While Daniel Ellsberg's publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 lead to him facing charges of espionage with a lifetime of prison and constant smears from institutionalists on the both sides of the acceptable American political spectrum as an un-American traitor, the Pentagon Papers are no longer controversial, and people who deride Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden with the same vitriol that Ellsberg faced in the 70s generally uphold Ellsberg as an example of a "good whistleblower."
Despite history absolving Ellsberg's work in the 70s, not many people know that Ellsberg is still alive today and still revealing secrets of the United States empire. People may say they uphold Ellsberg now, but they sure don't like covering what he has to say.
Daniel Ellsberg considers Assange, Manning, and Snowden to be his modern successors, has maintained personal friendships with all of them, advocates for their revelations to be heard, and advocates for their freedom, even testifying in defense of Assange at his extradition hearing.
My trial was stopped because of crimes committed against me that came out in the course of my trial. And amazingly, I have lived long enough to see Julian Assange facing the same charges for the same reason, essentially, and subject to the same crimes by my government in this case. Illegal surveillance, surveillance of Julian, as you’ve heard already in his Ecuadoran Embassy, where I visited him a couple of times, and efforts, even discussions of killing him. And I myself came out, had been subject to a scheme to incapacitate me, totally kill me or incapacitate me totally on the steps of the Capitol in 1972.
As I say, at that point, the war had still three years to go. But we were involved, in other words, not only in speaking freely but in doing so in order to reveal an aggressive war, a wrongful war that should have been stopped long before. And simply telling the truth, in either case, was not enough to stop that war, but in my case, it did prove a necessary element.
We are now, think of where we are at this point. Ten years ago, in 2010, I accompanied Julian Assange at revealing the Iraq War logs to a press conference in London. And in handling those and refusing to put over this material, secret material, refusing to give it to an authorized person, whoever that might be, I am a subject to trial and conviction in the eyes of our Department of Justice, as Julian is by that wrongful and unconstitutional reading of the Espionage Act. And I would be glad to join him in that. But obviously, the point here is he should not have been on trial at all. He was doing what he should have done, just as I did. I was doing what I should have done. I was facing 115 years in prison for doing that. Julian is facing 175, a kind of inflation here. But the effect on our lives would be pretty much the same if we got convicted.
So I’m saying that in the case of this war, let us recall, this is 2020. Julian was revealing that information about Afghanistan, crimes in Afghanistan, and a wrongful war in Afghanistan and Iraq in about the first decade, nine or ten years after that war had started. And revealing as I stood by him in England, revealing obviously that we were not only committing crimes daily, of turning people over for torture, and occupying a country whose people did not want to be ruled by foreign occupiers or by proxies whom they announced.
Furthermore, Ellsberg has revealed that the Pentagon Papers were incomplete. Ellsberg was specifically a nuclear weapons planner before blowing the whistle, and when he copied the Pentagon Papers, he also copied a separate, more controversial and dangerous set of documents specifically on US nuclear weapon policy that would be released later. Ellsberg published
The Doomsday Machine in 2017, to little press coverage.
Ellsberg reveals that close calls such as the Cuban Missle Crisis and incorrect false readings happen far more frequently than the public has been made aware.
The strategic nuclear system is more prone to false alarms, accidents, and unauthorized launches than the public (and even most high officials) has ever been aware. This was my special focus of classified investigation in 1958–61. Later studies have confirmed the persistence of these risks, with particularly serious false alarms in 1979, 1980, 1983, and 1995. The chance that this system could explode “by mistake” or unauthorized action in a crisis—as well as by the deliberate execution of nuclear threats—taking much of the world with it, has always been an unconscionable risk imposed by the superpowers upon the population of the world.
Potentially catastrophic dangers such as these have been systematically concealed from the public. In 1961 I had learned as an insider that our secret nuclear decision-making, policy, plans, and practices for general nuclear war endangered, by the JCS estimate, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps a third of the earth’s population. What none of us knew at that time—not the Joint Chiefs, not the president or his science advisors, not anyone else for the next two decades, until 1983—were the phenomena of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, which meant that a large nuclear war of the kind we prepared for then or later would kill nearly every human on earth (along with most other large species).
Ellsberg has also revealed the willingness of US officials to wage wars and conflicts that they know will escalate into nuclear war,
Ellsberg has this still-classified document that he’s waving around, challenging someone to come charge him for talking about it publicly. So far, they haven’t. But in it, there’s this conversation, and I believe it’s minutes of a meeting between the Joint Chiefs. The document is from 1964 and was commissioned by [Robert] McNamara. It is about what happened in the crisis in 1958 over Taiwan. One of the Generals, essentially, they say to each other a nuclear war would be better than losing prestige and strategic positioning in Asia.
that the notion of nuclear weapons as a deterrent is a myth,
[ICBMs] are essentially targets and they’re not that effective as adeterrent. What is effective as a deterrent are nuclear-armed submarines because they move around. It’s hard to track where they are and they have more than enough armaments to end life on Earth. But ICBM continues because they’re very expensive and the armaments industry makes tons of money out of making them.
and that the Soviet Union never had the intention or capability of a first strike.
The estimate of 40 to 60 [Soviet ICBMs] -which was pretty much in 1962 at the time of the missile crisis based on a lot of satellite photography - was much lower than was estimated earlier, from ‘58, ‘59, ‘60. The Air Force had a higher estimate. Even the CIA official estimate in 1961 was well over 100. I think was like 120. The State Department estimated like 160. The Air Force was much higher than that. And in August of 1961, the then-commander of Strategic Air Command, I was told, when I was at Omaha at the base there- that was Thomas Power- believed that there were then 1000 Soviet ICBMs. This was the time when the estimate was much lower, as I say; between 120 and 160. But 1000 is what he believed.
And Eisenhower actually didn’t accept that, but he was regarded as a doddering old man who was playing golf all the time, and simply not with it. We really looked down on him, because the Air Force thought that was almost the [treasonable] estimate which was also being made by the Army and Navy on the same basis of data. So my Air Force colleagues thought the Army and Navy were lowballing the estimate so as to keep a ceiling on the Air Force budget for missiles in their favor.
The Army and Navy were doing this. Now, in late- just after the estimate of 1000 in August, in September we finally got full coverage of the ICBM possible sites in Russia with our satellites, which were a very secret program, which my colleagues at Rand were not privy to at Top Secret level. It was higher than Top Secret.
I didn’t have a clearance. But people made a security lapse, in a way. I was there, and saw a new estimate. And was told in a security breach, in a way, which was almost unprecedented. I never- not before or after people told me something that I didn’t have the clearance for. And I couldn’t share it with Rand, because we would all have lost our access had I spread this around.
But the news was this: that what the Soviets had at that time was four ICBMs. Not 40, not 160, not 1000, but 4.
Now, that remained, by the way, relatively unknown to the public very late in the game. Even Richard Rhodes’ excellent book, his second book on the nuclear program, on the H-bomb, many years later was still saying that what they had then was not what had been predicted, but only 40. But that’s ten times more than they actually had. They had essentially nothing. They had not sought a first-strike force at all, which they could have had with their original missiles, inefficient and large and clumsy as they were. They could have had a first strike
Ellsberg says it is a matter of when nukes are used, not a matter of if nukes are used.
Is Ellsberg and irrelevant crank who knows less about nuclear weapons and whistleblowing than Atlas, or is his current work just as important as the Pentagon Papers?
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