News > January 17, 2008

By Elliot Engstrom | News editor

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers that widely ended public support for the Vietnam War, will be speaking at the university Jan. 24 as a part of the “Voices of Our Time” series about the need for new Pentagon papers. News editor Elliot Engstrom spoke over the phone with Ellsberg about his past experiences and his opinions about the current Middle East conflict.

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Ellsberg

Tell me a little bit about your job at the Pentagon and how it was involved in your decision to leak the Pentagon papers.

In 1964, having been a consultant at the Pentagon since 1959, I became a full-time employee, and by chance my work actually started on Aug. 4, 1964, the day that for some hours the President and Secretary of Defense believed that our destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf were attacked.

That belief led to a decision by the President to start the bombing of North Vietnam, what was called a retaliatory attack for the attack on our destroyers. Three days later, he got passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which had actually been drafted earlier, which gave him discretionary power to start a war when he felt it necessary to protect our interests in the Far East and repel further aggression. Only two senators voted against this, and what got their votes was their belief that there had been two attacks on our warships.

I knew within hours that there was great question as to whether there had been an attack at all. A local commander had acknowledged that most of his reports of torpedoes had been mistaken. The sonar officer on his ship was mistaken in that he was hearing torpedoes. Even so, the decision to retaliate had been made, and although there was great doubt as to whether there had been an attack, the President told the public that night that there was unequivocal evidence of an unprovoked attack in international waters on a routine destroyer patrol, and that we sought no wider war.

I knew that every one of those statements was false. I didn’t know for sure right away that there had been no attack, but I did know that to say that there was unequivocal evidence of it was a flat lie, just as I was certain that when Secretary of State Powell told the UN in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was the greatest threat to world security, he couldn’t believe that. It was an absurd statement, it had to be false. Now we know, there were no programs, there were no WMDs, just as there were no attacks in August of 1964. They may have believed that there were WMDs, but to say that there was no doubt, which was after all a necessary premise for attacking, was clearly a lie.

People ask, “Did Bush lie?,” “Did Cheney lie?” “Did Rumsfeld lie?” Of course they lied. Even though they probably believed strongly that there were WMDs there, they knew that the evidence was very thin and controversial. It was a lie into war.

We were lied into war as well in 1964. Unfortunately, even though I knew that on my very first day at the Pentagon, it didn’t occur to me to inform Congress of this. After all, I had promised not to tell anyone not authorized anything that I learned in my job, even though what I was learning was that the Constitution was being violated by lying to congress about a war. It didn’t occur to me that my oath to the Constitution which I had made overrode my promise to keep secrets. Virtually all act as if their promise to keep secrets overrides their promise to uphold the constitution. They don’t think about their oath to the Constitution at all. They think of being loyal to the President as their constitutional duty. Actually, it isn’t in this country.

Their duty to the Constitution is not equivalent to loyalty to the Commander in Chief. When he’s committing crimes, your duty is to uphold the law, not the President. However, these people would be punished in their careers if they did otherwise. They would not suffer for keeping their boss’s secrets. No official to my knowledge has ever gone to jail for lying to Congress when the President wanted him to do it. They lie to Congress all the time, and to the public. Actually, Bush has been found out a lot. But, as you may have noticed, he’s not under impeachment. There’s no question that Bush and Cheney have committed many major violations of the law and the constitution with respect to torture, surveillance, kidnapping and suspension of habius corpus. It’s not illegal, it’s just not constitutional, and it’s in violation of Common Law, British law which goes back to John I.

Do these people do these things because they want to go to war?

Well, in the case of Vietnam, my bosses thought they had inherited a war that they did not want to be charged with losing. It was not winnable, but you could prolong it, just like Iraq. Iraq will never be won by the United States. The Iraqi resistance will never give up trying to kill Americans and being willing to die to kill them. The reason that the people in our government are determined to keep those bases in Iraq is because they are in the midst of the riches of the world.

In the case of Vietnam, there was no oil. But there, they didn’t want to be called “loser,” and so each one wanted to pass the war on to his successor. In each case, they were willing to see Americans die and kill indefinitely in a war they knew would never be won. That’s not a good way to sell it to the public, so they lie. You need a certain amount of public support, so you lie your way into it. You do that in confidence that your secrets will not be told by any one of the thousands of people who know you’re lying. But they would have to do it at the risk of their jobs and their careers, and maybe even their marriage and their children’s education, or maybe even risking going to jail.

So knowing all of this, what compelled you to take such a risk?

Well, I had been in Vietnam, I had been surrounded by Americans who were risking their lives and giving their lives who believed in the cause, and I was one of those.

When I came to realize that it was all based on lies and it was an illegal war, that seemed to me to be murder.

I thought that I shouldn’t be part of a process of murder anymore, so I should be willing to go to prison to stop it. I don’t think I would have thought of that if I had not been the official who met Americans who were on their way to prison for resisting the war nonviolently. I thought that if they could do it, I could do it.

What needs to happen in order to end the conflict in Iraq?

The determination of both political parties to hold onto Iraq makes it hard for me to imagine what revelation could get us out of there.

If the revelation had come in 2002 when it could have, things may have been different. If Paul O’Neal had told us the things he told us in 2004 instead in 2001, we might well not be in Iraq today. If Richard Clarke, who was Head of Counterterrorism, had told us the day of 9/11 or the day after instead of in 2004 that the President was going to use 9/11 as an excuse to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, I think he could have prevented the war. Now, I think it’s late to get us out of there. What the American people could do is elect someone who is committed to getting us out. I don’t see that happening. Hillary has said the opposite, that she’ll stay there. So, we stay there killing and dying.

We haven’t yet attacked Iran. Here’s a case where intelligence officers got their new intelligence, which was truthful in that there was no nuclear program in Iran, but they actually forced the hand of the President to release it by threatening to leak it, meaning they would risk jail.

Unfortunately, the President still can look for incidents that he can use as an excuse to attack Iran. There are people that I think can prevent that by bringing out documents of the kind they have described, such as plans for an attack on Iran to be launched at the first excuse. So far, Congress has done the opposite.

The Senate has given the green light to attack Iran by declaring the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization There are people in the government who could obey their oath to the constitution by telling Congress the truth, and taking the risk. So far, no one has been willing to do that, but I don’t give up hope.