, you know, I thought, I'm sorry for interrupting, but yeah, there was something in the Washington Post where one time the senior anonymous administration official said, well, you know, we believe that he may have suspected ties to terrorism, or something like that.
Wow, really?
And that was, but they didn't understand what he was saying, how transparent it was, you know?
Yeah.
The, you know, why bother with an adversarial process of evidence and testimony and cross-examination, when you can just, you know, you can just go with executive branch suspicions.
That's what the process is supposed to get around, it's supposed to do away with, convicting somebody and putting him into the indefinite detention now, on the basis of the fact that somebody in the executive branch doesn't like the way he looks, who actually has a suspicion that he might have done something wrong.
Well, you know, back to that Official Secrets Act like they have in the UK, I mean, the tradition has always been that Richard Nixon would have loved to have one of those, but he couldn't because of the First Amendment.
You were not protected for liberating the documents.
You'd signed a I won't liberate any documents agreement, but when you gave them to the reporters, when you gave them to Mike Revell, etc., there are no charges in the world in America, in the United States of America, that could have been leveled against them, correct?
Well, no, not correct, Scott.
I'll tell you why.
No charges had ever been leveled in a court against someone who did what I did, a government official who released without authorization and in violation of the promise that I'd signed, the contracts I had signed, the conditions of employment.
I definitely broke those promises, but that was not by itself a crime.
When you make an agreement with a corporation that you won't reveal its secrets, you won't disclose various things.
In most cases, with some exceptions in the way of trade secrets, as far as I know, any cases, you can't be put in prison for doing that.
You can be sued, possibly.
But anyway, in my case, then, go back to your point, in my case, I was the first person ever prosecuted on those Espionage Act charges.
But if you read the charges as applying to my case, which had never been done before, because it was always believed by legal experts that if you did so, if you tried to apply those causes to leaks, to unauthorized disclosures, the act would be unconstitutional.
It would be an unconstitutional abridgment of freedom of speech and of the press.
Okay, if you read those words so literally and forgot the constitutional issue, they applied just as well, not only to journalists, but to members of the public who were reading this, who were unauthorized to get the information, received it or withheld it, didn't return it.
Hold it right there, Greg.
We'll pick that right up on the other side.
That's great.
So they could have been prosecuted, not Gravel, however, as a member of the Senate.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Dan Ellsberg is on the line, liberator of the Pentagon Papers.
The website is ellsberg.net.
The movie is The Most Dangerous Man in America.
You can find him all over Democracy Now!
recently and in The Guardian.
He's out there promoting WikiLeaks.
I guess where there's Jonah Goldberg on the dark side, there has to be a Dan Ellsberg fighting for us, and thank goodness for that.
Now, Dan, on the other side of the break there, you were saying that the, I forget, the Espionage Act, I guess, that was used against you or whichever, you can clarify, but you were saying that a lot of it was used against you.
The way that Hartman interprets it, it would apply, in a word, to journalists, and it would even apply to readers, although that would be a reductio ad absurdum.
They wouldn't want to go to that extreme, but if you, if the language that applies to journalists receive this classified information or information relating to the national defense without authorization and hold it, possess it, and do not return it, whatever that means, would be pretty hard in the case of WikiLeaks with digital data here to return it, but after it's gone out, especially.
But that would apply just as well, as I say, to readers, and it has to be judged constitutionally on that ground just as well.
Well, has the Supreme Court ever ruled on this kind of thing?
No, it hasn't, because the one case that led to a jury conviction, which was the case of Samuel Loring Morrison in 1985, was refused the review by the Supreme Court and was generally regarded by a lot of civil liberties lawyers as bad law at the time that they hoped would be reversed.
That hasn't happened, but there was not a flood of, there was one more case brought after that, and that was against the AIPAC members, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee people, which I felt was unlikely to go to jury trial, as if Israel were actually a foreign power here.
I thought that was unlikely to happen, and Obama did kill that.
But in that case, they did put on trial people who simply received the information and passed it on.
They would be in the position not only of Assange, but of, as I say, New York Times, and was generally said, even to this day, almost universally, that was the first time there had been such a prosecution of someone who didn't have a current clearance, wasn't an official.
That was not true.
In my case, Tony Russo was in exactly that position.
He didn't have a clearance anymore.
He'd been at RAND.
He was not an official.
In fact, he'd never been a government official, and yet he was charged with the same charges as AIPAC.
If he had been found guilty, we'd have an official secrets act right now that would apply to the press, would apply to you, Scott, and to your listeners, if they don't return the information they're receiving over the radio right now.
