- In 1971, former marine Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents
that exposed US government lies and helped end the Vietnam war. He tells
Duncan Campbell why he did it, and why he is calling on today's officials
to do the same to the Bush regime - and prevent a war in Iraq
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- A little more than 30 years ago, the leaking of 7,000
pages of Pentagon documents, which exposed an extraordinary catalogue of
lies and duplicity on the part of the US government, helped to bring an
end to the war in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, a former marine company commander,
who had served in Vietnam, leaked the documents, risking a life sentence
to do so. Now he is finally telling the whole story of how he became perhaps
the most important whistle-blower of the past half century.
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- It is a bright autumnal day in Berkeley, California,
and Ellsberg, now a sprightly 71, is having a rest day from a cross-country
tour to promote his memoirs, Secrets. It is his account of how he, an analyst
with the Rand Corporation, who had worked in the Pentagon under defence
secretary Robert McNamara and for the state department in Vietnam, was
finally driven by his conscience to reveal how successive US governments
had stumbled into a war that cost more than a million Vietnamese and 55,000
American lives, and how successive presidents had lied to the American
people about the conflict's conduct and consequences.
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- Ellsberg photocopied what were to become known as the
Pentagon papers, and then tried to persuade politicians to release them
and alert the country. When that failed, he gave them to the New York Times.
To ensure that the papers would all be distributed, he went on the run,
prompting what was described as "the largest FBI manhunt since the
Lindbergh kidnapping". When the FBI finally caught up with him in
June 1971, he was charged with 12 felonies and faced 115 years in jail.
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- He might well still be in prison were it not for the
almost psychopathic desire of President Nixon and his team to extract revenge:
a burglary of Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office was authorised in the hope
of finding information that might discredit him or, when publicised, drive
him to suicide. The Watergate burglars, Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, carried
it out. A team of heavies was recruited to break Ellsberg's legs. His phone
was tapped. It also emerged, during his trial in 1973, that the judge had
earlier been offered the post of director of the FBI, a job he coveted.
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- Once these plots became known, the judge had to abandon
the trial and acquit Ellsberg. The Pentagon papers also helped to so discredit
the war that they became one of the key factors in the US's final withdrawal
and Nixon's humiliating resignation. Ellsberg became a counter-cultural
hero.
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- Secrets recounts this story, filling in the many gaps
that remained at the time of the trial. It is also, in a way, a love story
about how he fell for his wife, Patricia Marx, and her pivotal role in
ensuring that the papers were leaked.
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- The Ellsbergs now live in a rambling, unpretentious home
in Berkeley, surrounded by buddhas and roses. Ellsberg has been speaking
so much that his voice is almost gone but he talks with the same intensity
that took him into the dock three decades ago. He sees many parallels between
then and now, with the country on the brink of another war.
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- "One of the key differences is that the military
now are clearly against this, which was not the case with Vietnam. The
military hated the way Lyndon Johnson conducted the war but they wanted
to get into it. This military clearly does not want the war so they're
leaking. The reasons Bush has given are ridiculous - democracy, give me
a break."
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- He lists "oil, oil and oil" as the main reasons
for the present war plans. He also anticipates an "incident"
that will be used as a rationale for the first US strike, just as the Gulf
of Tonkin incident - a supposed attack on a US destroyer - precipitated
deeper US military action in Vietnam. "Bush will want to claim, just
as Johnson did, that he was immediately protecting American troops. He
will want to say 'I'm bombing because I have intelligence that Americans
are at immediate risk. They are putting chemical warheads on missiles,
we think. I can't take the chance.'
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- "I believe Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz are using
our own troops as bait. There will be deaths, and they know that."
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- Ellsberg has noted that there have been frequent leaks
about the war plans in recent weeks.
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- "There is great dissent and that is clearly the
major reason for the leaking. It is clear that the administration is filled
with people who believe this is reckless, unnecessary, foolish ... I am
using every opportunity to say to people in the government who are in the
position that I was then, and who know that their president is lying us
into a wrongful and reckless war, to do what I wish I had done in 1964-65:
to go to Congress and the press with documents and tell the truth. That
would be a risk but there are times when big risks are worth that to save
a lot of lives."
- Ellsberg says that he doesn't like telling people to
take risks that he is not taking, which is why he is announcing that his
book contains some still unclassified secrets - one about a dialogue between
Johnson and the then Canadian prime minister, Lester Pearson, in which
nuclear war was discussed as an option in Vietnam. He is challenging attorney
general John Ashcroft to prosecute him for breaking the law.
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- Ellsberg is understanding about how people in power are
co-opted into a system in which leaking becomes hard. "There is no
set of genes, no hypodermic injection you can take which makes you immune
to going along with cruel, indefensible policies that your team and your
boss and your president say is what they want to do. I did it, but I don't
think I was particularly corrupt for doing that. I don't think there is
any human who is incapable of keeping their mouths shut about what they
know is wrong."
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- Britain crops up periodically in the discussion. He is
appalled that we still have an Official Secrets Act: "It is an outrage.
I'd love an opportunity to go to England and testify to anyone on my experience
and break their law. You cannot be a democracy in foreign affairs and have
the amount of secrecy unchallenged that we have in America or you have
in Britain. It's not just a joke, it's something that has to be resisted
and changed."
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- The book has revealing vignettes of Henry Kissinger and
how he wanted to use journalists to present him as a ladies' man. Ironically,
Kissinger had been a big admirer of Ellsberg's, telling an audience of
Rand personnel in 1968: "I have learned more from Dan Ellsberg than
from any other person in Vietnam." This credibility, and the fact
that Ellsberg was a Harvard-educated former company commander in the Marine
corps, who had been under fire in Vietnam, was what made him so dangerous.
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- The tapes he reprints of Nixon plotting to damage him
is like eavesdropping on a Mafia family dinner:
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- Nixon: Let's get the son-of-a-bitch into jail.
- Kissinger: We've got to get him.
- Nixon: Don't worry about his trial ... try him in the
press. We want to destroy him in the press ... Is that clear?
- Kissinger and (attorney general) John Mitchell: Yes.
- Since the 70s, Ellsberg has earned a living from lecturing
and writing, although anti-nuclear activism is his "top priority".
He has three children and five grandchildren and a bad back, but shows
no signs of slowing down. He has been arrested on many occasions, protesting
against US military actions.
- The almost universally friendly reception of the book
has encouraged him. Senator and presidential contender John Kerry has praised
him for the courage "which undoubtedly saved American lives in the
battlefield". Actor Martin Sheen recommends the book as "essential
reading for any American who wants to understand true patriotism".
Yet had it not been for the Nixon team's criminality, he says, his release
date with good behaviour would not have been until 2008.
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- However, Ellsberg expresses dread at what he fears is
an approaching war. "I don't want to test whether Iraqis will fight
in their own country for this tyrant, and I do not want to test what Saddam
will do if we really set out to kill him," he says. "I can't
think when I have felt that it was as ominous as this."
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- 'Secrets' by Daniel Ellsberg is published in the US by
Viking.
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- Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
- http://www.guardian.co.uk
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