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Daniel Ellsberg
Speaker; Activist; Author, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam
In conversation with Phil Bronstein, Executive Editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Continued from Part I of the discussion
Bronstein: How do we avoid World War III? You talked about leakage, and how there's more. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget-shares, lead to leaks. But the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public.
Ellsberg: The machinery of secrecy is clearly being developed and perfected. The real danger that we are in, unlike Vietnam – putting aside, if I can, my life's obsession: the possibility of nuclear war with Russia, which still remains, so it seems crazy to put that aside for a moment – but aside from that, we didn't face a danger in this country. CIA Director George Tenet (again not a hero of mine, until now) said in an unclassified letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the CIA has no evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and that Saddam Hussein is extremely unlikely to use his weapons of mass destruction unless attacked, in which case he becomes very likely. This directly contradicted the president of two days earlier. That was not a career move on the part of George Tenet. But are they keeping secrets? Yes, there are a lot of "leaks" now. (By the way, again I had to laugh when you talked about leakage. My wife hates me to be called a leaker. She says it sounds incontinent. I prefer Rumsfeld's words, unauthorized disclosure.)
The apparatus of secrecy is probably greater, but people's skepticism has increased. The Pentagon Papers show there was far more dissent inside the executive branch than they will ever let out. If both Feinstein and Boxer, the ones who voted for this bill and the ones who voted against it, get together, especially as senators where the Democrats have a majority in this lame-duck session, and they use their full power as senators, not just to vote on an issue or to filibuster, but above all to get information, here's a way to do it: Have formal hearings, call government witnesses that know the president is lying. Call them in and give them a chance to do what I encourage them to do. Tell the truth with documents. The building is filled with people who, faced with that challenge and that opportunity, would decide to give up their careers, which is what it would do, because they understand it could save lives.
Bronstein: You speak passionately about the trauma that you felt as a child during World War II and seeing civilians being bombed. That, even more than concentration camps, had a profound effect on you. I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that Saddam Hussein has bombed civilians. How does one deal with him? It doesn't seem sanctions and UN resolutions have done particularly well.
Ellsberg: I didn't know a lot about the camps during the war. We learned a lot from the Nuremburg Trials, from refugees after the war and people that came back. I was conscious of what seemed to me the epitome of Nazism: the bombing. Edward R. Murrow reporting from London as the city was burning. What could be more Nazi-like than deliberately bombing cities and housing and women and children? I was not particularly aware that the British from '42 on were bombing as many women and children and houses as they could, at night. It was safer to do that, because of anti-aircraft fire, and it was not shortening the war. I did not know that we were killing as many Japanese civilians as we could six months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Tokyo and 60 other cities in Japan. That was a war that had to be fought, it was a just war; but the napalming of cities and the burning of Tokyo was not just means, and it was not necessary. It was massive acts of terrorism. When I did learn about this, I hoped that my country would not go down that path again. We did, in Korea. I admired Truman then, unreservedly, for going against aggression and for keeping it a limited war and not using nuclear weapons as General MacArthur advised. But Senator Taft said, "We will rue the day when we let this war start without Congress having any role in it at all." Truman ignored Congress. To Senator Morse in '64, one of two senators who voted against Tonkin-Gulf, people said, Why bother, Wayne? It's going to pass. He said, "Yes it will pass, and you will rue the day."
Saddam Hussein is a monster, a tyrant. He has killed people en masse, and used weapons of mass destruction. Documents released two months ago showed we had not only known of his use of chemical weapons against Iranians since '83 and Kurds later, we had given them precursors for those weapons. In those days we knew he was a monster, but he was our monster against the Iranians. The horrible thing that makes him worthy of capital punishment is an action that we were arm in arm with him at the time.
Where is Saddam Hussein on this scale now? Saddam is secular; Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, hate Saddam and, as far as we know, have no connection. To say that Saddam is our number one enemy is not just false; it's absurdly false. It has to be a conscious lie. I cannot believe that, from George Bush on down, anybody in the government would endorse the statement our president is making as an excuse for this war: that Saddam Hussein is our number-one enemy. Our major negotiator to the Mideast (his career as a negotiator for Bush is over), General Zinni, who had been head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), says, I would put him sixth or seventh on the list. It's a dangerous world and Saddam is a danger to his own people, but a danger to us? Far less than the danger posed by: Al Qaeda; Pakistan's support for the Taliban; the possibility that weapons will leak from Pakistan to Al Qaeda; the danger from loose nuclear weapons, uncontrolled in Russia – which is far greater than posed. Can we afford to turn away from these real dangers?