Well, again, I'm sorry, because I was so hyperbolic about it, but there's actual some kind of meaning behind what I said about it.
All the secrets are because they're killing people all the time.
The reason there's Afghan war logs and Iraq war logs that need to be suppressed, we need to, even all of us, have these laws hanging over our head for even knowing about them, is because we've had wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we shouldn't have even had in the first place.
Now they're saying, Jonah Goldberg and these people, and worse, I think some Republican politicians are saying that Julian Assange ought to just be declared an enemy combatant, an outlaw, and outside the law, and we'll just use the military or the CIA or whoever to just strangle him with piano wire and that'll fix this.
That's right, there was, was it, was it Goldberg who said he should, why hasn't he been garroted yet?
That would be with piano wire, I guess.
Yeah, there you go.
I don't even know that's what that meant.
They've suggested bothering to define him as an enemy combatant or terrorist, just as a bad guy.
They haven't defined it one way or another, although, was it the, there is a bill, I have to remember the guy's name, in Congress right now, who is proposing that, a bill that would name WikiLeaks, by name apparently, as a transnational threat of some kind, which is very close to saying that it's a supporter of terrorist causes or something, which would mean that anyone who gives them money or who supports them publicly, as I certainly do, would be subject to the same measures as enemy combatants, and that seems to apply now not only to indefinite detention without charges or even after acquittal, but to possible execution.
That sounds very melodramatic, but I think that the, and I think it's unlikely that they will choose to send special forces to assassinate Julian Assange, public as he is, but it's not zero.
The chance of that is not zero.
It should be, and it isn't, and moreover, what I really want to draw attention is to, it's a situation we're in today, where a president of the United States, with no apology and no embarrassment, feels free to make such a directive to execute, or Lockheed in this case, without trial, without charges, without due process, absolutely openly.
Richard Nixon sent a hit gang, a hit mob of former Bay of Pigs veterans to incapacitate me, Daniel Ellsberg, on the steps of the Pentagon on May 3rd, 1972, but he did that covertly.
It was a big secret, and when it finally came out, it was one of the factors in charges that faced him with impeachment.
It wasn't even like a covert action, like in a finding, CIA, kill Ellsberg.
It was just like, hey, kill Ellsberg.
Well, they didn't say kill.
As the prosecutor, William Merrill, told me when I asked, what does that mean, incapacitate?
That's the word they used.
He said, well, that's the word they used.
Oh, they were just going to kill you.
I never used the word kill.
He said they use euphemisms of neutralize, terminate with extreme prejudice, take care of, as you say, rid me of this troublesome leaker.
Well, yeah, well, and it's a very important point that, you know, even George Bush never claimed that authority.
I guess he never had a chance to go that far or something.
He probably would have, but...
Well, he did.
No, I think, you know, Cy Hersh has said publicly that, I imagine he's working on this, I don't know, that, but he has said in public meetings that Cheney was directing assassination squads, and not just in Iraq, but worldwide, globally, that were actually operating and, in some cases, killing the wrong people.
Right, well, and there he is at the whole world's battlefield, including the Northern Command here in America.
That would apply.
When the world's a battlefield, it certainly applies to this country.
So not only could they prosecute us for looking at Wikileaks.org, Dan, but they could just use the military against us the same way that they're saying kill Awlaki or Julian Assange.
There's no law at all anymore.
Well, right now, there's a cyber command that almost surely is working at the problem, military people now, working at the problem of somehow stopping the Wikileaks operation, which apparently, I don't know the technology, apparently is very hard to do.
So, especially when it's not based in this country, but as one expert cited in one of these news articles, I have it here in front of me somewhere, said, the way to do this, you really can't stop Wikileaks from putting this stuff out.
The way to do it is to go after Assange personally in his reputation.
Make him look, in the words of John Burns of the Times, sketchy, or people of use other words, you know, unbalanced, if not crazy, imperious, arrogant, various, incredible, not to be believed.
Attack the messenger, in other words.
Which, again, was done.
They tried to do that against me without finding, apparently, what they wanted to find when they went into my former doctor's office and looking to blackmail me into silence.
But they didn't find information that they felt they needed to impugn me entirely.
Well, now, Dan, part of this, too, is that, you know, back to, you know, leaking specifically and Wikileaks and this particular story that has all these calls for all these extrajudicial powers to be deployed, it's the same premise, really, that we have left over from, I guess, our previous guest would have said, after Vietnam when the deer hunter came out about how, you know, everything would have been fine if only, you know, they just bombed them enough or they hadn't had one arm tied behind their back and it was the American, it was people like you and Walter Cronkite and the darn liberals in the press and the Congress who gave up and snatched victory from the jaws of, or defeat from the jaws of victory, I mean to say.
