The best source any journalist may ever have is a dedicated whistleblower. We're not talking here about an embittered former employee or casual mischief-maker. We're talking about serious people, conscience-stricken insiders who've formed an unequivocal view it's in the broad public interest for certain happenings to become public knowledge.

The scribe, for example, owes a fair bit to certain ABC people who probably risked their jobs in assisting him as he dug around into the corporation's early 1990s habit of accepting illegal, indirect, backdoor sponsorship for certain programming. Insiders helped because it seemed to them the only way of stopping what was occurring. Let's hope similar sentiments would prevail should such a cancer again come to invade everyone's commercial-free national broadcaster.

Anyway, with all that in mind, it's been fascinating to watch two Australian television interviews in recent weeks with the man who - probably with justification - frequently has been described as the world's loudest whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. Tony Jones interviewed Ellsberg for the ABC's Lateline in October, while David Brill spoke with him for an SBS Dateline edition screened on November 8. Both segments may have resonated most, perhaps, with older viewers. Because without a brief history lesson and a bit of context the enormous significance of Ellsberg's whistleblowing activities could be lost.

To fully appreciate an interview with Ellsberg, you probably have to know he's someone who'll go to the grave in the full knowledge that he changed the world. Whether he should have done it will come down to individual convictions. To give some idea of the magnitude and polarising nature of Ellsberg's leaks, he once faced a potential jail sentence of 115 years. His wife, Patricia, told Brill: "When we came back from the Ellsberg trial my dad took me out to lunch. And then he said: 'That bum Ellsberg should have gone to jail."'

To sketch Ellsberg's background and claims to fame would require triple the space available. So we must cut a few corners. Ellsberg, 75, is the former US marine and military analyst who, in 1971, chose to leak the explosive Pentagon Papers to The New York Times's Neil Sheehan.

The 7000 pages contained politically damaging revelations about the Vietnam War, and to say Richard Nixon's administration was displeased at the leak may be a vast understatement. When Nixon tried to stop the Times from publishing, Ellsberg leaked the documents to several other publications, ensuring the administration would be mired in endless litigation should it persist with non-publication injunctions.

It all led, indirectly, to the Watergate scandal which, in August 1974, brought Nixon down. Nixon aides, including Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, retaliated by searching out material via which to discredit Ellsberg. Members of Nixon's infamous Special Operations Unit broke into the office of a Washington psychiatrist, one Lewis Fielding, the latter having once treated Ellsberg. The intruders couldn't find Ellsberg's file but a pattern for illegal, politically motivated burglaries had been formulated. It was the White House's clumsy cover-up of a 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building that planted the seeds for Nixon's demise.

Now, 35 years later, Ellsberg has been warning of close parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. To paraphrase, Ellsberg has called the Iraq invasion stupid, illegal and justified by a premise constructed from blatant lies.

Jones: "Do you really believe the war in Iraq was based on lies?"

Ellsberg: "No question, no matter how much misunderstanding there was about the role of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The senior administration figures, all of them - George Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld (since resigned) - said: 'We have no doubt, our intelligence agrees, we know for a fact.' All those things were lies. The evidence they had, which was misleading at best, was extremely thin by any standards. The administration managed to conceal from the public for years the amount of controversy there was about the aims of the project, how much it would cost, how long it would take. All those things were concealed from the public and lied about, just as happened with Vietnam ... Iraq was a wrongful war."

Jones: "Do you not trust, in the end, the common sense of your President?"

Ellsberg: "I wish I could say yes ... But I would say if there had then been an effective opposition party in the (US) House of Representatives, in the Senate, he (Bush) has richly earned impeachment."

The scribe has said this before, but it may be worth repeating. The real Iraq story still hasn't quite been told. And it relates to exactly why Iraq was invaded in the first place. Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. When the former security adviser to the White House, Richard Clarke, was told the US would move into Iraq, he said it was akin to invading Mexico in retaliation for Japan having bombed Pearl Harbor.

So why did it happen? Tony Blair appeared to concede recently the invasion had been "a disaster" while other observers and protagonists have lately taken to calling it "a mistake". Close to 3000 US military personnel have lost their lives. Many thousands more are maimed for life. Unknown thousands of Iraqi civilians, some say more than 600,000, have died. That's quite some mistake.

Former NSW premier Bob Carr said on Lateline the other night he fears - fears shared by Ellsberg - that far from disengaging with the Middle East the US is seriously contemplating a strike against Iran. The scribe has a hunch Ellsberg and Carr are wrong. But you shouldn't put too much faith in that. The scribe never really believed the Bush administration would invade Iraq. He thought it was mere sabre-rattling. So much for sabres.

Copyright © 2006 The Australian

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