As secular as Saddam is, his people are Muslims. Bombing women and children Muslims in Iraq – no matter how careful we are, there's going to be a lot of civilians killed. When that gets out on television, it is going to enrage a large part of a billion Muslims, as far away as Indonesia, that will make it almost impossible for their regimes to collaborate with us on police and intelligence work against Al Qaeda. Americans will die as a result of that falling off of cooperation. That's why we have to avoid this.
Bronstein: You mentioned U.S. complicity with Saddam. Several questions here relate to Henry Kissinger, one quite direct: Is Henry Kissinger a war criminal?
Ellsberg: Well, of course Henry Kissinger is a war criminal, but…
Bronstein: There you have it.
Ellsberg: Some people who focus on Kissinger – in part because he's still alive – would be wrong, as the Pentagon Papers showed, to believe that the president's assistant for national security makes policy or carries out his own policy. I don't know how much he agreed with the policy he was carrying out. He's smart, Nixon was smart, but he was doing what Nixon wanted. That doesn't let him off the hook for being a war criminal.
Henry Kissinger knew the prospects of the war as well as anybody else, and he knew it before he got into that job. I said to Mort Halpern, who worked as Kissinger's deputy, "We're still debating, How could these smart guys have done that? There's no oil in Vietnam. It's hard to understand all this killing and dying." So I said, "Do you think Kissinger really agreed with the policy?" Mort said, "That question has no operational meaning. When I worked for him in the White House, he had one principle: find out what Richard Nixon wanted to do and recommend it. If he didn't know, if Nixon hadn't really decided what he wanted, then give him several alternatives and the minute he showed any flicker of interest in one recommend that." The tapes show that pretty clearly.
With one exception. In '72, there was an offensive going on in Vietnam that threatened to bring the house of cards down prematurely, before the election, and Nixon said to Kissinger, "I would use the nuclear weapon." I don't think he was kidding. I heard that on the tape. Kissinger did say, "Oh, I think that would be just too much." It's funny in a Dr. Strangelove way, but the tape does go on. Then Nixon says, "The nuclear bomb, does that frighten you, Henry? I want you to think big here, for chrissakes."
Bronstein: Is Bush's Iraq policy a matter of conscience or a matter of ego? You have written about the oil issue.
Ellsberg: Are they doing what they think is best? Yes. Is Bush acting on his conscience? No doubt. The problem of conflict of interest with people's background, from the oil industry, for example, like Bush and Cheney, is not that they tell themselves, I'm acting for my corporate sponsors and from personal interests against the interests of the United States. Conflict of interest consists of the fact they can't see any difference between the interests of the U.S. and what they learned, as oil executives, was in the interest of the U.S., and of those corporations. That's why the Constitution so wisely said, don't let one man, elected man – or in this case almost elected man – decide the issue of war and peace. That should be the job of a more broadly representative body that will make it hard and reluctant to get into war. As Tom Payne said, "It is the pride of kings that throws mankind into confusion."
When George Bush says, I will decide or I have not decided whether we go to war, not only do his subordinates not get up and say, Uh boss, you don't get to decide that, but too few journalists, too few people have said, the Constitution matters here.
Bronstein: To what extent does the media encourage or discourage our leaders to tell the truth?
Ellsberg: People understood that five presidents in a row – FDR through Nixon – did lie a lot, all the time, about their reasons. Watergate nailed that down. Then did that change? No. Irangate – there were hearings, but people didn't want another impeachment. Reagan and Bush Sr. got a pass. That was a crazy scheme: sale of arms to the terrorist state in Iran to get money to go against the will of Congress, and give it to terrorists in Nicaragua. George Shultz and Secretary of State Weinberger said to the president, This is criminal, it's wrong, it's crazy. Then the president decided and they kept their mouths shut. It goes on in all these administrations. I'm afraid they are too tolerant of officials who lie to Congress, as Weinberger did lie about his knowledge of Iran-Contra, and so did Bush. They weren't held accountable.
Bronstein: Do you think that there are a set of Pentagon Papers for Iran-Contra?
Ellsberg: No question. The lie Weinberger said over and over again was that he had kept no diary during that period as secretary of defense. He said that under oath. The special prosecutor wrote a good memoir about this; it took him years to discover the thousands of pages of diary Weinberger had kept showing that George Bush Sr. had lied when he said he was out of the loop and had not supported Iran-Contra. At the moment that came up, Weinberger was indicted by a grand jury at the request of the special prosecutor, as were a number of CIA officials, indicted for perjury among other things. George Bush, as a Christmas act in his last weeks in the presidency, pardoned the people who would have had incentive to testify in court about his own perjury. It comes close to saying that you can't hold a president accountable any more than Nixon, in the end, was held accountable. My interest is not to get anybody in jail. My interest is for us, the people, to learn the truth in a timely fashion. I wish I had put out the truth I knew in a much more timely fashion than I did.