And so this is really kind of the premise underlying this, right, is that we have these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They're both complete disasters.
And we have to have somebody to blame it on.
So we'll blame it on the people telling the American people the truth about what disasters they are.
And we'll claim that that information is what's causing it to be a disaster.
It's Assange's fault that we lost Iraq to the Iranians, I guess.
Well, you know, I'm struck that, as you say, there's a good deal of revisionism about Vietnam recently.
I understand in the Pentagon books that claim, I think it's by Lewis Sorley, two books that really claim that we did win in Vietnam, but the victory under General Abrams, that the victory was snatched away by Congress who took the money away and the liberal press and all that, which is a total myth.
But what is even more striking is the way that Iraq is being seen now.
It's being trumpeted by the Republicans, apparently, as a success, worthwhile, legitimate, even though there were no WMDs, even though there were no threat to the United States, even though it was a very clear-cut crime against the peace, unauthorized by the UN or in self-defense, a war of aggression.
Despite all that, worthwhile.
Look, we've achieved a democracy.
We've achieved a stable government.
And we're going to get out, as a matter of fact.
But that's the way it's being seen, actually, as a success.
And I don't think the Democrats are daring to question that.
Now, when the WikiLeaks logs on the Iraq war and show that the minimum measure of civilian deaths over there is like 120, 125,000 deaths, of which 15,000 had never been reported before these logs in the press, 15,000 deaths, five 9-11s, you know, or 30 milis, the Pentagon says, well, that's not news.
But where it might be regarded as news is to bear on this question of whether this particular war of aggression was necessary, worthwhile, when you look at the human costs of it.
Well, and you know, Bradley Manning, who you mentioned, who's the young man accused by the military of liberating these documents and giving them to WikiLeaks to share with us all, according to his chat logs, as published by Wire magazine, he had a crisis of conscience because he was ordered to help round up and arrest people, one of whom was guilty only of writing an editorial piece against Nouri al-Maliki, questioning Nouri al-Maliki, where did the money go, or something like that.
And he said to his commanding officer, hey, this terrible thing is happening, what do I do?
And his commanding officer said, keep your mouth shut and get back to work, meaning go back and continue rounding up and arresting innocent people and destroying their lives.
And he wrote, so that was when I wondered, well, wait a minute, if we're the good guys, how come we're doing the wrong thing here?
And this is what led him, he said, to do this, was he had a crisis of conscience about the war going on there.
So, you know, to round this up, and yeah.
Well, he said that what he had there, and apparently there's more to come, revealed crimes of various kinds that should be known to the American people and not just colored up.
Well, now we know part of that, the Iraq war logs reveal a tremendous pattern of criminal behavior in terms of torture, partly by Americans and British directly, but in particular, at a very large scale by the Iraqis to whom we turned over suspects or prisoners, knowing that they would be tortured.
In many cases, it turns out from the logs with Americans present while this extreme torture was carried on.
It's our legal obligation as a state under treaties to investigate and prosecute any such behavior and to stop it, to do what we can to stop it.
Instead, it was covered up and the order was given, and this is news.
The order was given again and again, and do not investigate, do not pursue this with the Iraqi.
That's an illegal order, and the behavior was illegal.
So in the face of this, the Pentagon spokesperson, Jeff Morell, said on a program in which I was on, I heard him say, we don't see any evidence of war crimes in this.
Well, he's either a total liar or totally blind to the very blatant implications of all this, and he really needs to go no further than to go in the Pentagon to the judge advocates of the various services and ask them whether they fail to see war crimes in this.
I'm sure that they've said right along that even the practices that we call extended interrogation, enhanced interrogation, that sounds like a vitamin additive, enhanced interrogation, were illegal, were torture that was illegal.
They were saying that, and they were simply overruled by Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld.
But in this case, the evidence is there that we knew it was torture.
Well, in short, for the purposes here, Dan, if I can just butt in for just a second, I wanted to point out that I saw a thing on Firedog Lake where they went and traced and said that apparently the Wolf Brigade was created immediately after this order to ignore torture went out.
Really?
I didn't see that.
But it was created by the U.S., essentially.
Yes, it's a break-off group, basically, of the Water Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council that had lived in Iran, that were the Iraqi traitors during the Iran-Iraq War, and lived in Iran for 25 years and were brought into Iraq on the heels of the American invasion.
And yeah, apparently there's some indication, I think I can fairly say, that maybe Rumsfeld even created this squad, particularly as part of that El Salvador option, to be the Shiite death squad.
As they said then, these guys are from here, they know the lay of the land and who's who, and we'll use them to decapitate the leaders of this budding insurgency, and that'll put a stop to it.
Yeah, well, this sort of puts in a very new light, or not too surprising, I suppose, that when President Obama, and like President Bush, makes statements, we do not torture Obama, I've ended torture, a lot of these incidents are in Obama's first year.
So they do apply to him.
He's continued the process, in other words, increasingly openly, and yet not entirely openly, because the fact is that the WikiLeaks exposures do have a lot of previously unreported news in them.
Right.
Okay, now, speak directly to any government employees who might happen to be listening to this, from the Don Ketcher on up to the Senate and the Cabinet, who ought to liberate documents and put them online, and which ones?
Well, I would, yeah, which documents you mean?
This is one kind of thing that was not in the Pentagon Papers.
This is clear-cut evidence of war crimes.
There was hardly any of that in the Pentagon Papers, so those did not actually challenge the Executive Branch to investigate and prosecute right away.
There was no news in the Pentagon Papers for the upper levels, because they'd written those documents.
They were internal documents.
Well, these are internal, too, so there's no news to the mid-level, the low-level in the Pentagon.
It's not clear whether the high-level people fully knew this.
They could have, they should have known all this, but they might not.
It might not have gotten up to them, in which case it's time for them to investigate and to change these practices, as Obama had promised to do.
But if that doesn't happen, certainly, Bradley Manning or whoever was the source, he's the accused source, not been proven.
But whoever gave this information to the press did the right thing, I would say, and there should be, and others should take that example.
They won't rush to want to be court-martialed, but actually, it was not WikiLeaks that failed Manning or whoever.
We're only mentioning him because he's accused and because of these reported chat logs that we saw.
But whoever did it, Manning definitely is not on trial because WikiLeaks failed to give him anonymity.
It would seem because of evidence that he gave himself to someone, whether it stands up in court or not.
So others, I would say, when they know crimes are being committed or that a wrongful war is in the making or a hopeless escalation, a reckless policy, we're talking about phenomena that occur an awful lot very frequently, and you know that it's being covered up, which again is almost the universal practice here, and no action is being taken otherwise to avert this, then it's up to you.
And you either go along with this and are complicit with it, as most people will do, or you'll take seriously the oath that you actually took if you're an officer or a congressperson or any official, any civilian official of the government, and that is to solely to support and defend the Constitution, which has been flaunted in the case of both of these wars as it was in Vietnam.
And you should stop violating that oath by keeping your mouth shut when you know that laws are not being obeyed and the executive is manipulating the country into war.
And you should consider paying whatever cost.
Now, Manning in a court-martial may actually, if they prove the charges against him, as you say, the cards are stacked against him in a military court, but if they prove those charges, he may very well be given a life sentence.
He's not facing that at this moment, but there is reportedly a lot more to come.
Well, apparently it's now 50 or 60 years' worth of charges on his 23-year-old dad.
With the charges right now, but that's just the beginning.
They've only alleged a few, they've only tied him so far to a few of these leaks.
Now, I don't know whether they could tie him to any others that are to come or any of these others, and I don't know whether they...
And that already amounts to a life sentence anyway.
If it should happen, the charges will be increased and he'll face, and you know, 50 years again is, well, he's a very young man.
It's not quite a life sentence.
I think he will be facing a life sentence.
The point I wanted to go to was, I certainly faced a life sentence, 115 years.
To me, it goes without question that to risk that or even to suffer that is, of course, worth it, a use of your life, a worthwhile use of your life.
Mostly we're talking about people who give their life for Hamid Karzai or Nouriel Maliki at this point.
That's right.
This is, I'd say, a much better cause, no question about it, to save a lot of lives and to preserve the best aspects of our Constitution and of the Bill of Rights.
I don't know why more people don't see that, but I do hope that they will come to do that.
That you say, what's my message?
My message would be, understand that just as if you're military, you see people all around you and you yourself who risk their lives for various reasons in combat and do it virtually routinely in a combat situation.
The time often to challenge is often there in civilian life to take a comparable risk of your own career and your own freedom, and that can be very well worth doing.
All right, everybody, that is Daniel Ellsberg, the heroic liberator of the Pentagon Papers.
The website is ellsberg.net, and of course, the book is Secrets, a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
The movie is The Most Dangerous Man in America, and you can read them all over the place right now and see them all over the place, preaching WikiLeaks and freedom of speech and the importance of whistleblowing inside the American empire.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Dan.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Good.
Bye.
